Sermon: 'But I Say to You' (Part One): The Spirit of the Law
Jesus Corrects the Letter of the Law Approach
#1681
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 19-Nov-22; 82 minutes
description: During the Intertestamental Period encompassing the time between Malachi and the ministry of John the Baptist, approximately 400 years), a group of separatists called the Pharisees emerged on the scene ostensibly to protect Israel from succumbing to Sabbath breaking to idolatry. Sadly, these well-meaning reformers devolved from piety to elitists, constructing a 50-volume compendium of negative rules, traditions of men, having nothing to do with God's holy and spiritual law. Jesus, God in the flesh, wanted to make sure that His disciples did not carry the Pharisees administration of the letter of the law (or the administration of death) into the church. The letter of the law was a tool of condemnation and death, while the spirit of the law (Hebrews 8:10; Jeremiah 31: 31-37) was a tool of life. Jesus assured His disciples, then and now, that the law was to remain forever, but it had to be far more than obedience to a set of man-made rules, but instead a motivation to keep the law (in a far more expansive way- going down to the marrow of the mind) in the spirit. Until Christ, the law was insufficient, requiring a spiritual instead of a code of rules. Jesus Christ despises both legalism and antinomianism but wants to fix His law in a fixed immovable place, warning His disciples that their righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees, keeping God's precious holy law in the spirit rather than in the letter, replacing the law of death with the law of life.
transcript:
Martin's last sermon, which he titled the "Intertestamental Period," provides some necessary background to what I will be speaking about today. He essentially covered the history between the prophetic ministry of Malachi to that of John the Baptist. That is about from 420 or so BC to about AD 25. So we are looking at a period of about 445 years, 450 years, something like that. And we can just shrug that number off, if we want to. But it is probably a good idea for us to consider that time period, how long 450 years is. We can just look back and say, "Well, okay, from Malachi to John the Baptist was a long time" and not really understand all the things that went on in that 450 years.
Let us consider this in our own history. What happened 400 or so years ago? This will give us a kind of an understanding of just how far back that is. The 450 years that he covered in that sermon is longer than the time since the Jamestown Colony was established in Virginia. That was 1607, 415 years ago. That is another 35 years to get to 450 years ago. Plymouth Colony, those Puritans of Massachusetts and the first thanksgiving that they had (that we are commemorating here just this week), that happened in 1620. The first Thanksgiving was 1621. That was 402 years ago. The King James Version was published in 1611. That is 411 years ago.
We have all kinds of weird music today. The music of the time was baroque, back around 400 years ago. That is Claudio Monteverdi. But you probably never heard of him. He composed his best known opera, which is called "Orfeo" in 1607—the same year Jamestown Colony was established. The kings of music at the time were Pachelbel, Purcell, Scarlatti, and Vivaldi. But all of them came a little bit later in the mid-1600s.
Shakespeare was in his heyday because he died in 1616. John Milton was born in 1608. Sir Walter Raleigh (the capital of North Carolina is Raleigh), he died in 1618. John Dunne, the great English poet, died in 1631.
Are you getting the idea that that was a long time ago? A lot has happened in the 400 and so years since those names were doing their thing.
About that time, early 1600s, England and America had competing rival ways of living. And we can almost see them as Puritans in the Plymouth colony and the other kind, Cavalier, which was in the Jamestown Colony. In England, those two ways of life would clash in the English civil war in mid-century from 1642 to 1651. The Puritans won that war but just for a little while and then the Cavaliers came back. That civil war may have been one of the last religious wars in the history of the world, in which Catholics and Protestants were pitted against each other—because the Protestants were the Puritans and the Cavaliers were mostly Catholic.
Ever heard of the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason? That did not even start until the end of the 17th century. The scientific revolution had just gotten started under the writings of Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Decartes. I mean those are old, old, old names. Do you remember them from your history class?
We can see a great deal can happen over 400 years or 450 years. We have gone from the earliest printing presses to the telegraph, the telephone, the fax machine, the Internet. Now we have virtual reality and all of that. From the telegraph on has just been two centuries of that 400 years. We have gone from carts and wagons and wooden ships, to trains, automobiles, and planes, and supertankers, and spacecraft. We have put men on the moon. We have put astronauts in orbit—long term orbit—at the space station, and we are planning missions to Mars. Our telescopes can see deep into the universe far farther than Galileo ever imagined.
Now, consider this. Really think about this in light of that intertestamental period of 450 years or so. Think about how they lived. I mean, to our way of thinking they lived pretty primitive lives. They did not have a lot of the conveniences that we have. None of us want to go back and live as they lived. We just have it so good. We have all our comforts, we have food, we have relative peace. We can get from here to there. We can call anybody we want and have all those things brought into our homes. But they did not.
