MATTHEW 5:43-48 - How To Fulfill the Law

Introduction

We’ve come to the end of the first chapter of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—and with it the end of the first part of this series. For the last few weeks we have been following Jesus’ disputes with the interpretations of the Law of Moses that were being put forward by the scribes and Pharisees—the self-proclaimed experts in Jewish law and righteousness. Jesus makes it clear earlier in this chapter that He is not abrogating or overthrowing God’s Law:

Matthew 5:17–18 (LSB)

17 “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. 18 “For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

But He does go on to say that the scribes and Pharisees had completely missed the point of the Law—they believed that their adherence to the outward, works-based adherence to the Law was enough to secure their righteous standing before God. But Jesus makes it clear that their version of “righteousness” according to the Law was not enough:

Matthew 5:20 (LSB)

20 “For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

And here we come to the reason that their Law-keeping was a failure: They were failing to truly keep the Law of God because they were failing to love one another:

Matthew 5:43–44 (LSB)

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and hate your enemy.’ 44 “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...

Now, I say that in part because of the way the Apostle Paul connects Law-keeping and love in the passage we read earlier in our worship from Romans 13--

Romans 13:8–10 (LSB)

8 Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. 9 For this, “YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY, YOU SHALL NOT MURDER, YOU SHALL NOT STEAL, YOU SHALL NOT COVET,” and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this word, “YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.” 10 Love does not work evil against a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the Law.

What does loving your neighbor look like, according to the Scriptures here? Loving your neighbor means not violating his marriage vows with his wife. Loving your neighbor means not taking his life unlawfully. Loving your neighbor means respecting his personal property.

What God’s Law was intended to do (among other things) was to show us how to love one another with our actions. And so, if you perform all the actions without the love, then you have not put it all together; you have not fulfilled the purpose of the Law.

Loving your neighbor is the fulfillment of the Law. Now the Pharisees said they were loving their neighbor...

Matthew 5:43 (LSB)

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR...

Yet Jesus says that the scribes and Pharisees were not fulfilling the Law—they were falling short of the righteousness God requires for citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven because they were doing all of these things without love. What they defined as “loving” was not really love at all. The so-called “love” that they were teaching and proclaiming was merely adherence to some outward behaviors—it was not the kind of love God commands.

And so as we come to this passage this morning, we find ourselves needing Jesus’ teaching here as much as the wayward scribes and Pharisees ever did. Because we live in a culture that is simply saturated with commands to love one another—you see the yard signs everywhere. We believe that we are a “loving” people, that since “God is love”, that He is therefore on our side in our practice of “love”. “Love” is the most important element of life (and we unironically believe this so much that those whom we deem are not being “loving” are therefore worthy of our hatred.)

It has been well-said by others that our current cultural battle is a battle over the dictionary. What is the definition of this word “LOVE” that you insist on? What do you mean by that? By what standard do you consider an action “loving” or “unloving”?

In much of our contemporary discourse, we seem to equate “loving” someone with some sort of emotion—that we are “loving” someone when we make them feel a certain way: accepted, cherished, valued, and so on. (And to be unloving is to make someone feel a different way—when they feel judged, convicted, criticized or contradicted.)

But is this what God means when He calls us to “love our neighbor”? What has He revealed to us in the Scriptures about what “love” is? The verses before us this morning from our Savior’s Sermon on the Mount offer us a revelation of what true love looks like—the kind of love that is a fulfillment of everything God revealed to Moses in the Law; in fact, the kind of love that God reveals to us throughout all the Scriptures.

Here in Jesus’ words at the end of Matthew 5 we have His own words about what it means to “love your neighbor”; here we have His definition of the word. And so the way I want to summarize it for us this morning—the definition of love we find here from Christ Himself is

Love means acting LAWFULLY toward your NEIGHBOR from the HEART

Christian, if you would love your neighbor the way Jesus commands you here, this is what that love will look like. It will not be merely a conformity to an outward set of expectations—and that means it will stand out in a world that has twisted and contorted the word “love” out of all recognition. This love is not going to look like what the world considers “love”—love as defined by God’s Word will

I. Dispute the world’s PERVERSIONS of God’s love (Matthew 5:43)

Look again at verse 43:

Matthew 5:43 (LSB)

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and hate your enemy.’

