Sermon on the Mount: The Law
In this next section of The Sermon on the Mount Jesus tackles the topic of “The Law,” which He then continues to apply to specific areas over the next couple of chapters. He is setting the stage here for what He is about to do and teach because He is going to provide some accusations and interpretation of The Law that go against traditional viewpoints, and yet, He wants to make it clear that He is not opposed to The Law.
Matthew 5:17-20
“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.”
Jesus, here, states that He did NOT COME TO ABOLISH The Law. His mission and goal on Earth was not to tear down all of the previous structure and rebuild something new. Jesus is God, and the God of the New Testament is the same God of the Old Testament, or, how Paul put it in Hebrews 13:8 “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” Jesus’ objective was to be the fulfillment of The Law and to shed light on the truth of The Law. This often came across as if He was setting up some new and heretical teaching because The Law had become convoluted and infiltrated with manmade qualifiers and interpretations, but at the end of the day, Jesus was the one who created The Law in the first place. It didn’t need perfection or reinterpretation. People just needed to understand what it was really about, and how to live it out in their lives, perfectly, as Jesus did.
Under Judaism, there are 613 commandments that have to be followed. 365 of these are negative commandments as in "do not" do this thing, and 248 of these are positive commandments as in "do" these things. In addition to these 613 commandments, which are drawn from various biblical texts, the Scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees would pile on different layers of each commandment. There's a commandment about not building a fire on the Sabbath, and as time has gone on it has been interpreted as not pressing a button on an elevator, not flipping a light switch, not making a phone call because all of those use electricity and therefore would be creating a spark or making a fire. There was even a situation in 1992 when three apartment buildings burned to the ground because the inhabitants had to consult with the priest to determine whether or not calling the fire department would violate the Sabbath. Under Judaism, following the law, and following it perfectly to the most nuanced interpretation, is incredibly important. Therefore, it was really important that Jesus made it clear that he had not come to abolish the law.
Had He said that He was coming to get rid of The Law He would have immediately ostracized most of the Jewish people. However, He gains their attention when He says that not a single aspect of all of The Law and The Prophets, in other words, all of the Old Testament, was to be gotten rid of or removed. He says it is important, that it is there for a reason, and He has no intention of abolishing it. However, people had misconstrued it to a terrible point. It had gotten to the point where Judaism was, and in a lot of ways, still is, overly legalistic. It was about the dos and do-nots. It was about whether you took one step too many. That was never the point.
The commandments, the commands and restrictions, were all there to orient a person's life towards God, to make them open to being the people that God wanted them to be. They weren't there to provide walls and boundaries. They weren't arbitrary. God is never arbitrary. Everything that He does is with intentionality, and that intentionality is to transform our hearts and minds to bring us back to the people that He made us to be, to return us to the people that we were in Eden before sin corrupted us. It is with that in mind that Jesus says that He did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, and in fulfilling the law, He is showing the kind of life that we are meant to live. He is showing the kind of people that we are meant to be, and He is verifying and confirming that everything that God said, everything that He said, in the past was still true and valid.
With that in mind, let’s look at the first of the Ten Commandments.
Exodus 20:1-3
"And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. “You shall have no other gods before me."
You shall have no other gods before me. That seems like a pretty straightforward commandment, right? God is God. You shouldn't be worshiping anyone or anything else. During this time there were plenty of other gods to follow and worship. God had just brought the Israelites out of Egypt, where they had been slaves for around 210 years. In addition to that, they had lived in the land for roughly 220 years before they were slaves. The Egyptian culture and religion was very familiar to them. It is not crazy to think that many of the Israelites had adopted the Egyptian religion and had started to worship some of the Egyptian gods and goddesses such as: Re or Ra, Amon-re, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Seth, Thoth, Min, Hathor, Seb, Heket, Typhon, Apis, and Serapis among others. Even if this wasn't an overt worship, one can easily imagine some of the customs, some of the beliefs, seeping into their families and being adopted into their worship of Yahweh. In addition, there were the Philistine, Canaanite, and Moabite gods of Ba’al, Dagon, El, Astarte, Asherah, Chemosh and more.
