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The Independence Podcast helps everyday people discover that true freedom isn’t found in self-reliance but in total dependence on Jesus Christ. Each episode blends honest conversation, biblical truth, and practical application to help listeners move beyond emotional devotion toward consistent, daily surrender. Whether you’re new in your faith or longing to grow deeper, you’ll find encouragement to trust God fully, live from His grace, and follow Christ with courage in a world that celebrates independence but neglects dependence on the One who truly sets us free.
Bryan Dunham (00:01)
What if the greatest threat to your faith isn't persecution but permissiveness? What if the reason many Christians don't look any different from the world isn't because they've rejected Jesus, but because they've slowly redefined what obedience to Him means? Welcome to episode 22 of the Independence Podcast. We exist not just to discuss, but to learn how to live independence daily.
on God. am your host, Brian Dunham. This week we continue in the series Bound for Freedom, where we're talking through the Sermon on the Mount. As we've discussed, this is Jesus' primary yoke or his instructions to his followers on how best to relate to God and to our fellow man, and to take on this way of living, to engage in the daily practice of living as Jesus taught.
we are agreeing to be bound by that teaching. And it's in that teaching that we find freedom. Hence the title, Bound for Freedom. All right, so a quick recap here. The Sermon on the Mount begins in Matthew chapter five. It's Matthew chapter five, six and seven. And it begins with the Beatitudes, which is what you and I call them. You'll be familiar with them if you haven't listened to this podcast in the previous episodes of this.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted. ⁓ understanding that the Beatitudes, this is not a spiritual ladder that you use to ⁓ climb to achieve righteousness. Like these are not prescriptive ways to be in the world, but they are rather descriptive of the types of people who are blessed in the kingdom of heaven.
kingdom that Jesus often talks about and invites people into. Then, after the Beatitudes, Jesus makes this turn and starts really setting the stage for delivering his primary teaching points about how his disciples are to live and move in the world. And he does that by first giving them and us an identity. So, the last two weeks we've discussed Jesus saying that our identity in the world as disciples is salt.
and light. Matthew, this is chapter 5, verse 13 through 16, you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. This is who we are, not what we are trying to be. But Jesus gives two warnings about this. Salt can lose its saltiness and light can be hidden. And as we talked about the last couple of weeks, what that means is
This has to do with our effective witness in the world for how we live our lives. Like, we can lose our effectiveness for Jesus. We can lose our light. Like, we can extinguish that in certain ways. And so, how does someone who is salt, so how does someone who is salt stop functioning as salt? Or how is someone who is light actually extinguish their flame?
Today's scripture is going to answer that. So let me read it and then we will get going. This is Matthew chapter five, verses 17 through 20. And Jesus, again, this is Jesus speaking. 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. For truly I say to you until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished.
Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. This is the word of the Lord. All right, so just a few things. There's a lot of language in here to kind of
decipher and talk through this idea of abolishing and fulfilling the law and the prophets and iota and a dot and relaxing one of the least of the commandments and then being least in the kingdom of heaven and great in the kingdom of heaven like what are what is all this about so let's talk about this in in sections and in snippets to help us fully grasp it first of all let's talk about the law and the prophets
So when Jesus says, law and the prophets, this would have been shorthand for the entirety of what their scriptures were, and it's what you and I call the Old Testament. So the Old Testament today is all the scriptures they had back then, and so when someone said the law and the prophets, they're talking about the whole thing. So when Jesus says the law and the prophets, that's what he's talking about. So when he says, abolish and fulfill, well, what does this mean? So...
When we look at the Greek terms here, abolish is kataluo. And it's a combination of two Greek words, kata, which means down, and then luo, which means to loosen. Now that word is gonna show up again later, the singular form of that, or the non-compound version of this, luo, loosen. But kataluo means to completely unravel.
