What do you think Jesus meant when he said,
“For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the saw, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. “(Matthew 5:20)
Jesus tells us what he meant Matthew chapter 15:
“Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is ‘devoted to God,’ they are not to ‘honor their father or mother’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! You nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you.
These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules. (Matthew 15:3-8)
Jesus was saying “You people still don’t get it. You have completely misunderstood the purpose of God’s laws.”(my paraphrase of the situation in Matthew Chapter 15)
According to Jesus when we focus so much on the letter of God’s laws and our own religious rules we miss the point. And unless we realize that true righteousness comes from within the heart then we are not welcome in the kingdom of God.
Over and over again in the Gospels you will find Jesus getting frustrated when people held so tightly to the letter of God’s law that they missed the spirit of the law. (Read Matthew chapter 23 to see Jesus really let them have it. Some of the most harsh and angry words ever spoken by the Lord against the church leaders are contained in this chapter.)
The spirit of the law is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)
Consider Matthew Chapter 12.
“At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.”
He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven’t you read in the Law that the priests on Sabbath duty in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and yet are innocent? I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’[you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” (Matthew 12:1-8)
I fear much of evangelical Christianity is missing the point. Jesus teaches us that rules have nothing to do with true righteousness yet it seems all the world ever hears from the evangelical community is condemnation. All the world knows is what we are against.
Without love and the fruits of the Spirit we are missing the whole point of why Christ came.
Some will say that these old covenant rules should still be looked to as a standard by which we are to live. That might be true from a secular standpoint. We need laws based on morality for a civil society. But the truth is focusing on religious rule keeping breeds hypocrisy and more sinful behavior. No one can ever meet the expectations which we set and so that leads to dishonesty and therefore hypocrisy.
The Apostle Paul wrote that the law actually arouses sinful passions in us like when you tell a child that he cannot do something and that makes him want to do it all the more.
For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. (Romans 7:5)
But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. (Romans 7:6)
But how can we do this? How can we be released from the chains of the law? How can righteousness come from our hearts when scripture teaches that our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked? (Jeremiah 17:9)
The answer is in Jesus Christ. Our righteousness and the accompanying freedom come from Christ and His fulfillment of the law.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.”(2 Corinthians 5:17)
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and werejoicein hope of the glory of God. (Romans 5:1-2)
Thanks be to God, who delivers us through Jesus Christ our Lord!
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