Colleen and Nikki discuss the transitional time during Jesus’ ministry as the New Covenant was being announced. Podcast was published April 7, 2020. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: Now, today we’re going to continue our studies on the covenants, but this one’s going to be a little bit different because we’re not focusing specifically on one covenant. We’re going to be talking about the transitional period, the time when Christ was here in His active ministry on earth before He went to the cross. If you haven’t heard Colleen’s talk from the FAF conference this year, just in February, go and look for it. It’s online, and it’s called “Why is Jesus Lord of the Sabbath.”
Colleen: As Adventists, we learned a lot of things about Jesus and His relationship to the law, especially His relationship to the Sabbath. So tell me how you understood Jesus’ role on earth in relationship to the law. What did He come to do? What are we supposed to learn from His relationship to the law? What did you understand?
Nikki: That was firmly rooted in what I understood of the Great Controversy worldview. It was that He came to prove that God’s law was fair, to prove that humanity can keep it. There’s so much tied into that. He had no advantage that we didn’t have, so He was not fully God and fully man.
Colleen: Although they said He was.
Nikki: Okay, yes. That’s fair and important to say, but I want to say that I was holding dueling ideas about that because you can’t say that God was capable of failing and capable of sinning and still say that He’s fully God. It just – it doesn’t work.
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: So putting it in Adventist terms, He was, and yet He was also without any advantage. Because of that, we were able to do whatever He did. He was our example. We could do anything He did, and He kept the law, and He kept it perfectly, and He showed us how to do it. And so when I’d read the gospels, it was to me the picture of how I was supposed to live under the law.
Colleen: Right. I had the same idea. I learned that if I prayed enough, I could avoid sin, because Jesus did. And I learned that if I depended on the Holy Spirit, I could somehow find it in me to avoid sin. So pray, depend, whatever that meant. I didn’t really even know what that meant, except it was supposed to be some sort of internal attitude of submission and beat myself into obedience, but I did believe that Jesus kept the law like any human could keep the law.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And yet, there’s so much about what Jesus actually did that no human can do, and I remember the surprise I felt shortly after coming out of Adventism when I read an article and actually heard a study taught by Dale Ratzlaff where he talked about Jesus’ relationship to the law in a way I had never heard anybody talk about it. We’ve gone over this fact before and will again, that the law is not divided into parts. It’s very popular for Adventists, as well as some other denominations, to say, “There is a moral law, a civil law, and a ceremonial law. The ceremonial law was completed with Christ and the civil law, and the moral law remains.” The Bible never makes that distinction. But what I remember hearing Dale Ratzlaff explain, and since then I have seen this very clearly in the New Testament, that Jesus did keep the law, but He did it in a way that was not like any other human. He was under the law, but as far as the ceremonial and ritual laws went, He didn’t keep them like any other human. He touched dead people and raised them to life, and He didn’t have to go through the required cleansing ceremony that Leviticus commanded people to do. In Israel, under the law, as part of the law, there was a command that if anyone had to touch a dead person, even for the sake of burying their mother or father, they had to go through ritual cleansing and excuse themselves from the company of the camp of Israel for a certain number of days before they were ritually clean. But you remember when Jesus raised Lazarus? He just called him forth. And with the widow of Nain’s son in Luke, Luke 7, He raised him from the dead. And in Luke 8 He raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead, and He took her by the hand, but He did not have to go through any ritual cleansing. Why didn’t He?
Nikki: He’s God. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] Exactly!
Nikki: You can’t contaminate God.
Colleen: As God, He was fulfilling the law. He was fulfilling those ritual laws that demanded cleansing, and He was demonstrating who He was as the One who was bringing meaning, fulfillment, health, and wholeness to humanity. That was a really big eye opener for me, when I heard Dale explain that. The fact that He could touch a leper and not have to go through cleansing, a dead person and not have to go through cleansing, He wasn’t breaking the law in any normal sense of breaking the law, but He was fulfilling it, which is something only God could do.
Nikki: It was identifying who He was. This was all prophesied of Him. That’s why when John the Baptist said, “Are you really the one?” His answer was, “Go back and tell him that the blind see and the dead live and –” yeah.
Colleen: According to prophesy. The Jews who watched Him do these miracles knew what the Old Testament prophets had said the Messiah would do. So as Jesus is going through His ministry on earth, He is systematically fulfilling the prophesies by doing the things that no other person could do without breaking the law.
