Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

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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.

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.

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:

Quoting from Isaiah 7:14.

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.