Meditation May 16, 2020

MATTHEW 5:17-19

 “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 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. Therefore 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.

Perhaps the best-known rallying cry of much of the church within my memory is “We are not under the law.” Misunderstanding regarding the relationship between the law and the gospel often divides us into camps of legalists and antinomians and has even been the occasion for a number of Bible commentators to pit Paul against Jesus. You would expect a Bible commentator to have read the Bible but to make that division, whatever you view on the law, is simply ignorance or deliberately making controversy where none exists..  While that is true insofar as it goes, it is generally taken in such a way by a large portion of the church that it completely contradicts what Jesus teaches.

John Newton, the converted slave trader, wrote that "Ignorance of the nature and design of the law is at the bottom of most of our religious mistakes. I have heard many well-meaning believers express their belief that the God’s given in Scripture has been completely abolished and believers have no obligation to make the moral law the rule by which they judge and guide their conduct. Not surprisingly but with glaring inconsistency seem by all but themselves, they will quickly judge others by the law. Their problem, I suspect, is a misunderstanding of grace; an ignorance of the Person and work of Christ. Perhaps I will get to that one day, but at present, we have Jesus’ affirmation that whatever else he may have come to do, abolishing one jot or tittle of the law was not part of it.

Up to this point in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaching must have a bit befuddling to the people and, if there were Scribes and Pharisees among them, His teaching to this point must have been in their minds nothing short of blasphemous. In his specification of the characteristics of believers, He has said nothing about the law, or the importance of observing them which was rudimentary in the Jewish mind, nor has he said anything about the Scribes and Pharisees and the following and deference they thought due them.

Jesus, who knows the minds and hearts of men, as he has shown on many occasions, must have anticipated or known what was going through their mind. So, He said to them, as it were, Look, I know where you mind is going, but “do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. His words imply that is exactly what they had begun to think. Preaching as He was, forgiveness and focused on what was on the inside as opposed to the religious rites and practices that were on the outside, His teaching appeared to be an attack on the two means on which the Jewish religion stood; i.e., the law and the prophets. The whole of the Jewish scripture, that upon which they built their religion, that by which they guided their lives and that by which they presumed to find favor with God is found in the law and the prophets, they two great Jewish divisions of the Old Testament.

“Do not think,,,” Jesus says. Not to get lost in grammar but that is said in the aorist subjunctive indicating such thinking was definitely happening. The sense is stop thinking that by what I have been saying that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. In contemporary vernacular we might read it as, I know where you mind is going, just don’t go there. Abolishing the law and the prophets hasn’t happened, isn’t happening, and will not happen. That is about as emphatic as it can be put. Not only is it the case that I haven’t come to abolish the law and the prophets but, on the contrary, “I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.” By living sinless Jesus fulfilled the moral law, all that encompassed in the Pentateuch, which as we will soon see included far more than they thought, he fulfilled all the ceremonial law in His sacrificial death and in doing so fulfilled all the prophecies. Not one jot or tittle was abolished or left unfulfilled. Jesus used jot and tittle as a metaphor to express the thoroughness of His fulfilling the law down to the most minute aspects. In the Hebrew language, something as small as a tittle could change the meaning much as a missing comma in English can change a meaning or make it ambiguous.





Jesus words make it clear that not one whit of the law is no longer applicable. One greatly errs to suppose that Christ allows any trifling with the word of God, the prophecies of the Old Testament or the commands of God holy law. The moral law is the believer’s rule for life and conduct. “Blessed is the man…whose delight is the law.” (Psalm 1) Anyone professing to be a disciple of Christ, who encourages himself or others in any disobedience to the law of God by some supposed abrogation of God’s moral demands is a false prophet and should not be heard in the church of God.

Many argue that the most obvious instance of Christ abrogating the law, at least in part, and adding something new is the change of the Sabbath. Far from supporting their antinomian position, such argument proves no more that that they have read the law as Pharisees for nowhere in the Pentateuch is it commanded that Saturday or Sunday or Wednesday is to be kept holy. The command is one day in seven.

The dissimulation of antinomians under the skirts of Paul are quickly exposed by the reading of Paul’s letters. Some apparently have never done that for early in his letter to the Romans he writes “Do we then nullify the law by this faith? Absolutely not. Instead we uphold the law. (Ro. 3:31) Again in Ro. 7 Paul writes, “So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.” He has the same message for Timothy; i.e. “For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.” (1Tim. 1:8) Except for the law, says Paul, we do not know sin. Christ did not come to bring any new way of righteousness and salvation into the world, but to fulfil that promised and foreshadowed in the law and the prophets. He did not come to do away with the law but to teach fulfill true obedience and by grace to deliver man from the curse, not the demands,

Sinclair Ferguson explains it this way: “Jesus shows us what the promises of the Old Testament really meant. Until he came, God's people knew them and believed them, of course. But only when he fulfilled them were they able to say, 'Now I understand them…'Jesus says the same is true of God's law. That point is often overlooked. In Matthew 5:17 , Jesus is teaching that if we want to know what the law really means, we must look at Him and what He does with it because He fulfils, or `accomplishes,' the law (Mt 5:18…Jesus did not weaken the law. On the contrary, He let it out of the cage in which the Pharisees had imprisoned it, allowing it to pounce on our secret thoughts and motives, and tear to pieces our bland assumption that we are able to keep it in our own strength."

It is only in the face of the law that believers are continually poor in spirit, mourn their sins and with gladness proclaim “Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!” (Lam. 3)