Nikki: You know, when I was just leaving Adventism and I would read these stories of Him doing these things in the gospels, and I would think about Him as our example, because that was still in my head –
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: – I wasn’t entirely sure how this looked. How are we supposed to be like the people in the Gospel of Matthew, when He says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” And as we’ve talked about so many times on here, a proper hermeneutic is so important to understand what you’re looking at and how to interpret it, and it was so helpful to me when I started learning how the Bible is broken up, how it was put together.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And Elizabeth has always taught us how to think of it in terms of numbers, and the New Testament is 4-1-21-1, and it’s four gospels, one book of history, 21 letters, and then one book on end-time events, the apocalyptic. When I was able to look at that and see, okay, the gospels, they’re a description of Christ’s ministry on earth and this transitional period –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – and the Book of Acts is a one-time, non-repeatable event in Christian history –
Colleen: Exactly. The planting of the church.
Nikki: – I was able to read things like about Paul going into the synagogue on the Sabbath and understand, “This is historical. This is explaining something. This is not a command for me.” The same thing with Jesus in His ministry. Yes, He is God incarnate, and as believers we long to become transformed more and more into His image, but that doesn’t mean that we are going to be able to go and cleanse lepers and do all of these things.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: These had a specific purpose and a specific context, and that was huge in helping me back myself out of the gospel and to look at what the gospel is telling me about who Christ is.
Colleen: Yes. That is such an important point. Understanding that there are four books that describe Jesus’ ministry on earth as a historical event, from different viewpoints. Each of these books is explaining how Jesus was fulfilling prophecy and is explaining His true identity as God the Son incarnate in human flesh. That understanding changed the way I saw the gospels, and I no longer saw Jesus as my example, who was showing me how to be good enough to be right with God.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He was right with God. He was God. And He was sinless because He was born not a sinner, conceived by the Holy Spirit. He did not have to be born again. He had a living spirit from conception. He came as my substitute, and He came as the Messiah, and that’s what the gospels demonstrate. One of the most common things that Adventists say, especially to those of us who have left Adventism for the gospel, is, “Well, Jesus went to the synagogue as His custom was –”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: “– and that is what we are to do because He lived under the law and as our example He showed us what to do.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That’s not the explanation of His going to the synagogue. He went to the synagogue because He was a Jew, born under the law, that’s a fact, not a command. And as you have said in the past, Nikki, it’s really helpful to understand that there are parts of Scripture that are descriptive and parts that are prescriptive –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – and descriptive passages are not commands for me. They are passages that explain what happened in God’s purposes, and the gospels include mostly descriptive passages of Jesus’ ministry, as He’s systematically teaching His disciples and showing the Jewish nation that their Messiah had come. So when He went to the synagogue as His custom was, He went because He was a Jew, born under the law, but He didn’t go to the synagogue and do what the other Jews did, and it’s so interesting to remember the things that He did on the Sabbath that no other Jew would have done, that actually got Him in trouble. He went and healed the man with the lame hand, a withered hand, and elicited enormous outcry from the Jewish leaders because He had done something not Sabbath-like on the Sabbath. Now, Adventists will say, “Oh, but He just showed us how to keep the Sabbath.” No. That wasn’t what He was doing. The Old Testament was very clear what was required of Jews on the Sabbath, and at the heart of the Sabbath command was that they were to stay in their tents. The synagogue was not part of the law, that came in the period of Jewish history between Malachi and the coming of Christ, during the intertestamental period when there was no new word from God. The Jews who had come back from Babylon and who had become subject to Rome developed the synagogue system. That was not part of the law. So Jesus going to the synagogue is not an example for us. He was just doing what Jews did. But He went and did these things, like healing the man with the withered hand, to show that He was the Messiah. To show the lame would walk, the deaf would hear, the crippled would be healed, the dead would live. These were things He did to show who He was, and He did them on the Sabbath as a fulfillment of what that Sabbath shadow meant. It was not a prescription for any other person. It was a description of His identity and His fulfillment of prophesy. When I understood that, the gospels began to look completely different to me.
Nikki: Um-hmm. Me too, yeah.
