Christ Fulfills the Law

Deut 28, Pastor Steve pointed out a few weeks ago, is so full of statements of blessing that it serves like a precursor to the Beatitudes. But the blessings were conditional on Israel’s complete obedience to the Law. And back then, before they had even entered the Promised Land, God had promised them that disobedience to the Law would lead to them being scattered in exile among the nations. And when Israel spent the next half-millennium continually turning aside from God’s blessings, failing to heed the prophets’ calls to repent, finally, under God’s judgment they were carried off into exile into Assyria and Babylon

There, they started listening to the prophets. They remembered what Isaiah had said, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel and the rest. And when they began to return to the land in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, the character of Israel had changed. The people took to studying the Law and the Prophets in ways they never had. The scribes, men who were devoted to the study, careful copying, and teaching of Scripture, became one of the most respected professions in Israel, and they were called “rabbi” as a term of honor. Over the centuries, the scribes developed massive commentaries on the Law that preserved the teachings of earlier rabbis.

And a new revival movement gathered people from across professions and backgrounds. They saw it as their responsibility to live out the Law completely faithfully. In order to keep themselves from breaking God’s Law, they built new rules around it, like a fence, to keep them from even approaching breaking the Law. They were the Pharisees.

The statement that ends our text today is shocking, to say the least. The scribes and the Pharisees were the best human effort could provide. Anyone hearing Jesus on that mountain that day would have responded: If my righteousness has to exceed theirs to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, who in the entire world can be saved?

And this drives us towards the Lord’s meaning in these verses.

If we understand the Old Testament correctly, we will come to the conclusion that our only hope is that another has paid our debt.

Which raises the question:

Q. How should we understand and relate to the Old Testament?

I. The Purpose of the Law (v17)

<<READ v17>>

EXPLAIN:

Today’s text begins with a warning. He says, “Don’t even let it enter your mind.” It is vital, Jesus says, that you and I are clear on why He has come.

Verse 20 indicates that our understanding of Jesus’s purpose and mission, and the way we understand the nature of the Old Testament and righteousness, says something about our very status before God.

2 Timothy 3:16–17 ESV

16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Jesus uses a peculiar phrase in verse 17.

The Law & the prophets is the normal expression for the entire Old Testament (Mat 7:12 and throughout the NT)

But by saying “Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets,” Jesus makes it clear that this isn’t just a general statement, but a clear, emphatic, extensive one. Pick out any text of the Law or the Prophets. Any text at all - and the answer to whether Jesus came to abolish it is “No.”

In Jesus’s day, there was a disagreement among Jews regarding just how authoritative different parts of Scripture were. Some schools of thought, like the Sadducees, figured the Law was the most important, and that other Scriptures were either less important or even non-binding. So you could disregard the parts of God’s Word that you didn’t like

But Jesus makes it clear: He has not come to abolish a single verse, a single letter.

The Law refers to the first 5 books of the Old Testament - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Now, my father-in-law is an attorney, and I know some of you hear “The Law” and think about some lawyer’s library full of dusty old books with things like “Van Staphorst v. Maryland,” and “West v. Barnes,” and either you get PTSD from high school Government class or you start geeking out because you hope I’m going to mention the first Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay. But I’m not. Because that’s not what Jesus means by “The Law.”

The word translated “Law” in Hebrew is “Torah,” which means “Instruction.” The Torah is the foundational documentation of God’s Covenant with Israel, including all of the commandments and precepts that God lays upon humanity, but also the story of God’s covenant with Israel, the story of salvation from the creation of the world through Israel’s deliverance in Egypt, to the moment Israel is about to step into the Promised Land.

Torah was God’s way for Israel. It was the story of Israel and the standard of God for them.

Jesus uses the term “The Prophets” to refer to the God-breathed account from Judges through Malachi, of God’s faithfulness and Israel’s unfaithfulness to that Covenant charter, and God’s intention to bring salvation to Israel and the whole world through the Messiah that He would send.

When Jesus says “The Law or the Prophets,” we should look and say, “Jesus is not bringing a rival message. He’s not softening the Old Testament message. He’s not un-hitching us from the Old Testament. He’s not calling the Old Testament into question in any way.”

Throughout Christian history, people have ignored Jesus’s words here and have decided that Jesus actually did abolish the Law.

So it’s important for us to see what the word “abolish” means. It’s a word that means “to overthrow.”

ILLUST: Flash-forward to 1066 in England. Edward the King of England names Harold Godwinson as his successor to the throne. But at the Battle of Hastings, William the Duke of Normandy kills Harold and by Christmas he’s got the throne. He’s overthrown what came before. Harold is gone. His authority is gone. You might remember him, but he’s not the king anymore.

Jesus says, “Don’t think I came to overthrow the Law. How could I? It’s MY WORD.” And that we better not think we can cut out half our Bibles.

Some Christians have trouble with the Old Testament. They’re not sure how to make it all fit together. Maybe that’s some of us. Jesus doesn’t say “Pretend you know how it all fits.” When He says, “Don’t think I came to abolish the Law, or the Prophets” you and I should look at our Old Testament and say, “Even if I don’t know exactly how it all fits together, I know that the same voice I read in Matthew 5 is the voice that says, ‘Let there be light’ in Genesis 1.”