It means to loosen something so much, you just take it apart. I don't know if you've ever had like a loose string on your shirt or something. I did one time I had what looked like a loose string. was just going to yank it and kind of pop it off. You know, like you do your app on your finger and pull. And I did that. And when I pulled, there wasn't enough tension, I guess, on the garment. it, it, ⁓ it pulled all the way out and started taking a seam apart. That's the image here is that is something that's being
So loosened, it's dismantled, it's taking it apart. That's cataluo. And then fulfill is playro-o. And playro-o means to fill up, to complete. I went and got gas in my truck today. My tank was not full, but I playro-o'd it. I filled it up. So this implies when Jesus says, I didn't come to unravel the law.
completely, I came to actually fill it up. He's implying that there's something lacking in the present modern day understanding of what they were trying to do when it came to executing on the law of the prophets. Jesus is saying, you have it there, but it's not complete. It's not full yet. So I'm going to come in and teach you essentially, I'm going to complete it for you. There's some things lacking in your understanding of the law and I'm going to fill it. So that's what Jesus means when he says to abolish ⁓
or to fulfill. So you're saying, I didn't come to take it all apart. I came to actually complete it for you so you could fully understand how to execute on it. There's some rabbinic parallels, right? Jesus is a rabbi. And so as we've talked about before, the main job of a rabbi was to interpret Torah. And if you followed a rabbi, you submitted to that rabbi's yoke, which was his way of teaching and interpreting the law and the prophets. So a teacher at this time could be said to
be destroying the law if he was misinterpreting a scripture. They could use phrases like destroying or abolishing. And then they would be establishing or confirming the law by rightly interpreting it. this idea of abolishing and fulfilling has absolute conceptual parallels in first century Near Eastern Judaism and rabbinic thought. Like this idea of bad interpretation is undermining the law.
But faithful interpretation is upholding it. so, ⁓ this was, Jesus is basically stepping into the world and saying, I'm not here to tear it down, I'm here to bring it up to its full intended meaning. And Jesus is not just giving a better interpretation here. He is authority. He is, that's why he can say, you have heard that it was said, but I say to you, this is Jesus.
reinterpreting Torah in the way they've always heard it. Jesus is saying, I'm going to fulfill it. Now I'm going to, I'm going to tell you how it really should be. Okay. Now this, this idea of loosing that shows up later. So abolish is catalog. Oh, but then let's skip to verse 19. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commands, some, some, um, Translation say,
the one that loosens one of these commands. It's the same root word, luo, as abolish. So it's not the exact same word. Abolish means completely unravel. Luo here just means to loosen it a little bit. So you've heard the terms before, if you're familiar with the New Testament, binding and loosing. Jesus talks to the disciples about binding and loosing. We'll get to that in a second.
These ⁓ terms binding and loosing were rabbinic words that were used in Jesus' day when they would take a section of scripture and if they were to bind it, it means that they would say, okay, that's forbidden. ⁓ Or they would say, this is something that you are obligated to do, like you must do this. That was to bind the Torah. And then to loose it was to permit something, to relax it, to allow, ⁓ and you know,
to allow a more liberal interpretation of the scripture. So, rabbis, as authorized interpreters of the Torah, when they would bind something, they would say, okay, this is required or this is not allowed. When they would lose something, they'd say, okay, this is permitted or it's not actually binding in this particular case. So, this was especially important in Jesus' day, this binding and loosing when it came to Sabbath laws, purity laws.
daily application of the Torah. So an example, you shall do no work on the Sabbath. This is one of the commandments. And so the rabbis would then begin to define, okay, well, then what does work mean? How do we define work? How do we know what's allowed and what's not allowed? And so one of the questions was, well, then is healing someone considered work? And I think the universal answer to that was, was yeah, healing is considered work.
Okay, well then the question is, well then can you heal on the Sabbath? And a rabbi that would bind would say, no, you cannot heal on the Sabbath. But a rabbi that might loose would say, yeah, you can in certain cases. And that's exactly the kind of tension you see Jesus stepping into here in that particular topic. ⁓ It circles around Jesus, but it was a topic that they were debating quite frequently ⁓ in their day and time.
