"What God's Law Requires" (Matthew 22:34-40)

Transcript:

Well, if you will open with me, our scripture reading from tonight is From Matthew, chapter 22, verses 34 through 40. If you're using a Pew Bible, this is on page 984. 984. Hear now the word of the Lord From Matthew, chapter 22, verses 34 through 40. But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him, Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?

And he said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. This is the word of the Lord.

You may be seated.

And as you're taking your seats, let's join our hearts together in prayer tonight. Gracious Father, as we study your word, we pray that the voice of your law would speak clearly the requirement that is put upon us. And, Father, as we see how far short we fall of the requirement that you have laid down for us in your law, I pray that the Gospel of Jesus would shine brightly. Father, we pray that you would fill us with your spirit, that we might have hearts to understand and eyes to see and ears to hear all that is contained in the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, your son and our Savior. It's in Christ's name that we pray.

Amen.

The great question that we are considering tonight in light of our catechism is, can we keep the law? Can we keep God's law? Now, this is a very practical question because people are always instinctively trying to answer this question. If you ask someone, are you a Christian, or you ask someone you know, if you were to die tonight, where would you go? You get a lot of questions that are indirectly, one way or another.

They might not put it in those words, but people are wrestling with that question, trying to say that indeed they think that they have kept the law of God well enough. Usually it sounds something like this. You know, I think overall, a pretty good person. Now, what the Scriptures teach for us is that Christianity, in fact, very strongly contends against that idea. Christianity does not start with, you are a Christian, you will go to heaven, if indeed you are a pretty good person, or you have kept the law well enough, you've kept the high points well enough, and maybe have fudged on some of the lower points, but really, the high Points, you're doing really, really well, and that's good enough.

Christianity starts in an entirely different place. Namely, that you are not a pretty good person. You are indeed a wicked, evil sinner. You cannot keep God's law. You fall short of God's law because of that.

If you are to enter into the kingdom of heaven, it will not be because of how well you have done to keep the law. It will be only because of how well Christ has kept the law for you and whether you have laid hold to Christ and his righteousness by faith. Well, tonight we consider the infinitely weighty burden of the law from Matthew, chapter 22. And our theme tonight is this, that love is the fulfillment of the law. Love is the fulfilling of the law.

We'll look at this passage in three parts. One, ranking the commandments. Ranking the commandments. Number two, reunifying the commandments. Reunifying the commandments.

And then number three, reconciling the law and the prophets. So we'll start with ranking the commandments in verses 30, 34, 36. In verse 34, we read about the Pharisees having heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees. And the story there is, if you look up the page, it's the story of when the Sadducees asked Jesus about the resurrection. The Sadducees don't believe in the resurrection, and so they tried to trick Jesus in the resurrection.

And that's a tremendous passage. That's actually one of my favorite passages. After studying that, maybe another day for another sermon. But the Pharisees, they heard that he had silenced the Sadducees and they gathered together. This guy can't get away with it.

This guy can't be continued to let, to continue to influence people. If the Sadducees, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so the enemy of them is my friend, or they're my friend, even though they are bitterly opposed because Jesus is their enemy. Together, if our the enemy, my enemy, can't take my enemy down, then we're going to have to raise up to try to do the trick, to try to trip Jesus up in his teaching. And so they gather together and they consult and they decide on a plan. And we read that one of them a lawyer.

Now don't think of a lawyer like in our day. This wasn't so much a lawyer in terms of the civil courts or criminal courts. This was a legal lawyer. This was one who studied the law. This wasn't a novice, wasn't someone who was brand new to the study of the law, the scriptures, the Old Testament.

This was an expert, this was someone who had given his life to these details. He was a scholar. And this lawyer asked Jesus a question to test him. Now, the word there for test can be used positively, but in the Gospel of Matthew, it's significant because this is the same Greek word that was used to describe the temptation of Satan. He's not just sort of seeing how good this guy is, he's really trying to trip Jesus up as much as Satan was.