Before we move to the rest of the text, let’s think about the purpose of the Law & the Prophets.

The Law is the record of God’s intention to rescue this broken world from sin and death through the Messiah who would come through the line of Abraham. God’s covenant with Israel is His promise, His commitment, to be their God and His call to them to be His people. In Exodus and Deuteronomy, the written Law is also called a witness against Israel. It gives the whole context for the relationship Israel was to have with the Lord, and that includes the call to perfectly reflect God’s character in their lives. The Law demonstrates the fact that no one is righteous in the true sense.

Paul picks up on this in Romans 1-3. If no one in Israel was righteous, with all the advantages of the Covenant and the Prophetic Word, then no one in the whole world was righteous. So the Law demonstrated the holiness and faithfulness of God and the sinfulness and rebellion of the whole world. The Law bears witness against you and against me.

Romans 3:19–20 ESV

19 Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

The rest of the Old Testament bear witness to God’s continued faithfulness to His promises in spite of Israel’s continued failure to live up to the Covenant. The prophets called out to Israel, and Israel ignored or killed them.

But the prophets said that God was going to fulfill His saving promises anyway.

So here is the purpose of the Old Testament in a nutshell: God created us, and all of us have gone the same direction as Adam and Eve, pursuing sin instead of righteousness. God promised to save us, and uses the story and standard of the Covenant to show us why we need salvation.

II. The Purpose of Christ

The rest of verse 17 says “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

Jesus fulfills the Old Testament in the following ways:

First of all, Jesus embodies the very promises of Scripture. This is one of the most prominent themes in all of Matthew’s Gospel. In Matthew 1:22, at Jesus’s birth:

Matthew 1:22–23 ESV

22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: 23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).

Quoting from Isaiah 7:14.

Matthew 8:16–17 ESV

16 That evening they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. 17 This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.”

Quoting from Isaiah 53:4.

We find out in Matthew 27 that even the manner of Jesus’s death fulfilled the words of Psalm 22, right down to the soldiers gambling for the Messiah’s clothes, the mockery of those around him, and even the fact that in His death, the Father forsook Him so that we could be saved.

Jesus embodied the promise of God in Genesis 3:15 to rescue humanity from sin and death through the costly defeat of Satan by a man called “the seed of the woman,” a child born to a virgin.

He embodied the promise of God in Genesis 12 that through Abraham’s descendant, people from every nation would be blessed. He embodied the promise of God in Genesis 49:10 that a descendant of Judah would be an everlasting King to whom all peoples would come, and the later promise that the everlasting King would be a descendant of David. He embodied the promise of Deuteronomy 18 that God would raise up one other prophet like Moses, one day, who would bring the words of God to them in a way no other prophet could - as one who saw God face-to-face and knew Him like no other.

He embodies the promise of God in 1 Samuel 2:35, when God promises that the Levitical priesthood, of mortal, sinful men, would one day be replaced with a faithful priest, who would do everything according to God’s own heart and mind and continue in His ministry forever.

God promises in the Law and the Prophets a savior who will be an everlasting prophet, priest, and king, humble and yet glorious, the son of God and the son of Man, who would die a substitutionary death for the sins of others, and yet live forever. Jesus came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets by bringing God’s promises to fulfillment.

He fulfills the Law and the Prophets by doing God’s commands, too. The Law showcases God’s holiness and the failure of sinful humanity, even the people of Israel, to live up to God’s standard. But Jesus does live up to the Law. That is why He came. To fulfill the Law in our place. To redeem humanity by the priceless shedding of His own righteous blood.

And He fulfills the Law and the Prophets in His own teaching.

ILLUST: In the Gospels, we see the Pharisees and scribes accusing Jesus of setting aside the Law because He did things like heal on the Sabbath.

The scribes and Pharisees accused Jesus of abolishing the Law and the Prophets because He didn’t follow the teachings of their rabbis, and He didn’t care about their man-made rules set up around the Law. The Law told them to work six days, and rest on the Sabbath. It did not say not to heal on the Sabbath. It was the rabbis who decided healing was forbidden. The Pharisees had decided it wasn’t enough to seek to remain pure from the things that the Law said were unclean. They decided that just in case you contacted something unclean in the marketplace, you had to wash your hands before meals - not for hygiene, for technicality-style Law-keeping. And Jesus calls them out for their hypocrisy in this in Matthew 15 - he says they honor God with their lips, but their hearts are far from Him.

And that’s the key to understand where the Pharisees missed the point. The Pharisees and scribes had put a man-made system of rule-keeping in place of a call to love the LORD your God with all your heart, and mind, and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says in Matthew 7:12 that that’s what the entire Law is about. And because Jesus, the Son of God, perfectly loved His Father and perfectly loved you and me and the whole world, He perfectly kept the Law, and so He fulfilled it.

III. The Permanence of the Law

In verse 18, Jesus tells us that <<READ 18>>. He’s not abolishing the Law, he’s fulfilling the Law and he’s reaffirming the permanence of the Law.

