MATTHEW 5:17-20 - Fulfilling the Scriptures

Introduction

Few things are more exciting for an elementary school student than coming into home room in the morning and realizing that you have hit the grade-school jackpot--you have a substitute teacher! Now, as anyone who has ever been a kid can tell you, there are few greater blessings that can come your way than to have a teacher who doesn’t know your regular teacher’s rules for the classroom. (And this isn’t just about the elementary years—right up through high school and college as well.)

If you know your business and don’t overplay your hand you can, with subtle suggestions and innocent-sounding questions, get a substitute to skip assigning homework or allow an early dismissal for recess or push back a due date for an assignment, or any number of things that will make your educational experience far more rewarding and less stressful. (The only fly in the ointment is that it there is a distinct possibility that the substitute teacher is, in fact, more strict than your regular teacher—in which case, the best thing is to just keep your head down and try to get through the day without drawing too much attention to yourself…)

From the way Jesus begins this section of the text, it’s hard to escape the sense that He was being perceived in a similar way—here was a Teacher who didn’t play by the same rules as their regular teachers did! At the end of the Sermon, in Matthew 7:28-29, we are told plainly that

Matthew 7:28–29 (ESV)

28 ...the crowds were astonished at his teaching, 29 for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.

The scribes were the experts in the Mosaic Law; they were the authorities that, along with the Pharisees, set the rules and requirements for being a faithful and righteous Jew. They were the ones who (as we will see going forward in Jesus’ Sermon, as well as elsewhere in the Gospels) set all sorts of standards for behavior and set themselves as judges over whether or not you were acting faithfully.

And here was Jesus, speaking with authority! He wasn’t constantly quoting other scribes, other rabbis, to give support for His teachings; as we will see next week, Lord willing, He was saying “You have heard it said… But I say to you...” And so apparently the people were beginning to suspect that this meant the end of the Law of Moses! They were tired of being oppressed and judged; they wanted freedom from the Law! And this Rabbi sounded like Someone who was going to do away with it once and for all!

And so it was into this rebellious attitude that Jesus spoke the words of verse 17— “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets...” Jesus was not going to tell His disciples and the crowds listening to Him to ignore the Scriptures; He was going to tell them to obey the Scriptures!

This is a crucial point to understand in our day and age as well. There is a curious tendency in our day—even among evangelical Christians—to set the teachings of Jesus against the teachings of the rest of the Bible. We are—like the crowds in the days of Jesus’ ministry on earth—a people who don’t want the standards of the Scriptures applied to our lives. And so we figure that since Jesus’ words are printed in red in our Bibles, that His words must be more important that the other words… So if we don’t like the Scripture’s teaching in Leviticus 20:13 that homosexuality is an abomination, for instance, or the Apostle Paul’s instruction in 1 Timothy 2 that women are not allowed to preach or act as pastors in the church, we just play what we think is our trump card: “Well, Jesus taught love, you bigot!” Moses and Paul are nasty religious authoritarians, the line goes, but Jesus cared more about love than the Law.

But as we see here in our text this morning, that is the furthest thing from the truth, isn’t it? J. I. Packer put it well when he said

The fact we have to face is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, who claimed divine authority for all that he did and taught, both confirmed the absolute authority of the Old Testament for others and submitted to it unreservedly himself. (Quoted in Storms, S. (2016). Biblical Studies: The Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:17–20). Sam Storms)

In verses 17-20 of Matthew 5, we have Jesus’ own teachings on the authority of the Scriptures—and what comes through here in these verses is that

If you claim to BELONG to Christ then you will SUBMIT to the WORD of God

If you belong to Christ by faith—if you have entered into the new way of being human that He established by His work—then you will regard the Scriptures the same way He did! and the first thing we see in this text is that

I. Jesus AFFIRMED the Scriptures

Matthew 5:17–18 (ESV)

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

To say that Jesus affirmed the Scriptures is to say that

He believed in their PERMANENCE (cp. Isaiah 40:8)

The phrase “until heaven and earth pass away” is another way of saying “until the end of all time”, or “the end of the age” (as Jesus says in the Great Commission in Matthew 28:20). As long as the sun is coming up in the morning, and as long as Mount Everest stands, God’s Word will not lose its authority. Jesus’ teaching about the Word of God here is very much the same as the prophet Isaiah:

Isaiah 40:8 (ESV)

8 The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

Did the Sun come up this morning? Then all of God’s Word is true. Are the hills all around your home still there? Then God’s Word is authoritative. And Jesus is careful to say that all of it is true and authoritative. The phrase “not one iota, not a dot” (or in the King James’ memorable phrase, “not one jot or tittle”) means that not even the smallest part of God’s Word has gone (or will go) out of date or lose its authority. You don’t get to pick and choose; you don’t get to say that this part of the Scriptures is authoritative, but that part isn’t; you don’t get to say “I like Jesus’ teaching, but not Paul’s”, or “I like the Psalms, but I don’t like Romans.” Jesus believed—and taught—that every last comma, every last stroke, every dot over every “i” and cross over every “t” remains as long as the world stands. And if you belong to Him, Christian, then that is what you are called to affirm as well.

