Living Inside Out - Matthew 5:17-20 - October 16, 2011
Series: Kingdom Life – A World Turned Upside Down #10
This morning we continue in our series on the Sermon on the Mount so I’ll invite you to open your Bibles with me to the 5th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew 5, beginning in verse 17. Now, I’ve chosen to call this series “Kingdom Life – A World Turned Upside Down,” because this is what Jesus is talking about. He’s telling the people what life in the Kingdom of God is really all about – this is what it looks like and this is how a citizen of the Kingdom lives. And if you’ve been following along in this series you will recognize that the life we are called to, and the life that is made possible for us as Christians, is a far cry from the life that the world would have us live. Life in the Kingdom of God truly is a life that is turned upside down.
In the Kingdom of God, it is the poor in spirit who enter in, the meek who inherit the earth, those who mourn their sin that are comforted, and those who are persecuted for righteousness sake that are blessed. While the world around them goes it’s own way the Christian is called to be a peacemaker as he, or she, seeks to bring the peace of God to a world lost in the turmoil and deception of sin. We are called to be the salt of the earth – a preservative influence of the things of God in our society. We are called to be light to a world blinded by the darkness of sin and shame. This is the high and holy calling to which we have entered in through faith in Jesus Christ and which is made possible by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And these words which have gone before, set the stage for the Scripture passage which we will look at this morning.
See, the crowd which has gathered around Jesus, and in the King James Version it’s called a “multitude,” – we’re talking about a lot of people here - those who have been listening to His teaching - are hearing things they’ve never heard before. They’re hearing truth as they’ve never heard it proclaimed. In fact, if we were to go to the very end of the Sermon on the Mount, chapter 7 of this Gospel, Matthew makes this declaration: “When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.” (Matthew 7:28–29, NIV)
And Jesus knew and understood the effect His words were having on the people. He knew that His teaching would be revolutionary to them. Which brings us to verse 17 because Jesus says this, in way of warning, and in way of explanation, … “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 tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17–20, NIV)
Now before we can really grasp what Jesus is saying here, and why it is that He is saying it, we need to understand what He is talking about when He speaks of the “Law” and of the “Prophets.” If you have a Bible with you this morning, I want you to take it and, just for a moment, hold it up so we can see it. Now, if you’re holding a Bible in your hands – and every one of us should be – if you’re not, I want to challenge you to bring the Word of God with you wherever you go, but certainly at the very least, bring it with you on Sunday mornings as we gather for worship – if you’re holding a Bible, you’re holding the revealed word of God in it’s entirety.
You can put your hands down now but think about what I just said. You have in your possession everything that God wanted you to know, and everything which you need to know, about who God is, what He is doing in this world, and about His love for men and women beat up and broken by sin, blinded by the darkness and in desperate need of salvation. You have in your hands the treasure of the Gospel – the Good News of Jesus – which has restored hope and life to a people who were dead in their sins and transgressions and who were without hope in this world!
And you hold in your hands, the “Law” and the “Prophets.” Now, keep in mind that in Jesus’ day, the word of God had not yet been revealed in it’s entirety. The people in the crowd that day did not have the New Testament that we have. But what they did have was the “mikra” – a word that means “reading,” or “that which is read,” and which was a term used to refer to the Word of God which they did have and which we, today, call the Old Testament. It consisted of three parts – the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.
The Law was also known as the ‘Torah’ – you’ve probably heard that word before – it means, “instruction,” or “teachings” and it’s used to refer to the first 5 books of the Bible - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These are the books written by Moses and which contain all the revealed teachings – instruction or law – by which God’s people were to live.
The Prophets simply refers to all the prophetic books of our Old Testament – books like Isaiah and Jeremiah, and so on. Books which call the people to righteousness, which declare the wrath of God against all wickedness, and which tell of the coming Messiah who will deliver the people from their bondage to sin.
And then there are the Writings which are all the books from the Old Testament that don’t fall into either of those first two categories – books like the Psalms and the Song of Solomon and so on.
The mikra, particularly the Law and the Prophets, were the teachings for life that the Jewish people were to be living by as they sought to live for God. And God had put these laws, these instructions, these teachings into place, for the benefit of His people. They were for their own good and protection. It’s the same today. Sometimes people look at the Word of God and they think to themselves something like this, “God doesn’t want me to have any fun. All these rules and regulations and teachings are seeking to rob me of the life I want to be living – the life where I can do anything I want and it doesn’t matter.” But you know what? Nothing could be further from the truth! In the Gospel of John we find these words … “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10, NIV) Jesus has come that you and I may have life and have it abundantly!
But the Pharisees – religious leaders of the day – went through the Scriptures and identified 613 rules that they were to live by. 248 were commands to do something. 365 of them were commands telling them what they were not to do. (Matthew Rogers, ‘Raising the Righteousness Bar,’ www.sermoncentral.com) But these instructions for life weren’t clear enough for the Pharisees. They read the word of God and found they had more questions than answers.
For example, they read Exodus 20:10 where they were told that they were to do no work on the Sabbath, and they asked the question, “What constitutes work?” So they decided to define work, and they defined it, partially, in relation to a burden that would be carried. This is what they determined … “Less then a burden is food equal to a dry fig, enough wine to fill a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, honey enough to put on a wound and enough oil to anoint a small member.” Anything else is against the Law! Folks, “The scribal law or the Mishnah is eight hundred pages long in it’s English translation. The Talmud or book of the law contains seventy-two volumes.” (Dennis Guptill, “24:6 – The Why of Rules,” www.sermoncentral.com) These are rules made by men and all this so they could live by the 613 rules that they had identified in God’s word. They placed upon themselves, and upon God’s people, a tremendous burden that God never intended. That’s why Jesus proclaimed, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28–30, NIV)
And as He stood before the multitudes that day, Jesus, in essence said this: “My teaching seems new to you. It’s a revolutionary change to the life you have been living. But don’t think that I’ve come to do away with the foundations of our faith. Don’t think for a moment that I’ve come to do away with the Law and the Prophets. This is not a new teaching. Everything I’m telling you today is really everything to which the Law and the Prophets have pointed from the very beginning. I have not come to abolish the Law, nor cast aside the Prophets, instead I have come to fulfill them.”
Many Christians today, live as though the Old Testament did not matter at all; as though it had no place in our lives. You can go into any Bible book store today and you can buy Bibles that contain nothing but the New Testament. And it’s a rich blessing that we have the New Testament – in many ways it’s the fulfillment of the Old Testament – it’s where we find the good news about Jesus – but it doesn’t mean we can do away with the Old Testament.
The Old Testament – the Law and the Prophets and the Writings – are incredibly important for us today because without them we wouldn’t be able to make sense of the New Testament. The Old Testament lays the foundation that the New is built upon. Listen to these words from the Gospel of John. Jesus is speaking to the religious leaders of His day and He says to them … “You study the Scriptures [and the Scriptures He’s referring to are the Law and the Prophets and the Writings] diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” (John 5:39–40, NIV) The Old Testament proclaims Jesus Christ! The Law points to Jesus! The Prophets point to Jesus! The Writings point to Jesus!
After Jesus called Philip to be His disciple, Philip went and found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote – Jesus of Nazareth.” (John 1:44-45, NIV) Folks, Jesus hasn’t come to do away with the Old Testament – we can’t throw it out the window and say it’s got nothing to do with us today – because Jesus says that He has come – not to abolish it – but to fulfill it. And I like that word, ‘fulfill.’ It’s a word that means to “level up to the top,” or “to complete something.” Jesus has come to ‘fill up;’ to ‘complete the Law.’
