How does God judge your life?
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2011 · 6 February 2011
Turn in your Bible to Matthew 5:17-20, and tonight I want us to share an opening message on one of the most marvelous passages of Scripture that we could ever study. We taking a short break from our study of 2 Peter because this passage teaches us even in more detail how we can resist these false teachers by living a righteous life.
Our Lord says, "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy them but to fulfill them. 18 For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. 19 Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men to do so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven."
Before we start to look at this passage, let me first put this in context. This comes right after the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 and each new teaching from Jesus flows beautifully from the previous teachings.
And this is the same with Matthew 5:17-20. Jesus starts in Matthew 5:3-12 to describe the character of believers as children of God. And verses 13-16 teach how the believers should function as God’s salt and light in a corrupt and dark world.
And now in verses 17-20 we find God teaching us the inner qualities of character that we need to have in order for us to function as God’s salt and light. And Jesus tells us that the foundation is God’s Word, the only standard of truth and righteousness. God has determined His absolute law and gave that to us.
People have always questioned this in terms of Christianity. Many people say, "It seems that you don't realize times have changed. The Bible doesn't fit the situation today anymore." The answer is, "That isn't true; the way of today has been described a lot in the Bible. People today live the same wrong way people lived in the past, and the only cure is in the Bible."
Most young people say, "That's your interpretation. Everyone has their own interpretation, and that's the way you understand it." The truth is that when the Bible confronts you where you don't want to be confronted, you say, "The Bible is out-of-date," or, "The Bible needs to be reinterpreted."
People today want to reinterpret the Bible because they want to deny its authority. Chapters they once believed to be written by God are now said to be written by some rabbi who added it in. Portions of the Scripture that they don't agree with they reinterpret to say what they want it to say. They say, "That's cultural and doesn't relate to today."
Jesus is saying that not one jot or tittle will pass from it, every bit of it will be fulfilled. He did not abolish or annul one bit of it, and anyone who teaches anyone else to disobey the smallest command in the Bible will be the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. Nothing ever changes in the Bible, nothing!
This Scripture is so important because here, our Lord tells us that we have an absolute, inviolable authority. That was Jesus’ view, and so it has to be also our view. In this passage, Jesus presents His perspective on the Old Testament. Jesus said that He did not come to destroy the Law but that He had come to fulfill it.
You see, the issue is that Jesus didn't sound like the Pharisees, and He didn't sound like the scribes. He didn't sound like anyone they were hearing in their day, and their natural reaction was to wonder whether He was really and Old Testament prophet or not. He refused to identify Himself with any of the sects of His time.
He did not follow all the rabbinic traditions; and He disregarded all the extraneous, legalistic rules. So the people were wondering, "Is He eliminating all the rules of the Mosaic Law? Is He removing the foundations for some new thing?" After all, it is the way of most revolutionary leaders to sever all ties with the past and do everything they can to completely repudiate the traditions that have gone before.
Right here, Jesus puts it all into perspective. What He says, in effect, is this, "This is nothing new at all. I am going to reiterate that to you and I'm going to fulfill the whole Old Testament law. I will not set aside one jot or one tittle of that law until all of it is fulfilled."
So what Jesus says is in direct confrontation to their thinking. On the surface it seems that traditions make the law harder, but in reality the rabbis and scribes made it much easier, because what they emphasized was external observance only. Jesus wouldn't lower the standard; He maintained it where it belonged with heart obedience and faith in God.
In fact, Jesus had a greater commitment to the law of God than the most conscientious scribe or Pharisee. The Word of God gives us the guidelines, the principles and the requirements. How can we really live out a righteous life, how can we live out the Beatitudes, how can we be salt and light? Certainly not by lowering the standard of the law of God and saying that it isn't binding anymore.
So how can we be all we have to be? The answer is by keeping God's principles of absolute obedience to an absolutely authoritative Word of God. That is in contrast to the theology of rabbis and the scribes of that day, where they only obeyed what they wanted to obey.
It is a powerful thought that the key to a righteous life is keeping the Word of God. That's why Jesus says in verse 20 that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Why? Because theirs was external and based on the traditions of men, while "Mine," He says, "is internal, based on the eternal law of God."
