Today on Renewing Your Mind... ... We begin to think about the teaching of Jesus.
You know, sometimes at the end of a sermon someone will come up to the preacher and say, ... Absolutely everything about life was regulated by the law that God had given through Moses. And of course, as you know, those regulations, they believed there were well over 300 of them, those regulations had been detailed by the Pharisees.
You know how it works. If I'm going to keep that law, then I need to do this in order to keep that law, and very soon what you need to do in order to keep the law itself becomes a law. And so the people were not only living in the law of Moses, but they were living in a culture where if you really wanted to be spiritual, and just in parenthesis this same error has sometimes been made by Christians, hasn't it?
If you really want to be spiritual, you need to go further than God has told us to go. And so a very natural thing to listen to, to all these words about blessed and to think, why is He not saying anything about the law? Think for example of the very first psalm that introduces the whole Psalter.
What is the blessedness of the first psalm? It's the blessedness of the man who meditates on the law of God day and night and who lives within the law. So why is Jesus not saying anything about the law? Well, now He's going to say something about the law. He hasn't said anything about the law so far because He understands the law can tell us how to live, but it cannot empower us to live.
The law can tell us what to do, but the law does not have the energy to enable us to do it. You remember how Paul puts this in Romans 8 verses 3 and 4. What the law couldn't do, God did through His Son, sending Him in the likeness of the flesh of sin and to be a sacrifice for sin. He condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. Paul was adamant that rather than destroy the law, the gospel gives us the power to fulfill the law and makes the law our delight.
And he learned that from the teaching of the Lord Jesus because this is what Jesus is saying here. And I want you to notice several things that He has to say about the relationship between the Christian and the law. First of all, notice how He underlines the ongoing role of the law in the Christian life.
He says it has a continuing significance. Don't think for a moment that because I have said the law cannot bless you because the law doesn't have power to transform you, don't think that I'm saying it has no significance. I have not come to destroy the law but to fulfill the law.
Actually, we might grasp the significance of what He's saying if we put it this way. I have not come to destroy the law. I have come to fulfill the law. And of course, He does this in Himself, doesn't He? He doesn't destroy the law. You look at Jesus and you see, oh, that is the life to which the law of God pointed.
This is another interesting thing here. You notice He says now, He says if anyone takes away from God's law, teaches people that they can ignore God's law, then they are stretching to the margins of the kingdom of God. It's a question whether there really is a place for them in the kingdom of God. So, the law functions as a kind of spiritual litmus test of teaching where the law is despised or ignored or where people say we can jettison the law because we are New Testament Christians. And Jesus is saying, now wait a minute here, how you think about the law and its ongoing role in the Christian life is actually a litmus test of how you think about me and how you think about Christian discipleship. And then the third thing that He says as He underlines the role of the law, which must have been mind-bending for His hearers, was this. You see these Pharisees in all the rectitude apparently of their lives. Unless your righteousness exceeds their righteousness, there will be no place for you in the kingdom of heaven. Now, His hearers at that point must have thought, who then can be saved? We see these men, their practice intimidates us.
They are so disciplined. And Jesus is saying, is He saying we need to be better than they are? Does that mean that we must fulfill the law in ways that they don't? And that's exactly what Jesus means. But you see, what He wants to say is the path the Pharisees have chosen will never lead to the fulfillment or the fullness of the law in their lives.
But the path of the gospel will always produce that fulfillment. I remember years ago having an experience that struck me as something of a parable of this. I was flying from Newark Airport in New Jersey to Tel Aviv in Israel, and there were many orthodox Jews, Hasidic Jews that came onto the plane. I was sitting in my seat.
There was a spare seat, which I hoped would be a spare seat the whole way there. And there was a secular Jewish lady sitting in the window seat. And I saw a Hasidic Jew. You recognize him immediately, don't you? He came onto the plane, and I could see he was looking at his seat number and eyeing up the seats. And I could see from his eye movements, he was the man in seat B. And as he looked at this secular Jewish lady and this obviously Gentile Protestant, I could see a consternation come over his face. He troubled the cabin staff until they placed him in a different seat. To me, it was such a striking experience, since he was only three rows in front of me, and I don't usually sleep in transatlantic flights.
