Matthew 5:17-18 Jesus Came to Fulfill The Law

I remember as a youth learning that if you were to lay out the vast network of blood vessels in the average adult, they would stretch out for almost a hundred thousand miles. That would take you around the earth multiple times. And I wonder still at this: how could so much fit in such a small, relatively, space such as the human body? Incredible.

Well, in much the same way, Matthew 5:17 in particular, as we will consider, is a little bit like that. There's so much meaning packed in such a small amount of words. That's why we only need to progress two verses this morning. One of the preeminent Bible theologians still alive today, by the name of Don Carson, in his book on the Sermon on the Mount, says quite bluntly, "Matthew 5:17-20 are among the most difficult verses in all the Bible". You can imagine the lack of confidence that formed in me as I read that while preparing to preach on it.

The question is why? Well, the principal reason is because we realize that Jesus is saying something quite profound here, while leaving us to turn it over and extrapolate all he meant by it. Simplicity then is the key. We don't want to chase every rabbit into its hole as we could. Or to use my illustration, we don't want to lay out every blood vessel we could about this text. Rather, we want to understand its heart.

And at the heart is this question: What did Jesus mean when he said he came not to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them? What I hope to convey, I might summarize with an illustration. There's a rare type of plant called a monocarpic plant. A monocarpic plant will spend its whole life, often years and years, growing without flowering. So, year after year rolls over, no flower, no fruit creates suspense and anticipation for its growers and those observing. The plant will only ever produce its fruit or flower once and then die.

What Jesus is going to explain this morning is something similar. It's how he addresses how he relates his coming, particularly to the law as well as the prophets. Well, what we learn is that the Old Testament law and prophets were like a monocarpic plant. For centuries, man waited in anticipation of its flowering, which would occur only once. The flower of the law and the prophets is Christ himself. All that came before him, he will say, had its trajectory, finds its goal, its purpose, its accomplishment, its satisfaction in the life of Christ and what he does.

So let's continue and understand this further.

Not To Abolish

At the end of Jesus' sermon on the mount, later on when we come to chapter 7, Matthew is going to tell us that the crowds were amazed at the authority with which Jesus spoke, not like their scribes and their Pharisees. In that statement, Matthew is communicating so much more than people might say today if they heard, say, a politician give a well-crafted speech or they heard a powerful sermon. Matthew is saying so much more. We need to understand the connotations of the term authority in its Jewish context, which Jesus is in, of course.

What was the authority for the Jews in Israel of Jesus' day? The Jewish people were living under Roman control. They lived under Mosaic law, a scriptural authority that regulated their calendar year, their ordinary and religious life, and so on, as the Lord had spoken through his servant Moses. Moses, the law, was held as a binding authority.

When Jesus enters the scene, Matthew has formed the narrative in such a way as to present Jesus as the new Moses. There's the parallel threat of Herod seeking to kill the infant Jesus in a similar way to Pharaoh with the infants in Egypt, with Moses. There's Joseph and Mary's flight to Egypt and then coming out of Egypt in a type of Exodus. There's Jesus who went up the mountain as Moses went up the mountain on Sinai, Exodus 19. And all to say, there’s an authority tension being built here in Matthew's account—an authority tension.

This question is no doubt in the minds of Jesus' Jewish listeners on the mountain. They're asking this question: how does the authority of Jesus relate to the authority of Moses, the servant of the Lord? Are these two men in opposition? If Moses spoke from God, what of this Jesus? When Jesus, you can imagine their question is, when are you going to start talking about the law?

As you know, Jesus was often accused by his opponents of disregarding the law of Moses. The first example in Matthew will come in Matthew chapter 9. "They brought to him a paralytic lying on the bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, “Take courage, son, your sins are forgiven.” Then it says the scribes said to themselves, “This fellow blasphemes.” In other words, Jesus is a law-breaking blasphemer. Later in Matthew 12, they say to Jesus, “Look, your disciples do what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.”

You see, Jesus is going to expose the fact that actually the scribes and the Pharisees, the so-called teachers of the law, had misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misapplied the law covenant. The law of Moses consisted of 613 commandments in total. It regulated the religious life, civil life, and moral life of the covenant nation. There were laws, for instance, for God and his worship, for the sanctuary and the priesthood, for the sacrificial system, for categories of clean and unclean, giving of alms and tithes and dietary laws, Passover, other feasts, and many other laws.

What happened over time is that the Jewish leaders and the scribes and Pharisees had created laws to help people keep God's laws. Over time, the laws of man became treated as if they were God's laws. So they created a hedge around God's law, which became treated as God's law. They obfuscated the real intent of the law. There's a lesson there, isn't there? Traditions must always be weighed against scripture and not exalted to the level of scripture.

