We gotta be better than “the righteous.”

Matthew 5.17-20, Luke 16.16-17.

Right after Jesus speaks on salt and light in his Sermon on the Mount, and tells his followers we need to be the world’s light, he says this about how we’re to live in order to be that salt and light: We gotta be righteous.

And by “righteous” Jesus does not mean we have to conform to popular Christian culture. We don’t have to be “righteous” the way conservative church people define righteousness. He doesn’t demand we act like they do, think like they do, dress like they do, vote like they do, or otherwise try to fit their standards. Jesus has a standard. What’s his standard? Well, the thinking and behavior he spells out in his Sermon on the Mount. He expects that of us. If the people of our churches are doing that—well they should, and good for them! But if the people of our churches are doing no such thing, and think they’ve found some other path to righteousness, like cheap grace or dispensationalism, I gotta warn you: Jesus doesn’t know them. And really it’s not safe to be among them. Leave, and join a better church.

If we wanna be righteous, we gotta trust Jesus. And Jesus says we gotta follow him. And—and here’s the part where you’re gonna see a lot of Evangelicals balk—we gotta also observe the Law of Moses. Certain commands still apply! Some don’t, because they only ever applied to ancient Hebrews. Some have clearly been superseded by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; the ritual cleanliness rules are an obvious example. But loving our neighbors or the Ten Commandments never stopped being valid; never stopped defining whether we’re right and wrong in God’s sight.

So if we wanna follow Jesus, we can’t be one of those Christians who think we’ve found a loophole which gets us out of obeying his commands and teachings in the scriptures. Israel’s scribes and Pharisees were notorious for their loopholes, and applied ’em so liberally Jesus couldn’t help but call them hypocrites, who pretended to be devout but were as pagan and evil as any Greek or Roman. Jesus expects way, way better of his students and followers.

His words, not mine!—

Matthew 5.17-20 KWL

17“None of you should think

that I come to tear down the Law or the Prophets.

I don’t come to tear down,

but build up.

18For amen!—I promise you:

Heaven and earth might pass away,

but neither one yodh nor one dot

ought ever pass away from the Law;

not until everything’s done.

19So whoever might annul the smallest of these commands,

and might teach this to people:

They will be called least in heaven’s kingdom.

And whoever might do and teach them,

this one will be called great in heaven’s kingdom.

20For I tell you this:

Unless your rightness superabounds—

more than scribe and Pharisees—

you might not enter heaven’s kingdom.”

Old Testament dispensationalists.

Much of the reason Jesus had to say this, is because there were certain Pharisees who claimed the coming Messiah would inaugurate a new dispensation in which the Law was abolished. They had in mind what the LORD told Jeremiah:

Jeremiah 31.31-34 CSB

31“Look, the days are coming”—this is the LORD’s declaration—“when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. 32This one will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors on the day I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt—my covenant that they broke even though I am their master”—the LORD’s declaration. 33“Instead, this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days”—the LORD’s declaration. “I will put my teaching within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34No longer will one teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know me, from the least to the greatest of them”—this is the LORD’s declaration. “For I will forgive their iniquity and never again remember their sin.”

Pharisees figured when Messiah comes, he’ll bring a new covenant with him, in which we won’t follow the Law anymore; we’ll follow our hearts. So the Law can be set aside, because we won’t need it any longer. We’ll know the Law—it’ll be embedded in us like a pacemaker.

And yeah, that time will come. Historically, Christians have believed this radical transformation of the human heart happens at the second coming. But it’s not yet. Right now, we’re still suffering from the effects of human depravity; we’re still learning to follow the Holy Spirit and produce his fruit. We still need the Law to point us in the right direction. Even though God’s kingdom has come near.

Luke 16.16-17 KWL

16“The Law and the Prophets

are preached as good news until John.

Since then, God’s kingdom is preached as good news,

and everybody forces their way into it.

17It’s easier for heaven and earth to pass away

than one dot of the Law to fail.

When Jesus returns, we Christians will be radically transformed, with new bodies which won’t have desperately wicked human hearts in ’em. Jr 17.9, 1Co 15.42-50 We’ll have Christ Jesus’s nature in us—a human nature which isn’t warped by sin.

But again: Hasn’t happened yet.

Problem is, a number of naïve Christians are entirely sure the Holy Spirit has already, successfully, completely done that. So they follow their hearts all the time, and not Jesus. Don’t know the scriptures; don’t know “the Law and the Prophets,” which is what people called the scriptures in Jesus’s day. Don’t know the Old Testament; don’t know the New. Don’t figure they need to: The Law was written on their hearts, right? They presume what their heart wants, Jesus must surely want; hasn’t he transformed their hearts? And they slap Christian labels on all their evil, do as they please, and think they’re righteous.

