When Jesus said, Don’t think I am come to destroy the law. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill it, I don’t really think Jesus’ disciples thought that was a strange thing to say at all. In fact, I think they might have wondered why he was telling them that. When he said, Verily I say unto you, not one jot nor tittle shall pass from the law ’til heaven and earth shall pass, I don’t think that was especially surprising to men who believed in the law. So what was Jesus driving at? Why was the
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When Jesus said, Don’t think I am come to destroy the law. I am not come to destroy it, but to fulfill it. I don’t really think Jesus’ disciples thought that was a strange thing to say at all. In fact, I think they might have wondered why he was telling them that. When he said, Verily I say unto you, Not one jot nor tittle shall pass from the law till heaven and earth shall pass, I don’t think that was especially surprising to men who believed in the law. They would have been much more surprised at the other way. So what was Jesus driving at? Why was the emphasis here? What was he bringing up when he says, Now don’t think this. Don’t imagine that I am going to destroy the law. Well, he ended this short passage in the Sermon on the Mount by saying this, For I say unto you that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven. In other words, there’s two standards here. There is the standard that the scribes and Pharisees would adhere to. But I am going to suggest that there is another standard that may even be higher than that. Now, what is, I think, often overlooked by people is that when they read through this, they don’t understand the significance of Jesus saying, not one jot or tittle, that is, not one dotting of the I or crossing of the T, shall pass from the law. He is talking about the written law, because it’s only in writing that we dot I’s and cross T’s. What’s the big deal about that, you ask? Well, it’s well understood among Jews, but not so well known among Christians, that there were two sets of law recognized among Jesus’ listeners. One, the written law. The other, the oral law. In the New Testament, the oral law is generally referred to as the tradition or the traditions of the fathers or the words that Jesus would use in the Sermon on the Mount. You have heard it has been said of them of old time. Now the church would later on have its own traditions, but in the ears of the people to whom Jesus is speaking, the only laws that Jesus can be referring to when he speaks of an oral law or a tradition are the traditions of the Jews. The written law, says Jesus, is permanent. The oral law can claim no such distinction. Now this is important because at the time Jesus was giving the Sermon on the Mount, there were two significant political parties in Jerusalem. and in Judea at large, in Judaism perhaps I should say, there were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Sadducees followed a very conservative view of the law in that they accepted the authority, or as an authority, only the written law. The Pharisees, on the other hand, understood as an authority in their religious life the written law and the oral law, and in very large measure the interpretation of the written law by the oral law. In other words, the oral law tended to take precedence over the written law. in that it was an interpretation of it. And this is why Jesus often found himself in conflict with the Pharisees when they would, as he put it, set aside the law of God in order that they could keep their own traditions. So Jesus, if you’ll recall, when he was tempted by the devil, made no reference to tradition. He didn’t say when the devil said, Now, if you’re the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. Jesus did not respond by saying, well, our tradition is. No, he did not. He said, it is written. In fact, on every one of the three different temptations he had, every time he said, it is written. Now, a tradition is established over time by a combination of teaching and decision-making. In other words, people may bring a case before the Sanhedrin or other authority. They present their case. The Sanhedrin hears it. They then discuss the matter and arrive at a decision that can be handed down, and that decision handed down is a judgment. It forms a part of the body of law. It forms a precedent. People will, in generations to follow, harken back and say, well, the Sanhedrin decided ten years ago that this was the case, and then they will base a current decision or a current judgment on that. This body of law we would normally refer to as judgments. Now, in the nature of things, judgments do not have the permanent application that the written law has. In other words, if I take the written law and I apply it to a given situation, let’s say a thousand years before Christ, I would deal with one set of problems. If I come down to the modern world and I take the same written law and I look at the circumstances around me today, I might come to a different solution because, well, for example, if there’s a law in the Old Testament that has a great deal to do with how you deal with your neighbor’s ox, Well, my neighbor doesn’t have an ox, but the principle underlying the law, for example, that said if you see your neighbor’s ox going astray, it says by all means you will return that ox to your neighbor. In other