Jesus affirmed the Scriptures—He believed in their permanence, and

He believed in their PRIORITY

Look again at His words in verse 19:

Matthew 5:19 (ESV)

19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

If every last stroke of the Law and the Prophets—every last comma and semicolon of the Scriptures—will remain as long as the sun comes up in the morning, then that means that there is nothing in the Scriptures that you can disregard! Jesus says clearly that you can’t pick and choose—you can’t say that you’ll just disregard something you don’t like (or worse yet—tell someone else they can just ignore something they don’t like!) This is why things like the age of the earth are so important—it really matters what you believe about whether Genesis 1-11 is authoritative or not. It really matters what the Scripture says the roles for men and women in the church are; it really matters what you believe about baptism, it really matters what the Scriptures teach about how God expects to be worshipped in church. As John MacArthur says of these verses:

“That Jesus does not refer to loss of salvation is clear from the fact that, though offenders will ‘be called least,’ they will still be ‘in the kingdom of heaven.’ But blessing, reward, fruitfulness, joy, and usefulness will all be sacrificed to the extent that we are disobedient” (MacArthur, 271, quoted in Storms, S. (2016). Biblical Studies: The Sermon on the Mount (Mt 19). Sam Storms.

If you claim to belong to Christ then you will submit to the Word of God—Jesus affirmed the Scriptures’ permanence, and He affirmed their priority. There is not one iota, not one stroke of God’s Word that will pass away, and you disregard or set aside His Word at the price of your reward in Heaven.

And at this point, I can see the question on your faces—if it is really true, as Jesus says it is here, that the authority and power of the Word of God—all of it—will never fade as long as the sun shines and the mountains stand, then does that mean all the atheist Redditors have a point? That all of their taunts that Christians only observe the parts of the Bible they want— “You say that homosexuality is wrong because of Leviticus, but Leviticus also says that you’re not supposed to eat pork or eat milk with meat, or wear mixed fabrics—you’re all just a bunch of hypocrites!”

So it’s a question worth considering, isn’t it? If Jesus says here in Matthew 5:18 that not a jot or tittle will pass away from the Law while the sun shines and the earth exists, then why aren’t we still observing Moses’ Law about food and clothing, why aren’t we observing the Sabbath on Saturday, why aren’t we performing blood sacrifices every week?

It is because of that phrase at the end of Matthew 5:18:

Matthew 5:18 (ESV)

18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

Jesus affirmed the Scriptures here in His Sermon, and as we move along in this passage we understand that

II. Jesus FULFILLED the Scriptures

Jesus said that He did not come to set aside the Law; He came to fulfill it:

Matthew 5:17 (ESV)

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

Jesus did not come to cancel the Law of Moses; He came to complete it. He came to be the perfect expression of everything Moses’ Law was meant to communicate. The Law of Moses had one purpose—to demonstrate how desperately sinful the human heart is, and how desperately terrible sin is.

After the latest Indiana Jones movie came out, we decided to go back and watch the original three (no, there were only three…) As we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, I remember watching as Salah and Indy lifted the Ark of the Covenant out of its sepulcher in the Well of Souls how shiny it was. And I thought how inaccurate that depiction was, because the actual Ark of the Covenant would have been caked with generations of blood.

Because the one thing that you come to realize over and over again as you read the Old Testament Law is how bloody it was. Everything in the Tabernacle had blood poured, spattered and smeared on it. For example, listen to the description of what Aaron was required to do on the Day of Atonement:

Leviticus 16:15, 18–19 (ESV)

15 “Then he shall kill the goat of the sin offering that is for the people and bring its blood inside the veil and do with its blood as he did with the blood of the bull, sprinkling it over the mercy seat and in front of the mercy seat... 18 Then he shall go out to the altar that is before the Lord and make atonement for it, and shall take some of the blood of the bull and some of the blood of the goat, and put it on the horns of the altar all around. 19 And he shall sprinkle some of the blood on it with his finger seven times, and cleanse it and consecrate it from the uncleannesses of the people of Israel.

The Gospels refer often the Kidron Valley outside the walls of Jerusalem and the Kidron Brook that flowed past. The name comes from the Hebrew word qadar, meaning “dark” or “turbid”. The Kidron Brook was dark because it was the place where all the blood from the Temple sacrifices drained to.

