After Pentecost Devotional - Day 06

"'You must obey God’s commands better than the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law obey them. If you don’t, I promise you that you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.'" Matthew 5:20

I routinely come across people telling me that we are believers in the New Testament and therefore we need to forget about the Old Testament. I hear claims that we are under grace, not law, therefore the Old Testament is no longer of any value. Interestingly, Jesus does not appear to be of the same mindset. No, Jesus was not a legalist in any sense, but here in the Sermon on the Mount he tells us that we need to do a better job of following what we call the Old Testament than the legalists were doing!

That is a far cry from telling us to distance ourselves from the Old Testament as irrelevant. If we are going to be honest about Jesus, we need to be honest about what he actually taught, not simply about what we want him to have said. If we are going to call Jesus “Lord,” the claim and title need to have meaning and relevance beyond the words.

It is on the heels of this comment about doing a better job than the legalists that Jesus begins to expound upon the Law and the traditional interpretations given to the Law. Rather than abolish the Law, he expands its meaning. Instead of ignoring its principles and application, he takes its application to a deeper level.

Murder becomes simply an extension of anger. Dehumanizing another in anger he considers equivalent to murder. He takes marital fidelity to a different level, the level of being unfaithful in thought and interest. He takes male privilege to cast out one's wife as becoming responsible for her economic and social need to be attached to a man. He extends law after law, regulation after regulation, taking us each time to a higher ethic of behavior than the mere prescriptions of any legal code.

Rather than casting the Law aside, Jesus calls upon us to internalize God's instructions far beyond the limits of where any legal code can take us. He calls us to follow the spirit of the Law, its principles of justice, mercy, grace, and care for one another. He calls us to internalize the will of Yahweh, rather than treat the legal code of conduct as one more means to manipulate people, escape punishment, and find a work-around to live as we please.

Jesus' intent was that we learn to live according to God's will, priorities, and purposes. He wanted us to learn to shift the direction of our lives into the patterns of God's desires. He wanted us to quit relying on the wording of a legal text and embody the principles behind those words of instruction. He wanted us to understand what it means to truly love one another, to act in grace, to show mercy, to aid the afflicted, and to become vehicles of God's redemption of all.

No, Jesus did not do away with the Law. What he did was much more important. He showed us that the Law was much more than a legal code for lawyers to navigate around. He called us to live according to God's principles and the greatest of these is love.

Determine whether you are more focused on rules or God's principles for life.


"Lord, help me see your will as a meaningful shift in my attitudes and priorities."

—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin
http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/ 
My latest books can be found here on amazon

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