So when a rabbi took on disciples, the disciple wasn't just there of course to learn information, he was to learn the rabbi's interpretive authority and framework for how he taught ⁓ the application of the Torah. So to be a disciple meant you will interpret and apply the law the way your rabbi does. Now.
When a disciple would have adopted and understood the rabbi's teaching in a way that the rabbi approved of, ultimately the rabbi would tell the disciple he would delegate the authority to them to bind and loose. And we see that in Matthew 16 verse 19 and in Matthew 18, 18. The language is pretty similar. I'm just going to read 18, 18.
Jesus says, truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. So, like what Jesus is doing here when he says that, this binding and loosing language, he's telling them that they're authorized to declare what he says is required, to declare what he says is permitted, and that they are allowed to apply Jesus' teaching authoritatively.
So it's not arbitrary authority. It's not they can figure out their own personal preferences. It is they have derived authority under Jesus's teaching. So they're not inventing or reinventing truth. They're authorized to extend and apply Jesus's interpretation. So you and I today might say, well, they're an authorized, like you ever seen the words authorized dealer of a particular brand of something?
That's kind of what this would be like. Like Jesus says, okay, you can now bind and loose whatever you bind has been bound, whatever you loose has been loosed. He's saying you're now an authorized dealer of my teaching. So connecting this back to Matthew five verse 19, I'm going to read the verse again. Therefore, whoever relaxes or looses one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
When Jesus says, whoever loosens the least of these commandments, he is using that same term. And it's not just addressing behavior here. He's addressing teaching and interpretation. Notice he says, whoever relaxes one of the least and teaches others to do the same. So it's not just about personal obedience or disobedience. It's about teaching others a relaxed version of what God has commanded. So
In Jesus's day, to loose meant to treat it as optional, to say its authority is not as weighty as other matters of the law. And Jesus says, if you do that, even with the least commandment, you are misinterpreting the Torah and you're misinterpreting the kingdom. Here in verse, and let's go back now to verse 18, because we didn't cover this yet. And I wanted to get through binding and loosing just that terminology first.
So verse 18, for truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. So iota here refers to the Greek letter iota, which is the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet. But, you know, the key here is Jesus is speaking about the Hebrew scriptures. So the underlying idea is going to most certainly be pointing to a Hebrew letter. So the yod.
is the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. So when Jesus says, not an iota, he's essentially saying, not even the smallest letter in the Hebrew text will pass away. Jesus is standing ten toes down here on the authority of Scripture and all of Scripture. So the next part, like the dot, sometimes you see, I've seen it translated as jot, I've seen it translated as tittle, like
these are not even letters, they're tiny, like little strokes or markings that distinguish ⁓ one letter from another that look very similar. So when Jesus says, not an iota, not a dot, this is an extreme statement of precision. So Jesus is saying, it's not just the ideas and themes of scripture that you need to be concerned about, but it's the words themselves, the letters.
even the smallest textual details. This is the highest view of inspiration of the Scriptures you can possibly have. And it's coming directly from Jesus himself. In Psalm 138, 2, it's just highlighting the importance of Scripture and how God's own view of Scripture is. Jesus just told us what his view of Scripture is. Psalm 138, 2 is,
I bow down towards your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and faithfulness for you have exalted above all things your name and your word. God's name and God's word is exalted above all things. So Jesus here is stepping into a world where rabbis are constantly interpreting the law, binding and loosing, establishing, sometimes undermining it.
and he makes a staggering claim. I'm not here to dismantle the law, but to bring it to its full meaning. Like you guys are lacking in how you think about its application, and I'm here to bring it all the way full for you. And if you take what God has said and loosen it, this is what Jesus is saying, if you minimize it, if you relax it, if you make it optional, you're no longer reflecting the authority of God, but you're replacing it with your own.
