The Law and Righteousness

SERMON ON THE MOUNT
THE LAW AND RIGHTEOUSNESS
COMMUNION SUNDAY
DR. JIM DIXON
MATTHEW 5:17-20
APRIL 22, 2001

In the Book of Psalms, in the first chapter, it is written: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly nor stands in the way of sinners or sits in the seat of scoffers. For his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by rivers of water that brings forth its fruit in its season. Its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. But the wicked are not so. They are like chaff, driven by wind. The wicked will not stand in the judgement, nor sinners in the seat of the congregation. For the Lord knows the way of the righteousness, but the way of the wicked will perish.”

Psalms 1 describes the Old Testament understanding and the Psalmist’s understanding of law and righteousness. To the Psalmist, law referred to one of two things: either the Decalogue or the Pentateuch.

Now, the Decalogue was the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, represents the heart of the moral law. Now, the Psalmists also, when they thought of the law, thought of the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch is a word which means “five rolls,” and it refers to the first five books of the what we would call The Old Testament. It refers to the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These five books, the Pentateuch, contain not only the Decalogue and the moral law, but they also contain the civil and ceremonial law of the nation of Israel.

Righteousness, for the Psalmist and for the Jew in the Old Testament era, consisted of obedience. You obeyed the laws. You obeyed the Decalogue. You obeyed the Pentateuch. You obeyed the moral law. You obeyed the civil law. You obeyed the ceremonial law. You obeyed all law. That was righteousness, and it was the only way to please God.

Now, we come to the New Testament. We come to Christ. We come to the Sermon on the Mount. Our passage of scripture deals with the law and righteousness. How did Jesus view the law and righteousness? What’s the relationship of the law to the gospel?

In the time of Christ, when a Jewish person thought of the law, they thought of three things. They thought of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments; they thought of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament; and then they also thought of the entire Old Testament, which had been assembled and compiled five hundred years before Christ. That was called the Torah as well—the law, the Greek word being “nomos.”

When they were wanting to make it clear that the law was referring to the whole Old Testament, they called it “the law and the prophets.” So, we come to our passage of scripture in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets.” So, He’s using the law in the sense of the entire Old Testament—not just the Decalogue, not just the Pentateuch, but the entire Old Testament. “Think not that I have come to abolish the Old Testament. I’ve not come to abolish it. I’ve come to fulfill it.” What does that mean that Jesus Christ has come to fulfill the Old Testament? The Greek word for fulfill is the word “plerosai.” This word can be applied to this passage in three different ways, and these, very briefly, will be our three teachings this Communion Sunday.

First of all, Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophetically. Sometimes the word “plerosai” was used in the sense of the fulfillment of prophecy, so Jesus came to fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament.

Now, you’ll recall in Luke’s gospel, the 4th chapter, how Jesus went, at the beginning of His public ministry, into the synagogue in the village of Nazareth. He stood before the people and before the religious leaders, and He opened the Scroll of Isaiah and He read from the 61st chapter a messianic passage. Then He said, “Truly I say to you, today, this prophecy is fulfilled in your midst. I am the Promised Messiah.” He came to fulfill all the messianic prophecies.

Time and again, as we go through the gospels, we read about the words and the deeds of Christ and then we see the statement. “This He said,” or, “This He did to fulfill what had been written by the prophets.” Remember that. He’s come to fulfill the Old Testament prophetically. And indeed, from beginning to end, the Old Testament speaks of Christ. We can go to the beginning. In Genesis, chapter 3, we can read how, “from the seed of woman there would one day come a man who would crush the serpent’s head.” From the seed of the woman, there would one day come a man who would crush the head of Satan… that is a messianic prophecy concerning Christ.

You can go to the end of the Old Testament, to Malachi, chapter 4, and read the prophecy concerning this individual called the “Son of Righteousness,” who will come with healing on his wings. And he will bring healing and judgement. It’s a messianic prophecy focused on Christ. The birth of Christ is prophesied in the Old Testament. So, you come to Genesis, chapter 49, and we’re told that the Messiah, the Christ, would be born out of the tribe of Judah. You come to 2 Samuel, chapter 7, and you see how the Messiah, the Christ, would be born from the line of David, and He would call God “Father,” and God would call Him “Son.”

You go to Isaiah, chapter 7, and you see that the Messiah, the Christ, would be born of a virgin. It was prophesied that His name would be called Immanuel, God with us. You go to Micah, chapter 5, and you see that the Messiah, the Christ, would be born in the little village of Bethlehem. It is written there in the 5th chapter of Micah, “You, Bethlehem, Ephrathah, though you are least amongst the clans of Judah, out of you shall come forth a ruler whose origins are from ancient days, from everlasting.”