I wish I did, but I don't. I kept my eye on him all night long. And all night long, he had his finger on Torah. And I thought to myself, what an illustration of Paul's teaching that when they read Moses, there is a veil over their face. I thought this man could have been sitting beside me, talking about his Messiah.
We could have been talking about the blessedness of belonging to the kingdom of God. And there he was, fulfilling righteousness, apparently in his own eyes, being the man of the first Psalm, but not knowing the one to whom the first Psalm pointed, who would have transformed the whole of his life and filled full for him the promises of the Old Testament, that people would come to the Messiah from all over the world, and here was one of them sitting three rows behind him, and he could have been sitting beside him. And there he was, fulfilling his righteousness, but not being filled full of the righteousness of Jesus Christ. And Jesus wants to emphasize, no, Christians do not dispense with the role of the law, but they understand that the filling full of the law in our lives takes place not out of our own strength, but only because the kingdom of God has broken in and given us new affections and empowered us in new ways.
So, this is what Jesus is teaching. He is underlining the role of the law. In the second place, Jesus is emphasizing that He has actually come to fulfill the law. Don't think that I've come to abolish the law. I have actually come to fulfill the law. Now, what does He mean, He has come to fulfill the law?
Well, in a way, it's a long story, isn't it? It's pretty clear, I think, in the Bible that the law that was given through Moses at Sinai was a kind of negative expression of the law that had been written in Adam's heart as the image of God. As the image of God, He functioned, we might say, instinctively in a way that conformed with the real purpose of the law of God. Then when He fell, eyes blind, as the story goes on, people understand the law less and less.
We find even the patriarchs living in a way that doesn't conform to the law that was written in the heart. And so, God now publishes it on tablets of stone, and largely in a negative form because His people are such spiritual children. You know, when your little fellow is two years old, you don't sit down and explain to him how electricity works. You just say, don't poke that into those holes in the wall because it may damage you. So, by and large, the easiest way to teach children is just to tell them what not to do.
That will keep them safe. And in a way, that's what God was doing. And so, most of the Ten Commandments are expressed in a negative rather than in a positive form.
But although they are set in the negative, inside the negative is a summons to God's original purposes for us. But this law we fail, and so Jesus comes, and He does two things. The first is He obeys where we have disobeyed, and the second thing is He bears the punishment or the penalty for our breach of God's holy law.
And He does that in order to cleanse our hearts and to set us free from bondage and guilt. And in that sense, Jesus fulfills the law. There's another sense in which Jesus fulfills the law.
The law not only gave commandments, moral commandments, the law made provision for what would happen if you broke those commandments. All of those sacrifices, every single day, sacrifices for sin. Every year, the Day of Atonement when the high priest would go into the very presence of God and offer a sacrifice there. Your whole life under the law was a life lived within what I call a kind of pop-up picture book version of the gospel where these sacrifices reminded you that you needed forgiveness, and these sacrifices pointed you to the forgiveness that God would give.
Do you remember the argument that the author of Hebrews uses? He says, you know, the priests stood at the altar every single day, every single day making sacrifices for sin. And if you'd been a believing Old Testament person coming into the temple in Jerusalem watching this, it should have dawned on you, if these sacrifices need to be repeated, these can't be the sacrifices that really take away sin. They must only be pictures of those sacrifices.
Otherwise, they would never need to be repeated. And God has promised us a sacrifice that really will take away our sin, so these can't be the sacrifices. Someone is coming who will be that sacrifice, and He has come. And so Jesus fulfills not only the moral dimension of the law in our place, but Jesus is the one who fulfills all these Old Testament pictures that the people were given that pointed them to how their sins would eventually be forgiven through one great sacrifice made by a high priest after the order of Melchizedek, not a high priest after the order of Aaron. Now, the disciples didn't understand this for several years, I suspect, but clearly they remembered that Jesus had said it and that He had not only fulfilled the moral part of the law, but He had fulfilled the ceremonial part of the law. And this was the reason why in the early church, all of those sacrifices and rituals were laid aside.
