Our scripture reading this morning comes from Matthew 5, verses 17 through 20. This can be found on page 1029 of your Pew Bibles. Matthew 5, verses 17 through 20. Hear now the word of the Lord. 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 say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Let us go before our God in prayer. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would bless this word, that you would bless our hearts, that you would soften them to be receptive to it. Help us to understand, Lord, what you would have us know through this word, and help us to be able to apply it to our lives to come. We pray this in your Son's holy name. Amen. Oftentimes, I find it critical and important when we come to a text to understand a couple of different things. First, it's context within the passage as a whole. and also try to place ourselves in the shoes of those who are originally receiving it. I think this is critically important, especially in this passage, to understand where we are coming from and where we are at this point. I'd like to take a brief moment to look through previous and later portions of this section of the Bible. We see just beforehand, he addresses a crowd with the Beatitudes, and then goes to the salt and the light, which is more about how we are to affect the world around us. This isn't really the crux of the Sermon on the Mount, though. Later on, after our passage, we see that he speaks a lot about the law not just being in deed, but also being in heart. And this portion here for 17 through 20 is preparation for the rest of that sermon on the Mount. This section is different though, because while previously the people who are listening to Jesus would not have been alarmed or threatened, after this section and the following section, they easily could have seen Jesus as speaking something that would be threatening or alarming to them. And to understand that better, we have to look sort of what the life of those Jews would look like, how they would come to understand his teaching. They were following him because they thought his teaching had authority. They liked what he had to say or at least curious by it. And he had performed many miracles that wowed them. And so they follow him, and he says the Beatitudes, which again, would have raised an eyebrow maybe, been surprising, but not threatening, so to speak. But here, this section and the following one are drastically different, because they seem to go against what the Pharisees had been teaching. And the people of that day, they only knew the law through those Pharisees, that was their they're coming in contact with the word of God. They didn't all have Bibles in their pews and be able to easily turn and look the law up for themselves. They knew it through the Pharisees or through the scribes who would tell them what it says and tell them how to keep the law. If you went then against the Pharisees and their teaching, it could be understood as going against the law itself. So when Jesus starts saying things that would be against the Pharisees' teachings, it would cause alarm to the people who are originally receiving it. You see, the scribes and Pharisees were very good at knowing the law. And I wanna take a brief aside here to describe a little bit about how they would know, the scribes and Pharisees, because that'll be important for recognizing the rest of our passage about why Jesus says what he does. See, the Pharisees and the scribes knew the law quite well. The scribes spent their entire time copying it, reading it, writing it. They knew the middle word of every passage. They knew the middle letter. If you said just a couple words, they would be able to finish the entire passage from memory. They knew it so well. They were also very good at keeping it, or at least they were perceived to be good at keeping the law. They gained their standing, partly, by being recognized as more holy than the other people. They thus had their power and were able to exert their influence over others. They were well known by it. And they were very good at making others keep it as well. When I first arrived at Mid-America Reform Seminary, where I am studying, I had an old car which was quite shaky, very worn down, and one of the headlights went out I wasn't aware of, and a cop pulled me over. He said, are you aware that your headlight is out? I said, no, I didn't. And he was a very gracious cop and he started explaining to me why he was pulling me over and why that was an offense. He was like, well, you see if there's another person and it's late at night and they're trying to merge over, if your headlight on that side is out, then they might not see you and they might hit you and technically you would be at fault. So we want you to get that fixed both for your own safety and also for the safety of others. And ended up not giving me a ticket at all, just a warning and an explanation for why it would be good. He was very gracious in that manner. But the scribes and the Pharisees were not into that kind of behavior. They would be much more likely to say, get your headlight fixed, here's the ticket. They would be very stern, and the people would be used to constantly being badgered again and again by all the little things that they failed to do. And also, and this is a critical part, the Pharisees were very good at adding to the law. You see, Pharisees sometimes get more of a bad rap than they need to, and I know that might sound a little bit weird, but part of the reason they were good at adding to the law was they had a zeal for the law. They really wanted to keep the law, and they so much wanted to keep the law that they would add laws just to make sure you were keeping the laws. For example, we know we aren't supposed to work on the Sabbath. The fourth commandment tells us at length that not only us, but also all our people under us are not supposed to work. But they would go a step further, and they would say, in order to not work, we have to understand what the concept of work is. And if you walk too far, that's tiring. So we're going to put a limit on the number of steps you can go to make sure you don't work. And then they would treat that additional law, the number of steps that you can go on the Sabbath, as if it were equated with the fourth commandment. The purpose behind that, though, was to keep the fourth commandment. It wasn't just because they wanted to add laws. It was because they had a zeal and a passion