Jesus says in Mark 7:9 quite bluntly to the Pharisees, “You are experts at setting aside the commandments of God in order to keep your traditions.” What I'm trying to say is there's a crisis of authority in the ministry of Jesus between Jesus and Moses and Jesus and the scribes and the Pharisees and their interpretation of Moses. There's a crisis.

So here in the Sermon on the Mount, it's as if Jesus is getting ahead of the dust storm for his disciples. He'll explain precisely how he is to be understood in light of not only the Mosaic law, but the entire Old Testament itself in view here. When you see the law or the prophets, the law and the prophets together mean the Old Testament as a whole.

So we read Jesus' answer beginning in Matthew 5:17: “Do not think that I came to abolish the law or the prophets.” What Jesus is saying here first is that nothing in his teaching is opposed to what was already written. Nor did he come to do away with the commandments of Moses as if to render them irrelevant and simply establish a new teaching. No, Jesus will even affirm the divine inspiration and lasting authority of the Old Testament and law for his disciples.

We see in verse 18: “Truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until all is accomplished.” But here's the thing. We've just learned Jesus did not come to abolish the law of Moses as a whole, but if you know your Bibles, at this point you must be sensitive to the fact that Jesus, as with the New Testament as a whole, clearly does render obsolete much of the Mosaic law that Jews lived under and it's no longer relevant.

So in what way can Jesus on one hand say the law is not abolished and on the other seemingly abolish law? There's a question. For instance, in Mark 7, Mark records that Jesus rendered the dietary laws of the Jews obsolete, no longer binding. You and I enjoy pork, don't we? Well, Jews were forbidden from eating pork and many other different kinds of foods. What was once kosher is now clean.

I've also noticed that when you came to church this morning, none of you brought with you an unblemished lamb, unblemished bull, or unblemished goat. No one's here putting the blood of a bull or a goat or a lamb on any altar to offer atonement for your sins throughout the past week. Well, that was prescribed in the law in the Old Testament. So wait a minute, in what way does Jesus not abolish the law when clearly the Christian church is not following most of the law that God gave to Israel? What exactly does he mean?

But To Fulfill

The answer to this dilemma is immediately answered by Jesus. We read in Matthew 5:17: “Do not think that I came to abolish the law or the prophets," here we go. "I did not come to abolish, but fulfill.” Now we begin to understand. All we have left to do is answer this question: What does Jesus mean by saying he came to fulfill rather than abolish the law or the prophets? Especially in light of the fact that clearly the mosaic code as a whole is not in effect for the Christian church. Well, we simply need to understand the prophetic nature of the law itself.

Yes, you heard me right. The law itself is prophetic. We tend to think that the prophets prophesied and predicted future events which came to pass. However, the Bible actually wants us to have a deeper understanding of prophecy. You know, at Christmas time, we pull out Micah chapter 5, where we find the prediction that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. We read X was promised and X was fulfilled at this time. That's prophecy. That's how we often think about it: a prediction was made, now it's fulfilled.

Consider Jesus' words in Matthew 11:13: “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John.” Do you notice that Jesus viewed the law itself as having a prophetic witness? So contrary to what we might naturally think that the law legislates and the prophets predict, in fact, even the law given by God to Moses was itself prophesying. Interesting. It was itself predicting, itself given with a goal and purpose in mind by God to Moses and the covenant nation—this is what Jesus is saying when he comes to fulfill the law because the law itself, every one of God's 613 commandments revealed to Moses to the covenant nation was given with a trajectory, a point at which fulfillment would be made. Moses himself said of the expected Messiah in Deuteronomy 18: “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen. You shall listen to him.”

So here now in Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, up on the mountain, the man is here—the prophet like Moses. Jesus wraps his arms around every jot and tittle of the Old Testament scriptures. All of its narrative, every promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob of land, seed, and blessing—every line of the Ten Commandments and the moral law. Every weekly Sabbath day, the Jews rested from their labours. Every year of Jubilee, every sin offering, every burnt offering, every peace offering, every grain offering, every guilt offering, and every Passover lamb that was slain—he grabs it all. Every feast of unleavened bread, the first fruits, and feast of weeks and of trumpets and of tabernacles, each day of atonement, year after year after year. All of it was given and legislated with a redemptive trajectory which points to Christ.

Moreover, think of the Jewish temple as the meeting place between God and man, with its altars, its lampstands, its showbread, its veil across the inner sanctuary that is laboured in the scripture as to precise, precisely how it was to be laid and set up, the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant, the Mercy Seat. Every last aspect to all that had preceded Christ, be it narrative, legislation, and law, prophetic witness—it was all in bold letters and underlined, pointing to the incarnation of the Son of God who would not abolish that law, but fill it out completely and carry it out completely because it was all silhouettes of types, shadows, and promises—expectations and hopes—which were not ends in themselves, but they had to rest upon, like that illustration at the beginning, the flowering, the coming of Christ.

