Grace and Truth from Faith
This past Sunday we got back to the Sermon on the Mount in our series in the Gospel of Matthew. Nick preached from Matthew 5:17-20, about Christ coming to fulfill the Law and the prophets. This is an important concept to understand about Jesus and the unbreakable connection between the Old and New Testament; the Law, or God’s standard, is not being abolished or negated, but fulfilled in Christ. This is because the Law and the Prophets pointed forward to Jesus’ coming and His teaching. It’s not as if the Old Testament was God’s Plan 1.0 but it didn’t work so Jesus came to initiate God’s Plan 2.0. The Law and Prophets took God’s redemptive work among his people only so far, and Jesus came to complete it and then push that Good News forward through the life of the church.
But this does leave us with a tension as Nick pointed out Sunday, in that Christ completed the Law and we aren’t held to that impossible standard because He did it for us, and yet He still says that no one can relax any of the commandments in the Law. We see this in the understanding of who Jesus is, put forward by John, in being Grace and Truth in John 1:14
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The tension between Grace and Truth is that God’s word is truth, and it condemns sin, and yet Christ came to atone for our sin and reconcile our broken relationships it caused. There is clearly a balance that we must strike, that can only be done through the Holy Spirit’s work in the hearts and minds of believing saints this side of eternity, who still fight the good fight against sin. Leaning too much upon Grace and relaxing the standard of righteousness the Law reveals sends us down the slope of Antinomianism (or lawlessness), which Paul explicitly calls out in Romans 6:1-4; leaning too much upon the Law or rules without Grace for our inevitable missteps tumbles us down the slope of legalism, which Paul also attacks in Romans 2:25-29 among other passages.
This idea sets up the “takedown” verse at the end of our passage this week. 5:20 “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Throughout much of the New Testament, especially within the Gospel accounts, the “scribes and Pharisees” are being severely criticized, and with good reason, as they are the posterboys for Truth without Grace legalism. It’s easy to sit in our position of historical clarity and point fingers at their failures, but not many of us would have been any different. It’s human nature to want to follow the accepted religion of the day, especially if it gives you a clear set of rules to follow so you can feel like you’ve checked all the boxes and you’re in the clear, at least enough to point fingers at those who clearly can’t check as many boxes as you.
The Pharisees were well known for their rule following and finger pointing at those they deemed didn’t measure up, which is why so much of the Sermon on the Mount is a takedown for that way of thinking and living. Their hearts did not line up with their actions. They were “whitewashed tombs” (Matt. 23:27-28), unable to truly understand what God means when He says “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matt. 9:13; Hosea 6:6). “Exceeding the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, then, is a matter of obeying God from a fundamentally changed heart. This is a heart that reaches beyond the legalistic boundaries of the Law to its compassionate purposes, while simultaneously recognizing its own spiritual poverty apart from God’s mercy (5:3, 6–7).” [GTB]
The Bottom Line is this: The Gospel brings total being transformation to a person, where both heart motivations and our behavior are moving toward Christ-likeness. As we continue in our Matthew Series, may we have our hearts and minds be increasingly molded by the work of the Spirit in forming us like our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 12:1-2).