When Jesus came, He didn't put an end to the Old Testament, He just restated its absolute, binding character. People say, "When Jesus says, 'You have heard it said, but I say,' isn't He adding to the Old Testament? No. Jesus is simply restating God's original intention because the rabbis had so perverted the Old Testament that He has to raise the standard back up to where it belongs in the first place.
Jesus told them to disregard the Sabbath; He rather ruthlessly swept away their traditions and tithings of minuscule things; He mocked their constant washings. He disregarded their oral and scribal law; He interpreted the written law in a totally different way than they did. He spoke with great authority, but in no way was He changing the Old Testament.
If you're a Christian today, God has not set aside His principles. There are still the same. In fact, Jesus lifted up the law and the Old Testament so high that He wound up exposing all the Pharisees and the scribes as hypocrites, didn't He?
In verse 20, He says, "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into My Kingdom." In other words, "Whatever your righteousness is, it should be righteousness in your heart on the inside, and not just external show on the outside.” Finally, in Matthew 23, He goes through the entire chapter, calling them hypocrites in verses 13, 14, 15, 25, 27, and 29.
So Jesus opens up His sermon by saying, "Here's my standard of righteousness, and here's how you live in the world, and the base of it all is to be obedient to God's unchanging law." Anyone who doesn't live by God's standards, who substitutes a man-made system, is just a spiritual phony.
Let's be specific about the law. What does Jesus refer to? Lots of people have discussed this. Well, Jesus uses the term 'law' in a rather comprehensive way. When the Jews used it in Jesus' time, they had four things in mind, four possibilities.
First of all, sometimes they used the term to speak of the Ten Commandments. Secondly, sometimes they used the word to speak of the Pentateuch, or the five books of Moses. Thirdly, sometimes they used the word to mean the whole Old Testament, but most of the time when they used the word 'law,' they were talking about the oral, scribal traditions that they had been receiving from these various rabbis.
In other words, Jesus put it right in Matthew 15:3, "And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition." The most common use of law among the Jews of Jesus' time was that it referred to these thousands of minuscule principles, external stuff that had replaced the internal law of God.
Here's the reason. Let's say you believe you're only going to go to heaven because you keep the law. But the law is inward, and the law demands righteousness, and the law demands a certain kind of character, and you're a despicable person and really don't want to change.
So you have to replace that with external compliance. For example, the Old Testament law had said that you couldn't work on the Sabbath. And so they said, "Alright, if we can't work on the Sabbath, we have to determine what work is, which they decided was to carry a burden. And then they had to define what a burden was.
The scribal law said, "A burden is food equal to the weight of a dried fig, enough wine for mixing in a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, honey enough to put on a wound, oil enough to anoint a small member, water enough to moisten an eye salve, paper enough to write a customs-house notice, ink enough to write two letters of the alphabet, reed enough to make the pen," and so on and so on.
They spent endless hours arguing whether or not a man could lift a lamp from one place to another on the Sabbath. They spent time arguing whether a tailor committed a sin if he went out with a needle stuck in his robe. They had a big discussion of whether or not a woman could wear a brooch; if it was too heavy, it was a burden. Or whether she could put false hair on; if it was too heavy, it was a burden, if it weighed more than a fig.
The scribes, you see, were the people who wrote out all this stuff; and the Pharisees were the ones who tried to keep it. To the strict Orthodox Jew of Jesus' time, the law was a matter of thousands of legalistic rules and regulations. So when Jesus came along and said, "I haven't come to destroy the law," that's not the law He was talking about.
The law of God is not some kind of changing mode of human opinion, designed to fit the whims of every society. The law of God is not something you just adjust and adapt to whatever sin is going on in your day. The law of God never changes.
We can divide the law of God into three parts: the moral law, the judicial law, and the ceremonial law. The moral law was for all men, the judicial law was just for Israel, and the ceremonial law was for Israel's worship of God.
Which law was Jesus speaking of? He was speaking of all three. Some say He was just talking about the moral law, but He wasn't. He came to fulfill the whole thing, whether it was the moral law, the outgrowth of the moral law in Israel, the judicial law, or the ceremonial law or the law of worship. He came to fulfill every bit of it.