Colleen: One of the passages that is the clearest about how Jesus treated the Sabbath is found in John 5. That has the famous story of how Jesus healed the crippled man, the lame man, at the Pool of Bethesda. The verse we’re leading up to is John 5:18, but prior to those verses it explains Jesus coming up to that pool and finding the man who had been lame for 38 years. So think about what that means. Today, with our more sophisticated medical knowledge, we can know that this man, who had been lying by the Pool of Bethesda for 38 years, unable to walk, had a lot that had happened to him besides just not being able to walk. What would have happened to his muscles in his legs?
Nikki: They would have atrophied.
Colleen: Yeah. There would have been no ability to walk. Even his bones would have thinned. He would have been unable to stand and walk unaided. He was there, lying there, and Jesus walked up to him in John 5 and said, “Do you want to be made whole?” What was the man’s answer?
Nikki: So that story begins in John 5:2, and the man answers Him, and really quick, we are reading out of the NASB. This is verse 7: “The sick man answered Him, ‘Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, but while I am coming, another steps down before me.'” So his response was almost like feeling sorry for himself –
Colleen: I think so.
Nikki: – an expression that, “Yeah, I want to be helped, but no one wants to help me.”
Colleen: And he didn’t even answer Jesus’ question –
Nikki: No.
Colleen: – which was, “Do you wish to get well?”
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: You think about people who teach the health and wealth “gospel,” and their whole premise is that if you have enough faith, this will happen. Jesus walked up to a man who was pretty much buried in his own victimhood and asked him if he wanted to get well, and he couldn’t even answer the question. He sidestepped it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He said, “Well, no one’s here to put me in the water.” And what did Jesus say?
Nikki: Well, I’ve always found it interesting that He didn’t console him in his feeling bad about that. I mean, that was his context, that was his worldview, that was reality, if you want to get well, you have to go in the water, and he couldn’t.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: He didn’t validate that. He gave him reality.
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: “And He said to him, ‘Get up, pick up your pallet and walk.'”
Colleen: And that command went with an immediate response, and it’s interesting that John specifically uses that word in verse 9, “immediately –”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: “– the man became well, and picked up his pallet and began to walk.” John goes on in the next verse to say the Jews were upset because the man was cured when?
Nikki: It was the Sabbath.
Colleen: And “It is not permissible for you to carry your pallet,” they were saying to him.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That man had lived on his pallet for 38 years. It had to be a fairly heavy bedroll. Probably he had some belongings that had sat on that pallet with him. Jesus commanded him to get up and do something that in the Book of Numbers, when a man picked up sticks to make a fire, the command was to stone the man. The Jews knew this in the books of the law. It was death for Sabbath breaking, and carrying a load on the Sabbath was considered Sabbath breaking, and here is Jesus not only healing this man but commanding him to do something that went against the tenets of the law, “Get up and carry your pallet and walk,” and the man did, immediately. Those atrophied legs were immediately whole, and this man did not even have the faith to get well. He just was feeling sorry for himself, and Jesus healed him, but he did get up and walk when Jesus told him to. He did act on the word of God. This created a huge furor. Ultimately, in verse 18, we see what it is that has made them so angry. As they’re complaining, Jesus says – in verse 16 we find out that the Jews were persecuting Jesus because He was doing these things on the Sabbath, and it’s so interesting in verse 17 what Jesus’ answer is: “He answered them, ‘My father is working until now, and I myself am working.'” Well, what did that answer mean to the Jews?
Nikki: Well, He was making Himself equal with His Father. As an Adventist when I read that, I was very confused because I thought God stopped working.
