Matthew 5

The Need for Christ

The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel according to Matthew 4. Fulfilling the Law, 5:17–20

He is in no way contradicting the Mosaic law, though He is opposed to the legalistic type of religion that the scribes had built upon it

The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel according to Matthew 4. Fulfilling the Law, 5:17–20

I came is a significant expression; it is not one that a person would normally use of himself. It will have a meaning like “came into the world,” “came from God” and points to a consciousness of mission

The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel according to Matthew 4. Fulfilling the Law, 5:17–20

To fulfil has been understood in three main ways: (1) It may mean that he would do the things laid down in Scripture. (2) It may mean that he would bring out the full meaning of Scripture. (3) It may mean that in his life and teaching he would bring Scripture to its completion

The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel according to Matthew 4. Fulfilling the Law, 5:17–20

But however we interpret it, we must not forget that the law may be summed up in the two commandments of love (22:37–40) and that “love is the fulfilment of the law” (Rom. 13:10

Holman New Testament Commentary: Matthew C. Standard of Righteousness (5:17–20)

The Law or the Prophets was one way of referring to the entire Hebrew Scriptures (our Old Testament). Jesus meant the same thing in 5:18 when he referred to the Law. Jesus was about to say some things that would strike the minds of the religious leaders like a sledgehammer

Holman New Testament Commentary: Matthew C. Standard of Righteousness (5:17–20)

On the contrary, he was going to fulfill it; that is, both keep and explain fully its original intention, which they had managed to miss over the centuries.

Holman New Testament Commentary: Matthew C. Standard of Righteousness (5:17–20)

There is much debate over what Jesus meant by the word fulfill. The word means “to fill out, expand.” It does not mean to bring to an end. Jesus was not taking away from the law, nor was he adding to it. He was clarifying its original meaning. After all, he was its author. And we must not forget that Jesus, as a Jew, related well to the law—not as it was commonly understood, but as it was originally intended.

“I’ve come to keep the law myself and to show you its true intent. Reinterpret accordingly.” John Piper explains it well:

Abolition is not Jesus’s purpose. Fulfillment is. And when the law is fulfilled in Jesus, its original use changes dramatically. A new era has dawned, and Jesus’s followers will relate to the law differently than Israel did.

Paul declares him to be “the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom. 10:4).

It is crucial to realize that the problem was never with the law itself. The law reflects God’s character and is therefore “holy and righteous and good” (Rom. 7:12). The problem has always been with sinful humans. We cannot keep the law. So rather than standing for us in vindication, the law stands against us in condemnation.

The good news Christians believe and proclaim is that the eternal Son of God, Jesus Christ, was “born under the law” (Gal. 4:4) in order to obey its demands—and to bear its curse—as a substitute in our place (Gal. 3:13–14). The lawmaker became the lawkeeper and then died for lawbreakers.

Let it be known to you therefore, brothers, that through [Jesus] forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses. (Acts 13:38–39, emphasis mine)

God designed the law both to instruct and guide his people and also to expose their sin and need for a Savior.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Rom. 8:1–4)

Further, as the apostle explains elsewhere, God has forever “[canceled] the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:13–14). The demands of the Mosaic law code—which cried out for our condemnation—died with King Jesus at Calvary.

The Old Testament prophets longed for the day when God would write his law on his people’s hearts. That day is here. “If you are led by the Spirit,” Paul writes, “you are not under the law” but under grace (Gal. 5:18). In other words, those who trust in Jesus aren’t under the law; the law is “under” them—engraved on their hearts. The Holy Spirit empowers those saved by grace to both desire and obey what was formerly impossible.

Imagine you had some dirt on your face but didn’t know it. “Go look in the mirror,” a friend says. Now, is the mirror’s job to clean your face? Of course not. It’s to expose your face and send you to the shower. Likewise, the law is a mirror that reveals sin. Its purpose isn’t to clean us, but to send us to the only One who can. The mirror of the law was designed to drive us to the shower of the gospel (Rom. 3:20; 5:20; Gal. 3:23).

This is the central message of the New Testament: God gives in the gospel what he demands in the law. At bottom, Christians aren’t bound by the Jewish law because our Lord Jesus kept it for us. He fulfilled its ceremonies, its festivals, its sacrifices, its moral demands. The law’s ultimate purpose was always to point to our need for a Savior—one who would forgive us and change us from the inside out, rather than leaving us to reform and redeem ourselves.