And that tells us, that gives us an insight into his heart as he poses this question. So one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. And here's a lawyer teacher, which is the great commandment in the law. Now, if you were, if you were a visitor to 1st century Jerusalem and someone asked you this question, it's very important to understand what exactly you're getting yourself into. You know, anytime you go to another culture, another place, another family gathering that's maybe not yours, another church, another place where the culture is different, you have to understand where the hot points are.

You have to, oh, someone asked a question, well, I think I can answer that. And you just foolishly rush in and try to answer a question. Well, if you don't know really what's behind that question, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble. And that's what they're trying to do here. Because the Pharisees regularly debated, the rabbis were divided on the commandments, the nature of the commandments, because they tried to take all 613 commandments that were in the law, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and they tried to divide them into which were the weighty, the important commandments and which were the lighter commandments.

Leon Morris in his commentary writes that opened up the way for speculation as to which of all the 613 commandments that the rabbis found in the law was to be regarded as the greatest of them all. You know, if you're power ranking, this one's greater than this one and this one's lesser than that one. Well, at the end of the day, when this all sorts out, what is the greatest commandment? And when you would ask someone that question, they would answer it. That would tell you a lot about their theology, about their view of Torah, their view of the law.

Now again, this is not a question of curiosity. This is not a question where this man is trying to learn something from Jesus. This is a question that was designed to test him, to trick him, to trap him. What this lawyer was doing is that he was skilled enough, with enough knowledge of the law that whatever Jesus answered, he could play devil's advocate. Oh, you say this one.

Well, what about this, that and the other? And the goal was to whatever Jesus said, he could argue the opposite point and try to embarrass Jesus. The second thing that we need to see from this, from this question is just that this entire approach to ranking the commandments and how it is tied to legalism, Matthew has so much to say about legalism. In the Gospel of Matthew and the Sadducees and the Pharisees approached legalism in very different ways. For the Sadducees, it was to minimize the law.

It was to try to really only focus on the actual absolute, essential commands they had to do. It was a rejection of all but the most explicitly stated commandments. And they really ended up focusing only on external and never to internal issues as they looked at those explicit commandments. The Pharisees, on the other hand, they minimized aspects of the law, not intentionally. Their goal really was to try to keep the whole law, but by this ranking system, they devalued the importance of certain commands and they ended up, although by a different path, at the same place that the Pharisees did, namely by devaluing the importance of the spiritual, the commands related to the heart.

In Matthew chapter 5 in Jesus Sermon on the Mount, he's saying, you have heard it said that really all you have to do is to avoid outright murder and to avoid outright adultery, and on and on and on. But I say to you, Jesus said, that if you are angry at your brother, you have already murdered him in your heart. If you have looked at another woman to laugh at her, you have already committed adultery in your heart. Jesus was raising the importance of the seemingly lesser spiritual commandments to show that you cannot keep the law without recognizing how much you must keep the full, not only external, but but the internal commandments of the law. Well, in this system, where laws were power ranked, which one is more important than the other, where some commands become essential and the emphases on the other commands get ignored, Understand what results from that?

Is someone able to take a look at the law and to see where that dividing line of the greater importance and the lesser importance and evaluating and looking at those more important commands and saying, you know what? I think I'm actually a pretty good person. Yeah, I've missed some of these down here, but I've kept all of these up here. And again, I think I'm a pretty good person. Sometimes we think of legalism and some of the popular definitions you may have heard of legalism is the idea of requiring more than God requires.

What's important to see in the Gospel of Matthew particularly, is that legalism is not really about requiring more than God requires. Sometimes it's requiring different things than God requires, but ultimately it's requiring far less than God requires. And again, the Sermon on the Mountain, Matthew 5, 19, 20. Jesus says, Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments, that's exactly what Jesus is being asked about here. Which are the least of these commandments, which is the greatest and which is the least?

