Dear Calvary,

It’s pretty common these days for people to dismiss Christianity as inconsistent because “they follow some of the rules in the Bible and ignore others.” The challenge usually sounds something like this: “When the Bible talks about certain sexual behaviors as sin, you quote that; but when it says not to eat shellfish or not to get a tattoo, you just ignore it. Aren’t you just picking and choosing what suits you best?”

As we’ve been making our way through the Sermon on the Mount, and particularly in chapter five we find that Jesus says something that has enormous implications. He summarizes His relationship to the Old Testament with this surprising statement:

“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.”  –Matthew 5:17

I will be referring to this on Sunday, but we haven’t taken the time in our series to unpack this appropriately, so let’s take a quick look now. If we understand what Jesus means in Matthew 5:17, it will shine instructive light on other important questions like, “What do the Old Testament commands have to do with New Testament Christians?” “Should Christians seek to obey the Old Testament just like the Israelites?” “Can we ‘unhitch’ ourselves from the Old Testament Law altogether?”

“Fulfill” means to complete.  An example of Jesus fulfilling the Law is that when Jesus came, He brought an end to the dietary and ceremonial laws around sacrifice because He became the ultimate Sacrifice. It isn’t so much that Jesus contradicted the Law, but that He fulfilled the law, He validated the Law. That is why cultural critics of Christianity (and sadly, many Christians) don’t realize that we are not bound to the Old Testament Law any longer.

One of the most helpful ways to think about this is to look at the three types of laws there are found in the Old Testament.

  1. There were Civil Laws, that were set up so the nation of Israel could thrive in their daily living. What we see in the New Testament is that Jesus came to establish the Kingdom of God on the earth – a spiritual Israel, that we now identify as the Church. We are no longer bound by the civil codes of Leviticus because God doesn’t have a nation-state on earth anymore. It is true that some civil laws have made their way into the legal systems of the U.S. and have been adopted in much of the world.
  2. There were Ceremonial Lawsrelated to Israel’s worship and were primarily to point people to the coming Messiah. These laws are no longer in effect with the coming of Jesus. These laws were about “clean” and “unclean” things, and various kinds of sacrifices. Other temple practices illustrate for us God’s holiness, our unholiness, and what God would do about it. The entire sacrificial system was designed to point out just how large the gap was between sinful humanity and a perfectly holy God—and just how costly it would be to bridge that gap. If we accept Jesus, the ultimate sacrifice, we don’t need the lesser sacrifices anymore. In fact, it would actually be offensive to go back to them, because that would communicate that Jesus’ sacrifice wasn’t sufficient.
  3. There were the Moral Laws, which reveal the nature and will of God declaring what God deemed right and wrong—the 10 Commandments, for instance, were fulfilled in Jesus as well, in that He kept all of them perfectly, every day, always, for His entire life. But unlike the civil and ceremonial laws, which were more time-bound, these laws reflected God’s assessment of right and wrong. They reflect God’s character, and since His character doesn’t change, His views on morality don’t either. In fact, whenever Jesus mentioned the moral laws, He either reaffirmed them or intensified them! To follow Jesus is to seek to love what He loved, including the moral law.

This helps explain what can seem contradictory to those who don’t see how Jesus fulfilled the Law. In Romans (7:1-6) and Galatians (3:25) Paul is very clear that we are released from the constraints of the Law.

Seeing Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law helps us see why we keep some of the Old Testament commands and (now) “ignore” others. The answer is simple, it is because they were fulfilled by Jesus.

See you on Sunday!

Pastor Gregg