Jesus and the OT
I am amazed how little time Christians devote to study the Old Testament – yet for Jesus it was “THE SCRIPTURE”
He said not a jot or tittle of the Law would pass away – so we would do well to study it closely.
Many Christians think that as Jesus came to fulfil the Law and the Prophets – and so we can now ignore them.
I disagree - at least with regard to God's Moral Law.
And the Moral Law can be summed up by the Ten Commandments.
Yet with regard to the Moral Law of God, Jesus raised the standards in the New Testament.
In the Old Testament, observation of the Law could be measured in a Court of Law.
If you committed murder – if you committed adultery – if you took God’s Name in vain – this could be tested in Court.
However in the New Testament, Jesus tells us that the keeping of God’s Moral Law has to be discerned by our conscience.
For example in our Gospel reading this morning Jesus said:
21 “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.
There are basically three types of OT LAW
1. THE MORAL LAW
2. THE CEREMONIAL LAW and
3. THE CIVIL LAW
1. The Moral Law
The Moral Law tells us about God’s character.
These never change, just as God himself never changes
They tell us what God likes and dislikes.
The Ten Commandments for example are MORAL LAW.
Jesus summed up the requirements of God’s Moral Law by applying two great principles.
The first is from Deuteronomy 6:5 -
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might."
The second is from Leviticus 19:18 -
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
2. The Ceremonial Law
The Ceremonial laws all prefigured Jesus’ death on the Cross. They related to the services of the sanctuary, the offering of sacrifices, and the priestly ministration.
Every sacred festival foreshadowed a saving event in the redemption of the world.
That why we no longer need to sacrifice a Lamb at Passover.
The Ceremonial Law has been fulfilled in Jesus.
3. The Civil Law
Every country has a civil Law and Israel was no different
So to Israel as a nation were given laws in the OT governing how justice was administered.
They were for a place (Israel) and a time – that is they were the law of the land in those days)
Unlike the Ceremonial Laws, which were wholly symbolic in nature, the Civil Laws were not abolished by the death of Christ.
Rather they do not apply to us as we are not in the Land of Israel.
We therefore no longer need to observe the CEREMONIAL LAW (as was settled in the First Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15) nor the CIVIL LAW (as we are not Jews living in Israel).
However Christians STILL need to observe the MORAL LAW OF GOD.
St Paul the great Champion of grace himself says this about God’s moral law
He writes in Romans 6
1 What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2 By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer.
Paul is talking about the Moral Law of God here.
Jesus took the Old Testament seriously and I think as Christians we need to do so too
But how do we avoid simply getting bogged done in legalism
After all in order to avoid breaking the ten Commandments the Pharisees had fenced the 10 Commandments around with more severe rules.
Jesus had no quarrel with the OT – The Law and the Prophets.
But he did have a quarrel with the fence around the 10 Commandments.
Michael Green writes this:
Jesus “is totally against the externalism induced by the enormous legislative superstructure which the Scribes and Pharisees had erected as a fence for the law.
Much of this legalism was contained in oral pronouncements, readily memorized in middle Eastern countries, where writing was not very common. But even now we can see how vast and how repressive it was.
In the third century AD some of it was codified in the MISHNAH, which runs into some 800 pages in English,
And then commentaries emerged to explain the Mishnah. These were known as TALMUDS. There are twelve printed volumes of the Jerusalem TALMUD and sixty of the Babylonian TALMUD.”
(The Message of Matthew – Michael Green p93)
In our reading this morning Jesus just touches on three of the Commandments.
The sixth commandment – You shall not murder
The seventh commandment – You shall not commit adultery and
The third commandment – You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain
And Jesus takes them all to a deeper level – to the level of the heart.
The key to understanding Jesus is that he is not just looking for an external observance but rather he is looking into the heart – or the motive behind what we do
Let’s just look at these
1. The sixth Commandment – You shall not murder
Murder doesn’t start with the actual act.
It goes back further.
As Michael Green put it with such a nice turn of phrase:
Jesus “traces murder to its dark lair in the human heart: hatred” (ibid p.94).
Jesus wants his followers to forgive and not hold a grudge
St Paul put it well when he says: “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph 4:26)
Story: The lack of forgiveness is one of the greatest curses in life.
Many years ago, at the end of the Second World War, one of my Austrian uncles, Blasius tricked my grandmother – so it is alleged- into giving him the family farm, instead of his older brother Wolfgang.
Uncle Wolfgang and his wife never forgave him.
And today, over 60 years later, even though one of the brothers is dead, the feud goes on.
Such is the fruit of unforgiveness.
The second commandment Jesus looks at in our Gospel lesson today is the seventh
2. The seventh commandment – You shall not commit adultery
Divorce was a hot potato in Jesus’ day
There were two schools of thought on the subject of divorce:
1. One school of thought - the conservative school of Shammai – defined the term “something indecent” (in Hebrew ervath dabhar) of Dt 24 as only allowing divorce if a sexual misdemeanour could be proved by witnesses.
2. The other school of thought - the liberal school of Hillel – defined the terms for divorce much more broadly and allowed it to cover any cause of complaint.
Accordingly a man could divorce his wife for any reason.
As Michael Green has so wonderfully put it, a man, under the Hillel school of thought could divorce his wife simply for “burning the toast at breakfast.”
In other words, under the Hillel school of thought, divorce was allowed for “for any reason”.
Indeed, one of the rabbis of the Hillel school, Rabbi Akiba went so far as to say said that a man may divorce his wife for no other reason than he found another woman more beautiful.
Jesus in contrast goes to the root cause of divorce – lust – or the sin of the second glance
Jesus said: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Mt 5:27-28)
He takes adultery to a deeper level – to the level of the human conscience.
Jesus goes to the root cause behind our breaking of God’s Law – he is looking for a change in our hearts
The final law Jesus deals with is the Third Commandment
The third commandment – You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain
The Jews are very careful with the name of God.
Indeed if you see some Jewish publications they omit the “o” out of God out of respect for not saying the name of God
But in Jesus day a nefarious practice had grown up.
You were not bound by an oath unless it was sworn on God’s Name and Jews were prohibited from doing that
So they swore their oaths on Jerusalem or the Temple – and that way felt they were not obligated to keep the promise.
Jesus is saying in this passage. When you do that you are still lying rogues.
God’s people have to be transparent and keep their word – however the give it.
I always remember the words of Psalm 15 where the psalmist talking about a blameless man says that he who is one
“who keeps an oath even when it hurts, and does not change their mind;” (Ps 15:4)
If Christians are entrusted with the Gospel of Truth, their lives need to reflect it
Let your “yes” be “yes” – and keep it says Jesus
Why say an oath. Perhaps it is because people don’t trust us
As one commentator put it: Oaths arise because men are so often liars”
Josephus, writing about the Essenes from whom we get the Dead Sea Scrolls said this:
They are eminent for fidelity and are ministers of peace. Whatever they say is firmer than an oath. But swearing (oaths) is avoided by them and they esteem it worse than perjury, for they say that he who cannot be believed without (swearing by God) is already condemned”
(The Message of the Sermon on the Mount John Stott p.102)
Can the world around us say that about us?
Do they hold us with great respect because of our character?
That is what Jesus is getting at in our Gospel reading today.
Let me leave you with one Scripture about the Early Church:
12 ……all the believers used to meet together in Solomon’s Colonnade. 13 No one else dared join them, even though they were highly regarded by the people. 14 Nevertheless, more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.
Let us resolve to be a Church like that. Held in respect by the local population for the quality of our lives
Amen