The Old Testament Law floated on an ocean of blood sacrifices to atone for the sin of the people. Jesus said that He had come to “accomplish” the purpose of that bloody, violent Law--

He was the SACRIFICE that fulfilled the LAW (Hebrews 9:18-26)

The book of Hebrews was written to answer the very question that we raised a moment ago—what is the place of observing the Law of Moses now that Christ has come? And the inspired author answers clearly that Christ made a superior sacrifice—in Hebrews 9, we read:

Hebrews 9:18–26 (ESV)

18 Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. 19 For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, 20 saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.” 21 And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. 22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. 23 Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. 24 For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. 25 Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, 26 for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Jesus finished the requirements of the Law. He completed, once and for all, every sacrifice necessary to atone for sin. There is no more need to keep going back to those sacrifices any more than there is a need to keep sending money to the bank once your mortgage is retired! In fact, Hebrews warns that if you keep trying to atone for sin through Moses’ Law, there is nothing but condemnation and guilt waiting for you there!

There is no atonement for sin left in the Law, because Christ fulfilled that Law—He is the Atonement for sin! So now we look back on the Law not as a way to cover our sins before God, but we look back on the Law as a reminder of the grace of God we have received in Christ! We no longer observe the death penalty for homosexuals or adulterers or rebellious children, not because the Law is abolished, but because Christ has already suffered that death penalty once for all! And now the Law stands as a testimony to the grace of God in Christ, as stands as an invitation to rest in His work who fulfilled it all!

Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament—He was the sacrifice that fulfilled the Law, and

He was the MESSIAH that fulfilled the PROPHETS

For thousands of years, right from the very beginning of human history, God had been promising through His prophets that He would send a Savior for His people. Right at the dawn of human history, while Adam was still digesting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the first promise came:

Genesis 3:15 (ESV)

15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

Centuries later, the patriarch Jacob would bless his son Judah with another prophecy:

Genesis 49:10 (ESV)

10 The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.

And centuries later Isaiah prophesied about the birth of this Savior

Isaiah 9:6 (ESV)

6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

And prophesied about His death for sin:

Isaiah 53:4–6 (ESV)

4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

A prophecy so unmistakable, in fact, that to this day, when Isaiah 53 is read to unbelieving Jews, they frequently claim that it is a New Testament passage that refers to Jesus!

Everything the prophets ever spoke about the coming Messiah came true in Christ; everything the Law ever demanded as the price of sin was paid by Christ. And Christian, if you claim to belong to Him then you will submit to what the Word of God says about Him—you will see and rejoice in the fact that

III. Jesus is the PROMISE of the Scriptures

Jesus began in verse 17 with a statement that He was not coming to set aside or abolish the requirements of God’s righteousness found in the Law, he was coming to perfect them. He did not come to cancel God’s righteous demands, He was coming to meet those demands in His own person! This is what He is aiming at in verse 20 of our text:

Matthew 5:20 (ESV)

20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

The people who came to hear Jesus’ Sermon were worn out by the fastidious scruples of the religious leaders over them—the Pharisees and scribes demanded that they measure up to a seemingly impossible standard of righteousness in order to be acceptable before God, and they set themselves up as examples of that standard. They had so parsed and examined and argued the finer points of Moses’ Law down to the thinnest layer in order to tell the difference between obedience and disobedience. According to the Mishnah, a collection or rabbinic teachings around Jesus’ day, it was lawful, for instance, to bind up a wound on the Sabbath, but not put ointment on the wound, which was considered “work”. It was not lawful to spit on the ground on the Sabbath, because that would make mud, which was considered “work”. And down to this day, observant Jews are still trying to keep the Law of Moses in the most fastidious ways, hoping to achieve the kind of righteousness God requires—elevators in some parts of New York City, for instance, are set to automatically open at every floor from sunrise to sunset on Saturdays, because to push a button would make it light up—and “kindling a fire” is forbidden on the Sabbath!

The scribes and Pharisees made all kinds of rules to try to achieve the righteousness God required in the Law—but Jesus says here that it wasn’t enough. The holiest people that Jesus’ audience ever knew were not righteous enough to enter His Kingdom!

But what Jesus promises His people is not just more precise righteousness than the Pharisees, but a different kind of righteousness altogether. Jesus came promising

The RIGHTEOUSNESS of God HIMSELF (cp. 2 Corinthians 5:17; Philippians 3:8-9)

There is no righteousness to be gained from keeping Moses’ Law, no matter how scrupulously it was kept. In fact, one of the Pharisees who was in Jerusalem at this time would someday realize this for himself, looking at all of his accomplishments of Law-keeping and saying

Philippians 3:7–9 (ESV)

7 But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—

As Jesus fulfilled that Law, He became the perfect sacrifice for sin—a sacrifice that accomplished what those torrents of blood streaming from the Temple could never do—brought the very righteousness of God Himself to His people!