Colleen: But it’s interesting that when sin entered in Eden, that perfect creation was no more. God has always had the plan to send His Son and redeem fallen man. But God Himself has always been also upholding the universe. In fact, Colossians 1:16 and 17 explains that Jesus is the one who does that. Jesus is saying, “My Father is always at work.” He is always in the business of saving fallen man. He is always in the business of holding the universe together, and the Jews knew that. The Jews knew that God was not the same as them. They were commanded to keep the Sabbath, but God had to keep creation going, and Jesus is right here making Himself on a par with God. And the Jews are enraged. This Sabbath healing was not about Jesus coming along and showing us how we are supposed to keep the Sabbath and giving Adventists an excuse to work in the hospitals because it’s doing the work of God to be a doctor and a nurse. You know, it’s interesting, my father was a physical therapist, and when I was growing up, he worked in Portland Adventist Hospital. Physical therapy was considered nonessential medical care, so the physical therapy department was always closed on Sabbath. The hospital ran a skeleton crew. There were certain jobs in the hospital that were not done. Even the cleaning crew was limited because cleaning had to be done not on the Sabbath hours. It’s not like that today in Adventist hospitals, but I can remember going into Portland Adventist Hospital as an elementary student and as a teenager. The lights were dimmed in the hallway, religious music was playing in the hallway, it was Sabbath in the hospital.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: This story is not an excuse for people to do that. This was not telling modern people how to keep the Sabbath and how to honor God by providing medical work. This was Jesus identifying Himself. And that’s why the Jews were so angry. They knew what the prophesies said. They knew only God could make a lame man walk. They knew that no one but God could have done this miracle, and they also saw Him doing it on the Sabbath, and now Jesus is saying He is in the same level as the Father, who is not bound by Sabbath laws. Jesus is right here saying God is not subject to Sabbath holiness. God is not going to keep the Sabbath with us in heaven, as Ellen White said. God never stops His work of upholding creation, and He Himself was God. Nikki, what was the result of that shocking declaration that Jesus just made.
Nikki: As you said, they were very upset that He was making Himself equal with the Father. It says in verse 18: “For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.”
Colleen: You know, I’ve heard so many people say, “This was just referring to the rabbinical traditions about Sabbath, that He was breaking the Sabbath, not really, really breaking the Sabbath because Jesus would never break the law, but He was breaking the rabbinical traditions. But that’s not what John says. John says He was breaking the Sabbath. He actually was going against the demonstrations, the laws, and the requirements of the Torah. He asked that man to carry a load. The significant thing is He wasn’t sinning, because He was fulfilling the shadow of Sabbath. He was doing what Sabbath always pointed to. He was bringing the wholeness, the healing, the meaning, the God-with-us reality that Sabbath always foreshadowed.
Nikki: He was doing exactly what the law purposed Him to do.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Only He could do this. If anybody else had done these things, they would have been held accountable for breaking the Sabbath.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: They would have been held accountable for not going and cleansing in the temple after handling a leper or touching a bleeding woman.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: But because this whole thing was set up to reveal Christ, He was doing exactly what it purposed Him alone to do, so it wasn’t sin.
Colleen: Yes. Today when people like observant Jews keep the law, denying that Jesus has already fulfilled it, they really are in a very real sense actually breaking the law –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – because the law was designed to reveal Jesus when He came, to say, “This is the one who is God. This is the one whom God promised. This is the Son of promise. This is the one the shadow pointed to.” Every shadow of the law pointed to Jesus, Sabbath rest, the bread of life, the light of the world, the Passover lamb, the blood on the doorpost. Every shadow of the law pointed to Jesus, and Jesus is observing the law and taking these ritual laws and fulfilling them by doing what was not lawful for a sinner to do, but doing what only God could do, was revealing He was the one, and after Him, the law is meaningless because He is the meaning. Another thing that helps us understand this is what happened in the Sermon on the Mount. The New Testament specifically refers to the Law of Christ. Galatians 4:4 says that Jesus was born of a woman, born under the law, and then in Galatians 6:2 it says “Bear one another’s burdens, and thus fulfill the Law of Christ.” So we see that Jesus was born under the law, He fulfilled it, and now our job is not to fulfill the law and keep it, but to fulfill the Law of Christ. Well, as an Adventist I heard many kind of convoluted arguments to explain that the Ten Commandments were the Law of Christ because, after all, God gave them. But that’s not what the New Testament says. The Law of Christ is not the Ten Commandments. And we talked last time about 2 Corinthians 3 explaining the difference between the law written on stone and the law of the Spirit. The Law of Christ is a new thing, but how do we know this? How do we know Christ has a new law? What’s really interesting to me is what happens in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 through Matthew 7. Now, before we look at Matthew 5 through 7, we have to remember that in Deuteronomy 4 we had very clear instructions that Moses gave to the wilderness generation before they entered the Promised Land. When he restated the Mosaic covenant to them, he said to them in verses 1 and 2 of Deuteronomy 4, “You shall not add to the word nor take from it.” They were to neither add to the word of the law nor remove anything from the word of the law. If they did, they would be guilty of blasphemy, and they would be guilty of sin before God. Until Jesus came, no one dared to add or remove anything from the law because only God could do that, only God could give the law and only God can decide how the law is stated. Jesus does something quite revolutionary. He begins with the Beatitudes, but then He moves into a restatement of the law. Now, I think we’ve all heard this explained, and it’s always been confusing to me from my previous Adventist mindset, but we have to look – first of all, after He gives the Beatitudes – and by the way, if any of you have not heard Kaspars Ozolins talk from the FAF conference in 2020 on the Beatitudes, you need to go back and look at it on the FAF YouTube channel. He explains how Jesus, in giving the Beatitudes, is identifying Himself. Who is the one who is poor in spirit? Only Him. And those who are in Him have that characteristic. Who are those who mourn and shall be comforted? Well, Jesus is the one who was the consummate one who mourned for our human sin, and in His death He did provide the comfort for that sin. Who is gentle? Who is merciful? Who is pure in heart? Only those who are in Christ, and Jesus demonstrated Himself to be that person. But after He goes through the Beatitudes, we come to this passage that is one of Adventism’s favorite proof texts, Matthew 5:17-20. Nikki, do you have that there?