Now, the beginning of this quotation is taken from Moses’ Law—at least, it is related to Moses’ Law. In Leviticus 19:18, we read

Leviticus 19:18 (LSB)

18 ‘You shall not take vengeance, and you shall not keep your anger against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am Yahweh.

Now, do you see the difference? As this Scripture is quoted by the Pharisees, we see that it is actually misquoted, wasn’t it? They had taken God’s Word that told them how to love (“love your neighbor the way you love yourself”), and turned it into a verse on who to love (love your neighbor, and not your enemy…)

But as you live out the love that Christ commands—the love that flows from a heart that has been reborn through the Gospel—your love will challenge the world’s false notions of love

Where it is SEVERED from God’s Word

Love that acts lawfully toward your neighbor from your heart is a love that desires your neighbor’s good just as much as you desire your own. But when we sever the definition of love from the Scriptures, we can go ahead and love ourselves more than others. And look no further than our current culture’s exhortations to “self-love” and “self-care” and insistence on how you must work on loving you before you can love others.

The Pharisees of Jesus’ day sliced up the definition of love in such a way that they did not have to ask themselves whether they loved others as much as they loved themselves—they were free to love themselves first and foremost. And we see the consequences of this severance from God’s Word in another way. Love that acts lawfully toward your neighbor from the heart is a love that will dispute the world’s perversion of love severed from God’s Word, and it will dispute the world’s perversion of love

Where it plainly CONTRADICTS God’s Word

Moving through the rest of verse 43, we see that omitting part of Leviticus 19:18 wasn’t the only way the Pharisees had perverted the meaning of love in the Scriptures—they went so far as to openly add to the Scriptures:

Matthew 5:43 (LSB)

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and hate your enemy.’

Now, right away, a diligent student of the Scriptures will call to mind verses like Psalm 139:21-22:

Psalm 139:21–22 (LSB)

21 Do I not hate those who hate You, O Yahweh? And do I not revile those who rise up against You? 22 I hate them with the utmost hatred; They have become my enemies.

Here in our text, Jesus is taking the Pharisees to task for adding “hate your enemies” to the commandment to love your neighbor. But Psalm 139 seems to be directing us to “hate our enemies”. So what is going on here? Is the Scripture contradicting itself on this point?

I don’t think so, and here’s the reason why—if you look at the context of Psalm 139, you see that David is speaking of enemies of God, not his own enemies:

Psalm 139:19–20 (LSB)

19 Oh that You would slay the wicked, O God! O men of bloodshed, depart from me. 20 For they speak against You wickedly, And Your enemies take Your name in vain.

This is not just playing with words—there is a big difference between saying “God’s enemies are my enemies” and “My enemies are God’s enemies!” To say, “God, those who hate You and rebel against you are my enemies, and I hate them!” is an expression of your love for God. To say, “Anyone who fights against me or is an adversary against me is an enemy of God and I hate them!” is an expression of your secret desire to be God!

And it is not hard to see this same kind of twisted logic on display in our own day, is it? You’re either on my side, or you’re evil! We make the unchallenged assumption that of course God agrees with our side; anyone who sets themselves against me is obviously an enemy of God! We increasingly open the door for anger, spite, derision and hate towards anyone who doesn’t utterly and totally agree with everything we say—the Pharisees would be proud of our world’s rigidity and blind insistence that any enemy of ours is ipso facto an enemy of God, and therefore worthy of hatred!

