This week we are continue our summer teaching series, A Kingdom Vision. The rest of Matthew 5 in the Sermon on the Mount continues a series of seemingly disconnected blocks of teaching from Jesus. Well, they share a stylistic connection, but beyond that, they seem independent of one another. But something Jesus says at the beginning (and which we are going to talk about today) and the end, tie them all together in a way that is as unexpected as it is difficult to hear. Brace yourself for what comes next because it is going to challenge some of your most fundamental operating code. Let’s talk about how we don’t get into God’s kingdom and why that matters so much.

An Elevated Standard

Let me start out of the gate here by saying something you have probably never heard a preacher say in a sermon, and definitely not as his opening statement. Are you ready for this? Here goes: My goal this morning is to make you feel discouraged and depressed. Aren’t you glad you came today? But that’s okay, next week…I’m going to make it even worse! I’ll bet you can’t wait to hear that now. (But you definitely want to be here, because we have a special gift for guys next week about which I am personally very excited.) 

But we’re talking about the Bible. Isn’t that supposed to be encouraging and uplifting? I have two responses to that objection. First, if you really believe that, I’m going to have to question if you’ve ever actually read it. There’s plenty of material in here that is neither encouraging nor uplifting in the least. It is designed and intended to leave you feeling defeated and like there isn’t any hope in the world except to throw yourself entirely on the mercy of God. This leads me to the second response. Before we can get to the good news of the Gospel, we have to make it through the hard news of reality. You can’t be saved until you are willing to admit you’re lost, and some people need to be convinced they are lost so they can embrace their need to be found. Until we realize there isn’t any hope but Jesus we aren’t going to reach very hard for that hope. 

There’s one other response to this objection. What Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount and which we are going to look at together today and next week would have been received by His audience as incredibly discouraging. Are you ready to find out what He said? 

This morning, we are in the second part of our summer teaching series, A Kingdom Vision. All this summer we are taking a deep dive into Jesus’ most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, spanning Matthew 5-7. We are aiming to gain a better understanding of the many, many remarkable, world-changing things Jesus had to say over the course of this series of teachings, but perhaps even more significantly than that, we are working to see what Jesus had to say here not simply as a loosely connected group of teachings, but as a single, cohesive vision of what life in God’s kingdom looks like. Proclaiming the kingdom of God was Jesus’ core mission on earth. In these words, we find the clearest and most compelling vision of what that kingdom will be like that has even been laid out for us. 

Last week we started things off by looking at two passages that are often seen as not having a whole lot to do with one another. The first is probably given the label “The Beatitudes” in your Bible, and in it Jesus opens His sermon by describing the kind of people who are able to enjoy the blessings of God’s kingdom. Following this, in a section typically labeled something like, “Believers are Salt and Light,” Jesus calls His followers—that is, those who are living with and enjoying the blessings of God’s kingdom—to live out their commitment to Him publicly. What we discovered together is that these are not two different teaching blocks as they appear to be. Jesus is telling us both what His followers look like, but also what they are to be doing. If we are enjoying the blessings of living God’s way, we need to understand that those blessings are designed to flow through us to the people around us. Or, as we put it then, the blessings of living God’s way aren’t just for us. 

Well, having established the who and the what of God’s kingdom, in what follows, Jesus starts to unpack the how. Or, to put that another way, Jesus starts to unpack the how not. We are going to break up this next part over this week and next. We need to do that because otherwise it’s a really big block of text that we are not going to be able to give nearly the attention it deserves. We also need to do that, though, because the weight of what Jesus has to say here is pretty heavy and we don’t need to be totally overloaded by it. Jesus offers a whole bunch more details about what life in God’s kingdom looks like, and these are all individually worth studying carefully, but like last time, the bigger picture is at least as important to catch as the details. If we miss the big picture, we run the risk of interpreting the details incorrectly and actually in ways that go exactly against Jesus’ larger point. More on that next time. For now, let’s take a little bit of this text and see what kind of sense we can make out of it. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, join me in Matthew 5:17. 

