Blessed: 5 Days With the Sermon on the MountExemplo

Jesus, The Fulfillment of the Law

Imagine you are on the hillside with Jesus’s disciples listening to His teaching. You then hear Jesus say that He hasn’t come to abolish the Law or the Prophets (Old Testament). The statement feels out of place. Why mention that now?

Apparently, Jesus’s teaching that the poor in spirit would inherit the Kingdom must have seemed off-putting to some. Perhaps even heretical. Here Jesus is making clear that He is fully in line with the Old Testament. His teaching is radical but it’s not unhinged from all God has been doing through His people since Abraham.

But Jesus goes a step further. Not only has He not come to abolish the teachings and message of the Old Testament, He has come to fulfill it. Not even the most committed Jew would ever claim such a thing. Everyone knew only God was capable of this kind of perfection. Jesus’ statement here is the linchpin of the New Testament. Everything hangs on this proclamation. If Jesus is wrong, this is pure blasphemy, but if He’s right, He’s the Messiah who has come to save us.

Today we question Jesus’ authority for different reasons than perhaps the Jews on the hillside that day. Does He have any relevance to our lives today? Is He really God?

Perhaps these questions are fully settled in your heart. You believe that Jesus is Lord, King, and God Himself. But maybe it’s been a while since you’ve let His words meet your weary and striving soul in its failed attempts at fulfilling its own righteousness.

What a wonderful time to pause and consider His fulfilling the Law. Where you have failed, perhaps for the seventieth or hundred and seventieth time, Jesus has accomplished the demands of His rules of righteousness for you. Where all the self-help books and seminars have fallen short, and your inner-truth has become more truth about yourself than you can actually bear, He is your righteousness. Where the sacrificial lambs, Torah observance, temple rituals, yearly feasts of the Old Testament failed to achieve wholeness for the Jew, and where our modern-day attempts to do better next time, find a new therapist, or be a better person have failed to ultimately fix us, Jesus says, it is finished. Not a stroke of the law has been missed. I am the end of the whole thing. All that the Old Testament demanded and predicted has been filled up in My Person. Receive it. Receive Me.

This is the part in Jesus’ Sermon where we realize that the Christian life isn’t primarily about what we do but whose we are. How we live matters, but this will be an outpouring of what Christ has wholly accomplished for us. So simply pause for a minute and receive. Cease striving, and fall back in the arms of the Savior who has fulfilled every demand of God’s Law, once and for all, for you.