They could write, they could mark things down on various media. They did not really have paper, they could use papyrus, they mostly put things on hides. They could scratch things into pottery. They could, if they really wanted it to last a long time, put it in marble or some other kind of stone and fix it on a public building. But the way they lived and the things that they had to use were, the only word I can think of is simple, and primitive and easily destroyed. It was hard to get information from one generation to another. Mostly it had to be oral. In some societies there was a little bit more writing and formal education. So those sorts of things would be able to be passed down somewhat.
At the time, the people of those times really learned how to memorize things. That is mostly how they were passed down. It was orally transmitted from one generation to the next. Some of the things were written down, some of them were not. Some were expected to be kept in mind and passed down that way.
But then, add in other factors. Add in climate. We talk about climate change all the time. It is just the way the world works. It gets hotter, it gets colder. There are storms, they happen, seas rise, seas fall. You have great storms out in whatever ocean or sea you happen to be on. Other climes have snow and ice, shorter or longer ice ages. It is just the way the world works. God made it to be that way. That is how it is on a planet that is tilted 23 degrees. And because of that it gets colder in some places and then goes around and the places that were warm are now cold again. And over time, because of various factors, it can be like an ice age in one area, like it was over North America for such a long time, and then it recedes. That is the way God has made the earth balance.
But people of the world for all this time had to deal with that sort of thing. They had to deal with these natural disasters we could call them. One of the things that the people in Judea had to worry about was earthquakes because there is a great rift that goes right up through the Dead Sea. So they had a lot of temblors, as they call them, and quakes and they would bring buildings down and that would cause fires and suddenly all their parchments and papyrus are up in smoke.
Of course I have not even mentioned war. The area that Israel lived upon, what we call the Promised Land, it was a bridge. It is the land bridge between Africa and Asia and Europe. Everybody was crossing back and forth over that land bridge to get where the grass was greener on the other side and conquer it. And so, Israel had to put up with one army after another, one empire after another, either coming from the north or from the south, sometimes from the east, and they were caught in the middle. They were on the anvil and the hammer was coming down. They could not get away. God put them there specifically that they would have to trust Him to keep them through all that time when stronger empires were fighting over their land.
They were in a pretty tough area. If it was not Egypt, it was Assyria. If it was not Assyria, it was Persia. If it was not Persia, it was Babylon. If it was not Babylon, it was Greek. If it was not Greek, it was Roman. And you name it. There were the smaller nations too like Syria and Edom and Ammon and Philistia that they had to worry about.
So keeping things straight, making them enduring, getting information from one generation to another was not easy. There was something bound to come up that would make it difficult for them. But they tried. This sort of thing happened religiously too, trying to get religious knowledge from one generation to another was very difficult. Of course they had teachers. The Levites were supposed to be the teachers of Israel. And we can tell by not only reading the history, but reading God's Word, reading God's evaluation of things in the book of Ezekiel, that they did not do their job. God says when He resurrects Israel, He is going to make them do their job right this time.
One of the things they did not do right was that they did not teach their fellow Israelites God's way. So they are going to have to do that again. And that sort of thing was happening in this intertestamental period too. But they were aware of this. They were aware that there were problems with the way things had been transmitted down the centuries. And because of their (they would think of it as ignorance, but it was their lack of obedience), but because of that they had gone into captivity to the Babylonians. And when they came back from exile, they determined that they were going to remember. They were going to teach. They were going to make sure that they and their descendants would not make the same mistakes as their ancestors had, which had caused them to be attacked and overcome and taken into slavery. Chief among them (also we find this in Ezekiel), the two things that really got under God's skin was their idolatry and their Sabbath breaking. So when they made up their mind after they came back from exile that they would not allow this to happen again, they emphasized keeping the laws that forbade idolatry and Sabbath breaking.
I have given you the background. Let us go to Nehemiah 8. (Nehemiah might have been the shortest man in the Bible. He was only knee high. Just kidding. He would have trouble with Bildad the "shoe height." Right, terrible Bible jokes and I am not even getting a laugh here.)
Nehemiah 8:1-8 Now all the people gathered together as one man in the open square that was in front of the Water Gate; and they told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded Israel. So Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly of men and women and all who could hear with understanding on the first day of the seventh month. [So that was a Day of Trumpets.]
Then he read from it in the open square that was in front of the Water Gate from morning until midday, before the men and women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the Book of the Law. So Ezra the scribe stood on a platform of wood which they had made for the purpose; and beside him at his right hand stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uijah, Hilkiah, and Masseiah; and at his left hand Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hashbadana, Zechariah, and Meshullam. [I need to take a breath after all that.]