One of the things that Jesus seemed to have a knack for was saying things that got the religious leaders of His day all fired up. Over and over again He said or did things that seemed to challenge some of their most deeply held beliefs about how a relationship with God works. The reason for this was that He was trying to help people see beyond the words themselves—although He was abundantly clear that the words do in fact matter a great deal—to the heart behind them. If you missed the heart, the likelihood that you got the words wrong went way up. What we see Jesus doing in this next section is an attempt to allay some of those fears on the part of His opponents, but in a way that was still pointing forward to where He wanted them to go. 

Look at this with me: “Don’t think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.” Now, again, Jesus had said and done some things that suggested abolishing the Law or the Prophets might actually be His goal. He had made some statements about the Sabbath in particular (and would yet do that some more in the next few months of His ministry) that rubbed observant Jews the wrong way. He wouldn’t make His disciples follow the rules about ritual handwashings before eating. He made some comments about the dietary laws that seemed to undermine them. He needed to set the record straight. So He made His goals plain: “I have not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets.” 

Now, the “Law” refers to the first five books of our Bibles. That was foundational for the people of Israel. It was central to their identity. The “Prophets” refers to the various books of prophecy in the Old Testament. These weren’t foundational in the same way as the “Law” was for the Jews, but they were significant in that they gave the people hopeful clues as to God’s plans for them in the future, and especially about the coming of the Messiah. (The rest of the Old Testament was simply called “the Writings.”) Jesus wanted the people to understand that undermining or abolishing these was not His goal. Fulfilling them was. 

Of course, even in saying that, Jesus was making some pretty bold claims. First, the fact that He clarifies that He didn’t come to abolish them suggests that He considered Himself to have sufficient authority to do just that. If I gave you the reassurance that I did not come to abolish the Constitution, you’d either laugh at me or roll your eyes or both because I don’t have anything like the kind of authority necessary to do something like that. The only kind of a person to make such a claim as Jesus is implicitly making here is either lying, crazy, or being totally honest and we had better listen to Him. Well, Jesus wasn’t crazy, and the resurrection proves He wasn’t lying. You can come to your own conclusions from there. 

The other bold claim Jesus makes here comes in the second part of v. 17. He didn’t come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but rather He came to fulfill them. Well, you only make a claim like that if you believe yourself to have the ability to back it up. Jesus understood Himself and His mission as fulfilling the covenant God made with His people through Moses and which had been in place for well over 1,000 years. When you fulfill a covenant—or a contract for that matter—the covenant or contract is no longer in place anymore. At the most it gets replaced by something new. 

In other words, in this first statement here, Jesus is making a claim to have incredible authority—God-like authority even. Maybe the crowd gathered there listening to Him didn’t register that claim, but we shouldn’t overlook it. We shouldn’t overlook it because it has a profound impact on the rest of what follows in this chapter. Because Jesus is God, He gets to set the standards someone has to meet in order to gain access to His kingdom. I hope you are paying attention, because He’s about to set those standards for us. 

Before He does that, though, He doubles down on His commitment to the Law. Verse 18 now: “For truly I tell you, until heaven and heart pass away, not the smallest letter or one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all things are accomplished.” Again, don’t miss what Jesus is saying here. He was reassuring them on His commitment to the Law. Heaven and earth will pass away before even the tiniest bit of it—one jot or tittle, as the King James memorably puts it—will “pass away” and be set aside as irrelevant. In the original Greek, Jesus is referring to the Hebrew letter yod, and the little dots that tell you what vowel sounds are being used since the Hebrew alphabet is all consonants. 

Great, so then the Law is permanent. Well, not so fast. Did you pay attention to everything Jesus said there? None of the Law is going to pass away…until. Until implies that at some point in the future, that is going to change, or that there is some set of conditions that will cause it to change. And what is this set of conditions? “Until all things are accomplished.” What things? The requirements necessary to fulfill the Law. 

