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Sermons and messages from Pastor Jason White and others at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Tyler, TX
Today, we continue to look at another verse that is commonly well taken out of context, all right. And this is what Jesus says in Matthew chapter five, verse 17, in what is known as the Sermon on the Mount, he says, Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets, I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Several years ago, my wife Natalie was at a women's bible study at another church, a previous church that we attended, and the person that was teaching the Bible study was teaching on this verse, and she used this verse to say, See Jesus says that he did not come to abolish the law, and so that means that the law is still in effect today. We should be aware of what all of the Old Testament commandments are, and doing our best to try to obey the commandments. Of course, Natalie came home, and this led to a number of discussions. I said, Well, did she talk about the rest of the context? He says she did. And so let's look at that, because at first glance there, it seems to kind of reinforce that idea. Even the very next thing that Jesus said was 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. So it's not going anywhere. He didn't come to abolish it. It's still going to be around. It appears. And then he says, Therefore, because it's still going to be around. Because I didn't come to abolish it. 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. And so again, you can look at that and go, Hey, I didn't just look at one verse. I looked at the next couple of verses of what he said, and he seems to be saying that since he didn't come to abolish it, and it's not going anywhere, it's going to last for all of eternity, then we should be practicing and teaching those because we'll be great in the kingdom of heaven. And so she kept drilling home that that's what we need to do. We need to know the law. We need to do our best to try to live by these commandments. And quite honestly, that led to a lot of bondage, because Natalie didn't want to disobey God. Didn't want to displease God by not following one of his commandments. It caused a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, a lot of worry, quite honestly, a lot of fear. You don't really know where you stand whenever you're obeying and trying to avoid certain things. And are you doing them all? Are you avoiding everything that you're supposed to be voiding. Now, some of you hear me talk about this right now, whether you hear or you're watching online and you're going, I don't see what the big deal is. I mean, isn't that what this whole thing is about? I mean, isn't this whole thing about commands? Isn't this whole thing about being obedient? Isn't this whole thing about doing what it is that you're supposed to do and not doing what it is that you're not supposed to do. Well, let's look at that. I mean, the question that we're asking is that really what this verse means, is that really what this whole Christianity thing is all about? And as you can guess from the title of the series, I'm going to make the argument that, no, that's not what this verse means. So what does it mean? Well, to answer that, we have to dig into the Old Testament law. We need to talk about what the Old Testament law really was, what it is, right? Of course, when we say that, we're referring to things like the 10 Commandments, all those things that most of us are familiar with, the thou shalt nots kind of things, right? But really it's more than that, because it goes way above and beyond that. When you look at all of the Old Testament, you would actually see that there's 613 commandments. There's all these things that you're supposed to do, and all these things you're not supposed to do, and these things that you're supposed to avoid. And there's, again, 613 of those things. So why? Why would God give them 613 commands to follow? Is that really what this is all about? Why did he give it in the first place. So let's talk about that. There's three reasons that God gave the Law. The very first reason is to reveal his character to the people of Israel and demand that the people conform to his character, conform to that law. The thing about God is this God is the only one who can truly reveal Himself to us, right? I mean, we've all kind of done that thing where we've judged someone, we've seen someone, we've seen a few things that maybe they did, and we're like, Oh, I know exactly who that person is, right? Only to find out. That that's not exactly who that person really was. After all, once you got to know them well, in a similar way, God's the only one who can truly reveal Himself to us. You and I can sit around and think about God all that we want to. We can try to figure him out. We can go, here's who God really is, just based on what it is that we're thinking about, right? But of course, we could be wrong, right? Because we're not God. And so if there is a God, if He created all things, then he's the only one who knows, ultimately, who he is, that can reveal to us who he is, what it is that he created, why He created it, and what the purpose is for. And so here's the thing, God chose to reveal himself to the Israelite nation, first and foremost, to work through this nation of people, his people, in order to reveal who he is and his character to all people, so that we would come to know him and what it is that He created us for and one of the ways that he did that with the Israelite nation was through the law that he gave them to follow. Now you may be wondering, how does that work, right? I mean, how does God we see the character of God revealed in the law? Well, we can't go into very detailed all a number of them this morning, 613, of em, right? But let's just take one, right? We all know the commandment that we're not supposed to kill, that we shouldn't really murder people. It's not okay to do that. And whenever we hear that, we see the character of God in that commandment. He is a God who values life, the sanctity of life. So we see his character is revealed in that law. We learn something