for the law. And that, in that respect at least, that is good. That is something that we should emulate, a zeal for the law, for understanding exactly what it means and what it doesn't. We take it seriously in our lives so that we can best walk in a way and in a manner that is pleasing to God. But with the Pharisees, they elevated their understanding of the law, and they elevated the purpose of the law as well. And that is the critical part that we find in this text. Because they were following the law, not because they had a love for God, but because it added to them a comfort that they were right with God. That in keeping to these laws, that they before God would be seen as righteous. And that is the critical failure, and one that the Jews of that time might also have fallen into. They would look around and say, well, the Pharisees are better at keeping the laws than me, so they're better with God. And we know that we fail before God, so we're not as right with God, and we try to be better with God through that keeping of the law. I hope all of you would know that that is not an appropriate way to view the law. But we run the risk of internally thinking of the law in that manner. A professor of mine was recounting an idea where he was talking to a dying woman in his congregation. And he was speaking to her and asking her, what is the assurance that you have? Do you have assurance that you are Christ? And she said, oh, Reverend, you don't have to worry about me. I've gone to church my whole life. And in one case, that is very good. That is a great blessing to be able to come before the Lord every Sunday for your entire life. But upon pressing it further, my professor realized that that was why she had assurance. I had come to church every week, so God has to accept me. I have done the right thing, so yes, God is going to give me his promises because of what I've done. Fundamentally, it misses the focal point of the entire gospel she had been hearing the whole life. We can't rest on our own works of the law in order to be saved, in order to be accepted by God. We have to rest on Christ specifically. The comfort that this woman had was similar in nature to the comfort that the Jews of this day were having. It was on the law. It was on their keeping of the law. They were not looking to the Messiah to save them, but they were instead looking to themselves and their own workings of that law to save themselves. And in this context, then, we can see a different color of this passage, which is important for recognizing why Christ says what he does, and what the purpose of this text is, is that the law is not the means by which we get to heaven, but it points to the one by which we get to heaven. The law itself is not how we get to heaven, but it points to the one by which we get to heaven. And there are a couple different aspects of this theme that we can draw out here in this passage. First, Christ recognizes very strongly that the law is not an error. It isn't. It's not wrong. He's come to change it. But also, the law is not itself complete. that it isn't the end. If we have this context in mind, it helps us to understand our passage more fully. Jesus is telling us in this following portion, 21 and beyond, that we cannot rely on our following of law. He makes this very, very clear. You have heard it said, you shall not murder, but I say to you, anyone who is angry with his brother is liable for judgment. This would have made people perk up their ears. Because previously they might have been able to say, oh, the sixth commandment, yep, got that one checked off, haven't murdered anybody. Don't commit adultery, I haven't committed adultery, and they put a little check by that box as well, good to go. You can run down the list and you can put little check marks by all the commandments I haven't broken. We read the commandments this morning, And there's a lot of those with, by the word of the letter of the law, I haven't broken them, but by the heart I definitely have. Have I ever been angry with someone? Absolutely. And suddenly I can't check that box off anymore. So when Jesus is saying this in verse 21 and following, it would have been rejected by them as, wait a second, that means I'm guilty. Wait a second, that's speaking against me. especially at the end of verse 20 here where it says, for I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. They saw the scribes and Pharisees as the ones who were much holier than them. So if they were told, no, you have to be even more so than them or else you won't enter the kingdom of heaven, danger, red flags would be going off, warning signs. Wait a second, this is bad. And the people knew the Pharisees knew the law. So again, going back, if they were flying, if what Jesus was saying was flying in the face of the Pharisees, it could be perceived as going against the law. In order to... To combat that understanding though, we see what Jesus starts off with here in verse 17. Anticipating that thought process that the recipients would originally have, the audience, they're listening to him in the Sermon on the Mount. Before he gets into the following portion, he starts off in verse 17 by repeating himself that that is not what he's doing. Do not think I've come to abolish the law or prophets. I have not come to abolish them. He's making it very clear. He is not going against them. not going against the law, that is, but is going against the Pharisees. He's separating the two in this by making it very clear he is not dismissing or combating the law in any way, shape, or form. Instead, he is recognizing them as fully good and true. That is partly why we see in verse 18, he says, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law. He's saying that this is truly good. It is truly important. It is perfect. And he's not giving any critique with any part of the law whatsoever. Instead, He's saying that the law is not only in agreement with what he is saying and will continue to say in the later portions, but it is also vitally important to continue to know and to practice and to teach. Now it could be understood, and some people do, that Christ is changing gears in the Sermon of the Mount. He's saying that even though the law is in agreement with what he's saying, The law itself is no longer the focus and instead he should follow his new teachings of loving the Lord with your heart. I don't understand it that way. I'm not convinced by that because Christ says that the whole law and the prophets are based on the two greatest commandments, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. I think the love portion of that was always part of the law. The law was not given to the Old Testament Jews as something that you just had to do. And now that he comes upon the scene, he introduces the fact that you now have to love your neighbor. But rather it was ingrained within the law to love at the beginning. So then by saying that this was part of the law, he would be refuting the Pharisees and their misunderstanding of the law. He was saying that the purpose behind what the law was already saying was being misunderstood. The law then was not false. Jesus was making that very, very clear, but it's being misunderstood and mistaught. And we run the danger, rather, of coming into that same misunderstanding. We might not make a ton of rules to follow, but are we still resting upon the law? One of the ways that this can happen is through comparison. We see someone who is evil, and we compare ourselves to them as better than them. And sometimes that can be our comfort, not just in the law itself, but in being better than others who fail at the law. We see a criminal on the news. A couple weeks ago, I walked in the door after coming home from seminary and there was some guy's face plastered on the news and it was saying how horrible the crime he did. He came in and he robbed a convenience store and then shot the clerk as he was leaving for no apparent reason. And the evil there was just potent. Why would you do that? And it can become very, very easy to then fall into the temptation of saying people like them should be put in prison. In one sense, that is absolutely true. We do not want people committing such crimes out on the streets. But notice it was people like them, they. The people who are sinful, they need to be kept off the streets. It can creep in where suddenly we are thinking of ourselves because I'm not a murderer. And we're going back to checking off the sixth commandment again, saying, I haven't done what they have done. We become, we start comparing ourselves to others, and it can become condescending and hypocritical. I grew up in a secular college, I was studying physics. Physics was a very, secular society there in that college, a lot of very vocal atheists. And one of the reasons that a lot of them were is they recognized or they perceived that Christians were condescending and hypocritical. And one of the reasons they thought that was the Christians were saying that someone was doing something wrong, even though the Christians themselves were sinful. Now, that's only hypocritical if the Christian doesn't recognize themselves as sinful. So in that case, they were entirely wrong. And they also were entirely wrong, and that condescension comes from if you think you are better than them because you are not sinful. But if we recognize ourselves as sinful, if we recognize ourselves as fully incapable of God's love, of receiving God's love apart from Christ, then we are neither. But it is so easy to fall into that temptation. It doesn't even have to be a comparison between you and a criminal. It can be a comparison between you and a friend or an acquaintance, someone who swears a bit more than you and you think, good thing I didn't get brought up in a home where that was regular, where that was normal. I'm glad I know better than that. But I have to ask, is God's bar really set so low that as long as you're better than someone else, you're good enough? As long as you're better than them, You're fine. That isn't what the scripture teaches us. And verse 19 tells us, therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. It is important to recognize that we do fail the law. Now, this might seem also to sort of go against verse number 18. But we can ask ourselves, why then do we not hold to all of the law that is given to us? We eat bacon, we wear mixed fabrics, we eat shellfish. You've probably heard some of these arguments before. Why don't we do those or hold to those laws if not an iota or a dot will pass from the law? And whoever relaxes one of the least of these will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. And this question is answered by the second point, the second theme in this passage that I want to draw out. That is the completion of the law. In verse 18, when Christ says these things, he is recognizing the full authority of scripture is coming from God. Again, it's not an error. But how do we recognize then why we only take some of the laws today? I think this is because we recognize that while we fully agree that all parts of the law are God-breathed, We no longer hold to all of the Old Testament Levitical laws because some of them no longer apply to us. And this, again, might seem directly contrary to verse 18, saying that no part will pass from the law, but hear me out. The reason we can hold both that nothing will pass from the law and still no longer hold to parts of the law is because the law has built into it a desired end. It has a goal in mind when it is given. It has a completion that it is longing for and expecting. And we see this at the end of both verse 17 and 18. Earlier, I read that it was not talking about abolishing the law. I do not think I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. And the end of that verse is very important. He isn't abolishing law, but he is coming to fulfill them. 18 is very much the same. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. So we have two words here, to fulfill them and until all is accomplished, that both have within the word an inherent understanding that there is something to be completed. The law itself isn't done. The law itself is not all there is. The Pharisees were treating it that way. The Pharisees were treating the law as the end, that was it. But Jesus is saying, no, the law itself is anticipating something. And that something, he is saying, is himself. I have come to fulfill the law. the law as a whole is pointing to him. And we see Old Testament sacrificial systems pointing forward to Christ. We don't offer sacrifices on altars, and we don't every year have to spill blood in order to atone for our sins. And the reason we no longer hold those is because they were pointing forward to Christ as our ultimate sacrifice. It was pointing forward to Christ's blood being spilled on the cross once for all, so that we no longer have to give