This also helps us to understand the astonishing and bizarre spectacle which we have been subjected to in the past weeks of watching protests in support of Hamas and their butchery of innocent Israeli children. Tens of thousands of people all over the civilized world—London, New York, Washington D.C.—people who have jobs and families and drivers licenses and everything, thousands of whom would call themselves Christians—celebrating with savage glee the kind of genocidal horrors and poisonous racial hatred that hasn’t been seen since Germany in the 1930’s—unless you count the George Floyd riots of 2000. When we sever the truth of God’s Word from our definition of “love”, we inevitably collapse into hatred—love your neighbor Republicans; hate those enemy Democrats. Love your based neighbors; hate those woke liberals. Love the immigrants who came over the border legally; hate the ones who have been let into the country illegally. Love those who agree with you, hate those who differ.

But Jesus calls His people to reject the false and wicked perversions of so-called “love” that this world concocts—when you are loving according to God’s revelation, acting lawfully toward your neighbor from the heart—you will not only dispute the world’s perversions of God’s love, you will

II. Display the PECULIARITIES of God’s love (Matthew 5:44-45)

Jesus demonstrates in verse 44 and 45 that you may not stop with loving yourself and hating your neighbor—loving those who are like you and hating those who are your adversaries:

Matthew 5:44–45 (LSB)

44 “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven...

God’s love is not like the love that we are inclined to demonstrate toward one another—we want to love ourselves more than we love others; we want to love those who are like us and hate those who are opposed to us. But Jesus says here that God does not love the way we do. He says that you will show that you belong to God (that God is your “Father!”) when you love the way He does.

But right away, we run into a problem, don’t we? Jesus says that we must display the peculiarities of God’s love—love the unique way that He does—by loving our enemies, and loving those who want to destroy us. So does this mean there is some way that God loves evil people? Does God “love” the wicked? If He does, then why do the wicked go to Hell? If God really does love His enemies, then why does He still destroy them?

This is a very important question for us to ask this morning—because if we are not careful we will say something about God’s love that is not true. So we need to make some careful distinctions about what we mean when we say “God loves the world” or “God loves the wicked” or “God loves you” or “God loves His Son”.

Theologians typically make three distinctions when talking about God’s love. The first way that we talk about God’s “love” is to talk about

God’s benevolent love - His KIND DISPOSITION to all His CREATION (cp. Luke 2:14)

This is the kind of love that we hear about from the angels the night Jesus was born, as they cried out

Luke 2:14 (LSB)

14 “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.”

The Scriptures tell us that God delights in all that He has created; He looks with a benevolent eye on all that He has made. Ezekiel 18:23 reflects this benevolence towards even wicked enemies:

Ezekiel 18:23 (LSB)

23 “Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked,” declares Lord Yahweh, “is it not that he should turn from his ways and live?

This is what it means to demonstrate the peculiarities of God’s love, Christian—that even those who are set against you as enemies; even those who are twisted and evil and wicked in their nature, you can look on as precious bearers of the image of God. Can you pass someone by on the street or in the store and look on them with kindness and affection completely apart from knowing anything about them? Can you can wish good for those who hate you? No matter how wicked their schemes or evil their nature, would you genuinely rejoice if they turned from their wicked ways and lived?

You demonstrate that you belong to God as your Father when you display the peculiarities of His love—His benevolent love of a kind disposition to all people everywhere, regardless of what you do or don’t know about them. And this brings us to a second way that we can talk about God’s love—

God’s beneficent love - His FREE BLESSINGS to all without CALCULATION (v. 45b)

This is what we see in verse 45 of our text:

Matthew 5:44–45 (LSB)

44 “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

God’s beneficent love is His relation to mankind by which He freely pours out blessings on all. The same Sun that shines its warmth and its light on your preschooler as he plays outside on a sunny day shines on the Hamas terrorists as they kidnap innocent children in Israel.

God’s beneficent love means that there are blessings He pours out on men without calculating beforehand whether they deserve them or not. Christian, when you display the peculiarity of a love that will bless even those who curse you; when you will do what good is in your power to do even for those who would hurt you—that is a love that this world simply cannot process.