about who God is based on the law that he gave them to follow, the things that he gave them to do, the things that he told them to avoid. We learn things about the character of God and who he is. But there's way more to it than just that, because he didn't just reveal his character through the law. He demanded that the people conform to it, right? I mean, Leviticus 1145 says, I'm the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt to be your God. Therefore be holy, because I'm holy, right? I am distinct, I am set apart. I'm revealing my character to you. In order to relate to me, you've got to be holy like me. And so they learned something about his character, and the way that they can relate to him is they've got to be holy. They gotta do the things that line up with his character. They've got to avoid the things that don't line up with his character in order to know Him. Now you can already see that there's a problem here. I mean, right, there's 613 of these things. Be holy, because I'm holy and I gotta follow through with every single one of those things. Are you kidding me? Well, maybe, God, grades on a curve, right? Maybe we can just look at all of those 613 and we can follow the ones that we think are really important, just do our best. Maybe if we're doing most of them, we'll be okay. But no, that's not actually the case. In our Bibles, in the book of James, we're told that whoever stumbles at just one point in the law is guilty of breaking all of it. And so this is a problem, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. The second reason that God gave the Law was to supervise the nation of Israel in the time before Christ. In the book of Galatians, the apostle Paul says that the law was our guardian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. This word Guardian that he uses right here, he's playing on something that was fairly common in biblical times. In many households, there would be a guardian who was kind of like a tutor, someone there who was to educate the boys in the household and to discipline them in the area of ethical conduct, right? And so Paul is pointing to the law and saying it was like a guardian in a household that's an educator and a disciplinarian for ethical conduct, kind of things. And so the same way the law was a guardian to educate and discipline Israel, to keep the nation set apart for his special purposes and to reveal Himself through them. Now, the other thing that I want you to notice here is this word right there, until,
until this was the law's function, but at some point in time when the thing that happens after the until happens, it implies that it's no longer to be in effect, which quite honestly, says a lot when we're already trying to understand what Matthew 517 is saying, when he's saying, I didn't come to abolish the law and we're. Trying to use that to say that it's still in effect today, but we'll continue to talk about that as we go as well. Here's the third and final reason that God gave the Law, and I think it's the one that really applies to all of us today, to imprison Israel and, by extension, all people under sin, when we are told not to lie, then we become aware of what sin is. For example, that when we lie, we are sinners. The apostle Paul kind of highlights this in Romans. 320 says, hey, no one's going to be declared righteous in God's sight by the works of the law, rather through the law. Here's what happens. We become conscious of our sin. We become aware that we are sinners, that we have a sin problem lying goes against the character of God. We become aware of those things. It's in our lives. But the worst news is that we're imprisoned by that sin, that there's nothing that we can do to not sin most of the time. The apostle Paul talks about this struggle in Romans chapter six and verses seven or chapter seven, and how we are slaves to sin. We have a sin nature that produces sins in our lives, and this is one of the main reasons that God gave the law to make us aware that we are imprisoned, that they were imprisoned by their sin and their sin nature. It revealed that they were sinners in the first place. They're stuck in their sin. They're separated from God, who's holy and demanding that they conform to his holy standard that we said, was one of the reasons that he sent the law in the first place. But this is why he was sending Jesus. This is why we have all of the Old Testament prophecies. Jesus, I didn't come to abolish the law and the prophets, all these prophets were pointing to Jesus, who is going to be coming one day that God was trying to reveal something about them who he was and how they don't match up to him, but that he was sending someone who was going to be a rescuer and who could get them out of their sin. And in order to do that, when Jesus came, He had to fulfill the law, which is exactly what he said. He did right? Don't think I've come to abolish the law of the prophets. I've not come to abolish it, but to fulfill them. He didn't come to abolish the law. He came to fulfill the law for us, and he did. He fulfilled the law and all the prophecies that were written about him in the Old Testament. We know that Jesus was born into this world, fully God and fully man, that he didn't have any sin in his life, that he lived a sinless life, and because of that, he could take your sin and your sin and your sin and your sin and my sin and the sins of everyone in the entire world, and he could take them upon himself, and he could die on the cross for those sins, paying the penalty for them. And that's what he did. And then after that, we know that God raised Him from the dead and defeated the power of sin and death for ever. And now, now that that has been accomplished, now that the righteous demands of the law have been met, then he can offer forgiveness to you, and he can offer it to you as a gift. This is what he does. He offers us His forgiveness, His righteousness, his life that we can just receive if we will put our faith and trust in Him. Soon as that happens, we are completely forgiven. The Holy Spirit does come to dwell in us, and then we have new life in him, spiritually and will now and forever more. And because Jesus has