Jesus Fulfilling the Law: Old Covenant vs New Covenant

Understanding the relationship between Jesus and the Old Testament law

Jesus did not come to promote the law, but to fulfill it

The concept of fulfilling a promise is key to understanding Jesus' message

Jesus' message is an all-or-nothing package, either he is the total fulfillment of the law or the law remains in effect

The Law In this video, I want to make my position clearer than I have already made it about the relationship between Jesus and the Torah, or the Old Testament law. If you've not already seen or heard them, please watch the following videos before viewing this one. There's a live stream on the Kingdom of Heaven, and a music video called The Law. Check them out. Then watch these other four or five videos. The difference between Jesus and Moses, the secret name of Jesus Four things you may not know about Jews and Israel, and maybe even Sunday worship in Mark. There's another one called Abraham's Descendant. Definitely check it out as soon as you can. It often helps to trace the doctrine back to its origins, in order to more clearly understand how to view it. Now, if you were to start with just the four Gospels, in an effort to understand what Jesus came to tell the world the whole Hebrew Roots doctrine would not naturally arise out of his teachings. They have come from some other source besides Jesus. Then there's the issue of keeping the Sabbath, which has been the primary obsession of earlier groups who stressed the need for us to keep Old Testament laws, like the Seventh Adventists and the Worldwide Church of God. Sabbath observance is one of the most repeated themes in the Gospels, but ironically it was always the Pharisees who took the side of the Sabbath, while Jesus' position was always to stretch or ignore the Sabbath. he made it clear that he had something better than Sabbath observances. Something which would replace or fulfill the spirit of what was contained in the fourth commandment. But the Pharisees didn't want any part of it. And the same is true of all the Torah worshipers today. Just remember that Sabbath arguments do not naturally arise from trying to obey Jesus. And that is the case with so much of the entire movement away from Jesus and back to the Old Testament. Virtually every Hebrew roots person who has ever written to me, claiming we're on the same wavelength quotes the exact same passage from the Sermon on the Mount. Nothing more! They quote Matthew 5 verses 17 to 19 I did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it. Everything that they stand for starts and ends there. It's like the secret passage in the board game Clue. You know how you instantly move from one extreme opposite side of the board to the other? From the study to the kitchen? Now, if you accept their interpretation for Matthew 5.17, you'll never see Jesus again. You will head down a rabbit hole to the Old Testament law and never return. They don't give two cents for anything else that Jesus taught. Their interpretation of that one passage, in isolation says that Jesus was little more than a prophet trying to get the Jews to follow the law in some way that they had not already done. Well, that is what prophets tended to do in the Old Testament. The children of Israel would go chasing after other gods, getting away from all the various teachings of the religion building groves and idols to other gods, and then along would come a prophet telling them to repent destroy their idols, and dust off the old laws and start practicing them as a nation once again. But of course, that's not what happened when Jesus traveled around the country. The Pharisees themselves were extremely zealous about the law. There might have been tiny discrepancies about issues such as whether or not the law taught about a resurrection after death but we read nothing about them desecrating the temple, worshiping Roman gods, or sinking into debauchery around the time of Jesus. Jesus did not come to get them back to the law because they already had it. And they had it in a big way. It's as simple as that. It's only because the church is full of people who have never read the life and teachings of Jesus that such a freaky teaching ever took off to begin with. Obviously, something is wrong with the Hebrew roots understanding of Matthew 5, 17-19 for them to have reached the conclusion that all we need to do is to go back to the Torah and start practicing it more religiously. Let's look more closely at the passage especially in the light of what Jesus actually taught elsewhere There are three verses and here the first one Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. All the emphasis is put on Jesus not destroying the law as though it means that he was there to promote the law and get people to turn back to it. But the key word here is not destroy, the key word is fulfill. He came to fulfill the law. If, for example, you make a promise in writing, it's a good idea for the person to whom you've made that promise to keep the written promise as evidence, just in case you go back on your word. But when you have fulfilled the promise, what happens to the promise itself? It doesn't really matter, does it? It's been fulfilled. When you finish the job by the date that you had promised to finish it, what further use is the promise? When you pay the amount that you had promised to pay, what does the other party do with the promise? When you get married to the person you had promised to marry, how much meaning does the engagement have anymore? What happens to the