words, you’re not allowed to see that ox if your neighbor belongs to him and just ignore the thing until it goes out and gets itself hurt, killed, and causes loss to your neighbor. Now, I think that’s a real neighborly law. But as I said, my neighbor doesn’t have an ox, so what am I supposed to do? If I see a valuable dog of his that’s gotten out of his kennel, for which he paid a great deal of money not only originally but in training, am I supposed to just ignore that dog? Or if a dog comes to me, shouldn’t I put him in my car and take him back to his owner? On what principle? Well, on the same principle that defined the fact that I’m supposed to, in Old Testament times, return his ox to him. This is what I mean by judgments change over time because judgments are applications of law to life situations. And if life situations change, then the judgment also has to change. And in a lot of things in the Sermon on the Mount, that is exactly what Jesus is driving at. Now, a lot of Christian misunderstanding of the law in the New Testament grows out of a failure to make this distinction and to take note of the fact that the law is a teacher, not a jailer, unless, of course, you break it, in which case the law can become a jailer. Now, by the time Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount, there was an enormous body of oral tradition that had developed among the Jews. The scribes and Pharisees had a system of judgments that they had inherited from former teachers and former generations, and Jesus is about to take strong exception to that tradition. Because of that, he has to first establish the fact that he is not playing fast and loose with the law. So he says, now I don’t want you to think that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets. Not one jot or tittle, that is nothing from the written law, is going to pass away until heaven and earth passes. Then he comes to this statement in verse 20 of Matthew 5. For I say unto you that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. Now, Jesus begins this part of his sermon by saying, You have heard that it was said. Now, notice the distinction. He did not say, You have heard that it was written. He did not say, You have read. So he is talking about the oral tradition handed down, memorized, and what have you, from the fathers. He said, You have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill. And whoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment. Now, what is he talking about here? First of all, thou shalt not kill is a part of the written law. But the overall statement, thou shalt not kill and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment, goes beyond that. What it is saying is that if in our society you commit murder, you shall be in jeopardy of the judge. In other words, you are going to be called into judgment, judged, and condemned for what you have done. Now, Jesus says, but I’m going to tell you this, whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. In other words, you’re going to be called to judgment simply for being angry with your brother, unnecessarily angry with your brother, anger out of reason. It’s going to call you into question. And whoever shall say to his brother, which is an out-and-out insult. It’s in the guy’s face saying, you’re a worthless no-good. Whoever does that shall be in danger of the council. In other words, you’re going to be called in question for this. But whoever shall say, you fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. Now, what does he mean by that? Well, Jesus is offering a new judgment of the law, which is on a higher plane than the previous judgments. It’s not good enough to refrain from outright murder. You aren’t supposed to murder in your heart either. And this underlines what I’ve said earlier about the purpose of the law. It’s not merely a curb on behavior. The old oral law was basically designed to curb your behavior. It had a lot to do really with how a society would function. It had to do with things like today would be speed limits so that you know when you can prosecute somebody when he has actually done something wrong. But what Jesus is talking about is not a curb on behavior, but a delineation of the difference between right and wrong. And you are headed down the wrong road anytime you enter into conflicts with your brother, even though you stop short of killing him. It’s one thing to acknowledge in your mind, for example, that a man is a fool if he really is one. There are some people who feel very guilty about the fact that even in their private closet they would say, boy, that guy is a real fool, because Jesus said, whoever shall say thou fool shall be in danger of hell fire. But if you look at the construction of the sentence, what Jesus is talking about is calling a man a fool to his face. Why is that a bad idea? Well, it can lead to a loss of a lot of bridge work. It can cause broken noses and black eyes. And in extreme cases, it could lead to death. Back in the days when men wore guns on their hips, people were a little more careful about calling a man a fool or a liar or something in that case to his face. So you’re headed into danger not merely when you kill. You’re headed into danger of judgment when you provoke. So what should you do? When you find yourself in this kind of situation, what would Jesus tell you to do? We’ll talk about that in a moment. I’ll be right back.