Have you caught what is going on here yet? In these two verses Jesus basically says the same thing in two different ways. Nothing is going to happen to the Law until the time is right. The covenant God made with His people is going to remain solidly in place until the time arrives for it to be fulfilled. In other words, that old covenant was solid. Nothing was going to happen to it…until the time came for something to happen to it. When that time arrived, it was going to be fulfilled and replaced. 

Until that time, though, the Law really did matter. It really was the way to get to God. That’s what Jesus goes on to emphasize next. “Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” If you want to be considered great by God, do what He says and teach others to do the same thing. It’s pretty simple. We sometimes make the idea of getting God to think much of us out to be this big, complicated endeavor that is going to require a ton of effort on our part. The truth, though, is that anybody can achieve that status simply by doing what He says. If you want God to consider you great, find a command and obey it and help somebody else do that too. 

So, what all of this sounds like so far at a quick listen is that Jesus is building up the importance—the necessity even—of the Law in enabling us to have a right relationship with God. For Jesus’ audience, if you wanted a right relationship with God, keeping the Law was the way to go. There was no other way. This was it. 

And, no doubt, many of them felt like they were doing at least a pretty okay job at it. We often feel about the same way don’t we? I mean, sure, we’ve done some things that weren’t right, but surely a few bad deeds in a sea of good ones can’t matter that much to God. We’re all basically good people, aren’t we? At least all of us except for the really bad people. And everyone knows that good people go to heaven. God grades on a curve. He’s merciful. That was one of Jesus’ big themes. At least, that’s all how the world around us thinks. But if we fall into this kind of a pattern of thinking—a pattern of thinking that was common in that day and has stubbornly persisted even in the church through to our own era—we are falling right into Jesus’ trap. 

After boosting up the importance of the Law, and of the necessity of the Law to achieve greatness in the kingdom of God—albeit with a couple of subtle caveats that all is not as it seems—what Jesus says in v. 20 is shocking. It’s not nearly as shocking to us as it should be, but rest assured this made all the jaws of all the members of His audience here hit the dirt with a resounding thud. Listen to this: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.”

Do you understand what He’s saying here? The scribes and Pharisees were part of the upper crust of first century Jewish religion. The Sadducees were higher up the political food chain, but in terms of their commitment to the Law and their scrupulously keeping every part of it, no one matched the Pharisees and the scribes. They studied the Law more than you did. They knew the Law better than you did. They kept the Law better than you did. And everybody knew this about them. We often consider them the “bad guys” of the Gospel accounts, and not without good reason. They were some of Jesus’ primary, most intractable antagonists. But in that day, they were highly respected and recognized for their commitment to God. People may not have liked them, but there was no doubt they were closer to God than the average Joe; much closer, in fact. For Jesus to have just declared that those who are great in the kingdom of God are the ones who do what He says, and then to turn around and declare that no one gets into God’s kingdom unless their righteousness (that is, their being right with God, which in the people’s minds meant keeping the Law) exceeds that of the two most righteous groups in the land would have left all their brains returning a does not compute error message. 

Why would Jesus do this? Why would He clarify the importance of the Law, only to raise the standard of keeping it way, way beyond what anyone could possibly manage to achieve on their own? Because He wanted us to understand something. He wanted us to understand precisely that, in fact. He wanted us to understand that we can’t meet God’s standard on our own. We can’t make ourselves good enough for God by sufficient effort. Or, to get a little more personal with that, your efforts to make yourself right with God aren’t enough. I told you today was going to be hard. 

Okay, but what are we supposed to do with this? Well, nothing just yet. As we are going to see next time, Jesus is about to double down on this idea in a really big way that makes it, frankly, even harder. For now, though, it’s enough to know that our very relationship with God hinges on our wrapping our minds around just how utterly insufficient to the task of getting right with God we really are on our own. Your efforts to make yourself right with God aren’t enough. Until you know that—really know that—you won’t ever enter into a saving relationship with Jesus. 