2 Corinthians 5:21 (ESV)

21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Jesus Christ is the promise of the Scriptures—a promise of the righteousness of God Himself, and the promise of

A RELATIONSHIP with God as FATHER (Luke 2:49-50; Romans 8:15)

When Jesus came to earth, He talked about God in a way that people were unaccustomed to—when Mary and Joseph reprimand Him for staying behind in Jerusalem at the Temple when He was twelve, He seems to bewilder them with His answer:

Luke 2:49–50 (ESV)

49 And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” 50 And they did not understand the saying that he spoke to them.

Before Jesus came, almost nobody referred to YHWH as their “Father”—God said to King David in 1 Chronicles 17:13 that He would “be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son...” But other than that, there were very few instances of God being called “Father”...

Until Jesus came. He constantly spoke of God as His Father and—what’s more—taught His disciples to call Him Father as well (as we will see later on when Jesus teaches them to pray “Our Father in Heaven...”). The promise of Scripture is that in Jesus Christ you have a promise of a perfect righteousness before God and a perfect relationship with God—and that promise will stand as long as the sun shines and as long as the mountains endure.

If you claim the name of Christ, then you will submit to His Word—the authority of this Word stands over and against any and every other authority of any other so-called god, over any human institution, over any cultural sensitivity or emotional objection. This Word—all of it—from Adam’s body formed from the dust to Noah’s ark floating above Everest, from giants with iron beds to dragons sweeping the stars out of the sky, from axe heads that float to striped rods that breed speckled goats, from water that bears a man’s weight as he walks to a donkey that argues in a human voice with her master, from an oil jar that never runs out of oil to a man walking out of His own grave—every last word of this Book is true and powerful and authoritative in your life, Christian.

And so, Christian—act like it. Charles Spurgeon once said to his people at Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, “There is enough dust on the cover of some of your Bibles to write ‘DAMNATION’ with your fingers.” If you only open this Book on Sunday mornings (or, for some of you, if you tap on your Bible app on your phone only while you’re sitting here), and the rest of the week you have no time or interest in God’s Word, then ask your Heavenly Father for grace to repent, and ask Him to give you the hunger for this perfect, eternal Word.

Treat this Word for what it is—the unchanging, unfading, powerful Word of God. Look for opportunities to study this Word—in our Sunday School hour, during the different Bible studies offered here each week. Find one of the many free audio Bibles to stream on your phone while you work or drive, get a memory verse app and start meditating on the Scriptures. Pick up a reading plan that will guide you in reading through a book of the Bible, or read through the Bible in a year (even if it takes two years to get through a one-year plan!)

Study this Word so that when you have the responsibility of teaching it—to your kids, to your family, to others in the church—that you are not relaxing God’s commandments, or teaching others (by your words or your actions) that obeying this Book is a matter of indifference. There are so many preachers and teachers and Bible college professors who are serenely confident that they will receive a wonderful, glorious reception in Heaven someday, but their decades-long record of ignoring or explaining away or outright rejection of parts of this Book mean that they will get to Heaven and be given the Kingdom equivalent of a janitor’s jumpsuit and a plunger! Christian, make it your aim that, whether by your words or by your example, you show that this Book is worthy of your complete, joyful obedience!

And never forget, beloved, that at the end of the day it is not how perfectly you read this Book or how perfectly you kept it. Your entry into the Kingdom of Heaven is not conditioned on a high score on a Bible exam! The righteousness that exceeds the Pharisees does not come because you had more verses memorized than they did—your righteousness comes because this Word has vouchsafed to you a perfect, unbreakable promise that when you come to Jesus Christ in confession that you are utterly incapable of the righteousness this Book describes, and when you come to Him believing that He is the perfect Sacrifice for sin that this Book promises, then you enter into a perfect relationship of love and acceptance and holiness that this Book guarantees will last for all eternity!

This enduring, powerful, authoritative Word makes an unbreakable and unfading promise to you today:

Romans 10:9–10 (ESV)

9 ...if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

Believe this Word just as Jesus believed it; submit to this Word just as Jesus submitted to it; love this Word just as He loved it; obey this Word just as He obeyed it—call on the unbreakable promise made by this unfading word and come—and welcome!—to Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Jude 24–25 (ESV)

24 Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, 25 to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

Matthew 5:17 teaches that Jesus fulfills the Old Testament Scriptures. In what ways do you see Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament?

How does knowing that the Old Testament points to Jesus change the way you read it?

Why is Jesus’ authority so important for trusting the truthfulness and accuracy of the Bible? Where does He get His authority?

Jesus teaches that all of Scripture is authoritative. What parts of Scripture do you find most difficult to obey? Why? How might we help one another grow in obedience to the Bible?

How does our obedience to the Word of God affect the way that we are salt and light in this world? How does the promise of the righteousness of God purchased for us by Christ enable our obedience to His Word?

How does the Old Testament depict the relationship of God to His people? How has Jesus fulfilled those Scriptures in the relationship that He has with His people? Do you have this relationship with God through Christ?