Raising the Bar Matthew September 9, 2012

Transcription

1 Raising the Bar Matthew September 9, 2012 Introduction: Last month many of you no doubt watched some of the Olympic Games on television. As with most of you, we watched a few of the big events such as gymnastics and swimming, but I was also able to catch some of the track and field events, most notably was the pole vaulting competition that I watched for a bit one afternoon. Now that s a pretty crazy sport! Run as fast as you can with a long pole, jam one end of it into the ground, and then use the other end to propel yourself fifteen to twenty feet into the air to clear the high bar. It s amazing anyone can do that at all without breaking their neck, much less doing it over and over with the bar being raised a little bit higher each time. While this morning s passage isn t about the sport of pole vaulting, it is all about raising the bar. Jesus is going to talk about the Law, about the Old Testament, and as we re going to see as we walk through the passage, Jesus is going to significantly raise the bar in terms of our understanding of the Law and what it demands of us. So to that end please open your Bibles with me to Matthew 5. This morning we are going to be focusing on Matthew 5:17-20, which is the beginning of a new section of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus elaborates on the correct understanding of the Law. So please follow along as I read Matthew 5, starting at v. 17. 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. We re going to consider this passage in two parts: first we re going to talk about what Jesus has to say concerning his relationship to the Law, and second we ll consider what he says about our relationship to the Law. So let s begin with our first point 1. Jesus relationship to the Law (v ) The first thing Jesus does is head off at the pass a possible misunderstanding. He says in v. 5, Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. Now if you know anything about Jesus, you know that his ministry caused quite a stir among his contemporaries and with good reason. To begin with, Jesus wasn t a member of the religious elite: he hadn t been trained in their schools, he wasn t counted among their numbers, yet as an untrained son of a local carpenter he was traveling around Galilee teaching with great authority. Then on top of that, at every turn Jesus challenged their teaching. He was brutally critical of the Pharisees who were widely regarded as the authoritative teachers of Scripture. And then to the chagrin of the religious leaders, 1

2 Jesus often acted in blatant violation of the Law as they understood it. He had the audacity to fraternize with sinners, break the Sabbath at will, and touch the unclean without any care for purity laws. So in light of that, you can imagine the questions people had in their minds: Is Jesus rejecting the Law of Moses? Is he trying to overturn everything our forefathers taught in the Law? Is he setting himself up as an authority greater than the Law and therefore abolishing it? Jesus knows those rumors and questions about him were floating about, so then, before he begins to teach about the true meaning of the Law, he states for his disciples in no uncertain terms his intentions. He states clearly that he has not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. Jesus has no intention to overthrow the OT; instead he has a much more startling relationship to it. Look again at v. 5 with me. Jesus says, 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. It is difficult to imagine Jesus making a more astonishing statement. Did you hear what he just said? Jesus said he came to fulfill the entire OT. What would you think of me if next week I came up to the pulpit, held up the Bible and said, I am the fulfillment of everything written in here? It all points to me and through my life everything said by Moses and predicted by all the prophets will be fulfilled by me? You d have me hauled off to a mental institution is what you d do. This is a stunning statement and would be utterly ridiculous if it wasn t true. It s statements like this that should put to rest any notion of Jesus as simply being a great moral teacher: unless Jesus is who he claimed to be the very Son of God, the promised Messiah he s not to be trusted, not making claims as outlandish as this. No man has ever uttered a more incredible claim than this one found here at the end of v. 5. Of course, what makes this statement so astonishing is not only that Jesus said it, but that it s true. There is perhaps no verse more important to understanding the OT than v. 5: Jesus is the fulfillment of everything in the OT. All things point to him and are fulfilled by him. Jesus led the greatest Bible study in the history of the world when in Luke 24 he encountered two men on the road to Emmaus and we re told that beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. Imagine listening in to that! The apostle Paul further affirms what Jesus is saying here in 1 Corinthians 1:20 when he writes, For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. Now I was very tempted to take this one verse and do a sermon on it and go into great detail about how Christ fulfills the OT, but in the end I decided not to because I didn t want us to lose the forest for the tree in terms of the big picture of what Jesus is saying here. But I can t resist just taking a very quick bunny trail here nevertheless because of how important this verse is to how we approach the OT. First, I need only just briefly mention the various passages that Matthew has brought to our attention already in his gospel. The first four chapters are full of statement after statement of how Christ fulfilled various OT prophecies through the events of his birth and early childhood. But then there are those aspects of the OT that were fulfilled not in 2