Thus, it was prophesied that the Messiah, the Christ, would come from Bethlehem, and it is also affirmed that He was pre-existent eternally with the Father. Now, the crucifixion of Christ is prophesied in the Old Testament. In fact, the entire events of Passion Week were prophesied in the Old Testament. When you come to Zechariah, chapter 9, and you see the prophesy that the Christ, the Messiah, the King, the Anointed One, would come into Jerusalem humble and lowly, riding on a donkey, and this He did on Palm Sunday as He came into the holy city of Jerusalem.

You go to Zechariah, chapter 11, and you see that the Messiah, the Christ, would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. Thus, the treachery of Judas Iscariot was prophesied. You come to Isaiah, chapter 49, and we’re told there that the Messiah, the Christ, would be executed in the midst of criminals. And thus He was crucified between two thieves. You go to the 22nd Psalm or the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, and you see graphic portrayals of the crucifixion itself. When you read the 22nd Psalm, when you read the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, it’s like you’re there at Calvary watching it all. You read about the piercing of His hands and His feet, and you even read many of the statements that He makes from the cross. You read of His agony. The whole event!

It’s also prophesied there that He would die in substitutionary atonement, taking upon Himself the sin of the world. He would be wounded for our inequities, wounded for our transgressions, bruised for iniquities. Upon Him would be the chastisement that makes us whole. By His stripes, we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We’ve all turned to our own ways, but God has laid upon Him the inequity of us all.

It was all prophesied. It was even prophesied that He would be buried in a rich man’s tomb, as He was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man. It’s all prophesied. The Old Testament also prophesies the Second Coming of Christ at the consummation at the end of the age. He will come in power and great glory, and He will come to receive His people to Himself, and He will come to judge the nations. That is prophesied in Isaiah, chapter 11, in Daniel, chapter 7, and in just a multiplicity of passages throughout the Old Testament. And it will all come true. But it’s all about Christ.

Even the Jewish sacrificial system and the blood of animals poured upon the altars of Israel all pointed to Christ and the need for His ultimate atoning sacrifice. He is the fulfillment of all of it. It all points to Him. I don’t know how anybody can read the Old Testament and not believe in Christ. The fulfillment of prophecy is incredible. How could anybody doubt the integrity of Holy Scripture? So, He fulfills the Old Testament prophetically.

Secondly, He fulfills the Old Testament legally by His life and actions. He fulfills all the law, all the commandments of God, from the Decalogue to the Pentateuch to the whole of the Old Testament, perfectly obedient, the man without sin, the Holy One. He has fulfilled all righteousness. He fulfilled the moral law; He fulfilled the civil law, the ceremonial law. He fulfilled all of this. He is utterly righteous, and He alone. So, He fulfills the Old Testament legally, obeying perfectly the law.

This last Wednesday I went golfing. It’s hard to imagine when you look outside today. Of course, Wednesday was a really nice day. I went golfing with two of our staff and one of our elders. It was my first time out this year. We played over at Inverness. I managed to send a number of golf balls to a watery grave. I shot a 72 on my way to a 98! It was Winston Churchill who said, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Sometimes it does feel like that. Sometimes it feels like that, and one of the reasons that golf can be very frustrating is because of the rules. I mean, if there weren’t any rules, it would sure be a lot of fun. But there are just tons of rules and regulations—hundreds and hundreds of them, all regulated and established by the PGA.

Some of these rules, in my opinion, just deal with minutia. Some of them don’t seem fair. You can be on the green and you’ve got your putt… You want to putt the ball into the hole but there are spike marks that some careless golfer before you has made on the green so that your ball can’t roll smoothly or accurately to the hole, but you’re not allowed to repair those spike marks until after you’ve putted. You’ve got to putt the ball over those obstacles. It’s all part of the rules.

You can hit your drive onto the fairway—it can be dead center in the fairway—but roll into a divot, a little hole that another golfer has made in hitting his shot, and you can’t pull your ball out of that other golfer’s divot. You’ve got to try to hit the ball while it just stays in the divot because that’s the rules of golf. It doesn’t sound fair. You didn’t make the divot, but those are the regulations and the rules of golf.

You can hit your ball into a sand trap. If there’s a tree growing over the sand trap and it’s a fruit tree and some of the fruit has fallen into the trap and it’s right by your ball so you can’t hit the ball without hitting the fruit, you can’t remove the fruit. You can’t remove the fruit because that’s considered a natural impediment. Now, if a basketball was in the sand trap hiding your golf ball, you could remove it. That would be unnatural. Of course, that means you never find a basketball in the sand trap, so you’ve got to hit your golf ball right into the fruit. That doesn’t make sense! It’s all part of the rules and regulations of golf. You see, sometimes when you get done with a round of golf, you just feel like a failure. I mean you feel like a failure, and you ARE a failure because you just can’t play in accordance with the rules!