And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God. Then all the people answered "Amen, Amen!" while lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. [Oh boy, look at these.] Also Joshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodijah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, and the Levites [I am glad they did not name all the Levites], helped the people to understand the Law; and the people stood in their place. So they read distinctly from the book, in the Law of God; and they gave the sense, and helped them to understand the reading.
I was purposeful in reading their names because what a lot of historians believe is that these men were the founders of the religious sect known as the Pharisees. This occurred in 445 BC (as close as we can get it). The political party that is called the party of the Pharisees did not develop for nearly 300 years, so it was quite a long time after this. But from this group of leaders arose what are called in the New Testament scribes, and it was the job of the scribes to interpret the Scripture for the people. So they were taking over the job of the Levites. Many of them were probably Levites themselves like Ezra was. But they took for themselves this responsibility to teach the people.
We can see here as it is written in Nehemiah 8, that this started innocently. It was actually a good idea for them to do this and they should be be lauded for standing in the gap and helping the people understand. So this was innocent and sincere in order to teach the people God's way of life under Ezra's supervision. We can only say that it must have been godly. He was a very godly man.
Now let us go to chapter 10. We are going to read verses 28 through 39.
Nehemiah 10:28-39 Now the rest of the people—the priests, the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, the Nethinim, and all who those had separated themselves from the peoples of the lands to the Law of God, their wives, their sons, and their daughters, everyone who had knowledge and understanding—they joined with their brethren, their nobles, and entered into a curse and an oath to walk in God's Law, which was given by Moses the servant of God, and to observe and do all the commandments of the Lord our Lord, and His ordinances and His statutes:
We would not give our daughters as wives to the peoples of the land, nor take their daughters for our sons; if the peoples of the land bring wares or any grain to sell on the Sabbath day, we would not buy it from them on the Sabbath, or on a holy day; and we would forego the seventh year's produce and the exacting of every debt. [so the sabbatical year] Also we made ordinances for ourselves, to exact from ourselves yearly one-third of a shekel for the service of the house of our God: for the showbread, for the regular grain offering, for the regular burnt offerings of the Sabbaths, the New Moons, and the set feasts; for the holy things, for the sin offerings to make atonement for Israel, and all the work of the house of our God.
We cast lots among the priests, the Levites, and the people, for bringing the wood offering into the house of our God, according to our fathers' houses, at the appointed times, year by year, to burn on the altar of the Lord our God as it is written in the Law. And we made ordinances to bring the firstfruits of our ground and the firstfruits of all fruit of all trees, year by year, to the house of the Lord; to bring the firstborn of our sons and our cattle, as it is written in the Law, and the firstborn of our herds and our flocks, to the house of our God, to the priests who minister in the house of our God; to bring the firstfruits of our dough, our offerings, the fruit from all kinds of trees, the new wine and oil, to the priests, to the storerooms of the house of our God; and to bring the tithes of our land to the Levites, for the Levites should receive the tithes of all our farming communities.
And the priest, the descendant of Aaron, shall be with the Levites when the Levites receive tithes; and the Levites shall bring up a tenth of the tithes to the house of our God, to the rooms of the storehouse. For the children of Israel and the children of Levi shall bring the offering of the grain, of the new wine and the oil, to the storerooms where the articles of the sanctuary are, where the priests who minister and the gatekeepers and the singers are; and we will not neglect the house of our God.
So the whole group of returning exiles make this oath, they make a covenant. They call it a curse because they were willing to take upon themselves the curse—what would happen if they failed to do these things. They decided that they would be very careful and do everything that they were supposed to do from the law, down to the most minute things—of making sure they tithed everything down to the "firstfruits of our dough" that they would give to the Levites and then the Levites would have to give their portion to the priests. They made sure—this was a long section, long passage—and they wrote everything down that they would do. They made sure they covered all their bases.
What is important here is what I was just getting to in verse 28. It says, "all those who had separated themselves from the people of the lands to the law of God." These people who did this became known as Hasidim, meaning pious ones. They were the ones that were devoted to God that they would do all these things. And they made this covenant that they would separate themselves from the people of the land. They would do all these things that the Book, not just the book of the law, but the whole law told them to do. Because remember, God had said that they were a holy people and they should be separate from the other peoples. And so this idea of separation became a key to the way they saw themselves. They saw themselves as different.
It is at this point in time that the really big gap between Jew and Gentile started to come to the fore because the Jews themselves regarded themselves as separate from the Gentile peoples. And so they basically put an arm out to keep them away, so that they were no longer doing a great deal of interaction with the Gentiles. And over a certain amount of time, they began to look at the Gentiles as lesser people and themselves as God's people. They began to look at themselves in a not very good way. They became proud.