Now, how has He done that? Well you could take the Law and divide it up into three main categories. You had the moral law, the ceremonial law and the judicial law. The moral law shows us how we are to live our lives in relation to one another and to God. The Ten Commandments would be an example of the moral law. The first four show us how to relate to God and the last six show us how to relate to one another. The ceremonial law showed us how to approach and worship God. This included the whole sacrificial system – the slaying of animals; the sacrifice of a lamb to atone for sin, and so on. The judicial law revealed God’s heart for justice and wholeness and holiness. Jesus fulfilled each of these three streams of law and He fulfilled them perfectly.
Jesus fulfilled the moral law by living a completely sinless life. The Bible tells us that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.” (Hebrews 4:14–16, NIV) Jesus was without sin and thus fully lived out, and fulfilled, God’s moral law.
He fulfilled the ceremonial law by His sacrificial death on the cross. In the 10th chapter of the book of Hebrews we read these words, “The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming – not the realties themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near in worship. … But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins. It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. … [Yet] Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest [referring to Jesus] had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins He sat down at the right hand of God … For by one sacrifice He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.” (Hebrews 10:1, 3-4, 11-14, NIV) Where bulls and goats and lambs died year after year to atone for sin, their shed blood was unable to make perfect those who drew near for worship. But the shed blood of Jesus is different, it’s better, it accomplishes what the Law was unable to, and it only had to be offered once to fulfill the ceremonial law.
And then Jesus fulfilled God’s judicial law as well. 2 Corinthians 5:21 proclaims that “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21, NIV) So Jesus bore the sins of many, exchanging His righteousness for our unrighteousness, and paying the price that that sin required so that God’s justice may be satisfied. In doing so He fulfilled the standards of God’s Holy justice to full measure and left nothing lacking.
So Jesus did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. Yet we’re also told that He came to fulfill the Prophets. This is much easier for us to understand because we know that the prophets speak of Jesus, they point towards the coming of the Messiah, and they look to the day when all the promises of God will be fulfilled. There are literally hundreds of prophecies that are found in the Old Testament that relate to the coming Messiah. To be acknowledged as the Messiah you had to meet all of those predicative prophecies and could be lacking in none of them. Those prophecies relate to where He would be born, to how He would die, and to everything in between. Professor Peter Stoner once calculated that the odds of any one man fulfilling even just 8 of those predicative prophecies would have been 10 to the 17th power meaning ten followed by 17 zeros. That’s a pretty big number! Stoner gave this illustration to help people understand just how big a number that is. He said …
“If you mark one of ten tickets, and place all the tickets in a hat, and thoroughly stir them, and then ask a blindfolded man to draw one, his chance of getting the right ticket is one in ten. Suppose that we take 10^17 silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They'll cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up one silver dollar and say that this is the right one. What chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would've had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote them in their own wisdom (Idem, 106-107).” (Mathematical Probability that Jesus is the Christ, www.biblebelievers.org.au/radio034.htm)
The odds of any one man fulfilling 48 of those prophecies is calculated to be 10 the 158th power meaning ten followed by 158 zeros. But Jesus fulfilled more than just 48 – He has fulfilled them all. If I told you that I knew of sure way you could invest your money and make a tidy profit and the odds in your favour of doubling your money were 10 to the 17th power you wouldn’t even hesitate. You’d say, “That’s a sure thing!” Well that’s what we have in Jesus – a sure thing!
Take a look at Matthew 5:20 with me. Having explained that He’s not doing away with the Law and the Prophets, but that in Him, they find their fulfillment, Jesus goes on to speak these words that must have left His listeners with a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs. He says this: “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:20, NIV)
The problem is this: the Pharisees were viewed by themselves, and by the people of their day, to be the most righteous people living on the face of the earth. And Jesus has just told the multitude that, if they want to enter into the kingdom of heaven, they need to have a greater righteousness than that of the Pharisees! And so do we? But how’s that possible? When we look at the Pharisees they seem to have it all together!
