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in order to achieve the life He desires for us. The chief difference between the doctor and God is that God gives us the power to live His righteousness through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Practicing righteousness is not a prerequisite; it is a proof. It is a sign that God is working in someone’s life.
Jesus Fulfills the Law vv. 17-19
Jesus went around seemingly disregarding the law. He healed on the Sabbath. He worked on the Sabbath. He ate and drank things He wasn’t supposed to with people He wasn’t supposed to be with. It would be natu- ral for even His followers to think that He was going to tell them that He had come to cancel or abolish the law. So, it must have been a shock to them when He said in Matthew 5:27, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.”
It is important to notice two things that Jesus did NOT say. He didn’t say He abolished the law. He also didn’t say He endorsed the law. He claimed that His purpose was to fulfill the law. The law was given for a reason: to show us the things that lead to life, to teach us obedience, and to reveal our own sinfulness to us.
Jesus didn’t come to add to or to set aside the law of God. He came to be the fulfillment of the reason that the law was given. In Galatians 3:24, Paul writes, “the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith.” The law doesn’t make us righteous. The law shows us we can’t be righteous on our own. Jesus fulfilled the law by being righteous for us. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship, “He has in fact nothing to add to the commandments of God except this, that He keeps them.”
The reason Jesus emphasizes fulfillment is to underscore the fact the God doesn’t change. God has one recipe for what brings life. God has one plan for redeeming and restoring fallen humanity. The plan didn’t sud- denly change when Jesus came.
Some might ask, though, what about the “rules” in the Old Testament that we no longer follow? Is Jesus say- ing that we should keep and teach them, too? It is important to distinguish between laws that are unchang- ing and laws which are for a specific people for a specific time. Many of the Old Testament “laws” that we no longer observe were focused on ceremonial and temple ritual. When Jesus came to be the fulfillment of the reason for temple sacrifice, he fulfilled those laws. They weren’t abolished. The reason they were needed was superseded. But the reason they were given, the character of God, and the nature of what brings life—these don’t change. Warren Wiersbe described it using the following analogy: “If I have an acorn, I can destroy it in one of two ways. I can put it on a rock and smash it to bits with a hammer. Or, I can plant it in the ground and let it fulfill itself by becoming an oak tree.” Jesus did the latter. The law was the acorn. Jesus is the oak.
There are certain ceremonial customs that we no longer need to observe anymore. The early followers of Jesus began to realize this and began to realize things like dietary laws and religious festivals were no longer necessary. This point is summed up in Colossians 2:16-17, where Paul writes, “16 Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day— 17 things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.”
Jesus and Real Righteousness v. 20
Jesus concludes this section with a final scandalous statement: “For I say to you that unless your righteous- ness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Righteousness and law were intertwined in Jewish thinking. Being righteous meant keeping the law. And no one was better at understanding what it means to follow the law than the Scribes and Pharisees. So, Jesus telling his followers that they had to be more righteous than the Pharisees would have sounded at best hyper- bolic and at worst impossible.
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