Now, I have kind of been harping on this separation, because separation (or separated) is the basic meaning of the word Pharisee. They were the separate ones. Originally that they were Pharisees, or separate, was a flattering thing, a flattering title. It was a mark of devotion to God and to the law, because remember, they separated themselves in verse 28 here from the peoples to the law of God. I am sure they consider themselves separated to God, but from its very beginnings they were separated to the law. They began to look at the law on basically equal terms with God. And it got to the point at the time of Jesus, where the law was superior to God, certainly God in the flesh. They thought that the law was superior to Christ Himself. They did not see Him as God in the flesh but you know what I am getting at here.
So over time, over those 450 years between this covenant that they made and the time of Jesus, the Pharisees took on traits that became very negative, the ones we see in the gospels that Christ criticizes quite deeply. And so the meaning of Pharisee devolved from separated to the law in a good sense, to a more critical one. We could probably describe it as they were the separatists or they were the elitists. It took on a negative turn rather than the more positive one of piety, of being pious ones.
As I intimated a few minutes ago, these Hasidim chose to devote themselves to specific parts of the law we had read through there. First, separation from foreigners, and this later included heretics and later included even the base among their own. Second thing they separated themselves to, or devoted themselves to, was strict observance of the Sabbath. We saw that in verse 31. After that we saw this is the third one, they devoted themselves to support of the Temple and its services and rituals, which included all the clean and unclean things, all the washings and so forth, that were part of the instructions about how to keep the Tabernacle and do all those things that God wanted the priests and the Levites to do. And fourth, they devoted themselves to strict observance of the tithing laws. Not only the tithes of their produce, but as I mentioned, the tithes of their dough and all the other tithes that were to be brought to the Levites.
Later, all of these devotions were blown all out of proportion because if you tithe of these things, would it not be more pious and righteous to increase your tithes and be seen doing these tithes and so forth.
So what developed from their interpretation of these laws and others, because they made use of those hides, and made use of the papyrus, and they began to write these things down, all of their ideas about how to keep the law, how to keep it even better so that it reached about 50 volumes of commentary. It became a compendium of minutia about every little thing that one could do, mostly in a negative sense, to break the law, as I mentioned before. Things like if you carry three barley grains on the Sabbath, then you were guilty of working. If you carried a needle on the Sabbath, you were guilty of working; you could carry thread, but if you carried the tool that would pull the thread, then you were working, you were being a tailor, you were doing your job on the Sabbath. Those sorts of little bits of minutia were in this 50 volume compendium of things you could do to sin.
They tried to cover every situation that they could think of so that a person could avoid breaking God's law, even in ignorance. So they wrote all of this down. Now, that is funny that they wrote everything down because this law became known as the oral law. But they did write down this oral law. Evidently they did both, they passed it down orally and they passed it down graphically by writing it.
Supposedly the oral law (this is the legend that began to accrue around it), had been handed down from Moses orally and it had gotten to the prophets and thus down to the great synagogue of their own time. And so even though you could not go back into God's Word to find a lot of this stuff, supposedly the mythology was that all the way back to Moses, the great pious people of the past were following this; this is how they lived, this is probably how they sold it to the next generation. "Well, if Moses did this or if Elijah did this or if Joshua did this or if Isaiah did this then shouldn't we also? Because they were holy prophets and their teaching has come down to us and we've written it down." So this was what became as Pharisaism, the teachings of the Pharisees and the scribes, and has come down to us as Hasidic Judaism. Notice that the word is the same. They became known as the Hasidim. Now the orthodox Jews are Hasidim, they are the same.
Most of it, I am sorry to say because of all the lives that it ruined during those 400 years, especially at the end of it, most of it, as Jesus confirms, was simply the traditions of men, not the law of God. He told them in several places that they put their traditions above the law of God. It was more important to them to keep their own traditions about washings and all these things than it was to do what God actually said in Scripture.
By the way, the washings (I think I have said this before), that they were trying to get Christ's disciples to do were ones that the priest did in the Temple when they were going to do anything with the holy things. It was not enjoined upon the people to do those things as a matter of course, even though hygienically it is a good idea to wash your hands before you eat. But as a matter of rule, of law, that command to wash was only for the priests in their duties in the Tabernacle or Temple precinct.
And so they took a law that was specific and they made it general for everyone. Then over time they criticized and condemned people for not doing what they did not need to do. So, Jesus says, "Look, you're putting your tradition over the law of God. If you read the law of God closely enough you would see that this is not necessary, only in the Temple."
I mentioned that the political party of the Pharisees did not develop until about 300 years after what we read in chapters 8 and 10 of Nehemiah. This was around 165 BC that they became a political party, and it was during the revolt against Antiochus Epiphanies. This was right before the war during that time Antiochus Epiphanies had defiled the Temple and they had to re-cleanse the Temple and rededicate it, which became Hanukkah, the feast of dedication. That was about the time that political Pharisaism began, right at that point.