Nikki: Yes. “Do not think that I came to abolish the law or the prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Colleen: Adventists use this passage to say, “We still have to keep the law. Jesus said, ‘I didn’t come to abolish it but to fulfill it.'” Right there we have to stop. Adventists do not understand what that word “fulfill” means, and that He isn’t just talking about the ceremonial law. He is talking about the entire law. Jesus came, lived under the law, but He did perfectly everything that the law suggested. He was not just being obedient, but He was doing what we just described. He was showing who He was. Every part of the law that was ceremonial or ritual, He demonstrated that that law did not bind Him and require Him to act as a sinful human and go and seek for cleansing. He was the one who brought the cleansing. He fulfilled the law. Even the moral parts of the law, the so-called moral parts, He not only managed not to kill or commit murder or lie, He in His heart never had a sinful thought. His fulfillment of the law was not just showing it could be kept. His fulfillment of the law was to say, “I am here. I am the one to whom the law pointed. You now look to me, not the law.” But the interesting thing is He says, “Not one jot or tittle or stroke of the law shall pass until all is accomplished.” That means not one tiny piece of the letter of the Hebrew law will ever disappear until all is accomplished. Well, we know that the law itself was fulfilled when Jesus hung on the cross and said what?
Nikki: “It is finished.”
Colleen: Even more than that, heaven and earth are still here, so what are we to do with that? It strikes me that the law is part of God’s eternal word. It’s contained inside the Mosaic covenant, as we studied last week. The law remains as part of God’s eternal word to show us clearly who Jesus was. If we couldn’t look back at the law and then see the life of Jesus as depicted in the four gospels, how would we know that what He claimed for Himself was true? We only can see “This is the Messiah” because He did what the law foreshadowed, and it says in Romans 3:21, a righteousness from God apart from the law has been revealed, but it’s been witnessed to by the law and the prophets. The law and the prophets foreshadowed the righteousness of Jesus that comes from His sinless fulfillment of the law. This is not a command for us to keep the law, but to look to Jesus, and He was explaining to His disciples and to the people to whom He was talking that they had to look at Him and see that more than the law was there. The law wasn’t going anywhere, but He had come, and it was holding a different place in history after Him.
Nikki: You know, we all have to deal with that passage when we leave Adventism –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – because it’s one of the first things that gets thrown at us, and you know, we’ve already talked about context is important. His audience here, it’s the Jews; right?
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And He’s speaking to them before He’s ever gone to the cross, before they know anything about any of that, so when He says, “Anyone who annuls one of the least of these of these commandments and teaches others to do the same shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven,” there are two things that jump out to me: One, He’s speaking to a pre-cross audience –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and two, He says that they shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. It doesn’t say they will never enter the kingdom of heaven. The group that never enters the kingdom of heaven, according to Jesus, is the group who is never born again. These people are still going to be in the kingdom, and this just takes me back to our podcast about rewards and faithfulness –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – they will be the least. But our salvation is not based on this.
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: So here again we have language about rewards.
Colleen: That’s really true.
Nikki: Yeah. There is a context for this, and He came to fulfill. I like the definition of “fulfill” that Gary often uses, our pastor Gary Inrig, he says that it means to fill it up with meaning, and that’s what Christ came to do.