does this mean for what Jesus just said? Like, recognize this teaching is a continuous whole. Like we talked about salt in one week, light in another week, and now we're talking about the authority of scripture and Jesus' view of scripture, but this isn't a separate topic. Like it is related to salt and light, which we talked about the previous two weeks. And so you have to look at it this way. Too often in scripture,
we'll flip over to a section and read a couple paragraphs and we read it in isolation as though that's how it was written and it wasn't written or spoken in isolation. This was given as a continuous whole. So very important for you to understand the complete context of what you're reading. So let's understand that when Jesus is talking here about abolishing, binding, loosing, and how not the smallest Hebrew letter or even mark is going to pass away, like
He's talking about salt and light. When he goes back to salt, loses its saltiness and light can have, that lamp can have its flame extinguished. What he's talking about there is related to this here.
So the primary way we lose our saltiness and our lights go dim or get extinguished is by losing our submission to God's Word. That's the point that Jesus is making here. And he talks about it really in three ways. The first one is we don't honor its authority or we stop honoring its authority over our lives and recognizing what he says there that
until heaven and earth pass away. Not even the smallest part will go away until everything is accomplished. The problem isn't that we've rejected the Bible, it's that we've started evaluating it rather than submitting to it. We have subtly moved from being
under the word to standing over it. And the shift is from submission to evaluation. Submission is, even when I don't agree, I will obey. Evaluation is, well, things have changed and evolved and culturally we're in a very different place than what we used to be. So we put ourselves in this position of looking over and evaluating scripture rather than just doing what it's instructing us to do.
So the first one is we don't honor its authority in our lives. We don't submit to it wholly anymore. And then the second piece is we loosen what God has said. So this again is that word, luo, which is to relax or to loosen a command. We don't reject God's word. We just relax it. And we get into this conversation of, did God really mean that? Did God really say?
Where were those four words first uttered in the Bible? Did God really say? Of course, it was with Adam and Eve, and it was Satan tempting Eve, questioning what God really said. And we say things like, well, it doesn't really mean that anymore, or that's not as serious as it used to be. Most people don't tear down the Bible. They just quietly loosen it. A verse here, a conviction there, until one day they look up and they say,
How did we get here? The authority of scripture slips through our fingers. We wake up wondering how we've drifted so far in the church from what is very clearly laid out in scripture, little by little over time until the distance between us and the truth grows so wide we can't remember when the break even started.
So we don't honor the authority of the Bible, that's one. Number two, we loosen what God has said. And then number three, we decide what is least. Talk about evaluation. We appoint ourselves as editors of God's commands. Like, okay, this matters. Well, this doesn't really matter. This is essential. This is optional. And this is the move that Jesus is confronting. The issue, even in today's world, is not just cultural disagreement.
The issue is how we handle the word of God. And this shows up in real issues that we deal with today. When it comes to sexual ethics or identity, like we reinterpret or we soften or we relax what scripture clearly teaches about identity and sexuality. When it comes to authority and roles in the church, we revisit what scripture says about church leadership and decide what still applies and what doesn't apply anymore. We have a generation.
of men who have become passive and left a leadership vacuum in the local church. And our women are doing the best that they can to try and fill that gap. Do you know what the most attended church service of the year is? If you said Easter, you are right. Do you know what number two is? It's not Christmas. It's Mother's Day. Mother's Day. Do you know why?
because mama tells her man, your butt out of bed, we're all gonna go to church for Mother's Day. When men abdicate their responsibility of the spiritual leadership of their home, it spills its way over into the church and it leaves a vacuum. ⁓ that our men would become the servant leaders in their homes and in their churches that God has called us to be.