And even though the Pharisees were never large in numbers, Josephus says that at most there were about 6,000 Pharisees—scribes and Pharisees—even though they were not many, they rose to power. They were the powerful among the Jews. You might want to know why 6,000 people could have that much power. And the reason is, those 6,000 people who were teachers, scribes, devout laymen, most of them, had the backing of the people. They had the backing of the people because the people had learned from them, because they were the ones out there interpreting Scripture for the people.
Their rivals were the Sadducees. These were the wealthy class and the priestly class. And there was an overlap between the wealthy and the priestly and they were considered separated themselves from the common people because of their wealth and because of their holiness, or because of the fact that they were priests. And so the people did not have quite as good a feeling for the Sadducees as they did for the Pharisees, because the Pharisees were among them. Sadducees were in an elite class.
So when there was a clash of any kind of idea about the way the country needed to go, people supported the Pharisees. Or if there was a religious question that had to be answered, they would mostly support the Pharisees because it was from the Pharisees that they were getting their instruction. And so the Sadducees had to be very careful about using their power because if the Pharisees did not like it, they could stir the people up. So there was a balancing act that had to be maintained between Sadducees and Pharisees, much like there is a balancing act now between the Republicans and the Democrats. Some are on top one time, the other ones are on top another time, and they try to maintain this balance to keep the peace.
Back then you also had to throw in the Greeks and the Romans and whoever else happened to be in charge. So a tumultuous period, to say the least.
But as the Pharisees political power began to grow, their righteousness, their piety, if you want, became tainted. Because now they had a vested interest in all sorts of matters beyond just interpreting the law. Now they had a personal stake in things in terms of their power and their prestige. They began to be fearful of losing that power, losing all the influence that they had. And being important men the leaders among them had to keep up appearances. They had to dress in fine clothing. They had to live in big houses. They had to be seen doing certain things because they were leading the people, were they not?
And so the corruption of their power began to occur. Their corruption of their thinking began to occur. And by the time of Jesus, 400 to 450 years after what we saw in Nehemiah 8 and 10, they became the caricature that we see of the Pharisees in the New Testament. Things have gone so far by the time of Jesus' ministry that they were a caricature of their own selves, of their own ideals. And so they made, can I say it, a ridiculous target for Jesus to use as a backdrop for a lot of His teaching. How many times does He point at the Pharisees and basically said they are all wet on this particular matter? Look at what they are doing and this is the right way to do it.
Such was the landscape, the religious landscape that Jesus encountered when He began His ministry. It was a lot to take on, a lot for one man to come up against because now we understand there is 400 or so years of history behind this group. They were established, they were strong, they were well regarded by the people. They were rich and influential. Yet God in the flesh decided to take them on and use them in many ways as a laughing stock. It was also an uphill climb because there was so much understanding that needed to be corrected. It was not just one or two or three little things, there was a whole body of teaching that needed to be set to rights.
In the rest of the sermon, I am going to focus on why He had to make those corrections, which He does in the Sermon on the Mount for the most part. Or at least in the Sermon on the Mount there is a concentration of them. As God in the flesh and the Founder of the church, He had to ensure that His disciples did not carry the errors of the Pharisees into the church and the doctrinal positions of the church under His administration, Christ's administration. He had to make sure that He cut these things out as soon as possible because they were that egregious to the true way of God.
Let us go to II Corinthians 3 now. We are going to read verses 4 through 18. I know this is another long passage, but it is important we see what is going on here. I want to get the whole gist of Paul's argument here.
II Corinthians 3:4-18 We have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves [he is talking about the apostles, the ministry, saying we trust God. These things did not come from us, we are not sufficient enough that these things should come from us], but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
But if the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away, how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious? For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory. For even what was made glorious had no glory in this respect, because of the glory that excels. [He is saying the ministry under the New Covenant is so much greater than the ministry under the Old Covenant that there is no comparison. That is basically what it says.]
Therefore, since we have such hope, we use great boldness of speech—unlike Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the end [or the purpose] of what was passing away. But their minds were hardened. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament, because the veil is taken away in Christ. But even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart. Nevertheless when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.
I could spend an entire sermon on this passage and I am sure other ministers have done it, probably have done series on it, because there is so much here, but a brief summary is going to have to do for this sermon.
Paul makes the distinction, a very clear mark of delineation between the ministry or the service of the letter under the Old Covenant, and its ministry, which he calls the ministry of death and the ministry of condemnation. The New Covenant law, he says, opposed to it, if you will, is of the Spirit and its ministry is life. He also calls it the ministry of righteousness. So one is looked at as very negative—the ministry of the letter, the ministry of death, the ministry of condemnation. Under the Old Covenant, the law's purpose, as Paul shows in Romans 7:7 (we are not going to read that right now), was and still is to identify and reveal sin. That was the law's purpose.