This commandment was not just an idle demand by a jealous God. There were plenty of options to choose from, plenty of paths to take. In many ways it was very much like our society and culture today. Though we may not be surrounded with as many supernatural deities as the Israelites were, we still have a huge pantheon of gods and godlike demands that we can follow. Even if we're talking about religious deities, there are a lot that people can choose from throughout the world. Today, you have Christianity, Islam and Judaism. You can be Buddhist or Hindu, which opens up thousands of gods. There are pagan religions, such as Norse and Egyptian. There are things like Wicca and other dark magic, witchcraft sort of beliefs and followings that bring their own set of supernatural religious figures to follow, and that's not even really scratching the surface. However, in addition to that, we turn a lot of things into gods.
There are a lot of things in our world that we place at the seat of highest importance in our life. Sometimes these can be people, whether they are friends, family, mentors or celebrities of some sort. Sometimes this can take the form of activities, pursuits, ideologies, beliefs or desires. Take a hard look at your life and identify what is the thing that controls you more than anything else. When you have to make a decision, who do you listen to? What guides you. What occupies your time? What occupies your attention? What occupies your money? Whatever that thing is, is your God.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest that you can have nothing in your life that isn't overtly Christian. It is okay to have a variety of interests and pursuits and beliefs and dreams and relationships, all of which can be important to you, but in this first commandment: have no other gods before me, God is saying that all of those things come secondary to following Him and living a life that is pursuing Him and striving to be who He has called you to be. Be. If God's telling you to play less video games so that you have more time to build relationships with people and you say, “No. I'm going to keep playing video games,” then video games is a god that comes before God in your life. If God is telling you to stop or change the sport or the hobby that you're involved in because it's keeping you from doing something that He's called you to do and you say, “No,” then that sport or hobby is a god before God in your life.
The important thing here is that it's different for every single person. There is no no strict rule and law that says you can do this and not do that. You're allowed to play 5 hours of video games a week, but no more. You're allowed to run only 3 days a week and never on a Sunday. That is not what God is calling us to, even though that is the type of thing that legalism lends itself to. The commandment here is that we put God first and foremost in our life, that we have an open heart and mind to listen to Him and to know who He is and to hear when He is speaking to us and to follow in faith when He asks us to do or not do something.
When you think of a friend that you trust implicitly, if that friend says they need you to do something or ask you to be somewhere, you may ask for details, but you don't need them. If you have a trusted friend or family member who sends you a text that says that they need you to meet them at a certain place and at a certain time, you go, even with no information. That is what God is implying is this commandment. Yahweh, God, Jesus should be first and foremost in our life. Nothing else comes before Him. If doing what He’s asked us to do and following him interferes with something else in our life then that other thing in our life falls away, not Him.
We see Jesus model this in his obedience to be the sacrificial lamb. He didn't want to die. During His life, He gained a whole lot of enemies by preaching and doing the things that He did. He was a 100% human, and as a rule, humans don't like creating enemies. People like to feel loved and accepted, not ostracized and hated. However, Jesus followed what God had called Him to do. He did what He was made to do. He said what God told Him to say. He went where God told Him to go. He was obedient, even to death, which He expressly stated, with agonizing anxiety, that He didn't want to endure. Yet, nothing came before God in His life.
Does anything come before God in your life? This is not just merely a question of what religion do you follow or who do you pray to and worship. It's a testament to the type of life that you live. Are there any other gods before God in your life? Does anyone or anything take precedence over Jesus Christ in your life? Jesus came to fulfill the commandment that there were to be no other gods before God. He came to fulfill a lifestyle that had God in charge of everything.
Think about what it means to follow The Law and The Prophets and to obey what God has called you to do. What does it mean to have God as the most important thing in your life? Ask yourself this question: Is He? It starts with giving your life over to him by accepting his gift of salvation, and it continues by growing in Him, by daily placing Him first, by adding things to your life that are important and by removing things in your life that are disruptive to your relationship with Him.
It is not so much about a strict set of rules to follow, but about a whole heart devoted relationship in love. If you have a good relationship with someone, whether that is a familial relationship, a really good friend or a romantic relationship, you know that it's not based on rules and guidelines and step-by-step instructions, but on true, heartfelt connection and love and devotion. It’s the same thing with God. He commands us to place Him first. We will never achieve that through following strict guidelines, but we can achieve it through giving our hearts and lives over to Jesus!