Colleen: And if those people, those who believed God’s word, those who were looking for the Messiah, such as His disciples, those who believed who He was as He revealed Himself, if they had failed to honor the law pre-cross, they would have been guilty of breaking the law.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So Jesus is saying, “You can’t annul the law,” because He’s speaking to them at the beginning of His ministry, and it’s still in place, just as you said. It’s such an important thing. If they believed in Him, that’s what puts them in the kingdom, not obeying the law.
Nikki: And even now, where we see that “until heaven and earth pass away not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until all is accomplished,” the law is the entire word of God, and there are things that are still yet to happen before heaven and earth pass away. There are specific purposes for specific parts of the law. The Mosaic Law was fulfilled in Christ’s work on the cross and His death and resurrection, but there is more of God’s word in the prophesies that are still going to come to pass, and it’s such a temptation for us to read ourselves into everything in Scripture and to just think from a man-centered perspective, but there is a Godly purpose for God’s Scripture.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: That’s why Timothy can say, “All of it is useful for teaching,” and so we have to be faithful to the purpose, and other parts of Scripture explain what the purpose of the Mosaic Law really was.
Colleen: That’s a really important point, and for Adventists who see this as a mandate to them to keep the law, they have already ignored what Scripture said about Gentiles, not to mention believers in general, but believing Gentiles who have been born again and are actually honoring the God of Scripture and the true Messiah and are living in the New Covenant, they are never required to keep the law, so the context of this passage in Matthew is not New Testament Christians and certainly not people who pretend to be Christians by using Christian language but not even teaching the true gospel. He’s talking to Jews, only to Jews, and He’s saying, “You cannot annul the law,” because it was pre-cross, and He says, “It will still remain.” What He’s not fully explaining but which the rest of the New Testament does is that the law is in God’s word, but it is not my boss as a Christian. It remains as a demonstration and a witness of Jesus’ identity and of the way God worked out His plans to bring the Messiah. That’s what the law does for us on this side of the cross.
Nikki: And can I just point out an error with the Adventist interpretation of this, another one.
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: It says that nothing is going to pass away, none of it. So they can’t have it both ways. They can’t say, “Well, this part did; yeah, this part is gone –”
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: “– but this part remains.” Because there’s no room for that in this text. Either you keep this text within the entire context of Scripture or you pull it out, twist it up, distort it, and come up with something completely different, and that’s the only possible way you could make this say that we are, as New Covenant believers, under the Mosaic covenant. It’s just – you can’t, you can’t do it without destroying it.
Colleen: That is such a good point, Nikki. I’m so glad that you said that. Because there are laws we don’t even thinkabout anymore, like “Don’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk, don’t mix linen and wool in fabric.” These were all part of the law.
Nikki: Women had to dress feminine. If you dressed masculine, you were in big trouble, so there go jeans.
Colleen: Um-hmm. Well, plus, a woman who had given birth to a baby had to leave the company of the Israelite community for a month or more, depending on if it was a boy or a girl.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That doesn’t happen now. Nobody would expect that now.
Nikki: And as an Adventist I would have heard all of this and I would have said, “Yeah, but you don’t understand that there were the ceremonial laws and the moral law,” but you know what? This passage doesn’t do that, and no part of Scripture does that.
Colleen: The law is a unit, not divided into parts, and Jesus is clearly saying, “Not one smallest letter or stroke.” That includes all these obscure laws. Nothing will disappear until heaven and earth disappear and all is fulfilled. So either you keep it all or you keep none of it, but since Jesus has come and fulfilled every shadow, He is the one we look to or we actually break the whole purpose and meaning of the law.
Nikki: This is a wonderful passage when you’re talking about Christ’s view of the inerrancy of Scripture. He said, “Not even the smallest letter or stroke,” even the grammar in the original language is inspired by God, and it will hold fast.
Colleen: Yes. If we can’t the words to mean what the words say, we are on a path that leads us away from the end goal of the truth of God. We have to believe the words mean what they say, and when we do, it becomes extremely clear. The law is a unit. It rises and falls as a unit. Jesus came to fulfill the entire unit of the law. And the law itself remains in God’s eternal word as a witness to the identity of Jesus, and His entire ministry was about revealing that identity. It was not about showing us how to keep the law, it was about showing that He was the Messiah who could do what no one but God could do. What do you take verse 20 to mean, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” What is He alluding to here? Even though He’s not saying it outright because He hasn’t yet gone to the cross, but how do you have righteousness better than the scribes and Pharisees?