Jesus goes on to press His point in verses 46-47:

Matthew 5:46–47 (LSB)

46 “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 “And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

When the New Birth that you have received in Christ transforms your heart, then the love that Christ calls you to display will dispute the world’s perversions of God’s love; it will display the peculiarities of God’s love, and it will

III. Demonstrate the PERFECTION of God’s love (vv. 46-48)

If your goodwill only extends to people who are kind to you, you’re not demonstrating any kind of “love” that is different from the lost world around you. The kind of love that Jesus is calling you to is a love that is totally unlike the so-called “love” displayed by the world, because

This love has SET you APART from the WORLD (vv. 46-47)

To genuinely and joyfully wish the best for and try to bless by your actions those who are trying to humiliate, oppress and destroy you, to look with kindness on the most wicked and evil enemies who would kill you if they got the chance—nobody in this world does that! Corrie Ten Boom tells the story of her arrival with her sister Betsie to the [HURT-again-bosh) Concentration Camp in 1944. When they arrived the guards threatened and harassed them with a torrent of rules and regulations about the camp. Corrie writes how angry and frustrated she was at the dehumanizing and wicked treatment they had received—but she recalls her sister saying to her,

“‘Corrie, if people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love! We must find the way, you and I, no matter how long it takes.’ I saw a grey uniform and a visored hat; Betsie saw a wounded human being. And I wondered, not for the first time, what sort of a person she was, this sister of mine, what kind of road she followed while I trudged beside her.” (Retrieved from https://www.talesofcourage.com/blog/betsie-ten-boom, Accessed 11/3/2023)

What sort of person was Betsie Ten Boom? She was a Christian who had learned the secret of love that set her apart from the world and marked her as a child of her Father in Heaven. The road she followed was the road marked out by her Savior in this Sermon:

Matthew 5:44–45 (LSB)

44 “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven...

The love that Jesus commands us to display here in these verses is a love that the world simply has no capacity for. In fact, you have no capacity for it, either—not in your own strength, not by your own moral character. Forget about the ability to genuinely love a Nazi prison guard—we are not capable of talking about our own president without contempt.

The only way that you can be capable of this kind of love—a love that surpasses the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, a love that outruns the so-called “love” that this world claims to show—the only way you can demonstrate this love is when your heart has been transformed by the New Birth—when you have been born again through your faith in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. This love demonstrates the perfection of God’s love because

This love has RESCUED you from God’s WRATH (v. 48; cp. Matthew 3:17)

When Jesus says in Matthew 5:48

Matthew 5:48 (LSB)

48 “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

the immediate context is referring to your comprehensive love for all people, whether or not they deserve it. (The Greek word rendered “perfect” in verse 48 also means “complete”.) The idea here is that since God’s love is complete—his benevolence and blessings are not incompletely or imperfectly given, but include all men—then that is how you must love as well. Let your love be perfected, complete, not failing to reach anyone. Let your love be complete—not just obedience to God’s Law, but obedience that flows out of a deep and genuine love from the heart.

But this brings us to one more way that we can speak of God’s love—

God’s complacent love - The SETTLED and ENDURING love which which He loves His CHILDREN (cp. Matthew 3:17)

Our modern connotation of the word “complacent” is rather negative—someone who is complacent is uncaring or indifferent; complacency in our modern usage describes someone who is not interested in change, or not willing to strive for advancement. But the original Latin source of the word comes from placere - meaning pleased, and the prefix com- meaning very. God’s complacent love is His being very pleased with someone—in fact, the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible uses a form of the word complacent in Matthew 3:17

Matthew 3:17 (LSB)

17 and behold, there was a voice out of the heavens saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.”

(in quo mihi complacui…) God’s complacent love is a love that will never cease. The day will come when God’s benevolence towards sinners will come to an end. The Day will come when there will be no more blessings of sunshine or rain or common grace on the wicked. Those ways of speaking of God’s “love” for the world have an expiration date.

But the way God loves His Son—and the way He loves all those who belong to His Son by faith—that love will never end. The love of God that saves you, Christian, is the love that was demonstrated by the work of Jesus Christ, His Son. It was His love that laid down His life for you, that loved you when you did not deserve it:

Romans 5:7–8 (LSB)

7 For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. 8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

The love with which Christ loved you is the never-ending, merciful, delighted love of God Himself—the love by which He rescues you from the wrath of God against your sin:

Romans 5:9 (LSB)

9 Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him.