We might be limping along right now as a church, but it was not intended to be that way. This was not what God intended. When it comes to ⁓ marriage, divorce, cohabitation before marriage, like we redefine what God has already very clearly defined in scripture. We live in a culture that worships material wealth and status. Like we bow at that altar. We ignore commands about money because they're inconvenient.
we could keep going on about forgiveness and gossip and holiness. There are some sins that we look at and think, okay, well, that's much more serious than this other sin. Like, that's not such a big deal. then others we just call, well, that's just my struggle. You know what? Most of the sins I struggle with are not because I can't stop. It's because I don't want to. The idea, I've heard it before, like, I just had these demons, like,
When we say we have demons, what we mean is there are certain sins I'm always going to struggle with and they're never going to be gone from my life. And I'm not saying that there's not real spiritual forces in an enemy of your soul, like that is doing battle in spiritual places. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Like we, know this. Okay. I'm not denying that, but sometimes I think we really just need to be honest with ourselves. Most of the sins I struggle with are because I like them. I want them.
I do not want to fully surrender to God because I enjoy engaging in them. But we don't want to say that out loud. So we lie and we just say, it's this demon, I just can't shake it. And that gives us an excuse as to why we continue to indulge in it without having to feel the weight of the rebellious disobedience that that is in the selfishness that's the place that it comes from. I want what I want. I mentioned before, I'm personally concerned about our
biblical illiteracy in the Christian church. And that has laid the foundation for so many of the things we see in our world and in our country. Did you know, like I'm looking up some data on this, that 20 % of American Christians read the Bible, quote unquote, regularly. About 45 % of Christians admit to rarely or never reading the Bible. And only 15 % read it daily.
Like, many American Christians cannot identify basic biblical facts. Like, only 26 % of Christians can identify the Good Samaritan story correctly. 14 % of Christians think Job is in the New Testament. 23 % think Sodom and Gomorrah are books of the Bible. 37 % misidentify basic biblical characters like Moses, Noah, and Elijah.
We're not actually rejecting the Bible in the American church. We have a church culture that's just unfamiliar with it. Yet we feel free to interpret a book we barely even know. If you are going to follow, if you are going to call yourself a follower of Jesus, it is a non-negotiable that you are spending time in his word and prayer daily, daily. Some of you are gonna hear that and go, well daily, well you don't know my life.
Look, if you're an athlete and Michael Jordan was the man back in my day, pick your athlete today that you love. I don't know if it's golf, Scotty Scheffler, whoever. If Jordan or Scheffler called you up and say, I'd to spend 30 minutes with you each morning at 5 a.m. I bet you, I bet you'd find time to find a way to make that happen. If you're a business guy, entrepreneur, like if Gary V or Tony Robbins said, Hey, I'd to meet with you each day for an hour, no charge. You come up with a way to make that happen.
But here, we are not talking about these men. We are talking about the creator of the universe. And even the way we talk about spending time with God is wild. Someone I dearly love said the other day, sorry God, I can only give you five minutes today. Think about that language. I can only give you. Friend.
If you are even remotely thinking that God is getting something from you that he needs, your view of him is way off base. Acts 17 tells us, God is not served by human hands as though he needs anything. Psalm 5012 says, if I were hungry, I wouldn't tell you for the world and its fullness are mine. You were meeting with him for your benefit, not his. So.
Well, let's try to bring this back to Matthew 5. Sorry, I didn't mean to go on a tangent there. So when Jesus warns about loosening the least commandment, he's kind of assuming you already know the commands. But today, we don't even know what we're loosing or what we're binding. And so we wind up creating this version of Christianity where Jesus is our Savior, but there's no authority that he has over our lives. And we create this Jesus that we want to follow.
We don't outright reject his word. We either don't know it or we selectively obey it like a buffet, like I'll take some of this, but not some of that. And Jesus says, that's not discipleship. As he says, why do you call me Lord, Lord and do not do what I say? We live in a time where the Bible is more accessible than ever, yet less obeyed than ever. We don't tremble at his word anymore. We negotiate with it.
