The Law – Part One – Introduction
December 22, 2008
Do not think that I have come to do away with or undo the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to do away with or undo but to complete and fulfill them. – Matthew 5:17 (AMP)
I was reading through a message by John G. Lake on the question of Sunday or Saturday worship and found in it some startling insights into the relationship between the law and the believer. As I considered what John was saying the implications of what he was saying hit me, and what hit me was far beyond the question of whether or not our primary worship gathering should be on a Saturday or a Sunday. As I continued to ponder this issue, I began to realize that what I was seeing was so simple and so clearly the gospel and yet at the same time, I believe there is something here of the relationship of the believer to the law that has been lost. I believe it is vital that we understand with a new clarity the appropriate relationship between the believer and the law because it vitally impacts many different areas. With that in mind, I’ll break out these thoughts across several posts so that each can be digested separately. Each part of the series will build up to the conclusion, so you’ll want to read through each one to participate in the complete conversation.
The Mosaic Law
The first thing we must consider is that the Mosaic Law, as a means to the sanctification and redemption of God’s people, utterly failed. There are obviously many purposes for which God gave the Mosaic Law, but for one He gave it that men might demonstrate whether they had the ability to adhere to even an outward display of righteousness. God dealt with men on the basis of outward behavior during this time and men fell woefully short. When the Israelites were given over to judgment, it was not just the judgment of a nation, but the judgment of systems of external morality. It was not just the failure of the Jewish nation; it was the failure of mankind to keep covenant with God by virtue of man’s own will.
What we find then is that outward requirements were incapable of dealing with inward corruption. While this may sound like an elementary principle, we will find a little later that most of the church has not yet fully grasped this issue. Seeing as the law could not produce a righteous man then, we must see that the law is powerless to do anything but demonstrate that man has a corruption that cannot be cured by himself. As an aside, the astute reader might notice that to fully grasp this statement is also to bring a question around much of our present evangelism. Our evangelism primarily revolves around telling “lost” people, whom the Bible actually calls dead not lost, that they need to make a decision of their will to choose Jesus. Without exploring this topic here, if the wills of the ancient Israelites did not have the capacity to choose good even in the face of the demonstrations on Mt. Sinai, what makes us think modern man’s will has the capacity to make a choice that brings salvation?
The Sermon on the Mount
The Sermon on the Mount, the height of the gospel declaration, gives us insight into the operation and direction of the law in the New Testament. As quoted at the top, in Matthew 5:17, Jesus makes the bold claim that He has come to fulfill the law. Most of us read that merely in the sense that Jesus is ending the Mosaic law, but if you look at the Greek word for fulfill, which is “pleroo” you will notice the meaning includes the following: “to make something full, or fill it up, or render it full or complete.”
Jesus follows this in verse 18 to say that nothing will pass away until the law has been accomplished. In other words, the law was given for a purpose that has not yet been accomplished. What is that purpose? The purpose is to have a people set apart, or sanctified, unto God. The law was given towards that purpose, but it failed to accomplish it and thus God injected Himself into the process in the person of His Son in order that God’s law might be extended and come to its marvelous conclusion. Do we consider that God is looking for an accomplishment to His law, or are we so eager to loose ourselves from the Mosaic requirements that we fail to consider the great accomplishment of God’s law that Jesus desires? Saints, God has in mind something more grand and glorious than our liberation from a ceremonial law. His law is going to accomplish something of eternal significance.
Jesus continues from this statement to declare that the righteousness of the people must exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees (vs. 20). In other words, God is about to require a righteousness greater than those that best understood, best kept, and publicly contended for the Mosaic law. Now this created a very real problem for the people of God listening to Jesus. Not only was there no one who could obtain righteousness under the law, but now they find that God is going to require an even greater righteousness of the people.
Jesus then explains that statement by giving examples of the righteousness that God requires (vs. 21-32). He begins each shocking new example with the phrase, “you have heard that it was said,” clearly referencing the law, in which He makes examples of what we would consider to be “major sins.” In order to be perfectly clear, Jesus does not use the example of “small sins,” (as if there were such a thing) but rather he uses the blatant sins like murder and adultery so that no one will misunderstand the gravity of His message.
