Read Along
Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used with permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets.
Jesus answers an accusation nobody in Matthew’s Gospel has made yet. No one has called Him a lawbreaker. And still He stops in the middle of the first long sermon Matthew records to deny it.
Then, three verses later, He raises the bar. “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Paul, who grew up a Pharisee, called them “the strictest sect of our religion.” So how could a fisherman or a farmer ever surpass them?
This is episode three of twelve on the Sermon on the Mount. Last time, Jesus told ordinary people they were salt and light, and that their good deeds would point others to the Father. This time, Matthew five, verses seventeen to twenty. Four verses, and the whole rest of the sermon stands on them.
So why would anyone think He had come to abolish the Law?
Look at what Jesus has just done. He went up on a mountainside and sat down to teach, on a mountain like the one where Moses received God’s law. He called beggars and mourners blessed. And at the end of the sermon, Matthew says, “the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.”
Jesus doesn’t sound like the teachers they knew. And in the very next section, six times over, He’ll quote what they had heard and then say, “But I tell you.”
Become a supporter to keep going
Hear and read all of Episode 3, plus every new one. Your support keeps 250+ YouTube videos free.