But Jesus says, whoever relaxes even one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be great in the kingdom of heaven. Then he says this, for I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Understand, we have sort of a view of the Pharisees where we see them as being these real stickler for the rules, those who were just very nitty gritty about which laws they were requiring and who added to the laws and were requiring those as well. Now they did add to the laws and they did require those as well.

But the Pharisees were really a group of people who tried to make keeping the law something that was accomplishable, something that was doable. And the way they did this was by trying to do this kind of power ranking system. So by their organization, by their teaching of which laws were the really important ones to keep, theoretically they could put the bar at a level that someone theoretically could get their leg over, could climb over and actually enter into the kingdom of heaven. But Jesus says at the end of Matthew chapter 5, the requirement is perfection. You must be perfect as your Father in heaven perfect.

The wrong question, therefore is, what is the minimum that I must do, which are the commandments that I have to keep to qualify as a pretty good person. The right question is, what does God actually require of me? Well, to answer that question, we need to go to the second section. We must work toward reunifying the commandments in verses 37, 30.

I want to read this again what Jesus says. And this is again what we've already read together in our study of the Heidelberg Catechism. And he said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the Great. And the first commandment.

And the second is, like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Now, we'll leave off verse 40 for just a moment, but notice the two commandments that Jesus quotes. These were not commandments from the Ten Commandments, like perhaps we might have expected. The Ten Commandments were a summary of all of God's requirements of his people. You can look at each of the Ten Commandments and see a full summary of what God requires of his people.

But the Ten Commandments, the summary of God's moral law, can be further summarized into two tables, two parts of the law, those duties that we have toward God, and those duties that we have toward our neighbor. And so Jesus quotes two verses from the Old Testament that serve as really faithful summaries of those two parts to the law. Those two tables to the law. The first is in Leviticus 19:18. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.

Or, excuse me, this is Deuteronomy 6:5, you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And the second is from deuteronomy, from Leviticus 19:18. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. So these were just sort of, when you're reading them, you don't necessarily note their importance in the context. Deuteronomy you do.

That's a very important passage. Leviticus. You're just kind of reading through it and it's there. But Jesus pulls this out as a perfect summary of those two tables of the law. But notice that what he's doing is he is reunifying.

He's sort of showing the connection of the entire law under the heading of love, love God, love your neighbor, love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind. Love your neighbour as much as you love yourself. And if you're like me, you probably love yourself a whole lot. Now, both of these emphasize, then, the internal requirement that we have toward God and toward people. We can't pick or choose.

We cannot deprioritize everything. When you see the commandments in this way, all of them are reunified in love. And nothing can be dropped, nothing can be taken away. As James says, to break the law at one point is to be guilty of violating the entire law. So love is, is the summary of the law.

But if we really think about what that would entail in our love for God and love for people, love is the infinitely high burden demanded by God's law. Now, the apostle Paul develops this idea in practical terms in Romans 13, 8, 10, he says, owe no one anything except to love each other. For the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment are summed up in this word, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor.

Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. Christian ethics are not about a list of do's and don'ts. It's not a legalistic external system that if you can make sure that you really take care to protect and preserve the commandments above the line that you're fine, you still are and qualify as a pretty good person. Christianity really is about love. But when we talk about love and we think about the way the word love is tossed around in our culture, it's also important to recognize that we cannot define love for ourselves.

Love in our culture is really directed toward sexual ideas, toward anyone or anyone whom you might desire. But what the Scriptures are really clear about is that that's not the way that God thinks about love. Love is defined and given structure by the specifications of the commandments. Those 613 commandments, all of those are about loving God, loving people. So Jesus extends his logic one more step in verse 40, then to say, you can't divide the law into the greatest and least commandments.

You must reunify the law under the heading of love. But in verse 40, Jesus takes one more step to reject the errors not only of the Pharisees, but also of the Sadducees. He says this in verse 40. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the prophecy. So our third point is reconciling the Law and the prophets.