accomplished all that, because it's been fulfilled, because the sending of the Holy Spirit applies all of those things to our lives. That was God's intention in the first place, restoring things back to the way they were meant to be in the garden. Then we no longer live under the Old Covenant. In the New Testament points to that the law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming, not the realities themselves. By calling this covenant new Hebrews, 813, he's made the first one obsolete Romans, 10, four. Christ is the end of the law. Can it get any more clear than that, so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes in even a few chapters before that one that I think makes it even more clear, potentially. So he says, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ so that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God, for when we were in the realm. Of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law, notice that were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, oh, those are good words. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law, so that we serve in the new way of the spirit, and not in the old way of the written code or the law. That's what he's referring to there. Again, I don't think it could be too much clearer than that. We no longer serve in the way of the written code. We now serve in the new way by the Spirit. So again, Matthew 517, Jesus didn't come to abolish the law. He came to fulfill the law, and now that he's fulfilled it, we no longer live under the law. We live by the way of the Spirit. We live in union with Christ, and he expresses his life, his character and his righteousness in and through us to a lost and a dying world around us. Okay? So now that we've kind of seen all of those other things, right, we've seen why God gave the law in the first place, to reveal his character, to demand that they conform to it, to supervise Israel until the time that Christ came, to show that they're imprisoned by sin. Then we can go back and now we can look at what Jesus said again here, and try to see in context what it says together with those things. So again, he starts off and says, don't think I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Then we read this 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. Here's what I want you to notice. There are two
untils here, alright? And they're not referring to the same thing, right? Right? The first until here is is actually kind of pointing to how the fact that the law isn't going to be abolished, that it's still going to be around, like we kind of mentioned earlier. But the second one seems to be pointing to the fulfillment that was coming through Jesus's finished work on the cross. It was the goal, right? Here's the way biblical scholar RT France put it in his commentary on Matthew. He says, based on this verse, the law is there to be fulfilled, not discarded, and that is what Jesus has come to do. The second until in the passage that we refer to then is not speaking of the time of their abandonment, but of their intended goal. We might paraphrase the whole saying as follows, the law down to its smallest details, is as permanent as heaven and earth and will never, ever lose its significance. On the contrary, all that it points forward to will, in fact, become a reality. And he says, Now that that reality has arrived in Jesus, notice that, now that that's arrived, the law will be seen in a new light, but they still cannot be discarded. So even though the law has been fulfilled, we do not abandon the Old Testament. We don't rip it out of our Bibles, and we don't throw it away. There is still purpose. It's still there. It's still useful, but it must be seen in a different light. It's still important for us to study, but in its proper context. And I think that is what Jesus was getting to in this verse that we read a second ago as well. So when he says, Therefore, anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commandments and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commandments will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Again, we look at that, and at first glance, we go, okay. I mean, it sure kind of seems like he's saying we're supposed to practice all of those things. But let's think about this for a moment. I just read to you, and we talked through the three reasons that the whole Law was given reveal the character to conform to that to supervise Israel, until Jesus came to show us our imprisonment under, you know, sin and the sin nature that we had. Well, guess what? Jesus has come now, right? We just read all of those verses about the law was a shadow of the things to come. The old is obsolete. The Christ is the end of the law we no longer serve in the old way of the written code. So we're going to look at all of those things and then read one verse and go, Well, I know it says that we don't live in the new the old way of the written code, and we live by the new way now. But Jesus says that we do here, and so I guess that we do. That's so confusing, right? I mean, what is it then? If all. Those things seem to point to the fact that that's not the way we live, the Christian life under the New Covenant, then Jesus must be saying something different here. And when we look at what he says here with the following verse, and then in context with the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, along with everything we've already looked at today, we begin to see what he's talking about. The very next thing that Jesus says to them is, For I tell you, listen to this, that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of God. This would have blown the minds of his original audience, right? Because these Pharisees and these teachers of the law that he's referring to, they were the ultimate standard. I mean, they the law was so important to them, these guys were trying to live it out as best as they possibly could. I mean, they respected these people. If there was anyone who was seen in the righteous as righteous in this day and age, it was these guys. But Jesus was saying, guess what? You gotta be even more righteous than those guys to get into the