God says, you shall not commit idolatry, you shall keep the Sabbath, you shall honor your father and mother, you go down through the Ten Commandments. You shall not steal, you shall not commit adultery, etc, etc, etc. You all know the Ten Commandments. That the Ten Commandments and other parts of the law were to reveal sin, to show what sin was, and the penalty of sin is death. It is very clear too—the wages of sin is death. That is Romans 6:23.
What we need to understand is the law was not sin. That would be ridiculous to think of the law itself as sin. But it tells us what God considers to be sin. And so it condemns the sinner. It is a tool of condemnation, but it is not sin itself. It is just a way to identify what God considers to be unlawfulness, sin, crime, put your title on it. God tells us in the law what we are to do and what we are not to do. That same law—no changes—which Paul calls back in Romans holy and just and good under God's Spirit; when we take the law and we inject God's Spirit into its keeping, gives life and serves righteousness to God's glory and to ours. The whole thing changes once you add the Spirit.
So the law without the Spirit, that is, the law in the letter and its ministry of the letter, can do nothing but negative things. But you inject the Spirit of the Lord into it, now the law is transformed into a tool of righteousness. Where before it had been merely a tool of condemnation, now it becomes a tool of righteousness. If we were to go to I Corinthians 2:6-15, we would find that the Holy Spirit lifts the veil.
Remember here in II Corinthians 3, it talks about the veil is taken away. Well, it is God's Holy Spirit that does that. It is the Holy Spirit that lifts the veil. It unlocks the mysteries of God. We are no longer blinded. Well, sometimes we are depending on who we are and what we have learned and that sort of thing. But our misconceptions of things can be taken away by God's Spirit. He could make it clear. So it reveals those things that are hard to understand—the deep things of God—so that we can understand even the deepest of the mysteries that are presented in the Book.
As a matter of fact, in I Corinthians 2:16 Paul tells us that with God's Spirit helping us to understand the law of Scripture, we have the mind of Christ. It can take us that far. It is not just a surface understanding of what God thinks. It is true and deep appreciation and use of the very mind of God.
So we can say that the law up until Christ was incomplete. That is probably the nicest way to put it. It was negative in many ways, but it was the Spirit of God given to us which transforms it into a powerful tool of righteousness and love, of goodness, of all those godly things that God wants us to learn and to use. So the spirit of the law which we talk about, Christ bringing the spirit of the law, is the same law, but it is just lifted to a higher level where those with God's Spirit can understand His original intent. Not just for giving it, but for using it. The spirit of the law broadens the law's application and teaches God's own actions and reactions, because the law is God's mind, if you will, in a legal framework.
We could put it another way: His law is a reflection of His character. So through His law He teaches His character to His children, those whom He has given the Holy Spirit. So to God's children who have the Holy Spirit, the law no longer brings death. Remember they have died to sin. They have died to those things there. They have come up in newness of life, so the law does not bring death anymore. It actually encourages life because it works with God's Spirit to train them in righteousness and in the life of God, the way God lives.
Let us go back to Matthew the fifth chapter, verse 17 and we will read down through verse 20. This is where we begin to put what is said in II Corinthians 3 together with my introduction about the Pharisees.
Matthew 5:17-19 "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven."
Now, with the explanation that I have just given you about II Corinthians 3, this paragraph on Christ fulfilling the law should become clear, obvious. The preaching in the gospel and the rule and the ministry of Christ in the church does NOT do away with the law. It does not destroy it. It does not in any way remove the law of God or the prophets or the whole testament! Jesus Christ is very clear here that He did not come to destroy it. He did not come to do away with the law. And, as a matter of fact, He says not even the smallest part—a jot or a tittle, a little diacritical mark—neither one of them will pass until all is fulfilled.
We have to think about what "all" is He talking about here, about being fulfilled. Because He really does not define what "all" is. But if God says all or everything, what does He mean? If you want my interpretation of this, "all" is His purpose. "So assuredly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till My purpose is fulfilled." Everything that God wants to do, certainly with His children, with the church, but it goes beyond the church because we know prophecies say that in the Millennium He is going to convert Israel and the Gentile world and then He is going to raise everybody up in the second resurrection and give them a chance to come to Him as well.
This, His whole plan, covers all humanity and so He is not going to get rid of the law until all humanity has had the opportunity to be saved. Why? Because it is necessary. Why would God, who gave the law in the first place, throw away one of the greatest tools of all for completing the task that He had given Himself to do? It does not make sense. Why chuck that thing that is going to help so many people? Why would He want to handcuff Himself and handcuff all humanity by making it harder to live God's way, to live like Christ and grow in His stature? If there is no standard there to gauge how well one is doing, to know whether one is doing what is right or wrong, it just does not make sense.