Nikki: It’s funny because I read this as an Adventist, and I think I probably had the exact same anxiety that the first audience had.
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: I’ve got to be perfect. There’s no way I’m going to make it. But now that I understand the gospel and now that I understand that when you come to faith and when you’re born again you receive the righteousness of Christ, I can go back with that fuller context, and I can read this and I can see Jesus is saying, “You need me.”
Colleen: And we have to mention what He did then in the next two chapters that describe the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. Remember we mentioned Deuteronomy 4:1 and 2, where Moses said, “No one may add to the words of this law, no one may take away from the words of this law.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So right after Jesus makes this speech about fulfilling the law and not annulling it, He moves into actually giving a new law. In verse 21 He starts, “You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.” That’s a really amazing statement.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: Because Jesus makes a contrast there. What is He contrasting? In verse 21 He says, “You’ve heard…” what?
Nikki: “That the ancients were told,” and then He quoted Scripture, “You shall not commit murder.”
Colleen: And He’s quoting the sixth commandment right out of the Decalogue, “Thou shalt not kill.” The Hebrew word for “kill” was “murder.” He’s quoting the sixth commandment, and then He goes on to explain the explanation of that, that, you know, if you commit murder – and the law explained this – they had to pay or be killed. But then He says, “I say to you…” “You’ve heard it said, but I say to you…” What rabbi had the right to do that? How did Jesus change the sixth commandment here?
Nikki: He said you can’t even be angry, you can’t even call anyone a fool or you’re guilty of hell. I mean, it’s completely – it’s a different message.
Colleen: And this is not explaining the meaning of the sixth commandment. God gave the sixth commandment to Israel knowing who Israel was, depraved humanity. He gave the law, as we learn in the New Testament in Romans, in Galatians, to increase sin, to point out sin. He didn’t give it as a way to make people good. God knew what He was doing when He told Israel “Thou shalt not kill,” but Jesus is now saying, “I say to you, you can’t hate. You can’t even have that negative thought, that destructive thought about another human being without being guilty and worthy of hell.” Given the command in Deuteronomy, we see Jesus specifically adding to the law, don’t we?
Nikki: We do, and we see Him, in the context of this, teaching about reconciliation, be reconciled to your brother. If you do have these issues, be reconciled to your brother. In the Old Testament it was: If you do commit whatever, you go and you sacrifice a lamb or you go and you do these other things.
Colleen: And it might have included repayment, depending on who was killed or what was damaged. There was legal justice involved. There was nothing in the Old Testament about the heart reconciliation and the heart not having these horrible thoughts about the other.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: This is not something a normal human can do. Jesus is saying, “There is a new law that I’m giving you,” and He’s not fully explaining how it will be fulfilled, but He is impressing on His Jewish audience that this is something they can’t do. They will need to be born again to do this. Jesus is giving the standard for what He is going to usher in with His death and resurrection, a New Covenant. This is the Law of Christ He is beginning to give, and He’s specifically adding to the Law of Moses, something which every Jew knew was ultimate sin, but He’s doing it because He is the author of the law. Now, we see Him do this again with the law of adultery. What does He say about that down in verse 27 and 28?
Nikki: Well, He starts again with, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Colleen: What is He doing here? Is there anybody who can manage to keep the kind of law Jesus is now giving? There is no human who is capable of never having a lustful thought, just like there’s no human capable of never having a destructive thought about a person they’re angry with. Jesus is setting standards so high that these Jews know they can’t keep them, but He is saying, “I say to you.” He is delivering the Law of Christ, but what we don’t see fully until later is that this Law of Christ will be possible within the new birth, when we believe Jesus and are credited with His righteousness. He is revealing Himself to be over the law, not under it. He is not explaining the law. He is delivering the truth about what it means to live a moral life, and it’s not possible in our normal human, depraved condition. He is revealing Himself to have authority over Moses, who said, “No one can add to this law or take away from it.” Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is doing just that and revealing Himself to the Jews, who knew Moses, that He was the one Moses had said, “One like me, a prophet like me, is coming. Listen to Him,” and Jesus is revealing Himself as that prophet, the new lawgiver. Moses gave the law to Israel. He delivered it from God. Jesus is the lawgiver of the New Covenant, and we see in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus introducing His ministry, His mission, His identity, and He’s doing it in a transitional period which we cannot look at and say, “Oh, yes, I can do that. He’s showing me what to do.” No, He is showing who He is.