3 a strict literal manner but in a typological manner, that is, certain things in the OT were a shadow and a type of what was to come. The NT dedicates a whole book to this topic: read the book of Hebrews and you ll find that it serves as an extended commentary on what Jesus says here about how he fulfills the Law. It tells us how Jesus fulfilled the OT priesthood, as he stands before God eternally as our Great High priest. It explains how Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice of atonement; all those animal sacrifices the Israelites did were meant to point them ahead to the one ultimate sacrifice that would once and for all atone for their sins. I could go on, but I came across a short video by Timothy Keller - the author of Counterfeit Gods, the Tolle Lege book we re reading this month - that does this much more succinctly and effectively than I could, so let me run that for you. [Show True and Better video clip] So there you have it: Jesus is the fulfillment of the OT. Everything points to him and is fulfilled by him. So far from abolishing the Law, Jesus completes it. So when we read the OT, we always need to be asking ourselves: how does this point to Christ? How is Christ the perfect fulfillment of this sacrifice or individual or situation? But there is yet another way that Jesus fulfills the Law that we need to keep in mind and that is that Jesus fulfills the Law by perfectly obeying the Law. Unlike everyone else who failed to give God the perfect obedience that the Law demands, Jesus did it. We re repeatedly reminded in the NT that Jesus was without sin. For example, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21 that He who knew no sin became sin for us and in 1 Peter 2:22 it says, He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. As a result, Jesus not only fulfills the Law in that it all points to him but also he fulfills the Law by perfectly meeting the righteous requirements of the Law through obedience to it. So Jesus hasn t come to abolish the Law as some might mistakenly think; in fact, such a notion is quite impossible in light of the permanence of the Law. Look back in your Bible with me at v. 18. Jesus says, 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. The simple fact is that the Law isn t going anywhere. An iota and a dot are the smallest part of a Hebrew letter, like the dot atop of a lower case i or the small line that crosses a t in English. Jesus says not even the smallest part of the Law will be abolished. The Law is pointing to something, it has a goal, a purpose, and until it is accomplished, it will last. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law, but he hasn t quite fulfilled it all yet, thus it is still around. The OT isn t worthless. It s not some relic of the past that we can ignore. It still has a purpose: to teach is about God s holiness, to show us our sinfulness, and to point us to Christ. It still serves that purpose today, and thus we should still read the OT, at the same time realizing that Christ has fulfilled it and will fulfill it. The key to understanding the OT is recognizing what has been fulfilled and what is still valid for us today. In those things which Christ has fulfilled, we re no longer obligated to obey because those parts of the OT have become obsolete. So for example we don t need to make animal sacrifices: Jesus fulfilled that by his death. We don t need to have a high priest: Jesus fulfilled that and serves as our Great High priest before the throne of the Father on our behalf. We don t need to follow the civil laws given to the nation of Israel because the church in Christ is the fulfillment of what the nation of Israel was 3