kingdom of heaven. And people would have gone. There is no stinking way. Then. What chance do I have right? And then what do we see Jesus do after this, he reveals to them how big of a problem they really do have, right? If the Old Testament was there, the laws were given to show them their sin, and they were not seeing it. They were missing it. They're like, I think we're doing okay. We're following a lot of them pretty well. He goes, Well, let me just show you that you're not doing okay, right? So he takes the Old Testament law, and he puts the real intent behind some of these things. We won't go through all of it, but the very next verse, I guess, paraphrase Jesus pretty much, says, hey, the law says don't murder. So if you start thinking, Hey, man, I haven't killed anybody, I'm doing pretty good on that one. Then he says, but really, if you're angry in your heart, then you will face judgment. Uh oh. And we've all been angry, right? And so now we've got a problem. He goes on and says this, Hey, the law says don't commit adultery. Hey, well, I've never crossed that line specifically, right? So I guess I'm doing okay, right? But, oh, wait, no, if you even lust then you have broken the commandment. Oh, great. Now again, we've got a real problem. And he just keeps going and going and going until finally he says, You know what? Just be perfect. Therefore, as your heavenly Father, is perfect. Ah,
how can I do that? That's impossible. In other words, there was no one who was sitting listening to the Sermon on the Mount, and they heard Jesus in Matthew 519, that we read earlier, right? Who, who was saying, practice the commandments and teach them, and you'll be great in the kingdom of heaven. And then he goes on to say all of these things. No one was walking away from that sermon that day going, you know what? We got to get busy trying to follow law better now. You know what they were walking away doing? There's no way. We don't have a chance. We cannot do it, which is exactly what the law was given to them in the first place for, and what he was trying to reveal. And now he had to do it through these means, because they weren't getting it in the first place, so now they're getting it. So the point is, is that when Jesus, in verse 19 is talking about practicing and teaching the Old Testament law, we see now in this context, that he's talking about it within the proper context of the way it's viewed on the other side of the cross. It's still important. It's still useful. Like I said, we don't tear it out. We don't throw it away. Why? Because when we look at it as one big story, we read it from the beginning to the end, we see it is the story of God. It's history. It's his story, right? It's one story in four different parts. It's the story of creation and how God created this planet that we live on. He reveals that to us, it's what went wrong with the place. Every time I look around, it seems like things are wrong. Well, he describes to you what went wrong and what is happening now as a result of those things, but we see what God did to redeem us from the fall and redeem what happened, the consequences of the fall, and then how it all ends in glory. For those of us who know and have trusted Jesus to be our Lord and Savior, and so it's useful to go back and read it all the way from one cover one into the other, to be able to see the story of God. When we're reading the Old Testament, we see the faithfulness of God. Even though Israel couldn't keep the covenant, he was still faithful and preserved a remnant to send Jesus through to bless all of us, fulfilling the Abrahamic covenant. We see God's holiness in the Old Testament. We see his character in the Old Testament. We see our sin if we're looking at. It and we see our need for a Savior. These are just a few of the ways that we see the Old Testament within the proper context. We just don't go back and say, Oh, I'm going to read it and try to follow everything in it and do what it what it says, right? That that's not what it ends up saying here. So when we see that Jesus said this, that's not what that verse means. When we look at that and say, See, you didn't come to abolish it. So that means it's still in effect today. We can't go there. We see that Jesus fulfilled the law. We now live in a new way, which is Christ in us and through us by the Spirit. And if we have put our faith and trust in Him, then our job is now to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, who has written his character on our heart. He's made us a new creation in Christ, given us a new heart where he's written our his character onto our hearts. And as we keep our eyes fixed on him and we abide in our abiding and we walk in dependence on him. His character gets expressed through us that is written on our hearts. Now if you're here today and you've never put your faith and trust in Jesus, then the way this applies to you as we've broken down this whole law and the whole purpose and meaning of what it is for, then surely you've seen that you and every single one of us have a problem, that there's no way that we can obey all of those things, and that God doesn't grade on a curve, that you're not going to be okay if you're just going, I've been a pretty good person, and I think that once I die, one day, God's just going to say, You know what, you are better than a lot of people. And so come on in right we see that we're sinners. There's no chance that we have, but the good news is that Jesus came to die for our sins so that we could be forgiven and we could have his righteousness and His eternal life and be with Him forever. And so maybe the way this applies to you is today's your day to receive Jesus's forgiveness by putting your faith and your trust in him instead of trying to obey everything that you're supposed to obey and avoid everything that you're supposed to avoid, or just hoping that you're better than most people and you're going to be okay, maybe he's revealed His truth to you and how bad the bad news really is, but also how good the good news really is. Guys, the Christian life isn't a life of religion. It's being in a relationship with God through Jesus and living dependently upon him.