It was as though the noonday sun had risen, and so, as John Calvin says, they didn't strike matches in order to be able to see because Jesus had fulfilled the law. And there's another sense in which Jesus fulfilled the law. God had given the law through Moses for a particular group of people and a particular nation because it was in one nation He planned to preserve the promise that the Messiah would come, the seed of the woman who would bruise and crush the head of the serpent. And that promise was going to be kept in one nation. It was going to be preserved there. And so, His moral law was applied to the civic life of that one nation.
It was never meant to be a permanent arrangement. The sacrifices were not meant to be permanent. And the particular applications of the law of God to this particular society, well, those were intended also until the Savior came and He became the King of an international society. One can put it this way, being an Old Testament Jew worked only in one country in the world, didn't it?
Why? Because the sacrifices were in Jerusalem. The feasts were in Jerusalem. If you were an Old Testament Jew somewhere else, you had to come back to this one country, this one nation, but no longer.
No longer is that true. It's almost as though what Jesus does…remember, He commanded the man who was paralyzed to take up his bed and walk. I sometimes think that when Jesus rose again in the garden, what He did was He took all those applications of Moses' law and He just rolled them up and He carried them away. Now, of course, there are many things that our societies can learn from the different ways in which God's law was applied to civic life in terms of justice, as the Westminster Confession says, in terms of the general equity of the law. But you see what Jesus is saying?
He's saying, I not only fill the law full in your life, but I fill the law full because I'm the one to whom the law was pointing. And as a result, in me you see all these Old Testament pictures fulfilled. And in me, because I am God's King, the application of the law of God to one particular society has now come to an end because the Christian life can be lived anywhere.
It's really an astonishing thing, isn't it? You know, our instinct is sometimes to think that, you know, unless society is well-ordered, it's really difficult to live the Christian life. It would be hard to persuade a Chinese Christian of the last 50 years that that was true. Isn't it a striking thing then that Jesus has come in order that the Christian life could become an absolutely international reality? And then there's another way in which Christ fulfills the law. He fulfills the law by His obedience to it and by His dying to pay its penalty. And then, in addition, through the power of the Holy Spirit, He comes and He fills out, fulfills, fills full the law in the lives of His people. And that's actually what the rest of Matthew chapter 5 is taken up with. Jesus has said this astonishing thing, unless your righteousness is greater than the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you'll have no part in the kingdom.
And of course, His hearers are asking the question, how can that possibly be the case? You know, we've always looked to these Pharisees and they're intimidating obedience to God's law, and we thought, I can never get up that high. And now He's telling us we're going to get up higher. And here is the great message that Jesus enables us to fulfill the law of God at a much deeper level than the scribes and the Pharisees. And because He enables us to keep the law of God at that much deeper level.
You remember the promise of Jeremiah? God will come by His Spirit and He'll write the law right down into your hearts. And so, obedience will arise from your heart. You will love God's law, have affection for God's law and God's ways because He has become your heavenly Father. And you'll begin to discover yourself saying, well, of course, Father, of course I'll do that because it is your perfect will for my life.
That's what it means for the law to be filled full. The only way our righteousness can exceed the legalistic, ritualistic righteousness of the Pharisees is if we obey God from the heart. I hope today's message by Dr. Sinclair Ferguson has been a help to you. We're grateful that he's been able to join us these past few days, teaching from his series, Sermon on the Mount. In 12 messages, Dr. Ferguson shows us how this teaching by our Savior equips us to live a godly life in this fallen world. You can request this two-DVD set when you give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.
You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343, or you can make your request and give your gift securely online at renewingyourmind.org. Equipping you to know what you believe and why you believe it is why we exist here at Ligonier Ministries. And one important way we've done that through the years is with the Reformation Study Bible. And now, thanks to the generous support of ministry friends like you, we are pleased to announce that the Reformation Study Bible has been translated into Portuguese. Just like its English counterpart, this new translation elevates Scripture on every page. So we thank you for your ongoing support of this ministry. Well, the Sermon on the Mount is an example of the kind of teaching that Jesus did when He was in public with the people. But what kind of things did He teach His disciples when they were alone? Join us tomorrow for a message from Dr. Ferguson's series, Lessons from the Upper Room, here on Renewing Your Mind.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-04-17 01:52:05 / 2023-04-17 01:59:41 / 8