4 pointing to. But since we re still obligated to a holy God to live righteous lives, the Law continues to reveal God s righteousness. The Ten Commandments still reflect for us the moral will of God; they show us our sin, how we have failed to obey him and how we are in need of a savior. And until there is no longer a need for people to see their sin, the Law will endure. The book of human history has not yet been closed, so until heaven and earth pass away and God finally brings the elect into the fullness of their salvation and judges the wicked for their sin, the Law will remain to accomplish its work. Moving on now, besides his own relationship to the Law, Jesus has something to say to us about our on-going relationship to the Law as his disciples. Just as he hasn t come to abolish the Law, neither should we think as followers of Christ that we can set the Law aside and forget about it. So for our second point this morning, we need to consider 2. Our relationship to the Law (v ) In light of the permanence of the Law, Jesus reminds us of the on-going importance of the Law for his followers. Look back in your Bibles at v. 19. 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. Too often people have misunderstood the gospel to imply that the Law doesn t matter anymore. Jesus fulfilled the Law and died for our sins so that we are forgiven and no longer need to fear God s judgment because, as the apostle Paul put it, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So the conclusion some make is that therefore we can dispose of the Law and live however we like. That s exactly the response Paul anticipated from the Romans when he laid out the gospel for them. In Romans 6 he asks, What shall we say then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? The logic works like this: since God gives us more grace in Christ when we sin, should we keep on sinning since getting grace is a good thing? And what s Paul s reply to that? By no means! How can we how died to sin still live in it? Any notion that the gospel frees you to go on sinning is ludicrous. But sadly this kind of thinking still is with us today. I ve heard people say, Well it doesn t matter what I do because Jesus died for my sins and so everything is forgiven anyway. So they think they can live like the devil because Jesus died for them and no matter what they do Jesus will forgive them. Perhaps you ve thought like that. Maybe you ve tried to justify your sin by saying, Well even if I do sin, Jesus died for it, so it s not like I m going to have to worry about going to hell if I indulge in this just once. But the problem of course is that if you re going out willy-nilly engaging in sin while at the same time claiming to be a Christian, then one has to ask some serious questions about the validity of your so-called faith. Since salvation is not just a legal transaction, but a spiritual transformation where God changes your heart so that you mourn over sin and hunger and thirst after righteousness, you can t possibly be saved if after being set free from it you jump right back to sin and even use the gospel as an excuse to engage in it. Christians don t neglect righteousness because they re forgiven: instead they long for righteousness all the more because they want to please and honor God with their lives. 4

5 So Jesus reminds us that those who relax or break one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same is least in the kingdom of heaven, meaning a Christian who makes little of the pursuit of holiness in his live shouldn t expect much of a reward in heaven. But those for whom the gospel leads them to a greater diligence in obeying God s Word and living righteously will be considered great in the kingdom of heaven, because the grace of God is working itself out as it ought: we are doing the good works which we have been created to do in Christ Jesus. And should such a slothful, lazy, indifference view of the Law persist, one should have no assurance of salvation at all, because Christians who have been forgiven of sin can t possibly stand to continue to engage in it if their hearts have truly been transformed by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps it s worthwhile to pause for a moment here and ask yourself, Am I pursuing righteousness? Do I care about God s commands and strive to put them into practice in my life? Or are you just coasting? Are you banking on the fact that because you said some prayer at VBS when you were a kid that you re going to heaven in spite of the fact that you haven t darkened the door of a church in years and don t show the slightest evidence of pursuing a live of obedience to God s Word? Those who follow Christ have been given hearts that love the Law and desire to obey it, not because they have to but because they want to, so they might live a life pleasing and acceptable to the One who saved them. But then in v. 20, Jesus sets the bar even higher. Look back in your Bibles at v. 20 and follow along as I read. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. You can imagine the jaw-dropping, stunned looks on the disciples faces when he said this. He can t be serious, can he? See, for the Jews of Jesus day, the Pharisees were the Olympic gold medalists of righteousness. A Pharisee was to righteousness as Michael Phelps is to swimming. Nobody was a better example of righteous living than the scribes and Pharisees. These guys were the paragons of virtue and morality. How could Jesus possibly expect anyone to exceed their example of righteousness? There are two answers to that question, both of which we need to grasp if we re going to understand what Jesus is saying here. The first is that the righteousness we need to enter the kingdom of heaven must indeed surpass that of the Pharisees because it needs to be a perfect righteousness. God s expectations are clear: Be holy as I am holy. That means without sin: perfect obedience from the day you take your first breath to the day you take your last. And what that looks like far exceeds what we commonly think it does. As we re going to see over the next few weeks, Jesus is going to take the Law and show how deep the rabbit-hole really goes: You think you haven t murdered? Jesus says, Let me tell you what that commandment really means in terms of hating someone. You think you re righteous because you ve never cheated on your spouse? Well then, let s talk about lust for a moment, shall we? We re going to spend the next few months listening to Jesus utterly demolish any notion we have that we are righteous by laying out for us the true intention of the Law. He s going to make it abundantly clear that we have failed miserably to live up to God s righteous requirements. 5