Matthew 5:17-20
“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.”
Jesus, here, states that He did NOT COME TO ABOLISH The Law. His mission and goal on Earth was not to tear down all of the previous structure and rebuild something new. Jesus is God, and the God of the New Testament is the same God of the Old Testament, or, how Paul put it in Hebrews 13:8 “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” Jesus’ objective was to be the fulfillment of The Law and to shed light on the truth of The Law. This often came across as if He was setting up some new and heretical teaching because The Law had become convoluted and infiltrated with manmade qualifiers and interpretations, but at the end of the day, Jesus was the one who created The Law in the first place. It didn’t need perfection or reinterpretation. People just needed to understand what it was really about, and how to live it out in their lives, perfectly, as Jesus did.
Under Judaism, there are 613 commandments that have to be followed. 365 of these are negative commandments as in "do not" do this thing, and 248 of these are positive commandments as in "do" these things. In addition to these 613 commandments, which are drawn from various biblical texts, the Scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees would pile on different layers of each commandment. There's a commandment about not building a fire on the Sabbath, and as time has gone on it has been interpreted as not pressing a button on an elevator, not flipping a light switch, not making a phone call because all of those use electricity and therefore would be creating a spark or making a fire. There was even a situation in 1992 when three apartment buildings burned to the ground because the inhabitants had to consult with the priest to determine whether or not calling the fire department would violate the Sabbath. Under Judaism, following the law, and following it perfectly to the most nuanced interpretation, is incredibly important. Therefore, it was really important that Jesus made it clear that he had not come to abolish the law.
Had He said that He was coming to get rid of The Law He would have immediately ostracized most of the Jewish people. However, He gains their attention when He says that not a single aspect of all of The Law and The Prophets, in other words, all of the Old Testament, was to be gotten rid of or removed. He says it is important, that it is there for a reason, and He has no intention of abolishing it. However, people had misconstrued it to a terrible point. It had gotten to the point where Judaism was, and in a lot of ways, still is, overly legalistic. It was about the dos and do-nots. It was about whether you took one step too many. That was never the point.
The commandments, the commands and restrictions, were all there to orient a person's life towards God, to make them open to being the people that God wanted them to be. They weren't there to provide walls and boundaries. They weren't arbitrary. God is never arbitrary. Everything that He does is with intentionality, and that intentionality is to transform our hearts and minds to bring us back to the people that He made us to be, to return us to the people that we were in Eden before sin corrupted us. It is with that in mind that Jesus says that He did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, and in fulfilling the law, He is showing the kind of life that we are meant to live. He is showing the kind of people that we are meant to be, and He is verifying and confirming that everything that God said, everything that He said, in the past was still true and valid.
With that in mind, let’s look at the first of the Ten Commandments.
Exodus 20:1-3
"And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. “You shall have no other gods before me."
You shall have no other gods before me. That seems like a pretty straightforward commandment, right? God is God. You shouldn't be worshiping anyone or anything else. During this time there were plenty of other gods to follow and worship. God had just brought the Israelites out of Egypt, where they had been slaves for around 210 years. In addition to that, they had lived in the land for roughly 220 years before they were slaves. The Egyptian culture and religion was very familiar to them. It is not crazy to think that many of the Israelites had adopted the Egyptian religion and had started to worship some of the Egyptian gods and goddesses such as: Re or Ra, Amon-re, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Seth, Thoth, Min, Hathor, Seb, Heket, Typhon, Apis, and Serapis among others. Even if this wasn't an overt worship, one can easily imagine some of the customs, some of the beliefs, seeping into their families and being adopted into their worship of Yahweh. In addition, there were the Philistine, Canaanite, and Moabite gods of Ba’al, Dagon, El, Astarte, Asherah, Chemosh and more.