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So in Jesus’ judgment, what did he say you ought to do when you’re angry and the temptation to go call somebody a fool to his face is upon you? Well, he said, if you bring your gift to the altar, and this is verse 23 of Matthew 5, if you bring your gift to the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift before the altar and go your way. And first be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift. Now, he’s giving them this instruction in an atmosphere where their religious observances had to do with the temple and the gifts that are brought to the altar in the temple. But I think it’s easy enough to understand today that here we can be carrying on our religious life or attempting to act religious or going to church or all this. And we find that either in prayer or somewhere else, we find ourselves in a hostile attitude toward a brother. He says, stop what you’re doing and go be reconciled to your brother and then come back and be religious after that. Because candidly, I think what Jesus is suggesting is, that your religious worship of God doesn’t mean a whole lot if you’re harboring hostility and anger and hatred in your heart towards somebody else. The warning, I guess, is don’t let anger and hostility fester. Lance the boil. Go talk to somebody. But by the way, when you get there, don’t tell him he’s a fool to start off the conversation. Jesus goes on to say, agree with your adversary quickly while you are in the road. Don’t even get away from it. Lest at any time the adversary deliver you to the judge, the judge deliver you to the officer, and you be cast into prison. Verily I say unto you, you will not get out of there until you have paid the uttermost farthing. I guess in a way what he is saying is you’d better get this thing settled out of court and get it settled fast because if you wind up getting in a lot of trouble on this, I’m not going to bail you out. God isn’t going to bail you out. There’s not going to be anything done for you. You should have gotten this thing cleared up. And, you know, I think that’s awfully good advice. Settle the thing quickly and settle it out of court if there’s any way you can possibly do it because all you’re going to get is a lot of misery, heartache, Forgive me, trial lawyers, but I think most people’s lives are going to be a whole lot happier if they stay out of those situations. There’s one other piece of advice. This is for what it’s worth. Just take it and file it away in your memory. My impression is that most of these lawsuits take place not so much because of the damage or the hurt the person actually endured, but because they got angry at someone and the court system becomes an instrument of revenge. So don’t make people angry if you can help it. If you can give a little on a business deal, do it. If you can heal up hurt feelings and ruffled feathers, do it. It’s cheap in the long run, folks. A lawsuit, apart from the money it’s going to cost you, is going to cost you long nights of lying awake and staring at the ceiling and trying to work out what you’re going to say to justify yourself and all those things. It’s going to eat you up. Settle it out of court. Get it over with. Clear it up now. And get on with life. The modern expression for it, get a life. Now, one of the themes that Jesus is developing is looking out for the things of the heart as opposed to thinking, well, I haven’t actually done this thing with my hands yet, so therefore I’m innocent, I’m not guilty, there’s nothing particularly wrong. Listen to verse 27 and 28 of Matthew 5, this continuation of the Sermon on the Mount. Now, you have heard it has been said of them of old time, you shall not commit adultery. The idea being is that if you can stay out of your neighbor’s wife’s bed, you have done all that can be expected of you. But I say unto you, said Jesus, that whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart. So it is a matter of the heart. The sin is already done. Now, Jesus is pointing out something that should have been obvious from the beginning. And that is this, that merely staying right with the community by avoiding outright sin, observable sin, is not enough. You can be right with the community and wrong with God. And more important than that, well, nothing is more important than being right with God, but understand what I’m saying. Very important. The harm to the self begins much earlier in the process of sin than most people think. There are two kinds of harm that are done by sin. Harm to others and harm to self. Now, did you notice that I didn’t say a word about harm to God? Well, do you really think that there’s anything we can do that will harm God? Can we reach up into heaven and touch Him? Can we slap His face? Well, hardly. Now, the two kinds of harm, the harm to the self is in many ways the most tragic. And I don’t mean that to be taken in a selfish sense. What I mean is this, that when harm is done to us by others, we can recover. It’s not easy, but it’s easier than the other kind of recovery. When we have destroyed our character from the inside out, how can we dig ourselves out? In other words, when we have destroyed inside of ourselves the very mechanism by which we can turn to God, or straighten ourselves out, we’re out of luck. And that’s the kind of harm that we do to ourselves by committing sin. And this is what salvation is all about. You may have seen somewhere on a barn somewhere, or a neon sign on top of a building, Jesus saves. Okay, from what? What for? Salvation is bandied around by Christians as though the whole world knew exactly what they were talking about. It’s a classic example of jargon, where we say, well, come be saved, my brother, or don’t you want to achieve salvation? And we’re not just real clear about what salvation is. We just know that it’s better than hellfire, so let’s get saved. That seems to be adequate for some people. But salvation… is about the destruction of the inner man, a destruction that in the nature of things is irreversible. That destruction that takes place down inside of yourself can’t be reversed by you because you have destroyed in yourself the capacity to recover. This is why keeping the law cannot forgive sin. You can’t be saved by keeping the law because the breaking of the law in the past has destroyed inside of yourself those things that you need to save yourself. And so, there you are, with a great big hole inside of yourself that you can’t do anything about. Jesus saves is the antidote for that destruction, and that’s what salvation is about. The healing of the inner man, the rescue of the man inside from the destruction he has wrought upon himself. But think about this for a minute. If Jesus is to save you, The destruction has to stop. You can’t expect him to come to you and heal the destruction, rescue you from the destruction that has gone on inside of yourself when you are still tearing things down. This is where the law comes in. The law teaches you the difference between constructive and destructive behavior. The religious word for this is repentance. We repent of breaking God’s law. We repent of our destructive behavior. We stop doing things that hurt ourselves and that hurt other people, and we start living according to the light that the law shines on our path and on our feet, so we will not stumble. Repent and be baptized is the formula that Peter gave on the day of Pentecost. And you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. And that Holy Spirit can begin the work of reconstruction of the inner man. While you are saved through faith in Christ, you cannot be saved without repentance.