Let’s turn to the 18th chapter of the Gospel of Luke for a moment. Luke 18, beginning in verse 18. We have a passage here that will help us understand what Jesus is getting at with the crowd. This is what we read … “A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” [That’s the question we all want the answer to, right? What do I need to do to get to heaven?] “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: [Here is uplifting the Law again.] ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’” “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said. When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” (Luke 18:18–27, NIV)
Let me ask you this: What was the rich man’s problem? He was keeping all the Laws but Jesus said that that wasn’t good enough to gain him entrance into heaven. So again, what was his problem? Galatians 3:21 says this: “For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law.” (Galatians 3:21, NIV) This man, like so many people in our churches today, is trying to earn his salvation by his good works, by his keeping of the law. But the Law doesn’t give life. It can’t give life. It brings only death because neither man, nor woman, can keep the law perfectly. It is beyond our ability to do so and so we become subject to the penalty of the Law.
In the book of Romans we read these happy words … “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” (Romans 3:21–24, NIV)
Jesus has filled up what the Law was lacking, He has made complete that which was incomplete, He has done for us what the Law was powerless to do! But many of us are living just like the Pharisees. We look great on the outside – we’re keeping all the Laws and we’re doing the big things we should – we’re coming to church, we’re reading the Bible, we’re attending Sunday School. To all outward appearances we have it all together – but inside it’s a different story altogether. Inside there is a rot that no-one else can see – no-one that is but God Himself. The Pharisees and the rich young ruler looked great on the outside. If you had a checklist of what a man of God should look like, you could have checked off every item on that list. Everyone, that is, but one. They missed the most important one – the one that undergirds everything else.
See, it all comes down to a heart problem. The motive in living for God, is not because the Law tells us we need to, but rather because of our love for Him. It’s out of our love for God that we ought to be living in accordance with His word. We can have all the outer appearances of righteousness, but if we have none of the inner reality, we have a big problem. That’s why Jesus called the Pharisees, “hypocrites” - because their hearts didn’t match their outward appearance. The Pharisees believed that it was all about the letter of the Law. Jesus condemns them, not because they kept the Law, but because they completely missed the Spirit of the Law. Life in the kingdom isn’t so much about rules and regulations as it is about loving and honouring God. The letter of the law brings death whereas the Spirit brings life.
Like the Pharisees, many today are concerned with getting the outside right at all costs, so we get good at covering up what’s really going on inside of us. Jesus looked at the Pharisees and called them, “whitewashed tombs,” because to all out appearances they had it all together but inside there was rot; there was death. And we are good at covering up the rot inside. We learn to hide our hurts and pains and sins. And we learn to hide the darkness – but hiding it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still there. Let me use myself as an example this morning. If you look at my outer appearance, what you see, looks to be o.k. You could say I have it all together. But what I’ve really been doing is hiding what’s inside. What you haven’t seen, because I haven’t let you see it, is this … (take off coat and show ripped and dirty shirt). None of you had any idea what the inside looked like, did you? It’s been this way all morning but you had no idea!
That’s how the Pharisees and the hypocrites live – having the appearance of righteousness but not the reality. What we need to do is to get the inside right. That’s why God told His people that the day would come when He would give them a new heart – a heart that was full of life rather than death, then they could live life out of the overflow of their heart. They could live inside out if you will as they let the light and love of God shine through. And we need that righteousness that comes from Christ because the righteousness of the Pharisees will not do! We want to be living inside out. Living out of the Spirit, living out of the new life, and undergirding it all with love because where people look at appearances, God looks at the heart. And where we tend to say, “If we’re obedient we’ll be right with God,” God says, “If you’re right with Me, you’ll be obedient.” Folks, when the heart is right we respond to God, and His word, with a love that results in obedience.
My prayer for us this morning is this: that everyone of us would understand our need for a righteousness that is beyond ourselves and found only in Jesus because the Christian life isn’t so much about what we do as it is about who we are inside. It’s not about trying harder to keep all the rules – it’s about allowing God to shape our character and to bring that transformation to who we are and then all those other things will follow. Let’s pray …