Now, I think a lot of people just view the Old Testament like that. I mean, don’t we? Doesn’t the law just feel like a burden and doesn’t it make you feel like a failure? All those rules and regulations. None of us measure up. We don’t measure up. Certainly, we don’t even bother with the civil and ceremonial law, which is lifted in the New Testament. We sure bother with the moral law, but we can’t quite measure up. Even if we hunger and thirst after righteousness… even if we really try, we’re sinners in desperate need of grace. Before the law, we are failures but Christ fulfilled the law, every iota, every dot, every minutia, and every point of minutia. He fulfilled all of it perfectly. The Holy One. The man without sin. He fulfilled the law, and the Bible says He did it for you, and the Bible says He did it for me. We are saved not by our righteousness. We’re saved by His righteousness when we receive Him as Savior and Lord and when we embrace Him. That righteousness is imputed to us.

So, we go through life as Christians trusting in His and His obedience because He has fulfilled the law. I mean it’s like in golf a Pro Am tournament where an amateur like myself gets to play with a pro except your score doesn’t even count. It’s his score that saves you, and his score is perfect. That’s at the heart of the gospel, and you’re all going to celebrate that as you partake of the bread and cup this morning as you are saved by His righteousness and not your own. He has fulfilled the law legally.

Well, finally, Jesus Christ fulfills the Old Testament didactically. He fulfills the Old Testament prophetically, He fulfills the Old Testament legally, fulfilling all righteousness, and finally, He fulfills the Old Testament didactically. I must tell you, most Bible scholars think that in light of the context this is the primary meaning that Christ had here.

Now, the word didactic comes from the biblical word, the Greek word “didasko,” which means “to teach.” “Didikai” is a teaching. What this means is that we only understand the full meaning of the moral law, we only understand the full meaning of the Old Testament, we only understand the full meaning of the commandments of God through the teaching of Christ through His didikai. He fulfilled the Old Testament didactically, by His teaching and by His teaching alone.

The law, apart from Christ, is completely misunderstood. Now, I said earlier that in the time of Christ when the Jewish people thought of the law, they thought of three things. They thought of the Decalogue, The Ten Commandments; they thought of the Pentateuch, the First Five Books of the Old Testament; and they thought of the law and the prophets, the whole Old Testament cannon. But the truth is, they also thought of a fourth thing.

When the New Testament Jews, in the time of Christ, thought of the law they thought of the scribal law. The scribal law was the didikai of the scribes. It was the teaching of the scribes and the Pharisees. It was viewed as fulfilling the Old Testament, explaining the law. And, of course, the scribal law was not written down in the time of Christ. It was the oral law, and it had been passed on from generation to generation by the scribes and the Pharisees. It was over and above and in addition to the Old Testament, meant to explain the Old Testament, meant to clarify the law, meant to fulfill the scriptures. That was the didikai of the Jews, the scribal law.

Now, in the 2nd the 3rd centuries, scribal law was written down, and it became the Mishnah and the Talmuds. The Mishnah consists of 63 tractate, and it’s translated into the English into a book that’s 800 pages long. There are two form of the Talmuds, the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmuds. The Jerusalem Talmud is 13 volumes in length and the Babylonia Talmud is 60 volumes. It’s all a putting into writing of the oral, or the scribal, law. It all seeks to fulfill the Old Testament didactically through this teaching to help the Jews understand the meaning of the Old Testament scriptures and the meaning of the law. But it failed. In fact, it perverted the law. It distorted the law. It made people misunderstand the law. It made people misunderstand the true meaning of the Old Testament.

I want to read for you just a brief little section out of the Mishnah, which was, in the time of Christ, the scribal oral law. You should understand that this section of the Mishnah deals with the commandment to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Of course, each of the commandments of God (and the Jews identified 613 in the Old Testament) is dealt with exhaustively in the scribal law and in the Mishnah and the Talmuds. So here is the commandment to remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.

What does that mean? The Old Testament just gives the laws, but the New Testament teaches those laws are things that we are to apply by the Spirit and in the love of God and in love for God. But the scribal law seeks to fulfill that commandment by explaining it completely. So, the scribal law tells us that you can’t work on the Sabbath, and they identify 60 different types of work, one of which is burden carrying. So, in the Mishnah and in the scribal law, there are endless pages dealing with what it is to carry a burden. Can you carry a needle in your robe? Can you wear your false teeth? Can you move a lamp from one spot to another on the Sabbath? Those were all potential violations of this commandment to honor the Sabbath, to not work on the Sabbath.