And consider for a minute just how countercultural of an idea this still is today. It blew the minds of Jesus’ original audience for sure. But when we actually grasp what He’s saying here, it’s a shock to our systems too. We live in a world that tells us every single day that we are good enough. We should think of ourselves as good enough. We should banish negative thoughts. We are smart. We are capable. We are good people. And if we don’t believe that, the problem isn’t with us, per se, it’s with our thinking. We don’t need to fix ourselves, we’re already good enough. We need to change our self-talk. Even though it was given satirically and meant to mock the self-help culture, Al Franken’s SNL character, Stuart Smalley’s advice is treated like a gospel truth: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” 

For folks who have spent much time marinating in that kind of an environment, the message of the Gospel plays like an instrument that is jarringly out of tune. This is not because the end of the Gospel message is that God loves you and sent His Son to lay down His life on your behalf such that when you place your faith in Him you can have eternal life. Everybody’s mostly happy to hear that part. It’s the first part and the middle part that I cut out of that statement that give us trouble. The middle part I cut is that Jesus’ life laid down on our behalf was to pay the price for our sins—a price we couldn’t pay on our own. That points back to the first part: we are sinners in need of saving. 

That idea implies two things we don’t like to hear. Number one, we aren’t the good people we prefer to imagine ourselves to be. By defining us as sinners apart from Christ what the New Testament authors mean is not that we are good people who occasionally do bad things. They mean we are broken people for whom good things are the occasional exception to the otherwise unbroken record of evil. Nobody likes to hear that, and for most people, until they have finally run so hard into the walls of reality because of their sinful choices that they know beyond a shadow of doubt that unless they get help they are utterly without hope, they are going to be hard sells on the idea.

Number two, the idea that we need saving necessarily implies that we can’t save ourselves. The problem here is that in every single one of the stories we tell about people overcoming incredible challenges to find the life they’ve always wanted, we are the ones who save ourselves in the end. Sure, we may get a hand up along the way, and that hand up may come from a divine source like God, but at the end of the day, we are the ones who do the hard work of getting where we want to go. Yet Jesus here was clear: “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.” His audience understood and we need to as well that nobody’s righteousness surpassed that of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus wasn’t just making the standard high here; He was making it impossible. Your efforts to make yourself right with God aren’t enough. Neither are mine. Nobody’s are. That’s the point. Getting into God’s kingdom to enjoy and share all those blessings like we talked about last week isn’t something we can do on our own. Your efforts to make yourself right with God aren’t enough. 

But hearing that like this is one thing. Sitting here in church like this we are all supposed to be nodding along in agreement with the Gospel condemnation the preacher is throwing our way. After all, that’s what the church is for, isn’t it? To make us feel badly about ourselves? Number one, no, and if that’s all the church is doing, then it’s not doing its job correctly. But that aside, nodding along here and actually rooting this thinking entirely out of our hearts and minds so that the poison of self-righteousness doesn’t keep us distant from God when we don’t have to be is tricky business. This is why Jesus goes on from here to offer up six different examples of places we think we are doing pretty good in our relationship with God only to reemphasize the point over and over again that our efforts to make ourselves right with God aren’t enough. That’s all going to have to be a conversation for next time. 

For now, I want you to leave here today knowing two things with absolute certainty. First, and to repeat the point, your efforts to make yourself right with God aren’t enough. They never will be. Second, that’s okay, because the burden of getting right with God has been lifted by somebody else. That somebody is Jesus, and when you are willing to actually place your trust in Him, He’ll do all the heavy lifting for you. When you give up the burden of putting forth pointless effort to achieve a goal you aren’t ever going to accomplish on your own anyway, and receive with gratitude the gift—the grace—Jesus has prepared for you, then you can begin enjoying gratefully living a life that reflects the grace you have been given. Doesn’t that sound better? Your efforts to make yourself right with God aren’t enough. Come back next week, and we will explore that idea a little more and land with both feet on the most important truth of all.