So now, while we do not have a temple, we do not seek a temple because Christ is our temple. He's the meeting place between man and God. We do not now celebrate the Jewish feasts, yet we consider them not abolished but fulfilled, for in Christ they were carried out to their full meaning. We no longer bring goats, lambs, and bulls to the altar for sacrifice, for Christ's blood shed on the cross speaks better than that blood ever could, and his sacrifice for our sins he has made once for all.

Furthermore, while much of the moral law, the Ten Commandments, makes its way into the New Covenant, the New Testament, it makes its way in as a lasting transcendent law for God's people. The moral law itself is actually fulfilled by Christ, for its demands on God's people have been met because of Jesus' perfect righteousness and his full obedience to it as man's representative.

It's interesting in 2 Corinthians 3, Paul refers to the Ten Commandments; he speaks about that which was given on tablets of stone and he calls it a ministry of death. Why? Because it has no power in it to enable sinful man to keep it. The law was not given with power in it to keep it. It results only in our damnation, but Christ, you see, is the moral law's fulfillment. He's the true and faithful Israelite who lives and carries out in his life that perfect righteousness required, and he carries it out in full obedience as the faithful son. He fulfills all righteousness on behalf of his people. So Paul can say in Romans 10, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”

You see, God's masterpiece of redemptive history was pregnant with expectation that the Old Testament, be it legislation or narrative or prophecy, was all pointing and speaking towards something which was ever more glorious, something lasting in the place of what was temporary, something to bring colour and light to what were shadows, something to bring an end to what were types, and his name is Jesus Christ. As Jesus said on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, you remember, Luke 24: “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them the things concerning himself in all the scriptures.”

So Jesus is saying in Matthew 5:17, “How ever could I abolish what was actually spoken in the expectation of me?” Rather Jesus has come to "fill full" the law, as Sinclair Ferguson put it.

I might illustrate it this way. There are these videos I've seen on YouTube of competitions where it's an artist sort of competition. Basically, the artist has to paint or draw their picture or whatever they're doing upside down—not them themselves, but on the canvas, the drawing has to be done upside down. They get 20 minutes or whatever to do it, and then at the end you're looking at this mess; it looks like you can't see any form or true shape to this drawing. And then the siren goes, they have to finish drawing, and then they grab their painting or their drawing and they flip it upside down, and we say, “Wow". What's left is a beautiful portrait that at first you couldn't see because it was upside down, then it's revealed.

Well, it's a little bit like that with what's going on here in Matthew 5. Jesus is taking the Old Testament and he's shaking out all of the tradition and obscurity that the religious leaders had added to it, and he reveals himself as the one to whom not only the law was pointing and given an expectation of, but in addition he shows himself as ready to carry out the law completely for his people.

So let's conclude. I might then apply what we've considered in this way. Very shortly in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is going to give an exposition of six points of the Mosaic law so that among a couple of things we as his disciples might understand what lasting relevance the law has for us, and that's coming; we'll look at that then.

But take, for example, Matthew 5:21 “You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder, and whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court,’ but I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court, and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good for nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court, and whoever says, ‘You fool’ shall be guilty enough to go to the fiery hell.”

One reaction that we're supposed to have to Jesus' explanation of this sixth commandment is, we're supposed to say: if the deeper reality of the commandment not to murder really extends to how I treat another person, that violation makes a person guilty before God— which among us is without guilt? We've all violated over and over and over again what Jesus said. We have become guilty even of the fiery hell just on this single commandment, so of course we're all with guilt.

Jesus will then later pull down the curtain on any goodness that we might think is in us before God. He says in verse 48, “Therefore you are to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” If you're like me, you'll be wanting to cry out, “Jesus, if that's the standard for men and women to participate in your kingdom that you came to bring, I don't stand a chance. I'm undone! Woe is me, I'm at my end. I'm bankrupt; I have no righteousness of my own; I'm a great sinner.”

But what does Jesus say? Well, he's already said it. Matthew 5:3: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” So now we realize that as believers, we participate in Jesus' kingdom by grace, because the kind of life required for my acceptance on my own, it's not in me; it's in Jesus! It's in him!

Jesus kept the law. He fulfilled the law to its full measure. And there that righteousness that he earns by keeping the law coupled with Jesus' cross is that two-headed fountain of mercy, which washes over the sinner to cleanse and they stand with empty open hands. And so Jesus says, “Do not think I came to abolish the law of the prophets; I came to fulfill.”