This will be inserted into our series of lessons showing the continuity between the Old and New Testaments.
We have just finished an examination of Matthew 5:17-48 in several lessons. A critical element is that you understand the context: The whole Sermon on the Mount is a restoration of the Covenant. The Covenant is far more than the Law Code of Moses. The Covenant is a personal commitment to Jehovah as your feudal Lord and Father.
So over the previous few centuries, the Jewish leadership had continually departed from that high moral standard of a personal, heart-led loyalty to God. Even before the Return and Restoration, the Covenant was emptied of that personal loyalty issue, and the Law Code became rote behavior. This shows up in the Post-Exilic prophets, calling and calling for the people to give their hearts to the Lord.
In Jesus’ day, the leadership in resisting that call were the Scribes and Pharisees. They had fully institutionalized the doctrine that rote performance was exactly what God wanted. It was a perversion of what God had said about Himself. In their twisted imaginations, this legalistic nit-picking was how God Himself operated and what He expected, and even admired, about the Pharisaical rabbinical school of thought. It was a blatantly false image of Jehovah.
Thus, the key phrase for this passage is what Jesus said to His audience, warning them that their obedience to God was a far higher standard than that of the Scribes and Pharisees. They didn’t even qualify for the most basic level of citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Then Jesus proceeds to run down a series of moral principles that were as old as Noah. Keep in mind that a basic understanding here is that Noah was easier and more generic than Moses. And the Pharisees couldn’t even be bothered to obey that easy standard. They worked night and day establishing theory and court precedents to avoid having to obey even that much.
And these items Jesus cited were just the bare minimum that God required for mankind to live on the earth without reverting to the moral chaos before the Flood. With each basic principle, Jesus points out how it masks the very much higher moral truth of God’s personality. If you want to stand in the Presence of God, it will require a driving desire to please Him. To please Him requires that you grasp the fundamental nature of righteousness as the moral orientation of God, and you have to want it for yourself.
Mere rote obedience is just enough to keep Him from wiping you off the earth. If you want Him to smile, to actually impress Him and gain His loving attention, you must be like a child who struggles to grasp what God is actually trying to accomplish. Trying to approach it like an adult, as if there were some potential to work as equals, was a blasphemous insult. He longs for humans to come to Him like children.