these sacrifices. It gives us a need of our Savior. When it tells us all of these things that we read in the commandments this morning, we recognize, well, shoot, that's, I'm guilty. Now what? And that means we must have someone to save us. We can't do it ourselves. But he kept it perfectly, in perfect obedience of every part of the entire law. He paid the sacrificial price. He has fulfilled all of the predictions of those laws, all of the requirements of those laws. He fulfilled Israel as a holy nation, making all the people who come to Him in faith as holy. His holiness is now ours. His keeping of all the law is counted to us as our righteousness. We then, despite our failure, despite our sin, are perfect because He is. And that is why there are a number of laws then that we do not hold to any longer. We don't go through sacrifices because he was our sacrifice. We cannot then turn back. To try to follow those laws which have now been completed at Christ's death doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The law and the prophets give us types and shadows of Christ. They're looking forward. to something to come. Now that we have that, we can't go back. To go back to something that has already been completed makes no sense at all. I am currently engaged to a girl down in North Carolina. I love her a lot, and I have a picture of her on my phone. I like the picture, not because the picture itself is necessarily a striking picture, but because it is of someone that I love. When I go down there, hopefully the beginning of May, after graduation, and visit her, and she'll be standing there at the airport terminal, and I walk off the plane, and she runs toward me with her arms wide open, it would make no sense to say, now hold on a second, just wait up. I really like this picture. It's a picture of someone I really love. I like that. It wouldn't make sense. I wouldn't be busy looking at a picture when she's right in front of me. When the real thing is there, I completely disregard any of these pixels on my screen because they are nothing compared to the real thing. I don't turn back when she's there in front of me. Or it'd be like celebrating a baby shower for my brother. And I go to him and say, congratulations. And he's like, I'm not having a child. He's like, no, no, no, not for your son, but I'm giving, I'm trying to celebrate your baby shower in anticipation of your own birth. He would look at you kind of quizzically. What do you mean? I'm already born. I've been born for 25 years. It wouldn't make any sense to celebrate the coming of him when he has already been here for 25 years. And so too, it makes no sense to go backwards in the law and try to hold to those laws that were predicting Christ and were completed and fulfilled completely in Christ. The law then in that respect and in those laws are done, they have been completed and fulfilled. There's one last question then that remains. What about the moral laws, the commandments we read this morning? Have those been fulfilled on the cross? Do we do away with those as well? We might not have these dietary restrictions, we might not have sacrifices anymore, but the Ten Commandments are part of the law. In fact, that's the part of the law we're most accustomed to hearing. It's important, though, to recognize that the Old Testament sacrificial laws, the dietary laws and so forth, those separating Israel from the rest of the world, those ones are fulfilled completely, but the moral law in one sense is not completely fulfilled. First, I want to say the way that it is completely fulfilled. Christ completely fulfilled the moral law in his life. And when he died on the cross, his righteousness and keeping to that law was imputed to us, yes. But in the way that the moral law was not fulfilled means it wasn't complete. In that, it still guides us today. We still have the moral law to tell us how we should live and tell us how God wills us to live. And so long as us humans remain sinful, we will need the moral law for that purpose. We do not seek to abolish that part and to abandon the 10 commandments, the moral law, simply because Christ has imparted his righteousness to us. but we serve him through keeping it. And if we are his, if we come before him as his children, and we seek to conform our entire lives to him, we must do so in such a way that pleases him, which is outlined in the moral law. So even though the moral law is fulfilled in him, we still keep it in a way that the other types of laws, the dietary restrictions and so forth, we do not keep. Because those were in anticipation of Christ, but the moral law is a guidance in our lives. This gives us a different understanding of the law entirely than what the original recipients would have understood it to be. It's not through our own keeping of the law, but it's through faith in Him who kept the law. Hebrews 10 and 11 make that rather clear. Hebrews 10 is telling us that all these laws are pointing forward to Christ, and Hebrews 11 reinterprets or reunderstands the way of salvation of all of the Old Testament patriarchs and so forth by faith. Abraham was saved when he did such and such. By faith, Moses was saved. By faith, Rahab was saved. By faith, all of these different people were saved. all of them throughout history, both beforehand and afterwards, are saved not through the works of the law, but through the faith in Christ, the one that the law is pointing towards, the one that the law is predicting, the one that the law was longing for fulfillment and has now been fulfilled. And we are saved the same now, today, as they were both in the Old Testament and until the end of this world, through faith in Christ. So come to Him. Come and be saved. Amen. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You. We thank You that You have sent Your Son to live a perfect life for us where we fail. We thank you that you have not left us in our sin, but have given your Son for us. We thank you more than that, that you have given us your Holy Spirit to tell us of this and to generate within us the faith that we can come to you as our Father, as the one who saves us, as the one who gives us so much. Lord, we thank you for this and we pray that you would be able to work within our lives in a way that will Produce a conduct that is fitting of your service. Pray that you would conform all of our lives in thought, word, and deed to your law. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.