They identified another type of work on the Sabbath not as burden carrying but as writing. You can’t write on the Sabbath. What does it mean to write? Well, you have this statement in the Mishnah. “He who writes two letters of the alphabet with his right hand or with his left hand, whether of one kind or of two kinds, if they are written in different inks or in different languages is guilty. Even if he should write two letters from forgetfulness, he is guilty, whether he has written them with ink or with paint, red chalk or anything which makes a permanent mark. Also, he that writes on two walls that form an angle or on two tablets of his account books so that they can be read together is guilty. But if anyone writes with dark fluid with fruit juice or in the dust of the road or in sand or in anything which does not make a permanent mark, he is not guilty. If he writes one letter on the ground and one on the wall of the house or on two pages of a book so that they cannot be read together, he is not guilty.”

This is typical reading from the Mishnah. This was the kind of stuff that the scribes debated endlessly, thinking that they were actually fulfilling the Old Testament and fulfilling the law. Jesus said no, no, no. Jesus said, “I am the Mishnah. I am the Didikai. I fulfill the Old Testament. I fulfill the law. It is My teaching that explains the true meaning of the law and the commandments and My teaching alone.”

This is why the scribes and Pharisees hated Him so much, because He had thrown out all of their scribal laws. He had set Himself over those laws, explaining to the people that His teaching clarified the true meaning of the Old Testament and the commandments of God. That’s why, when we go through the Sermon on the Mount, again and again you hear Jesus say, “You’ve heard it said of old, but I say to you….” Because He fulfills the Old Testament didactically. He helps us understand what it really means. He shows us that it’s all rooted in love, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind and loving our neighbor as ourselves. He shows us that the law was meant to inspire and not to burden the people, and that it focuses on the heart and not on externals and minutia. The law was meant to change your heart and transform my heart by the power of the Spirit of God.

And so, as Christians we recognize Christ fulfills the Old Testament prophetically. It all points of Him. He fulfills the Old Testament legally. He has fulfilled all of the commandments of God and fulfilled all righteousness. We are saved not by our righteousness but by His. We come to this table falling down before Him in gratitude that He is our righteousness, and by His works and His obedience we are saved. But we also come to this table understanding the true meaning of the moral law and seeking to honor that in our lives, seeking to honor Christ, seeking to obey Him. “If you love Me,” He said, “you’ll keep My commandments.”

As we close this message, I want to share with you something that I shared with the elders a week ago. The Apostle Paul in the book of Philippians, the third chapter, writes that there are enemies of the cross. He explains that there are enemies of the cross in this world. In the third chapter of Philippians, He seeks to define them. He defines them in a variety of ways, but one of His descriptions is this. “Their god is the belly. “The enemies of the cross. Their god is the belly.

What did He mean by that? Well, you’ll find among scholars two different opinions. One group of scholars believe that he is referring to the Judaizers. They are the enemies of the cross because their god is the belly. The Judaizers are described in the book of Galatians and mentioned in other passages of the scripture, but they infiltrated the early churches. They said to the Christians, “Even though you’re a Christian, you’ve still got to obey all the law, not just the moral law. You’ve got to obey the civil and ceremonial laws of the Jews and of Israel. That’s not been lifted. You’ve got to obey all of it, and that’s what it means to be righteous.”

They came into the churches with the Levitical dietary laws, the dietary laws of the Jews found in the book of Leviticus. They said to the Christians, “You can’t eat this. You can eat this, but if you eat this, you’ve got to eat it in this way.” The apostle is saying their god is the belly. They’ve literally turned diet into religion. The Judiazers are enemies of the cross because they’re trying to save themselves by their own righteousness and their own conformity to the law instead of trusting in the righteousness of Christ.

But another group of scholars look at this passage and they say, “No, Paul is not referring to the Judaizers. He’s referring to the Libertines.” The Libertines came into the Christian churches and they had said to Christians, “You can eat as much as you want, and you can become a glutton. You can drink as much as you want, and you can be a drunk.” Because the word belly was used metaphorically to refer to the center of passion, they also said you can have sex as much as you want with whoever you want. You can be promiscuous. None of it matters. Be a glutton. Get drunk. Have sex. It’s all covered by the cross. These were the Libertines. Paul is saying that they are enemies of the cross. They are enemies of the cross because they perverted grace to license and because they don’t really love the one who died there. Jesus said, “If you love Me, you’ll keep My commandments.” And you’ll seek to honor Him in all that you do.

As you come to the table and you come to the bread and the cup, you don’t make either of these mistakes. You don’t come as a Judaizer. You’ve not fallen back unto the law. You’re not trying to save yourself. You come acknowledging that you’re saved by Christ alone and by His righteousness, and it’s by His grace and mercy. You don’t come as a Judaizer, a legalist, but you also don’t come as a Libertine. You don’t come to this table as a Libertine. You acknowledge that in your love for Christ you seek to keep His commandments and you hunger and thirst after righteousness. You long to please Him and you want to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and might, and you want to love your neighbor as yourself. If you’ve sinned, you come in repentance, asking for His forgiveness. As we come to this table, let’s look to the Lord with a word of prayer.