Now remember, the Sadducees had a very minimalistic view of the Bible. They only accepted as authoritative the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, where the Pharisees accepted everything. The Sadducees only accepted that minimal version of the Law, only the first five verses books of the Bible. But what Jesus is doing is not only reunifying the commandments, he's reunifying the entire Old Testament Scriptures, and he's reunifying around that summary. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

William Hendrickson on this word depend. He writes, the idea here is that they are the peg on which the whole law and the prophets hang. Love is the peg on which the whole law and the prophets hate. Remove that peg and all is lost. For the entire Old Testament with its commandments and Covenants, prophecies and promises, types and testimonies, invitations and exhortations points to the love of God, which demands an answer of love in return.

Thus, there is not a hierarchy of laws as the Pharisees taught. There is a single peg on which all the commandments of the law hang. We cannot interpret the Bible to devalue anything, for everything hangs, everything is a part of the entailments required by the command to love. Now, that would stand against what the Pharisees argued for their legalism, but it also stood against the Sadducees skeptical legalism of minimalism. Now, literally, what Jesus says is on these two commandments depends the whole law and the prophets.

The word there is a singular verb. It's not all the law and the prophets are the subject and they the law and the prophets depend on them, depend all the law and the prophets. It's all the law is the subject and it depends all the law with the prophets as sort of an add on depends all these two on these two commandments. And so there's a singular focus, a singular nature to it. The idea being that the prophets is not a second kind of law, but that the prophets and what we have in the prophets is an exposition, explanation, an application of what the law requires.

Now remember that in the Old Testament, the prophets would also include for the Jews, they would think of the prophets in is including the stories of the histories of the Old Testament. So when Pastor Ken was here teaching, preaching through the Book of Judges, those were the former prophets, as opposed to the latter prophets, which would have been Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, those kinds of prophets, but where we have not only the clear teaching, the precepts that we talked about this morning, but also the examples together. You were seeing an exposition of what the law really required. And all of that is showing the theme of the requirement of loving God and loving other people. And that's what is required by the law and what is illustrated and applied by the prophets.

So Jesus is rejecting what the Pharisees are teaching, what the Sadducees are teaching, and against both. He's elevating the entire law as essential for keeping the greatest commandment. Now, how do we apply this tonight?

Well, our application here tonight is love because God first loved us. Love because God first loved us. That's 1 John 4:19. Now, again, I mentioned, you know, our Heidelberg catechism readings and our themes tonight are not the surface positive and encouraging. I understand this sounds dark and somewhat depressing, that all of us are guilty, all of us are evil, wicked, Sinners.

But before we can talk about anything good, before we can talk about the good news of the Gospel, we must start with a right understanding of the law. Because the law tells us that there is a standard of righteousness that God requires from us. And that standard righteousness is love. Perfect love. Perfect love with all our heart and soul and mind and strength toward God, and perfect love so much as you love yourself.

Thus love your neighbor. Every specification, every detail in the entire Scriptures can be put under one of those two headings. Everything that is explicitly taught or that we can deduce by good and necessary consequence from the law or the prophets or the New Testament. All of these are making one of these two points that you are not a pretty good person. You are rather a wicked, evil sinner who falls infinitely short of the standard of the perfection of your Father who is in heaven.

Now, from these we have to then move to understand the gospel. If all of us are so far fallen short, then this is where the gospel truly shines. We can't look at that law and say, boy, I better try harder. What we have to see is that we are already failures, already behind the eight ball. And the gospel then comes to us as people, people who are needy and desperate and cannot come to God on our own.

So before we can talk about keeping law and loving God and loving other people, we have to think about the Gospel. And this is why these two things hold hand in hand. The entire Scripture is certainly part of it is law, but there's another word that is spoken, and that's gospel. The entire Bible doesn't say, just try a little bit harder. Just make sure you are at least keeping the law that is above the line.

The entire Bible says, on the one hand, you are condemned as a sinner, and on the other hand, Christ has done something for you that you could not do for yourself. This is true even in the Old Testament. In the preface to the Ten Commandments, the Lord reminds his people of the good news of what he has already done for Him. He says, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaughter. And it's only in the context of that relationship, that covenant relationship, that he then gives them his law.