Their evil behavior, hypocritically but poorly disguised as righteousness, makes it clear we still need the Law, the Sermon on the Mount, and the writings of the prophets and apostles, to tell us how God still defines right and wrong.

Now yes, we do need all these scriptures together—not just the Law, not just the Sermon—to help us better understand what Jesus means. And we need the Holy Spirit to guide us lest we twist the scriptures. And we need fellow Christians, and Christian traditions, to keep us pointed in the right way. If you were hoping to strip off any of these things because you feel they’re getting in the way… well you’re absolutely right; if you wanna be selfish or wanna sin, they’re definitely getting in your way; they’re meant to. But if you legitimately wanna follow Jesus, the more helps the better!

Law and grace work together.

Like Jesus said, he didn’t come to abolish the Law, but build it up. Properly he said πληρῶσαι/pliróse, “to fill,” and some bibles translate this “fulfill”—and there’s a really warped way certain Christians treat the word “fulfill.”

Y’know how Jesus fulfills Messianic prophecies? These prophecies used to be something people watched out for, waiting for the time Messiah would be born and fulfill them; kinda like Christians likewise look for End Times prophecies to be fulfilled. But once fulfilled, we don’t have to look out for them anymore. And these Christians claim the Law is the same way. Jesus has arrived, and fulfills the Law same as those prophecies… so we don’t need to look out for the Law anymore. Don’t need to heed it. Don’t need to guard it. Just need to follow Jesus, our hearts, and the Christian crowd.

Of course everything else Jesus said in this passage, indicates that’s not at all what he means. He’s come to fill it. That means he fills in the missing parts of it. He makes sense of it. He explains to us—as he does in the Sermon on the Mount and his other teachings—how it was always meant to work. He had to dig it out from under Pharisee traditions and loopholes, and use it to reveal to us God’s goodness and character.

See, by itself the Law can only do so much. Fr’instance we can’t have a relationship with the Law—not that certain Christians don’t try to have close personal relationships with their bibles. But it’s a book. It’s an inanimate object. It’s very limited in what it does. It can tell us what God thinks about ritual sacrifice, slavery, which foods to eat… yet it says nothing about gun control, time management, how democracies oughta work, which musical style God likes best, and who specifically he wants me to pray for today. There are a lot of blanks in it.

These blanks are meant to be filled by the Holy Spirit himself.

But same as the Pharisees, Christians typically fill in these blanks with our deductions. Whenever the bible is moot, we cherry-pick scriptures so we can create a “biblical principle,” and claim that’s God’s will. Some of us even try to enforce our deductions upon others. Trouble is, these added rules bind people, not free them. And they always reflect the person issuing the rules, not God. The more wicked the individual, the more warped the interpretation.

In comparison, Jesus came to set us free. Jn 8.31-36 Rather than drive ourselves bonkers ’cause we haven’t got the Law perfect, Jesus grants us grace: Follow the Law as best you can. And if you can’t, don’t sweat it. Pick yourself up and try again.

Too many lawless Christians teach us to not try again. They even claim any attempt to obey the Law rejects grace. They take the scriptures where Paul rebuked the Galatians for thinking they could be saved by Law, Ga 3.1-4 and claim it also means we shouldn’t follow the Law in the first place. Yep, the opposite of what Paul meant. He himself taught it’s wrong to figure since we’re not saved by Law, it’s okay to sin now. Ro 6.15 Yet that’s what many a dispensationalist teaches.

This is why Jesus pointed out anyone who ignores his Law, and teaches others to ignore it, will be least in his kingdom. Mt 5.19 Thanks to God’s grace, such people might get into his kingdom anyway!—but because they reject God’s revelation in the Law, and ignore God’s revelation through his prophets, they’re gonna suck as Christians. They won’t be the sort of people God wants to populate his kingdom with. They’ll be in it, they’ll be saved, but they’ll be as raw as a last-second deathbed convert. They’ll still have a lot of growing up to do.

Conversely, anyone who knows God’s Law, obeys it, and teaches it, will be considered great. Mt 5.19 After all, Jesus is God: He’s the very same LORD Almighty who gave his Law to Moses at Mt. Sinai. It’s why he can teach so authoritatively on it: It’s Jesus’s Law. He knows what he meant by it, and how it’s to be applied. Namely in love and grace, not legalism.

So don’t assume Jesus came to dissolve the Law and Prophets. Learn from them. Learn how to apply them rightly. Follow Jesus, not the crowd. Be better than the crowd.