Every single thing in the Old Testament points to Christ. So Jesus is saying, "You're thinking that I'm going to put it all away, and you can just be free and easy and it will all be wonderful. I'm telling you that God's standard hasn't changed. No part of the sacred Scripture will ever be destroyed or annulled - it will be fulfilled and I Myself will fulfill it."
First of all, the law of God is binding because it is authored by God. Secondly, it is affirmed by the prophets, and thirdly, it is accomplished by Christ. This is the heart of the matter. Either in His first coming, His return in the Spirit, or in His Second Coming, Jesus will fulfill the whole Old Testament ceremonially, judicially and morally.
In what sense does Jesus fulfill the law? Some say that He fulfilled it with His teaching, that there was an incomplete code in the Old Testament and it needed new dimensions, so He added to it. In a sense, He did expand and clarify the law of God. When He sent the Holy Spirit through the writers of the epistles, He clarified even more of the law of God. But that can't be the real reason or the meaning of 'fulfill.'
Some Bible teachers say, "In His life, He kept every part of God's law, the moral, judicial, and ceremonial law. He worshiped in the right way, He was fair and equitable, He never violated a rules God made, He was perfectly righteous and He was the absolutely holy One, the perfect righteousness." And that's true.
But that still isn't the heart of what it's saying here. There is truth in all of that. He did add new perception to the Old Testament law. In fact, He took the whole law and reduced it to one thing, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself." But there is still another reason.
Let me give explain it to you. He fulfilled the whole Old Testament law by being its fulfillment. Not by what He said or did, so much, but by what He was. "What does that mean?" He didn't come just to rescue the law from rabbinical perversion or just to be a model of righteousness. He came to bring in everlasting righteousness by being the Messiah the law predicted.
God had peculiar laws for Israel; this is His judicial law which set them apart. They had certain dietary laws, certain laws of dress, of agriculture, laws within their relationships with certain things they had to do. These set them apart.
"How did Jesus fulfill that?" When Jesus died on the cross that was the final, full rejection by Israel of her Messiah, right? That was it. And that was the end of God dealing with that nation as a nation. The judicial law that He gave to Israel passed away when God no longer dealt with them as a nation anymore and Jesus built His church.
One day God will go back and redeem that nation again and deal with them again as a nation. But for this time, when Jesus died on the cross, the judicial law came to a halt. The national people of God were no more. A new people was created, consisting of Jews and Gentiles, which would be called the church.
What about the ceremonial law? How did He fulfill that? He did it by dying on a cross. And when He died, the whole ceremonial system came to an end. In fact, when He died, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom, and the Holy of Holies was revealed.
Jesus ended the ceremonial system and we no longer worship God with the blood of bulls and goats. We no longer go through all the offerings and all that stuff. It was only a few years after He died that He allowed the Romans to come in and absolutely destroy the temple. The whole sacrificial system came crumbling down when He died; it was over.
That only leaves one element of God's law abiding still, that is the moral law, which is what undergirds everything. That will be with us until we see Him face to face. In other words, what the law couldn't do, Christ did. He brought an end to the picture because He was the reality.
Look at the tabernacle; what was that picturing? The tabernacle had a door. Christ said, "I am the door. The tabernacle had lamps; Christ said He was the light of the world. The tabernacle had bread; Jesus said He was the bread. It had a mercy seat, He said, "I am the mercy seat." Everything pictured Him.
The point is that Jesus fulfills every part of the law. Because He fulfilled the whole law, so can you and so can I. Because He was perfectly righteous, because He fulfilled all righteousness, you and I can too. Romans 8: 4 says, "the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit."
Have you found the Lord Jesus Christ and given your life to Him? He alone can give you the absolute standard for your life and cause you to live a righteousness that, of yourself, is impossible. He alone can enable you to fulfill God's law and empower you to have the kind of character that He demands.
If you haven't, then where you are sitting, open your heart and let Jesus come into your life. Receive Him as your Savior and Lord, that He might fulfill the law of God through you by His power. Let us pray.