And God's relationship with his people, his work, his redemptive accomplishments, always precede the law, because we simply cannot keep the law. Moreover, God is the model for our love, because God is love.

And what we read in 1 John 4:10 in this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. That word propitiation means an atoning sacrifice in which Jesus endured God's wrath in our place for our failure to keep all the law. Your greatest problem is the wrath of God which is against you. And you may not be able to see it today, but it will be revealed on the last day. Except for the Gospel, for all those who are looking to Jesus Christ, the wrath of God has been answered.

It's been exhausted, it has been drained to the dregs. There is nothing left that can spill over onto you because Jesus Christ did all of it. Jesus Christ, in his 33 years on this earth as a true man, did everything that was required of him under the law. He established by his works a perfect righteousness, the one that we needed. And when Jesus went to the cross and he was cursed and condemned and, and hanged on a tree, bleeding out, he poured out the wrath of God upon his head.

And he took that for you in your place, which you deserved. And when he said, it is finished, that is, he gave up his life, he meant that for all those who are in Christ, there is nothing left. And when he rose from the dead on the third day, it was proof, vindication that there truly is nothing left. For those who look to Christ in faith tonight with this catechism question and drawn from this scripture and other scriptures is teaching is that you really do have no hope tonight. If you simply are resting on the idea that you are a pretty good person, there's nothing there.

That is a house of straw against which God will bring the blazing fire of his wrath on the last day. It will be washed up in a moment. You have no confidence. If you think that you have kept enough of the law to stand before God with confidence, because you haven't. There's nothing you could do in this life because of all of the ways that you have already sinned to please God on your own.

But God has done something for you. And it's Christ Jesus, crucified, dead, buried, raised up on the third day who promises you that he has taken your sins upon him and he has given you a perfect spotless righteousness. If you look to him in faith and if you haven't looked at Jesus in faith, I plead with you. The King has offered a pardon. The King has offered forgiveness.

It's a good word. Will you not take it tonight? But it's only then. It's only then, after we have been reconciled to God out of our sin, through faith in Jesus Christ, that then we can start thinking about how to walk in the commandments that are given to us here. Now, we can't approach this law on our own, in our own strength.

I'm just going to try a little bit harder to keep it. That will work. But when God has been reconciled to us through his Son Jesus Christ, do you know what else has been reconciled to us? The law. We approach the law not on ourselves as guilty, condemned, sin, sinners.

Jesus makes an introduction. He makes our new acquaintance with the law by introducing us the Law as a friend. The Law. As we study the Word, everywhere we see a commandment, we look at it and say, this is not what I must do in order to live. Because there I'm relying on the Gospel of Jesus.

But I look at the law and I see these are areas that I need to look at my life and say, oh, there's still more that I need to confess and ask for God's forgiveness for. And this is the standard toward which God is sanctifying me by his Spirit. The law becomes a teacher, a coach, an exhorter to call us to greater holiness, not by our strength, but by Christ who is within us. So I want to give you three simple questions for you to consider prayerfully this week. First of all, let's think about your loving your neighbor as yourself.

What person do you need to pray about for God to forgive you for your lack of love and to transform your heart to love that person, to love that neighbor as yourself? Is there a person you need to pray about tonight? Second, what action do you need to take to serve someone with the love of God? But the third question, I suppose I should have started with this one, but this is the most important question that I want to leave hanging, is are you trusting in anything you do as something that makes you a pretty good person before God? By God's grace, let that aside, drop that, turn to Christ in faith, ask him to forgive you and ask you to build you up to the sanctifying spirit that he pours out to you.

Because love is the fulfilling of the law. Pray together. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the love of God. This is ours in Christ Jesus. And we pray that as we come to your word that we would repent from our sins and we would believe the gospel of Jesus.

We thank you for all you have done for us in and through Jesus Christ. And we pray that it would be to him that we would cling tonight. Pray this in Christ's name, Amen.