promise after it has been fulfilled? Your purpose was not to oppose the promise. Your purpose was to fulfill it. It's just that the end result is much the same as it would have been if somebody had come to destroy it. There is no further use for it, except maybe as a historical record. It's not rocket science, folks. Do you see how simple it is? Jesus is talking about fulfilling a promise. And a promise is what the first three quarters of the Bible is all about. It's called the Old Promise, or the Old Testament. So, Jesus is saying that fulfilling a promise is not destruction in the sense of one being good and the other evil. He did not come to fight the Torah. But the end result of him having fulfilled the Torah is that all anyone needs to do now is just to rejoice at this fulfillment of the promise Leave the promise itself to be what it is, a historic relic. You see that? Jesus and Paul both try to get people to see that his message to the world should never have been a threat to the religious leaders of his day. He actually had the spirit of the law from start to finish. But they clung to the written letter of the law, the little details, and reacted to Jesus in fear. And they did it for their own selfish reasons. Now, what about the next verse, verse 18? The plot does thicken a bit here. Listen. I say to you, till heaven and earth pass, not one jot or one tittle shall pass from the law till it all has been fulfilled. Now, this paints quite a different picture, doesn't it? but only if you assume that Jesus only partially fulfilled the old promise. That would create a huge problem, because what we read here is that there cannot be partial fulfillment. You cannot set aside some of the Torah unless you prepare to set aside all of it. Either it has been fulfilled in every jot and tittle, or it must be taught and practiced in every jot and tittle. You see that? not one jot, not one tittle of the old promise will be done away with until and unless it has all been fulfilled. This is so simple, yet I keep feeling like I need to say it again because it just doesn't sink in. We only have two choices. Jesus is an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it package. Either he totally fulfills the Torah, or else every jot and tittle of the Torah is still in effect just as it was written and just as it was practiced by the very best Hebrew rabbis and priests of the Old Testament. Paul hammered it home. He said it's all or nothing. Either you follow it perfectly in every jot and tittle For you let go of it completely, and cling to Jesus as the total fulfillment of the law. Your only hope of salvation. So, which is it going to be? There are thousands of jots and tittles on all the intricate details of the various sacrifices for various sins in the Old Testament. That is, in fact, the bulk of what the law is all about. a lot of rules, a lot of punishments, and a lot of sacrifices in order to be forgiven for breaking the rules. Now here the amazing thing Listen to this The Torah worshippers themselves do not follow the rules about sacrifices They say the sacrifices have been fulfilled in Christ You hear that Didn't we just read that they can't do that? They can't do away with the sacrifices and still keep the rest of the law? Not one jot or tittle can be done away with until it has all been fulfilled. See, I don't have a problem with not doing the sacrifices, because I believe it's all been fulfilled. But people who want to skirt around everything that Jesus said, and drag you back into the Old Testament law well, they really do have to reject Jesus in order to do that, don't they? Not a few jots and tittles from Jesus and the rest from the Torah. It's one or the other. So, do we treat dwarfs as unclean? Do we stone gays? Do we tear our houses down piece by piece and deposit all those pieces in the rubbish dump outside of town if we get mildew on our house? Do we use two different kitchens in which to cook our food? Do we condemn anyone who wears a wool garment along with a cotton one? When you put all of that up against Jesus, the cornerstone, the fulfillment you see them for the gnats that they are. All of it. Just gnats. Go back to the law, and it won't be long before you're fighting over gnats of every persuasion. Whoever can catch the most gnats wins the self-righteousness competition. It even goes so far as to how you spell the name of Jesus, or how you pronounce it. Now look at it like this. Does anyone know how any ancient language was pronounced? We don't have tape recordings of Jesus saying his name. All we have are very old written records, and we simply guess how words were pronounced in those days based on clues about the way they're pronounced today, or similar words. Especially when vowels are left out, and when some letters like J and V can even today be pronounced in more than one way it becomes virtually impossible to know how they were pronounced. So, some say Yeshua, and some say Yahashua, and some say something else. Honestly, they'll fight over anything. The Torah is all about straining at gnats while swallowing the camel of Christ's teachings. In the first five books of the Old Testament, there are references to a few festivals. They were not the core of the law. They were like the Sabbath, just holidays. Employers are sometimes punished for not letting their employees have a holiday. But the masses themselves, the workers don't need a law to have a day off work. They'll love that. But the Torah worshippers argue over festivals and their supposedly hidden meanings. They have not