Sermon Tone Analysis

The Fulfillment of the Law

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 tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Interpretation

SLIDE: MT.

OF BEAUTITUDES

Jesus begins his ministry by proclaiming the good news of the kingdom ().

The Old Testament prophets looked forward to a time when messiah would come and usher in the reign of God.

This is what Jesus is doing by proclaming the kingdom - the long awaited time when God would usher in his reign had finally dawned.

background information

The Old Testament prophets looked forward to a time when messiah would come and usher in the reign of God.

This is what Jesus is doing by proclaming the kingdom - the long awaited time when God would usher in his reign had finally dawned.

And yet we look around the world and see mass shootings, threats of war and violence, we have turmoil in our own homes and in our own hearts.

We don’t see a world that looks like God’s kingdom, and yet in Jesus ministry we see little glimpses, seed-like forms of the kingdom.

One commentator says that the kingdom is “both a future event and a present reality” (Gordon Fee, quoted in Kingdom Ethics, 20).

There is an already-not-yet reality of the kingdom

And yet we look around the world and see mass shootings, threats of war and violence, we have turmoil in our own homes and in our own hearts.

We don’t see a world that looks like God’s kingdom, and yet in Jesus’ ministry we see little glimpses, seed-like forms of the kingdom.

One commentator says that the kingdom is “both a future event and a present reality” (Gordon Fee, quoted in Kingdom Ethics, 20).

There is an already-not-yet reality of the kingdom

We simply cannot understand the Sermon on the Mount correctly if we do not understand it in light of the Kingdom for this reason:

Proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus telling us what life in the kingdom looks like (Kingdom Ethics, 31).

Verse 17

Christ: The Fulfillment of the Law

Verse 17

SLIDE: MT.

SINAI

One of the coldest experiences in my life was not trudging through a blanket of snow on a frigid Minneosta January day…it was in of all places the Middle East.

For part of my studies I traveled to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt to St. Catherine’s monastery at the base of Mt.

Sinai.

Early in the morning around 430, I along with about 20 other students arose and hiked to the top of the mountain.

After the hour hike we made it to the top summit where the distant granite peaks were shrowded by the black of night only to be exposed by that piercing ray of light of the morning sun.

We were all standing there shaking, chilled to the bone.

I couldn’t help but think what it was like for Moses?

Did he experience the same cold before God appeared in a flame or fire.

It was a majestic and historical experience for me.

Mountains in particular play an important role in the Bible.

It was on a mountain where Elijah slew the prophets of Baal.

It was on a mountain that God told Abraham to go and sacrifice his only son Isaac.

It was on a mountain that Moses and the Israelites looked into the promised land.

But perhaps the most famous mountain in the Bible is mount Sinai.

It is there that Moses stood before the flaming presence of the Almighty and received the law, the Ten Commandments etched into those granite slabs.

It was there that God established his covenant relationship with Moses and the Israelites.

It is no accident that in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus goes upon on a mountain and teaches about the law.

Matthew is presenting Jesus not just as a new Moses, but a better Moses.

SLIDE: Christ: The Fulfillment of the Law

Mou

But so that no one would think that Jesus is somehow standing against or contradicting the law of Moses, Jesus early on in the sermon says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to ablish them but to fulfill them.”

The three important words in this verse that we need to investigate if we are going to understand the rest of the passage are: law and the prophets, abolish and fulfill.

Law and the Prophets

As Pastor Vonn spoke about last week, a team of ten of us just recently returned from Israel and Jordan.

One of the things that strikes me every time I travel to the Middle East and in particular the lands in which the events of the Bible actually took place, I am reminded about how foreign the land and culture of the Bible is to our land and culture.

We would be wise to remember this and do the hard work of seeking to understand the cultural background of the biblical events.

In many ways we have westernized and sanitized the biblical events and we lose the real shock and radical nature of these events.

We read the words of Jesus as if they occurred in a vacuum without regard for any of the surrounding context.

Jesus lived in a culture that deeply cherished and treasured the Scriptures that we call the Old Testament.

They were deeply immersed in the history of God dealing with his people.

Jesus has in view the Old Testament, the law referring to the first five books and the Prophets is probably another way of referring to the rest of the Old Testament (WBC, 105).

We need to have the entire Old Testament in view.

One of the things that we commonly hear today is that the Old Testament is all about trying to earn favor with God by keeping the law and the New Testament is all about grace.

This could not be further from the truth, and Jesus himself in this passage shows that this is not a correct understanding of the Old Testament.

The law, and obedience to the law of God was always viewed as a response to God’s grace when God delivered the Israelites from captivity in Egypt.

The law was a blueprint of what it looks like to live in a covenant relationship with God.

Keeping the law was never viewed as a way of earning favor with God, or earning salvation (Brown, 62).

God’s grace has always been the clarion call of his dealings with his people.

Now the law in the Old Testament and how it relates to the coming of Jesus in the New, is a topic that is so complex that we don’t have time to give adequate attention to it here, but one thing must be said, the entire Old Testament law must be now read in light of Jesus’ words and deeds.

Israel had a long history of misunderstanding the true intent of the law.

Perhaps one of the most famous instances comes from :

School of Hillel

7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,

with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?

Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,

the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

8 He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.

And what does the LORD require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy

and to walk humbly j with your God.

School of Shammai

Abolish

Verses 17-20 introduce the following section vv.

21-48 where Jesus takes six different examples from the law of Moses and sheds new light on how to understand these laws.

Perhaps you recognize the statement of Jesus, “You have heard that it was said…but I tell you.”

It is easy to assume that Jesus was doing away with the law or giving a new law, because what Jesus taught was so different from what the crowds had heard before (WBC, 104).

But in v. 17 Jesus twice says, “I have not come to abolish them.”

He wants to make sure that no one is going to misinterpret him.

He is not overthrowing the law that God gave to them through Moses.

There were probably some already early on in Jesus’ ministry that thought that Jesus was ignoring, or worse, contradicting the deep foundation of the Old Testament law.

The implication here is that already in Jesus ministry there may have been the thought that Jesus was by his teaching was ignoring the deep foundation of the Old Testament law.

Throughout the Gospel of Matthew the religious leaders frequenlty confront Jesus and his disciples with the accusation that they are law breakers.

In many ways I think many Christians today have a similar perception of Jesus, not that Jesus was a lawbreaker perse, but that he has indeed abolished the law Old Testament law, and that because of Jesus the law doesn’t matter anymore.

The Old Testament law is still relevant, but in order to understand what this means we have to understand our next key word: fulfill.

John Stott sums it up well how we ought to think about the law:

For the moment it is enough to emphasize that according to this verse (17) the attitude of Jesus to the Old Testament was not one of destruction and of discontinuity, but rather of a constructive, organic continuity

“…the attitude of Jesus to the Old Testament was not one of destruction and of discontinuity, but rather of a constructive, organic continuity” (Stott, 72).

Fulfill

We can understand Jesus fulfilling the law in two different ways:

Jesus has come to fulfill the law, not abolish it, but what does this mean?