I want you
to use your imagination with me for a minute. Imagine that we are in Israel 2000-plus
years ago on the side of a mountain listening to Jesus preach His Sermon on the
Mount. Wouldn’t that be great? But before we go any further, I have to give you
the background for this setting. We don’t know how many people are sitting and
standing around him. Probably hundreds of people gathered that day to listen to
this young man and almost every one of them had read and studied what we call
today the Old Testament.
It’s what
good Jews did back then. They studied the scriptures and they went to the
synagogue and they were taught what the Law of Moses said. The Law of Moses is
considered by most to be the first five books of the Bible, also called the Torah
(in Hebrew) or the Pentateuch (in Greek). It includes the 10 Commandments but
also all the other laws that are mainly in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
These laws
were given to Moses by God and defined how the Hebrew people were to live,
worship and rule. There were rules for everything that a person could possibly
do. There were very specific rules for how, what and when to walk, talk,
sacrifice, get clean, what to eat, what to wear, when to celebrate, when to work,
when to rest. You can read it. It is overwhelming and impossible. I’ll just say
it. Yet, that was the law that God gave and if you wanted to be right with God,
you followed the Law.
So, for over
a thousand years, the Law of Moses had been drilled into the people as how to
be right with God. Follow the Law for true righteousness. When you messed up
and didn’t follow the Law, there were very specific sacrifices to be made so
you could get back to that righteousness. So, that is the context and that is
the mindset of the people that Jesus was preaching to here in the Sermon on the
Mount.
So, if we go
back to imagining that we are there for this great sermon, can you imagine the
peoples’ response as they are listening? As Jesus started off with the
Beatitudes and told the people that they would be blessed by God if they mourn
over their sins and if they are meek and truly desire to be righteous.
If you are merciful and pure in heart, you can be right with God.
Can’t you
just see the people in the crowd squint and turn their heads and look at each
other? A husband says to his wife, “Hmm…nothing about the Law in there.
When’s he gonna talk about the Law?” And then Jesus goes on to tell them
that they are salt and light, meaning they have the truth and should speak the
truth and they will give God glory by doing good things. But still nothing
about the Law. All good rabbis would teach about the importance of the Law.
What’s going on here? And then it dawns on them. He is teaching against the
Law! He’s here to do away with the Law. This is blasphemy!
But Jesus,
being God, knows their thoughts. He hears their questions and answers them
directly in Matthew 5:17-20. Now, sitting here today, on the other side
of the globe from where it happened and 2,000 years later, you are wondering
what the big deal is. You know that we are not under the Law but under grace
(Romans 6:14). Shoot, you’re wondering why anybody would read those Old
Testament passages anymore anyway. What’s that have to do with you? Why should
you care? Those are good questions. Let’s look at Matthew 5:17-20 to get
some of those kinds of questions answered. Jesus said,
“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. 18For 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. 19Therefore 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. 20For I tell you that unless your righteousness
surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly
not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Let me ask
you a question. When we say that we don’t have any rules around here, what does
that mean to you? Does it mean that it’s okay if, while I’m preaching and I
really want to make a point, that I can accentuate that point with a cuss word?
We don’t have any rules around here so does that mean if I hear you singing off
key during our worship music, I can punch you in the mouth? Would it be okay if
I took a few bucks out of Janet’s purse when she wasn’t looking? Why not? We
don’t have any rules.
We don’t do
that kind of thing around here, not because we have rules against it but
because we love each other and don’t want to hurt one another. I like it around
here and I want to stay here because I enjoy being with you and I am blessed by
you and so I don’t want to do anything that hurts you. It’s because of our love
for each other that keeps us from having a bunch of rules to follow. I think if
Jesus physically lived in Wise County, He would be a member of Christ
Fellowship. I really do. He’d get along well here with us not having any rules.
He might visit Cates Street Baptist every now and then, but He’d be a member
here. 😊
Just like we
aren’t members here because we are perfect, we aren’t right with God – we
aren’t considered by God to have righteousness – because we follow all the
rules and all the Law of Moses. That’s impossible. God considers us
righteous because of our life-changing faith in Jesus. It was
Jesus who fulfilled the whole Law of Moses and kept all the rules and did
everything just right without ever sinning. It is our faith in Him and our love
for Him that makes us want to please Him with our lives and be right with Him.
When Jesus
said He came to fulfill the Law, that word means to literally fill full.
Fulfill is to fill full. If you filled a glass full of water to overflowing, it
is filled full. Nothing else will fit. Nothing else is needed. That’s what
Jesus did with the Law and the words of the prophets in the Old Testament.
I hear
people say they don’t ever read the Old Testament because it doesn’t apply to
us. We aren’t Jewish. We aren’t under the old law anymore. Why should we read
it? And if you came to me and asked me where to start reading if you had never
picked up a Bible, I would tell you to start with one of the Gospels. Read the
Book of John first and see who Jesus is. Get to know Him and why He came and
why He died and what He did for us. Read that first. But then you can go back
and start reading the Old Testament with eyes that are looking for Jesus
because everything in the Old Testament is ultimately about Him.
In the very
first book, Genesis, God created Adam and put him in the Garden of Eden with
this one command. Don’t eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil or you will surely die, meaning die in your sin. What keeps us from dying
in our sin? Jesus! It was starting to point to the Savior, Jesus, way back
then.
