Jesus and the Old Testament

Matthew 5:17-20

Introduction

I spend a fair amount of time on social media, with varying degrees of positive experience. I have been able to reconnect and keep in touch with people from my past. But I am also connected with and sometimes in conversation with people I don’t personally know. 

A number of years ago, I was speaking about why Christians need to support measures that help the poor. Someone responded by saying that was actually un-Christian because it threatened the principles of capitalism. I shared a passage from the Bible that confirmed that God expected us to integrate care for the poor into our activity. He responded with “That’s in the Old Testament, we don’t have to do that anymore.” Aside from the fact that Jesus talked a lot about help for the poor, this does raise an important question: What role does the Old Testament play in our spiritual life?

If I was to ask you if we were expected to follow the Ten Commandments, probably many of you would respond in the affirmative. And yet the wearing of clothes made of two different materials, something prohibited twice in the Old Testament, is not likely a concern. Nor do you likely feel guilty when you eat bacon or shrimp. Even going back to the Old Testament, I doubt any of us observe the Sabbath as Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, as it is taught in the Old Testament.

And yet despite this, Jesus never discounts the Old Testament. In fact he lifts it up, for in fact, the Old Testament was the only Bible that Jesus and the disciples had. Jesus, and later Paul, will very often quote the Old Testament to make their point. 

In the passage we are looking at, Jesus specifically says that he did not come to abolish the Old Testament. He even said the smallest Hebrew letter, something that looks like our apostrophe will disappear. Perhaps we need to take a second look at our shopping lists, both for food and clothing. Or is there something more going on? We are going to take a closer look at this passage.

What is Jesus Referring to?

We have been talking about the Old Testament, but Jesus does not use that term, as at the time, there was no New Testament. So what exactly is Jesus talking about? He speaks of the commands. There are Ten Commandments but Jews had counted all the commands and they added up to 613 commands. Jesus says that he did not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. What is that? That is a reference of the two main sections of the Old Testament and it became shorthand for all of the written revelation. So it refers to the commands, but also how those commands were interpreted by the prophets. The Old Testament is not just a list of dos and don’ts. It is a story of people called by God, saved by God, rebelling against God, and being wooed back by God. The commands were not designed to make life miserable but to help describe a living relationship between a people and their God.

How Does Jesus Fit With the Old Testament?

Jesus has endorsed the value of the Old Testament and has stated plainly that he has not come to abolish the Law. Jesus goes beyond rejecting the idea of ending the Law, he actually says that he has come to fulfill the Law. What does that mean?

One interpretation is that Jesus came to live out a life in full obedience of the Law. The problem with 613 commands is that it is very difficult to completely follow all of them, all of the time. Most of the time is not good enough. If a police officer pulls you over for going through a red light, they are not going to be impressed that you stopped for the previous one hundred red lights. That’s not to say that the Jews had a legalistic faith in which one mistake left them condemned. That is one of the reasons there was a sacrificial system, to deal with all of the breaking of the Law. Jesus, on the other hand, was the only perfect man, being God incarnate, and he would have been the only one who could keep all of the Law all of the time. In that way, Jesus fulfilled the Law.

That is part of what is going on here but there is more. Not only did Jesus fulfill the Law, the Law was fulfilled in Jesus. After Jesus died and was raised, he would remind his disciples that the Scriptures had said this would happen. Part of that is the specific prophecies about certain events, but more that that, Jesus means the entire trajectory of Scripture. The Law and the Prophets are not just a collection of verses, they are a story that leads to Jesus. That people who believed and then wandered and then repented and believed only to wander again. Promises of a restoration that never seemed to quite materialize, even after a physical return from exile. God continually using the least expected people, God turning over power structures. Hope in the midst of so much uncertainty. All of this was taking the story in a certain direction, one that would be fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus couldn’t abolish the Law and the Prophets because that was part of his story.

What Does This Mean For us?

That’s all very nice but how does that affect us? One of the concerns that the early church had was that people would believe in Jesus and then act as if nothing had happened. The Law provided an ethical and moral framework for living life. What happens when that Law is abandoned? 

The first thing that we need to know is that there was an understanding that the Law applied to Jews and Gentiles differently. Even in Old Testament times, they did not expect non-Hebrews to eat kosher. They expected them to live morally but not to directly participate in the covenant made through Moses. One of the biggest issues in the early church was what to do about Gentile Christians. It was agreed that they did not need to follow the Law but they still had to live as followers of Jesus.

The Law and the Prophets, the Old Testament, is still important to us. Not only does it point us to Jesus, it also gives us a picture of who God is. The God who values justice in the Old Testament is the God who values justice today. If we reject the Old Testament, then we miss out on so much of who God is.

But how do we live this out? Jesus was good enough to summarize the commandments as love for God and love for neighbours. He doesn’t say that he is replacing the old commandments with these two but rather they two summarize everything the Law was trying to do. Is something the right or wrong thing to do? Does it demonstrate love for God or people? If not, it is something to be avoided. Faith in Jesus is not a license to live for ourselves, it is the motivation to live a better life.

Conclusion

There is something that happens in movies that become franchises with multiple prequels and sequels. Each director makes their own movie in this connected universe. However, whoever is making the latest movie can choose which of those sequels are a part of the grand story. If one of those movies took the story in an unpopular direction, they can exclude that story. If the director wants to, they can ignore all of the previous movies and do a reboot which starts from scratch with only the setting and characters remaining the same.

There were some in the early church that tried something similar with the Bible. They excluded the Old Testament and even removed the Old Testament quotes from the New Testament. While modern Christians are not so radical, they may see the New Testament as a soft reboot. We can safely ignore the Old Testament as long as we believe in Jesus. The problem is that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament and the Old Testament was his story. We may have to interpret it carefully, we may have to obey it through the lens of love, but the Old Testament is also a part of our story and we need to value it.