He says every single letter is important. Iota is the smallest Greek letter, corresponding to YOD, the smallest Hebrew letter - just a little line. He says not even a dot will pass away - even the little marks that distinguish one letter from another. Even in its fulfillment, every verse, every word, every letter remains authoritative for you and me, he says, until He returns and heaven and earth give way to the New Heavens and New Earth, where sin and death are finally and completely destroyed and all is accomplished.

The Law still has its work to do until Jesus returns. That’s why Jesus says we must not think He has come to abolish it.

APPLY: We can be sure we have misunderstood Jesus if we think that since He has come, the Old Testament is done. It’s a surefire recipe for a faith disaster.

One of the earliest and most serious crises in the history of Christianity came from a guy named Marcion shortly after AD 100, when he decided that the Jesus of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament were completely different, and cut the Old Testament and everything he didn’t like in the New Testament out of his Bible. What he ended up with was not Christianity at all.

And in the words of Ecclesiastes, there’s nothing new under the sun. Even today, people try to drive a wedge between the Old and New Testaments. Instead of taking Jesus at His Word about the Old Testament, they think they understand Jesus better than Jesus, which ends up distorting Jesus’s mission, His identity, and the nature of salvation. And that means it’s not a message that can give salvation. This is the seriousness of Jesus’s warning

The surest way to avoid the disaster is to take Him at His Word. Without the Old Testament, you have no promises from God to save sinners. You have no story and standard of the Covenant to understand your need for God.

But the Law and the Prophets stand today as a testimony of God’s faithfulness, God’s promises, God’s plan for salvation, and our rebellion, our sin, our need for salvation.

How we apply the Old Testament has changed because Jesus has come. But the authority of God’s Word never changes.

Jesus tells us that He is the perfect and once-for-all fulfillment of the Old Testament sacrificial system. He’s the true Passover Lamb - his blood is poured out to redeem us from slavery to sin and death. He is the sacrifice of our Atonement, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. As Christians, we are not obligated to keep the Feast of Passover and the Day of Atonement because they are fulfilled in Him.

But we must have Him as our Passover and our Atonement, or else we are still in bondage to sin and will face God’s judgment.

And this brings us to verse 19, and with this I close:

IV. The Provision of Christ

<<READ 19-20>>

In the next several weeks, we’re going to see how the Pharisees relaxed God’s Law. They externalized it by adding to it. But Jesus calls us back to the heart of the matter, literally.

Two kinds of people are pictured in verse 19. The first one looks at God’s righteous standard and does what Jesus insists He has not come to do. They lower the standard to something more manageable for sinners. God’s Law calls people to perfect obedience from the heart. That’s why, at the end of Jesus’s exposition of the Law in Matthew 5:48, He says:

Matthew 5:48 ESV

48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

If God gives you a standard of righteousness that you can’t possibly keep, which is more likely: That he wants you to dumb it down, or that he wants you to come to Him, in honesty, and ask for help?

The person who says, “You do not need to be perfect” has decided that not every iota and dot of the Law really counts. When God says, we must be careful to do all that He has commanded” in Deut 5:1, and Deut 6:25, 11:22, 11:32, 12:1, 12:28, 26:16, 28:15, 31:12, and 32:46, Jesus says that He means it.

He says that even the least commandment is a matter of serious importance. To relax God’s commands and to teach others to do the same is tremendous arrogance. To say that godliness doesn’t matter, to minimize sin, to settle for mediocrity in this world so desperate for salt and light reveals a heart that needs to be radically reshaped by the God revealed here in Scripture.

The other person in verse 19 does God’s commands and teaches others to do the same. This is a person animated by a desire to walk in the way that Jesus also walked. They have hungered and thirsted for righteousness, and they have found satisfaction in Jesus. They have looked at their own hearts and realized that if the standard is perfection, there is no way that they can possibly get there. But instead of relaxing God’s commands, they came to Him poor in spirit, mourning for sin, and received the perfect righteousness of Christ as a gift.

As the Prophet Jeremiah says,

Jeremiah 23:5–6 ESV

5 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 6 In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’

That’s the promise Jesus came to fulfill. And Paul says:

Romans 3:21–22 ESV

21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction:

And in fulfillment of Ezekiel 36:26-27, Jesus gives them another gift:

Ezekiel 36:26–27 ESV

26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

The righteousness of the believer is perfect, because it’s Jesus’s righteousness on their behalf. The Pharisees and scribes had an external righteousness but unconverted hearts. It looked good on the outside. It convinced their neighbors. But Jesus says that unless your righteousness exceeds theirs, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven.

And that’s where this all comes full circle. Don’t think that God will accept you because you keep most of the rules. Don’t think God will set aside His standard of perfection and grade you on a curve.

Don’t think Jesus came to call you to lukewarm, half-hearted religion.

Jesus came to fulfill every promise that God ever made to you. To fulfill the Law that you have broken every day of your life. To fulfill the righteous requirement of the Law in your place. To fulfill the curse of the Law for your disobedience. To fulfill every page, every verse, every iota, every dot. So that you could be declared righteous and so that then, in joyful response to the God who so loved you, with new hearts, you would do something no one has ever done in their own strength: You would obey from the heart.