Life of Christ – Part 3

By Jonathan | April 28, 2015

Jesus and the Law of Purity

The Sermon on the Mount is arguably the greatest sermon recorded. This message was probably a collection of sayings common to Jesus. We see similar phrases and ideas spread through the travel log in Luke 9-19. But here in Matthew 5-7 we get it all together, and the message is powerful enough to knock you over. If by the end you do not feel as small as a thumb tack or as lost as a non-believer then you are not really reading the sermon.

First, he smacks you in the face with the Beatitudes thus separating out those who are in this Kingdom of God he has been preaching from those who are not in the Kingdom. It is the line in the sand and a boarder line between two nations. Are you in? Or, are you out?

Then, he does a punch to the gut when he reinterprets the Law of Moses with his “You have heard that it was said. . . But I say to you . . . .” One by one he goes through laws that you may think you follow. Have I committed adultery this week – you may ask yourself. Nope! Oh wait, did you lust after that person? Smh, yes. Then you’ve committed adultery. Have you murdered someone today? I can safely say no. Well, what about what you said regarding ________. You murdered them in your heart.

Next, Jesus goes to the public eye with a right jab in chapter six. Do you pray so others look at you? Do you show off how much you tithe or give to others? Do you find glory and recognition in what you do here on earth? Because if you do, then you will not be rewarded for your righteous acts in heaven.

Finally, with a sweep of the leg Jesus has you on your backside by the end of chapter seven when he deals with internal matters. Condemning others leaves you condemned. Bear fruit or risk the axe. Build your house on the Rock or be swept away.

I don’t think Jesus wanted to beat us up with his message like described above. Yet that is what conviction from a righteous judge does to those with impure hearts. And his message here is not about doing this or doing that to the letter of the Law. The issue at hand is much deeper much more rudimentary to our very essence. It is about the purity of the heart. Paul is going to pick up this same idea when he talks about the “circumcision of the heart.” For Jesus, the law of God should have always resided in the heart.

So let me say this one thing now, the law of Moses was never for earning salvation. It was to keep the covenant between God and Israel. It was for continued relationship. They already thought of themselves of receiving God’s grace and favor by the mere fact they are God’s people and he brought them out of Egypt. Why would they need to earn it through law keeping?

With that being said, let us return to the situation at hand in Jesus’ day. They are all about law keeping because they have learned from their past. They broke the Torah or Law of Moses and that led God to destroy them through the agents of Assyria and Babylon. The Jews did not want that to happen again. In fact, they wanted to restore the Kingdom of old and was awaiting the messiah – or king – to restore Israel. So they thought that if they kept the law perfectly then that would lead to the coming of the Messiah.

The problem then with any law keeping is you put up a fence around you to protect yourself from others. The Jews did just that. They were putting up a fence called Torah around them to protect them from the world when they were to be the ones to spread the message of YHWH and be a light to the world. Following legalistic rules with good intentions winds up condemning you in the end and that is what the Pharisees and Scribes are guilty of in the gospels. That is why Jesus sends the woes upon them in Matthew 23.

Here, Jesus is saying put the law on your heart. Do not use it as a fence to protect you from others. When you put it on your heart then what ever you come in contact with becomes clean. For whatever enters a man becomes filtered through a pure heart and comes out clean. Then you are able to go into the dark and defiled parts of the world and be a light to the lost.

The Sermon on the Mount is not about rule keeping. It’s about purifying everything you come into contact with. And if we approach life with this idea that you are there to purify what has gone terribly terribly wrong then imagine what transformation we could cause in the world around us.