This commandment was not just an idle demand by a jealous God. There were plenty of options to choose from, plenty of paths to take. In many ways it was very much like our society and culture today. Though we may not be surrounded with as many supernatural deities as the Israelites were, we still have a huge pantheon of gods and godlike demands that we can follow. Even if we're talking about religious deities, there are a lot that people can choose from throughout the world. Today, you have Christianity, Islam and Judaism. You can be Buddhist or Hindu, which opens up thousands of gods. There are pagan religions, such as Norse and Egyptian. There are things like Wicca and other dark magic, witchcraft sort of beliefs and followings that bring their own set of supernatural religious figures to follow, and that's not even really scratching the surface. However, in addition to that, we turn a lot of things into gods.
There are a lot of things in our world that we place at the seat of highest importance in our life. Sometimes these can be people, whether they are friends, family, mentors or celebrities of some sort. Sometimes this can take the form of activities, pursuits, ideologies, beliefs or desires. Take a hard look at your life and identify what is the thing that controls you more than anything else. When you have to make a decision, who do you listen to? What guides you. What occupies your time? What occupies your attention? What occupies your money? Whatever that thing is, is your God.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest that you can have nothing in your life that isn't overtly Christian. It is okay to have a variety of interests and pursuits and beliefs and dreams and relationships, all of which can be important to you, but in this first commandment: have no other gods before me, God is saying that all of those things come secondary to following Him and living a life that is pursuing Him and striving to be who He has called you to be. Be. If God's telling you to play less video games so that you have more time to build relationships with people and you say, “No. I'm going to keep playing video games,” then video games is a god that comes before God in your life. If God is telling you to stop or change the sport or the hobby that you're involved in because it's keeping you from doing something that He's called you to do and you say, “No,” then that sport or hobby is a god before God in your life.
The important thing here is that it's different for every single person. There is no no strict rule and law that says you can do this and not do that. You're allowed to play 5 hours of video games a week, but no more. You're allowed to run only 3 days a week and never on a Sunday. That is not what God is calling us to, even though that is the type of thing that legalism lends itself to. The commandment here is that we put God first and foremost in our life, that we have an open heart and mind to listen to Him and to know who He is and to hear when He is speaking to us and to follow in faith when He asks us to do or not do something.
When you think of a friend that you trust implicitly, if that friend says they need you to do something or ask you to be somewhere, you may ask for details, but you don't need them. If you have a trusted friend or family member who sends you a text that says that they need you to meet them at a certain place and at a certain time, you go, even with no information. That is what God is implying is this commandment. Yahweh, God, Jesus should be first and foremost in our life. Nothing else comes before Him. If doing what He’s asked us to do and following him interferes with something else in our life then that other thing in our life falls away, not Him.
We see Jesus model this in his obedience to be the sacrificial lamb. He didn't want to die. During His life, He gained a whole lot of enemies by preaching and doing the things that He did. He was a 100% human, and as a rule, humans don't like creating enemies. People like to feel loved and accepted, not ostracized and hated. However, Jesus followed what God had called Him to do. He did what He was made to do. He said what God told Him to say. He went where God told Him to go. He was obedient, even to death, which He expressly stated, with agonizing anxiety, that He didn't want to endure. Yet, nothing came before God in His life.
Does anything come before God in your life? This is not just merely a question of what religion do you follow or who do you pray to and worship. It's a testament to the type of life that you live. Are there any other gods before God in your life? Does anyone or anything take precedence over Jesus Christ in your life? Jesus came to fulfill the commandment that there were to be no other gods before God. He came to fulfill a lifestyle that had God in charge of everything.
Think about what it means to follow The Law and The Prophets and to obey what God has called you to do. What does it mean to have God as the most important thing in your life? Ask yourself this question: Is He? It starts with giving your life over to him by accepting his gift of salvation, and it continues by growing in Him, by daily placing Him first, by adding things to your life that are important and by removing things in your life that are disruptive to your relationship with Him.
It is not so much about a strict set of rules to follow, but about a whole heart devoted relationship in love. If you have a good relationship with someone, whether that is a familial relationship, a really good friend or a romantic relationship, you know that it's not based on rules and guidelines and step-by-step instructions, but on true, heartfelt connection and love and devotion. It’s the same thing with God. He commands us to place Him first. We will never achieve that through following strict guidelines, but we can achieve it through giving our hearts and lives over to Jesus!
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