Have you been rescued from the wrath of God by the perfect, never-ending love of Jesus Christ that was set on you by His grace? Then demonstrate it—let that love be perfected in you as you show that you belong to your Father in Heaven by loving the way He does. Act lawfully toward your neighbor from your heart—a heart that has been transformed from death to life, from rebellion to obedience, from hatred to benevolence, from selfishness to generosity. Make it your aim that everyone you meet will see the same love in you that drew Christ to die on that Cross for you—and through that love that sets you apart from this world, a love that this world cannot comprehend—you will glorify your Father in heaven and draw this poor, broken, wicked world to Him.

Or do you read these verses and see here the love that Christ calls you to demonstrate and you realize that this kind of love is foreign to your life? The movements of your heart are not toward blessing those who curse you, but rather full of bitterness and grudges and pain and hatred towards everyone who has ever wronged you. There’s a list a mile long of people that you want to “get back at” in one way or another, but very few people (if any) that you would willingly give yourself for. You can think of plenty of reasons to hate, but when you hear Jesus say to love your enemies your immediate response is how pointless and impossible it is to love someone who hates you.

Deep down, you despise such a call—it’s a display of weakness to return hatred with love. Your hate is your strength; your hate is righteous, your hate is justified in light of what has been done to you.

But Jesus says that a heart characterized by that hate will never enter Heaven. You have a choice to make today—you can cling to that bitterness and hatred and animosity towards everyone and everything that has wronged or hurt you until it consumes you, and in the end you are cast into the place where all you will be able to do for eternity is hate—hating God and receiving His wrath poured out on you in return forever and ever.

Or you can listen to the voice of Jesus Christ this morning—because He is calling you to let go of that hatred, and to let go of the pride that causes you to cling to it. He is calling you to repent of that hate, to lay down all of your pain and all of your past abuses and mistreatments, pile up all of your reasons for your anger and animosity and grudges at the foot of His Cross. He has the authority to call you to this because He Himself suffered from the hatred of those who put Him to death—the most mistreated, abused, reviled, tortured Victim ever in the history of the cosmos. And His response to that hatred was to love even them.

So, friend, that means that you cannot argue with what He is calling you to do. You cannot say, “But I have so many good reasons to hate them for what they’ve done to me! You can’t expect me to let go of that!” You can’t say that to Him—because He has suffered more (and forgiven more) that you will ever be able to fathom. And He did it for people who hated Him. While we were still His enemies, while we were still children of wrath, while we were dead in our sins, He loved us anyway!

And this is the One Who is calling you away from all of that hatred this morning—He not only offers you freedom from the hateful things that have been done to you, but He offers you cleansing from the hateful things you have done to others. This is the only way that you can be free—there is no other escape from the consequences of your hatred, there is no other way to please God, there is no other way to fulfill the righteous requirements of His Law, no other way to be perfected in Love but to come in repentance and faith to Love Himself—so come—and welcome!—to Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION:

Hebrews 13:20–21 (LSB)

20 Now the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, our Lord Jesus, 21 equip you in every good thing to do His will, by doing in us what is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

What does the word “love” mean in its common usage in our society today? How does the world’s definition of love differ from God’s Word?

Read Romans 13:8-14 again. According to the Apostle Paul, what is the connection between the Ten Commandments and love as defined by God’s Word? What light does this shed on Jesus’ accusations that the Pharisees had failed to fulfill the Law?

Is it ever appropriate to tell an unbeliever, “God loves you?” Why or why not? In what ways can we say God loves an unbelieving, wicked person? In what way is it wrong to say God “loves” an evil person?

What does it mean to “act lawfully toward your neighbor from the heart?” How can demonstrating love the way Jesus describes in this passage cause you to stand out in this world? Pray for opportunities to show this kind of love to someone this week!