I love the
story of Noah’s ark, don’t you? I’ve been fascinated by the logistics of all
that since I was a kid but did you know that the ark points to Jesus? The
waters came and flooded the earth and everything that wasn’t in the ark
died. And just like that, everyone that isn’t in Jesus will also
die eternally in their sins. It was pointing to Jesus. It was saying, “Hey,
there is something better coming.”
Keep reading
and you start to hit some chapters that, I’ll be honest, are kind of boring and
hard to understand. In Exodus, when it talks about how to build the tabernacle,
it gives detailed instructions about what goes in the tabernacle and what it is
to be made of and exactly how big it is and it’s all so tedious and
boring…until you really start to study it deeply and realize that Jesus is our
tabernacle and He was being described and pointed to and hoped for way back
then.
I challenge
you to go back and read the Old Testament again, but this time do it with an
eye on Jesus. How did Jesus fulfill those things or become those things or
perfect those things way back in the “boring” Old Testament? Did you know that
Jesus Himself actually showed up quite a few times in the Old Testament? When
we get through (in the next two years) with the Sermon on the Mount, we are
going to look at some of those times. That ought to be fun.
But it’s
when you get to the Law of Moses that Jesus says He fulfilled all of it. Prior
to Jesus being born and dying and rising again, the way you were right with God
was to make sacrifices of animals. You remember in Romans 6:23 where it
says that the wages of sin is death? That was not just a New Testament
teaching. Originally, in the Old Testament, when somebody sinned, they would
bring a perfect bull or goat or dove or some kind of critter and they would
sacrifice that animal on the altar and then they would take some of the blood
and sprinkle it over the altar to signify that the sin had been covered over by
that blood.
Jesus
fulfilled that law by being the perfect sacrifice whose blood doesn’t just
temporarily cover over that sin but does away with it forever. Hebrews 10:4
says that it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin
but Hebrews goes on to say that (v. 12) when this priest (Jesus) had offered
for all time one sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right hand of God and (14)
by one sacrifice has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.
Y’all, this
is really good news! Because Jesus goes on to say in His sermon in verse 20
that unless your righteousness surpasses that of
the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the
kingdom of heaven. The people listening to Jesus believed the Pharisees
and teachers of the Law were the most righteous and holy people on the planet.
How could they be more righteous than they were? In fact, that word “surpasses”
is used of a river overflowing its banks. Jesus said you have to be way more
righteous than those guys.
The problem
with the Pharisees was their religion was external. They did everything right
outwardly but neglected the heart issue which was the main issue. Jesus called
them whitewashed tombs and said they cleaned the outside of the cup but the
inside was filthy. And they had no excuse. Their great king and forefather,
David, knew this. He knew it was a heart issue. After he sinned with Bathsheba,
he wrote the 51st Psalm and in it he said, “You do not
delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt
offerings. 17My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart
you, God, will not despise.”
The
Pharisees thought of themselves as righteous and holy because they did
outwardly what the Law said to do. They might hate their brother and lust after
their sister but they didn’t show it, so they felt pretty good about themselves.
What a slap in the face to almighty God! And it’s the same today when we make
ourselves to look very religious. We go to church sometimes. We pray before
lunch. We even commented “amen” on that post on Facebook. God must think we are
really something, right? We might as well be Pharisees.
The Apostle
Paul was a Pharisee. Do you remember that? In Philippians 3, Paul says, “If someone else thinks they have reasons to put
confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of
the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in
regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as
for righteousness based on the law, faultless.
Now, Paul
could have stopped there and all the Pharisees and teachers of the Law would
have loved him and he would have been comfortable in this life and would have
been respected and loved by all the people and he would have busted the gates
of Hell wide open and he knew it. So, he continues…
7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the
sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of
the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have
lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and be
found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law,
but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God
on the basis of faith.”
It is that
life-changing faith in Jesus that saves us and makes us righteous. It is our
faith that makes us right with God, not because of what we do. But we do what
we do because of our faith, not because we have rules or laws against it. We
are obedient to God because we love Him and don’t want to hurt Him. We like
being with Him and want to stay with Him and are blessed by Him and so we don’t
want to do anything that would hurt Him. It is because of our love for Him that
makes us want to please Him and be obedient.
Now, if you
are anything like me, right about now you are thinking, “That’s right. Those
Pharisee kinds of people drive me crazy. It reminds me of old so-and-so. He was
like that.” Yes, you might think, like I was, that this would be a good
time to put in an illustration of some preacher who had gotten caught sinning
or some cop who got caught breaking the law. It would help remind us of what
Pharisees look like. That’s what I was thinking too until I realized that’s
probably just what a Pharisee would think.
In Luke
18 it says, “To some who were confident of their own righteousness and
looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee
and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and
prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers,
adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and
give a tenth of all I get.’ 13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance.
He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have
mercy on me, a sinner.’ 14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the
other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will
be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Lord, please
forgive me. I am sick of my sin and I am sorry when I hurt you. Forgive me when
my love for you and my faith in you is not reflected in my life but especially
in my heart. Have mercy on me and forgive me and help me to live more like you
and to love more like you. As my friend David said, “Create in me a pure heart, oh God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” But you will have to do it,
Lord. I can’t. Do it through me and in me and I give you all the glory. Thank
you, Lord. I love you. In the name of Jesus, I ask these things. Amen
As the music
plays, will you join me as we continue to pray?
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