Matthew 5:19-20 "Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven."
These two verses shout out to the reader who is really thinking, they shout out that the law, both keeping it and teaching it because He includes both of those here, is vital to entering and enjoying the Kingdom of God. As a matter of fact, one's place in the Kingdom of God depends on how one keeps and teaches the law. As a matter of fact, the way verse 19 reads, He basically says here that a person will not even be there if they do not keep the law and especially if they teach others to break it. That is one way to keep yourself out of the Kingdom. However, a person who keeps and teaches them will be lauded and glorified in God's Kingdom.
Then in verse 20, once He has made these whoppers of statements here in verse 19, Jesus says something that probably shocked the sandals right off His disciples when they heard it. And probably anybody else who was in hearing of what He said. The righteousness of the Pharisees, the Pharisees whom everybody in Judea and Galilee considered to be the standard as their teachers, as their rabbis, as the ones who had taught them the truth, the righteousness of the Pharisees was insufficient. It was not enough. It was too weak to gain entrance to God's Kingdom. You have to be more righteous than the Pharisees.
In other words, what He was saying here without coming right out and saying it, is that Pharisaism was a false, deficient religion. That was a knife to the gut of the Pharisees. Their religion was inadequate. All their manmade rules, all their practices, all their pieties and show of humility were utterly profitless. No matter how sincere they may have been, their religion was a sham. It was hypocritical posturing. It was useless. He had a word for that in the book of Ecclesiastes: Vanity. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." Pharisaism was vanity. Why? They were wrong. Just to put it right out there. They were just flat-out wrong. Their approach, their purposes, and their interpretations, by the time they got to Jesus Christ in His ministry, it was all wrong. Their actions were wrong. Except for their most basic teachings which came directly from Scripture, their doctrines were wrong. Certainly the ones that were based heavily on the oral law.
If you want to, just for kicks, go to Matthew 23 and find out just how wrong they were. Why they were wrong is very easy to answer. We saw it in II Corinthians 3. They were wrong because they did not have God's Spirit. So they were just continuing and amplifying, actually, the ministry of the letter, the ministry of death, the ministry of condemnation. They were simply promulgating, advocating for a religion of this world, a religion of men, not the true religion that God gave under the Old Covenant, because they had so twisted through their own reason what God had said that it becomes something else, something evil. So Jesus has no qualms in Matthew 23 to call them hypocrites, blind guides, fools.
It will be interesting when we get to to Matthew 5:22. An interesting word there, but Jesus calls them in Matthew 23 "whitewashed tombs full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness." You think He was being nice? Hardly. He calls them sons of Gehenna and lawless. He calls them, probably the one we remember the most, serpents and brood of vipers. They received greater condemnation because they had God's law, they had God's covenant, and they had twisted it to their own ends and then they had forced it upon others across all levels of people of Judea and Galilee. And on top of that, they exalted themselves while they were essentially enslaving their fellow Israelites to their unrighteous and unmerciful dictates.
No wonder God castigated the way He did! Jesus Christ could have said, "I gave you the best of everything! The best law, the best that human beings can have and follow, and you ruined it. You took it totally out of context and you twisted it to your own ends and you made other people live by it." Where He says in Matthew 23, you did not lift a finger to help them.
Now, think of this in terms of what I have given in the sermons that I gave on the Beatitudes there. The Pharisees attitudes were diametrically opposed to the attitudes of Jesus Christ, which He shows in the Beatitudes. They were worthy of condemnation just for that, just for their mind and the way they treated other people.
Back in Matthew 5, verses 17 through 20. Notice that in this paragraph Jesus uses the phrase, "I say to you" twice. He uses it in verse 18, where He says, "For assuredly, I say to you" and then in verse 20 He says, "For I say to you." When we run across these things in Scripture, especially in the Gospels, they should be to us like billboards staring us in the face. They should be like sirens going off or trumpets blasting in our ears when we read this. When God incarnate, the Son, says "for I say to you" or "Assuredly I say to you," or in the King James, "Verily, verily, I say unto you," or as the Good News Translation has it, "I am telling you the truth," or "For I tell you the truth," when He says this, He is saying to us, "Listen to what I am about to say. This is important. This is something you need to understand because I value it highly. I am emphasizing, I am underscoring this so you listen to what I say. It's important that you grasp this."
When He says, "I say to you," these are critical points our Savior is trying to get us to understand. So what does He say here? "I say to you," "Assuredly, I say to you," He says, "The law is here to stay. It's not going away! Get that in your heads. I'm not doing away with the law, I am not destroying it. In fact, it's going to last forever."