Jesus then continues to destroy every man’s hope for righteousness by looking at the most holy among then and declaring, “You have looked at a woman and become sexually aroused and that is the same as the adultery for which you would convict a brother.” He looks then to a religious leader and declares, “Your anger with a fellow Jew is the same act before God as the one who murders another.” The audience is now spell bound. What will Jesus say next? Their very hope of standing with God, the law, now that it has been expounded by Jesus has been found to be their greatest enemy.
Furthermore, Jesus is filling up and completing this law that it might come to God’s glorious conclusion, but in that filling up the requirement of the law is enlarged. Who will be able to stand before this new law? Understand though that this was entirely within the expectation of the people because of John Baptists’s ministry. John’s ministry had been, “repent for the ruler of God’s kingdom (the Messiah) is coming.” People responded to John and repented precisely because they wanted to cleanse their hearts before His appearing so that they would be numbered among the righteous and not the wicked when Messiah executed judgment. Now the people, already having trembling hearts, are sitting before Messiah Himself and He is enlarging the concept of righteousness beyond what they had already failed to keep.
What we miss is that Jesus is introducing the basis here for the New Testament law. We sometimes are so pre-occupied with the desire to be free of modes of worship and kosher foods that we fail to see that while Jesus did liberate us from the Mosaic Law, He also brought it to fullness and brought into place a complete law which we fail to examine or consider.
The Root Issue
What Jesus revealed in the Sermon on the Mount is that man’s actions are not the source of his guilt before God. While the physical actions a man takes may establish guilt or innocence before his fellow man, those actions are not the source of guilt before God. The source of guilt before God is the heart from which the actions flow. This may seem like an elementary concept, and it truly is, but it is one that we must understand if we are to really grasp what salvation is and is not and if we are to relate the gospel correctly to the world around us.
So then, man’s guilt before God is not because of what he does, but because of who he is. It is the secret longings in a man’s heart that bring the wrath of God to bear against Him, not what the man may or may not have done. Taking specific actions may require specific punishments in this age, but with regard to the issue of ultimate righteousness before God, the physical actions are irrelevant as the guilt is determined in the heart not in the level of self control.
This is how we can clearly know, as Paul declared, that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). All have sinned even if they have never violated Moses’ commandments because they have violated the law of God that Jesus presented in the Sermon on the Mount. Any evil act physically committed serves only to confirm and demonstrate the evil that is already within. While the court of man can judge the evil acts performed by men, the court of God judges the evil resident within the man without regard to its physical demonstration.
Why can God look at a man that is a “good man” by our standards, having never violated a moral code, and justly condemn him to hell? It is because of the evil within. God looks within the man and sees the fountain from which desires and thoughts flow and that fountain is full of iniquity. The man may have some success in controlling his outward actions, but he cannot control the fact that within him is a well of corruption constantly bringing before his mind the consideration of a million evils.
Why then is God so jealous for what is within a man? It all returns to the book of Genesis where God declares man to be His image. It is because we are God’s image that the root of iniquity is so significant. We are created purely as a demonstration of God to creation. We are made to be His eternal companion. No corruption can ever come into God’s heart. No sin can ever tempt His mind. This is the ultimate meaning of the holiness of God. It is not just that everything He does is perfect, though it is, but that every consideration of His heart and mind is, at all times, full of absolute perfection. This perfection is required of man because man is made in His image.
When man contains corruption within, regardless of whether he demonstrates it without by his actions, his essence is corrupt and so God’s unfathomable purity burns against this sin. In fact, I believe that this is the issue of hell. In hell men experience the burning of God’s perfection against sin. It is not the “meanness” of God on display, but rather it is the display of God’s purity burning against evil that it may be consumed. The eternality of hell comes from the fact that man, being made in God’s image, can never be destroyed. Men are immortal creations and so God’s burning against the root of evil in men’s heart must necessarily continue on into eternity.
Being made in God’s image goes for beyond the issue of having a spirit and a mind, having dominion over the earth, or being the eternal companion of God. It is that we are called to think as God thinks and feel what God feels. We are called to be like Him in His very essence. Obviously we will fall short of His fullness as He must ever be the creator and we are always the lowly creation and yet we, above every other creature, are to demonstrate His nature. His nature is one of such deep purity that even the thoughts in the hidden places of His heart are always pure and so too the inner thoughts of His created image must be pure.
In our next post, we will take the subject of repentance and see how it relates to the law of God in the New Testament. After considering other topics, we will conclude with seeing the absolute majesty and beauty of Christ in being the ultimate and only solution to man’s dilemma.
Continue to Part Two, Defining Repentance.