6 If that s the case then, what hope can we have? If the most righteous people they knew didn t measure up, how can I hope to exceed their righteousness and achieve perfect obedience to God s commands? Here s the bad news: you can t. But now let me tell you the good news: Jesus has done it for you. The only way we can ever exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees and render unto God the righteousness he requires of us is to receive it by grace through faith. For those who have trusted in Christ for salvation, Christ s righteousness is credited to them as their righteousness. Jesus is pointing the disciples to look far beyond moral self-improvement as a means of salvation. You can never be good enough to merit eternal life. You re good deeds will never outweigh your bad deeds because first of all God doesn t grade on a curve - he demands 100% obedience - and second of all, Scripture says that whatever is done without faith is sin which means that as an unbeliever all you ve ever done is sin. Apart from Christ, even your kindest act was sinful because it wasn t done out of faith. But God provides for us in Christ what we could never achieve on our own. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21, For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Not only does Jesus die for our sins but he lived the righteous life we should have, and when we turn from sin and trust and Christ, God considers Christ s righteousness to be our righteousness. It s the greatest trade ever made: Jesus receives our sin and we get his righteousness. So then, the only way for you to have a righteousness that exceeds the Pharisees is to have Christ s righteous imputed to you by faith. But there s a second part to this that is important for us to recognize as well, and that is Christians should also have a practical righteousness that is greater than the Pharisees as a result of being a Christian. The result of receiving the imputed righteousness of Christ by faith in turn leads us to begin to practice true righteousness in our life, not in order to gain salvation but rather as a response of love and gratefulness for the salvation we have already received. You see, the Pharisees had a form of external righteousness: they prayed in public; they tithed on their spices; they avoided anything that might even possibly be viewed as work on the Sabbath. They were all about external obedience. Yet time and time again Jesus confronts them, calling them whitewashed tombs that were clean on the outside but full of filth on the inside. He warned them that what made them unclean wasn t what they touched with their hands; it was what came from inside their hearts. They did good deeds, but their motivation was to be seen and praised by men, which ruined any hopes that God would reward them for their efforts. Yes, the Pharisees had an external form of righteousness, but it was like a thin shell hiding the rotten yoke of a heart inside of them. And do not think for a moment we re any different. There are plenty of morally righteous people who avoid all kinds of evil: they don t drink, they don t smoke, they don t watch certain movies, they don t gamble and so on. And they think by avoiding those terrible, terrible things they re virtuous people. And then on the other side of the ledger they re engaged in all kinds of good things: they attend church each Sunday, they volunteer in their community, they serve in a soup kitchen, they teach kids at VBS all good things 6