We don't submit to it. We sift through it to see what we want and what we don't want. Choose the parts we like. And Jesus says, when you loosen even the least of these commands, you will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But did you catch that?
in the kingdom of heaven. The people that are loosing the commandments and teaching others to do so are still in the kingdom of heaven. This is not a conversation about who's in and who's out. This is a conversation about those that are in and their fidelity to what God has taught. And it's important to recognize that when Jesus says, you know, if you try to loosen one of the least of these commands, you will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.
This isn't about importance, it's not about ranking, it's not about, you know, who is at the top of the heap and who's at the bottom of the heap. Like when Jesus is talking about these terms, great and least, like least in the kingdom of heaven, or you'll be called great in the kingdom of heaven, this is about influence and effectiveness. So when you loosen what God has said, you're not just adjusting your life, you're redefining who has authority over it. And when less of your life is governed,
by God's authority, you lose your distinction as a follower. You are salt that is losing its saltiness. This is how it ties back in to salt and light because when you obey his commands and teach others to obey them and you're not judging what is the least and what is the greatest because it's all important according to Jesus, even the tiniest marks in the law are important. Then when you're that person,
You're called great in the kingdom of heaven, not because you are elevated to some higher status, but because your influence and your effectiveness is reaching its maximum potential when you have fidelity to the word of God. Teaching the truth to a world that is in desperate need of it will make your influence and your impact great.
But as it stands, we have Christians saying, Lord, Lord, while living lives that are functionally self-ruled. And Jesus asked the question we can't avoid. Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say? That pathway just leads to selective obedience. And it's not that people are obeying nothing. They're just obeying what they think feels right.
And they've heard the whisper, did God really say that? And then they, like Eve, have decided for themselves what they will obey and what they won't obey, which commands they'll follow and which ones they won't follow. At the end of the day, this is not as much of a knowledge problem as it is an abiding problem. Because when you're truly abiding in Christ, you're spending time in His word and you're not negotiating with it.
you're submitting to it. And that submission, which is brought on by a high view of His Word that you are daily abiding in, that will make your effectiveness as salt and light truly great. But if you desire as a Christian to loosen the commands, to relax some of those things, to say, yeah, those don't really apply anymore, that's not such a big deal any longer, or that's just a little
That's not a big deal over there. Jesus is saying that that is what is going to cause you as salt to lose your saltiness. It's going to extinguish the flame that is in your lamp and your effectiveness will be the least. You will lose your effectiveness for the kingdom. So, wow, Christian, do you know his word? Are you spending time daily in scripture and in prayer?
And when was the last time you did, if not? Whatever you have to do, start spending daily time in His Word. This is step one of living independence on God. All right, let's read the last verse here, Matthew 520. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, here he is saying that there are people that are outside the kingdom.
that maybe want to get in the kingdom, but to get in the kingdom in the first place, your righteousness has to exceed that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. Now, we read that and we miss how shocking it would have been for them to hear. Because in Jesus' day, the Pharisees weren't the villains. Like, they were the standard that any person would try to get to. Like, they are the benchmark. They were the most disciplined, the most devoted, the most externally obedient people in Israel.
If anyone was doing it right, quote unquote, it was them. So when Jesus says, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees, every person listening would have had the same thought. How's that possible? Because Jesus isn't raising the bar slightly. He's shattering their framework of what true righteousness would have been. And this is the moment where Jesus begins to expose something deeper. The problem
isn't that the Pharisees were too serious about what they were trying to do. It's that they misunderstood it entirely. And we will start getting into that next week. Hey, if you have read my book, Questions God Asks, please, please go to Amazon and leave me an honest review. It only takes a few seconds, but helps more than you know to get the word out. If you haven't heard about the book, just go to questionsgodask.com. can download a free chapter.
To get a feel for it and then you can also contact me on there if you have any questions or comments If this episode has helped you, please share it with a friend and follow the show until next week grace and peace my friends