New Testament Doctrine — Matthew 5:13-20

Jesus has been striving all this time to correct the Talmudic lies of the Pharisees, along with the occasional secularist nonsense from the Sadducees, and a sprinkling of deception from other Jewish sects. Sometimes He references those false teachings to refute them. At other times He simply restates the Law of Moses in terms that repudiate everything wholesale. Such were the Beatitudes, flatly stating that God favors and blesses people who see through the words of the Law to the heart of the Father.

If persecution from worldly people is a primary mark of God’s favor, then what kind of people ought we to be? Jesus talks about salt. What role does it play in daily Hebrew life? It takes just a little salt to preserve things, and even less if you simply want to make food palatable. To whom does it then make the world palatable? We are talking here about God’s evaluation of things. God favors those who make the hard choices for His glory instead of what mere flesh wants. So, salt symbolizes the people who seek to live by their convictions, striving to please the Father as if He were a real person.

Israel was supposed to be that salt. The nation as a whole had lost her flavor. It was like the cheaper salt that most peasants bought. All it took was just a little contamination with moisture and the salt changed color, becoming totally worthless. That stuff got tossed out into the street.

So Jesus is addressing this audience that hungers for a higher understanding of divine revelation. They are trying to revive the Covenant with the Father. This makes them the salt of the whole world, the reason God hasn’t called for the end of all things yet. Indeed, they are like the sole light in the darkness of a fallen world. While ancient cities were seldom built right on top of natural hills, a lot of cities were by that time built on mounds of rubble from previous occupations of a given site. A mound that was occupied afresh would be rather well lit at night. You could see it from a long way off.

The whole point in having lights in the home was to give light to a whole room. What would be the use of hiding it under a basket? The witness of God’s people was supposed to work like a lamp in the darkness, so everyone could see what was real, what the situation was actually like. In this fallen world, people of the Covenant lived in such a way as to show what God had in mind, how fallen people were supposed to live. When people saw how the righteous lived, and how their lives had a tendency to expose evil and make good more enticing, they would then see the glory of the Father. It makes His reputation much stronger, and the Covenant starts looking like a really good idea.

In the minds of Pharisees and their ilk, what Jesus was doing was tearing down the Law — but they had made their Law a false idol. They had it all wrong; the Law of God was not at all what they said it was. So Jesus doubled down, saying that He had no intention of tearing down the boundaries of Moses and the Prophets. Indeed, He was there to enforce those boundaries. Matthew uses a Greek word (pleroo), typically translated into English as “fulfill.” In the context, it should be pretty clear that Jesus says He intends to satisfy and to execute the demands of the Covenant.

This is in contrast to the Pharisees who insisted that their Talmudic reasoning was more binding than the written words of Moses. They were departing from the Covenant, running off in the wrong direction. Jesus meant to breathe fresh life into the words of Moses and the Prophets. Indeed, He personified the Covenant. He was the very breath of God walking on feet among the Jews. That was the inherent thinking of the ancient Hebrews who put those words on parchment or papyrus. Hebrew language wasn’t declarative, but indicative. It wasn’t meant to carry meaning, but to point the way, to indicate meaning as a place to live.

So until the existing world was ended, then the only way to live was that walking, breathing image of what the Covenant indicated. Nothing in the Covenant could be forgotten. Because the Jewish leadership sought to drain the life from the Covenant, they were teaching people to violate its provisions. The Covenant was a living thing, not some static proposition. They had completely misunderstood the purpose of the written record.

Thus, by taking away the life of the Law, the Pharisees were teaching people to break the Law. Even if someone who fudged just a bit on one provision made it into the Kingdom, they would be the most ignoble. But those who breathed life into the Law by living it by their hearts would be the nobles in that Eternal Kingdom. You had better hope your moral character was stronger than those of the scribes and Pharisees, or you would never even comprehend the Kingdom of Heaven. You certainly would never see it.

By His choice of words, Jesus was implying that this Kingdom was going to be soon instituted. Only those who live the Word of the Father would be welcomed into it.