Secondly, in verse 20, He says acceptable righteousness must be far more than robotic or willful obedience to rules. That is the central tenet of Pharisaism. "If you just keep the rules, you'll be fine. You will not become indebted to God, you will not have sin." But Jesus is coming right out and saying, "That's not enough. Just keeping the rules is not enough." That might shock some people, but that is what He means by "your righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees." As a matter of fact, in modern lingo, He says, "My Father will slam the gate shut against people who think that all that is required to be saved and receiving eternal life is to keep the rules."
What is He knocking down here? In two "For I say unto you" phrases He says, antinomianism is out and legalism is out. Both are wrong principles. You must have the law, so there goes antinomianism. But the law itself is not the means to the Kingdom. There goes legalism. Jesus is saying, "I am looking for a different way."
The apostle Paul and all the apostles had to contend with Pharisaism and legalism throughout their ministries because it was the predominant belief among the Jews, wherever they happened to be. So, they had to constantly fight against this idea that all you needed to do was keep the rules. Paul, fighting this in his own ministry, wrote extensively about justification by faith rather than justification by works. Let us go to Romans the third chapter.
Romans 3:19-31 Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law, no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin. [the law's purpose is something different] But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe.
For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God sent forth to be the propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God has passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. [they do not have a part in it] Or is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? [One could think maybe it does. What purpose is the law?] Certainly not! [he says] On the contrary, we establish the law.
He is agreeing totally with Jesus Christ. The law is not going away. It has a different purpose. It is not for justification, it is not for getting right with God when one comes into the church. It is part of that in terms of a standard that we have to gauge ourselves against, but it is not part of the justification from God. That is through faith, through belief. So one cannot enter the Kingdom, as Jesus said; even be justified before God, as Paul says, through deeds of the law. Because we are all sinners, and we could never pay the price. So if we are trying to get in God's good graces by being righteous, it does not work because we have such a list of sins trailing behind us, that it is impossible for any man to pay for them, even for one!
Justification is by God's magnanimous grace through faith in the blood of Jesus Christ our Savior. That is what puts us in God's good graces, as it were. Because He Himself, wanting to be just and a justifier, saves us through the blood of Jesus Christ. He does it of His own accord. All we have to do is believe and make the commitment to be righteous like He is, to go through the program, to finish the purpose that He has laid out for us. But notice where Paul ends up in verse 31. "Does justification by faith nullify the law?" No way! Not in the least. He says we establish the law.
That word establish is the Greek word histemi. It is Strong's number 2476 and it means "to make stand," it means "to uphold and maintain" or "to fix permanently." I like that one. We make the law fixed permanently, which Jesus had said in Matthew 5. He did not come destroy. It is there until all is fulfilled. The wording here implies that justification by faith reveals the law has a fixed or standing place in God's purpose. It has just been misunderstood by most.
Romans 7:4-6 Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another [he had just been talking about how the law works in a marriage, they are bound until one dies, death severs the law of marriage. He is saying here that death, our baptism, has severed us from the law that held our sins over us.]—even to Him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God. [That is the purpose, we were brought up out of the water, 1) to marry Christ as His bride and 2) to bear fruit to God.]
For when we were in the flesh [that is, before our calling], the passions of sins which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death. [The things that we were doing were just vanity (that word again), our character was not sufficient to bring any kind of life. Everything that we did was just leading towards death, towards sin.] But now [there is a big difference] we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by [the law was doing what it was designed to do at that point, which was to show sin and to convict us of those sins.], so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.
So in baptism we died to Christ, which freed us from the law's hold on us due to our sins. But now that Christ has delivered us or saved us from the penalty of sin through His death, through His own blood, we are free to serve or live in the newness of the Spirit. Do you remember back in II Corinthians 3, it says where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty? Well, now with God's Spirit, we are free to live God's way and to produce the fruit He wanted us to see. Because before we were shackled to our sins, we were on death row. We had no freedom to do anything, but Christ came into our lives, the Father drew us to Him, and we believed and we were justified. And those sins—the shackles—went away. The law had done its purpose there for the unconverted who wanted to be converted. Right? The law had done its purpose.
Now that we have His Spirit, the law takes on a new role. It is no longer the law of death, but it is a law of life! A law of righteousness. The law, once we are converted, is a guide to righteousness, to living as God does. It still points out sin, that part of it has not gone away. It still has that job to point out sin.
But with the help of God's Spirit, we can either remove our longings, our desires to go that sinful way and avoid what is sinful in us. Meaning, we can mortify our flesh, we can get rid of the leavening that is in us, put it out of our nature, because the Spirit gives us strength to do that. And on top of that we can put on the righteousness of Christ, which is the new man. And that is going to please the Father because it is producing the fruit He called us produce.
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