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I was teaching a class on the Sermon on the Mount once, and when it came down to exam time, I asked my students on a quiz, to demonstrate that we should not always take Jesus literally. In other words, tell me out of the Sermon on the Mount what you would go to that tells us that we should realize that Jesus uses metaphors, figures of speech, and yet you need to be careful about this literal business. Well, about a third of them got it right. It sits there staring you in the face in verse 29. Jesus, having made this point about lust, you know, he’s talking about if you see a woman and you sit and stare at her and lust comes on in your heart, he said, you’ve already sinned. So if your right eye offends you, he said, pluck it out and cast it from you, for it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish and not that your whole body should be cast into hell. Oh, wow. You know, pluck out your eye? But the problem I’ve got with that is that if I found myself lusting after a woman, a beautiful woman with my eyes, Taking one of them out is not going to help. The other one is still there, and it can keep right on looking. But then the next verse is very revealing. He says, What in the world does he mean? Well, now… Tell me, is there anyone listening to me that really thinks that if you stole something, it was your hand’s fault? Well, of course not. The decision to steal took place in the mind. It didn’t take place in the hand. What in the world are you going to accomplish by cutting off your hand because you’re a thief? You’ve still got another hand to work with. Now, it should be obvious to anybody, if you just sit back and say, okay, Jesus often uses metaphors. He uses figures of speech. What is the meaning of what Jesus is saying? Well, what Jesus means is that you should cut those things out of your life that lead to sin. It’s in the context of visual lust, right? So if you have a subscription to a girly magazine, cancel it. Cut it off. Don’t give yourself the opportunities in your life. Sever yourself from relationships that cause you problems. If you’ve got someone that’s tempting you too much to go to bed with the wrong person, sever the relationship. Cut it off. Get away from it. That’s what Jesus is saying. He’s saying, deal with this thing in your heart before you ever get to the action, because I will tell you surely that if you don’t deal with it in the heart, you will get to the action, and you’ll be dead. Be very careful when you’re reading through Jesus’ words about being too literal. Sit back for a moment and think about it and ask yourself, okay, what does he mean? Now then he comes on to say, it has also been said that whoever will put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement. But I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causes her to commit adultery, and whoever shall marry her that is divorced commits adultery. Now, this is a classic example of what Jesus is doing relative to the judgments of the Pharisees as contrasted with the judgments of God, or, as it may be, with His own judgments. Now, what had been said was, whoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement. That’s the oral tradition. Here is the written law. It’s in Deuteronomy 24, verse 1. When a man has taken a wife and married her, and it comes to pass that she find no favor in his eyes because… Now, not just because she burnt the toast one time too often, not just because she got a little bit old and wrinkled, not for any of those reasons. If it comes to pass that she find no favor in his eyes because he has found some uncleanness in her, So there’s a reason for it. Now, you should know that the Hebrew word for uncleanness here is matter of nakedness. And the word nakedness in Hebrew used in this context is a euphemism for sexual sins. Fairly simple. So if it come to pass that he finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some sexual uncleanness, not just dirty habits. I’m not talking about that, folks. I’m talking about… sexual sin in her, then let him write her a bill of divorcement and give it in her hand and send her out of his house. Now he may well have had the option of having her stoned to death as well, but I don’t think very many men really wanted to do that. So rather than have to kill a lot of people, rather than giving them a divorce, give them a divorce, a bill of divorcement, and send her away. And when she has departed out of his house, she may go and be another man’s wife. Now that’s what the written law said. The oral law, on the other hand, seemed to allow divorce for anything. Now what is generally not noticed in this is that Jesus allowed the same exception that Moses allowed. In the Hebrew, I’ve already explained, we’re talking about a matter of nakedness, which is a euphemism for sexual sins of all types. The Greek word in Jesus’ statement is pornea, which refers to a broad spectrum of sexual sins. The word pornographic in the English comes from the Greek word pornea, and it gives you an idea of what he’s talking about. Okay, so Jesus acknowledges then that sex is basic to marriage, and when that bond is broken, the bond of trust and everything about it is broken, he allows, as Moses did, for remarriage. Now, divorce is a very painful subject. It’s very complicated from a theological point of view. In fact, things usually do get complicated when the theologians get involved. We’ll have more to say on the subject later in Matthew’s work. But for now, please write to me and ask for my study paper on the subject of divorce. It’s free. My objective in this paper is not so much to lay down a doctrine of divorce and remarriage or to give you a thus saith the Lord or something that I think all churches ought to impose on their membership. What I’m trying to do is to give you the tools to understand what the law is and what Jesus’ judgment relative to the law is so that you can understand how to deal with your situation. Just ask for the article on divorce. Until next time, remember, you were born to win.
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