7 to be sure. So they take pride in being a good Christian man or a godly Christian woman because of what they do and don t do. But someone can do all those things and still have a wicked, unregenerate heart. So you go to church how are you the rest of the week? How do you treat you wife? What do you look at when you re in front of the computer all alone late at night? What s the nature of your thoughts when you lay your head on the pillow at night? What words do you use in that inner-monologue you have with yourself? What is it that you really crave, that you re passionate about, that motivates you to do what you do? The real test of righteousness concerns what you do when no one else is around: the secret desires, attitudes, and motivations of your heart, your behavior when no one else there to either condemn or praise you. The reality is that if you are a Christian, you righteousness will exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees because the source of true righteousness the attitudes and motivations of the heart will be transformed. When you become a Christian and receive the righteousness of Christ by faith, God also changes your heart so that you both desire to be righteous and are empowered to actually live righteously through the power of the Holy Spirit. In short, you exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees because you ve become the kind of man or woman described in the Beatitudes. You hunger and thirst after righteousness and you are satisfied because you are now enabled to live righteously because God s Spirit dwells in you. Every true Christian will exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees because they have been given Christ s righteousness through faith and have been granted spiritual rebirth that allows them to live righteously from the heart. Let me quote Martin Lloyd-Jones for a moment: It comes to this, that unless my life is a righteous life, I must be very careful before I claim that I am covered by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. For to receive the grace of God in Christ means not only that my sins are forgiven because of His death for me but also that I have been given a new life and a new nature. It means that Christ is being formed in me, that I have become a partaker of the divine nature, that old things have passed away and all things have become new. It means that Christ is dwelling in me, and that the Spirit of God is in me. The man who has been born again, and who has the divine nature within him, is a man who is righteous and his righteousness does exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees. He is no longer living for self and his own obtainments; he is no longer self-righteous and self-satisfied. He has become poor in spirit, meek, and merciful; he hungers and thirsts after righteousness; he has become a peacemaker. His heart is being purified. He love God, yes unworthily, alas, but he love Him and longs for His honor and glory. His desire is to glorify God and to keep and honor and fulfill His Law. The commandments of God to such a man are not grievous. He wants to keep them, for He loves them. He is no longer at enmity against God, but he now sees the holiness of the law and nothing so appeals to him as the living of this law and the exemplifying of it in his daily life, It is a righteousness that far exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. (Lloyd-Jones, ) Thus what Jesus calls us to here is possible, but not by our own strength. To have a righteousness that exceeds the scribes and Pharisees is an impossibly high bar; as men dead in our sins, unable and unwilling to obey God due to the enslavement of our desires to wickedness, we cannot do this. But God does for us in Christ that which we are entirely incapable of in ourselves. He pours his grace out upon us, making Christ s 7

8 righteousness our righteousness through faith, and transforming our heart through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit so that we ll live righteously for the glory of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. What Christ commands, he graciously grants. We can be righteous because he makes us righteous. Conclusion: So let me close then by asking you to ponder carefully what Jesus says here. Jesus has made it abundantly clear that he is the fulfillment of the Law, that the Law isn t going away anytime soon, and that those who follow him must take the righteous demands of the Law seriously in their lives. Approaching holiness in a casual, lackluster manner is to risk being called least in the kingdom of heaven, and to fail to have a righteousness that surpasses the scribes and Pharisees is to risk never entering the kingdom of heaven to begin with. You aren t saved by good works, but your good works demonstrate whether indeed you are actually saved or not. So if you are clinging to a hypocritical righteousness one that is all external because you don t drink or smoke certain things and attend all the right events but your heart is a jet black cauldron of hate, lust, bitterness, unforgiveness, pride, self-centeredness, slander, gossip, and lies then you need what only Christ can give you. You need his perfect righteousness to be your own. You need a transformed heart that s been made new and washed clean by the Holy Spirit, and you can only receive that by faith. You need to stop pretending to be on the outside what you know you aren t on the inside. It s time to turn from sin, turn to Christ, and find the forgiveness and cleansing that only he can provide. And if you re a Christian, if you ve been saved by grace and you re relying on the sufficiency of Christ s death to satisfy the wrath of God for your sin and the sinless life of Christ to be your Spotless Lamb, your perfect righteousness, then let this message be a call to you to pursue holiness with even a greater vigor. Paul said in Ephesians 2:10, For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. So walk in them. Pursue righteousness in your life. Do not be slack; do not be lazy; do not presume upon God s grace that just because there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus that you can indulge in sin on the side. Let your hunger and thirst for righteousness be filled by living in joyful obedience to God s Word. God has set you free from sin s dominion and empowered you by the transforming work of the Holy Spirit to live in a manner holy and pleasing to him. So do so, in order that you might be great in the kingdom of heaven and that the God you love, who saved you by his grace through Christ your Lord, might be glorified in you. Let s pray. Endnotes: Lloyd-Jones, D. Martin. Studies in the Sermon on the Mount. William B. Eerdmanns Publishing Co.: Grand Rapids, This sermon was addressed originally to the people at Grace Brethren Church of Waterloo, IA by Pastor Rob Borkowitz. Copyright