Nikki: It’s almost like when you’re looking back from the born-again perspective, you can kind of see how He’s teaching the law of love. He’s teaching reconciliation. He’s teaching faithfulness inside marriage –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – not just faithfulness, but a sense of responsibility to care for it. He says – after that adultery comment, He says, “You’ve heard that it’s said that you can leave your wife,” and He says, “No, don’t do that.”
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And so it’s impossible when you don’t know the Lord. When you know the Lord and you go back and look at it, it’s almost like you feel like you can see what He’s doing. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Yes, exactly. Retrospect. What is it they say? “Hindsight is 20/20?”
Nikki: Yes! [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: But it’s interesting because, honestly, I didn’t have that hindsight as an Adventist. I felt so much anxiety when I would read this.
Colleen: I did too. I did too, and I had no idea how to be that good.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s only by knowing Jesus, by trusting His word, and by seeing Him as the one who is fulfilling the law and being our new lawgiver, our new righteousness, the one who has become to us wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, 1 Corinthians 1:30. So we see, from what Jesus is doing here in the gospels, that morality does not come from the law. The law is not the thing that defines moral living. The law was a document that God gave to Israel. True morality is the actual identity of God Himself, the righteousness of God Himself, and Jesus is the one who actually has that righteousness and gives it to us when we trust Him. He gives us His righteousness, not our own. He doesn’t give us the power to have His righteousness.
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: He gives us the credit of His own personal righteousness, which is alien to us. And we see that Jesus didn’t need the law to keep Him from sin. He was greater than the law because He was the law’s author in the beginning, and He had the right to deliver a new law when He came to earth in His ministry.
Nikki: Yeah, as I listen to you talk about this, I have these thoughts in my mind. I remember hearing, as I would speak to Adventists once I left Adventism –
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: – and they would say, “Well, God wrote the law on your heart. You’re supposed to keep the law, it’s written on your heart.” That the law is eternal, and it’s just something we’re supposed to do now. So I’m listening to this, and I’m looking at how clearly Jesus is describing love for the brothers, love for humanity, and just the law of love. That is what He puts on our heart when He causes us to be born again and He gives us a heart of flesh, and one of the markers of being a child of God is love, love for the brothers –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – love for God. Honestly, even love for fallen humanity –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and a desire to help them know what’s true and to share the gospel with them. All of that is new, and that’s where our heart changes, and that’s where our obedience begins. It’s not the Decalogue on the heart. If it was, you wouldn’t need a remnant church teaching everybody about the Sabbath because it would already be there.
Colleen: That’s so true. He not only writes this law of love in our new heart of flesh, giving us a new heart and a living spirit, but He writes Himself on our hearts by sealing us with the Holy Spirit when we believe. It’s an amazingthing. He makes us different, He makes us new, and He seals us with His own presence, which never leaves a believer. The lawgiver gives us Himself, and His own righteousness when we believe, and that’s what Jesus is saying here in the best way He can say it prior to living out the fulfillment of His sacrifice, His burial, and His resurrection, to usher in righteousness and reconciliation.
Nikki: So today we got to look at how Christ began to usher in this New Covenant that wasn’t inaugurated until His death, burial, and resurrection, and on the night before He went to the cross He gave us the New Covenant. He gave us the symbols of the New Covenant, the bread and the wine, and He says that it was His body given for us and His blood shed for us, and after the cross, after Pentecost, He has His apostles go into all the world and begin to teach the church, those of us who believe, His desires for us, what He’s done and what we’re to do next, and we find ourselves, then, in the New Covenant, and we’re going to look at that next week.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: So I hope you’ll join us. If you have any questions or comments that you’d like to share with us, write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com, and if you’d like to sign up for our weekly emails and blogs, you can do so at proclamationmagazine.com, and there’s also a donation button if you would like to donate to the ministry. We would love for you to follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and we look forward to seeing you again next week.
Colleen: Nice to talk to you again, Nikki, out of our isolation.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: Bye to all.
Nikki: Bye.
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