yet been fulfilled, they tell us. Yes, they have. They've been fulfilled in Christ. Every single rule in the entire Torah is fulfilled in Jesus. Can't eat pork? Fulfilled in Jesus. Dirty semen? Fulfilled in Jesus. How to cut your beard? Fulfilled in Jesus. Feast of Tabernacles? Fulfilled in Jesus. I don't need special events for each of these details. The fulfillment is not an event. The fulfillment is the Messiah himself. So the question is as simple as this. Are we going to obey every jot and tittle of all those laws about stoning people? about sacrificing animals, about releasing scapegoats, and about what to do if you get mildew in your house? Or are we going to say, Jesus has fulfilled the Torah, totally fulfilled it, in every jot and tittle? In this passage from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not give us any middle ground. All these people, and that includes all the Pentecostals and Baptists, Dispensationalists who have tried to create a system of theology that continues to teach that flesh Jews have something that Jesus was not able to give to the Gentile nation of Abraham's descendants. They are all denying everything about Jesus. He cannot be a partial savior. Until they can let go of their pandering to Jews and their double-mindedness about the law they can never fully embrace Jesus for who he is. Abraham's promised descendant, the one through whom all the nations of the world will be blessed. All the promises of God are yea and amen in Jesus. Every last jot and tittle of them Am I making myself clear I hope so Now let have a look at the 19th verse the third one Jesus says whoever breaks one of these least commandments and teaches others to do so shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. Now, note that he says one of these commandments. What commandments was he referring to? Now, I'm fine if you want to say he was referring to every single rule in the Torah because I'm confident that when I do and teach every commandment of Jesus I am teaching everything that was encompassed in the law. But if you read on, you'll see that Jesus probably used those words, these commandments because he was about to list a couple of the commandments specifically. And what he says about these commandments gives us a better understanding about what the whole business of fulfilling the law is all about as well as what it is that we must do and teach. Here it is in verses 21 and 22. You have heard that it was said by them of old time, you shall not kill. And whoever shall kill, shall be in danger of the judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother without a cause, shall be in danger of the judgment. So we have two commandments here. The Torah commandment, don't kill. and Jesus' fulfillment of that command, which is don't even be angry without a good cause. So if it has to be one or the other, which one is going to be for you? Which one is superior? Which one is the fulfillment of the other? Which one goes deeper to the root cause of murder? And if you keep and teach the better one, does it mean that you contradicted the other? Of course not. You don't even have to know the other. The fulfillment covers every jot and tittle of the lesser one and more but only if you're spiritual enough to recognize the underlying spirit of the written law. The Sabbath, Jesus said, was given for man and not man for the Sabbath. Think about those words. God gives us some holidays, literally holy days. Now, when we stop working for money, every day it becomes a holy day, a holiday. So it is the same with all the festivals and the other holidays. The same with the health rules. They're just that, health rules. If something is bad for your health, don't do it. Unless not doing it is likely to offend someone, or hurt someone. Such as happens when missionaries are invited to homes and offered water that has not been boiled. Jesus put all of that into perspective if you just study his life and teachings. You see what I'm saying? Get the spirit of the law and get down off your religious high horses about how you're holier than everyone else because you don't eat pork. My goodness, we learned about how to eliminate trichinosis from pork ages ago but still people get all self-righteous about not eating it. What do you think would happen if we taught every jot and tittle of what Jesus taught, and never even gave a thought to the Torah. Would we be considered least in the kingdom of heaven because we've only taught what Jesus taught? Because we've ignored what the Torah teaches? Now remember, it has to be all or nothing with the Torah. You can't say, well, Jesus overlooked a few jots and tittles, so we need to teach what Jesus taught plus the jots and tittles that he missed. No, you have to totally teach one or the other. The old promise can only be dropped when it's been totally fulfilled. And until it has been fulfilled, we must teach it in its entirety. And when the veil was ripped from top to bottom in the temple, when Jesus said on the cross, it is finished, God left the box. This is the box in which the Torah was kept. This was the box where they believed that God lived. God left it, never to return. The old promise had been fulfilled, in toto, completely. If something is unhealthy, and it's not going to offend anyone, you don't need it. But don't do it because you think you're more righteous than other people. Do it because you want to live longer. Just simple common sense. As Paul taught, we've been set free from the law, so let's not go back to following it. The introduction to John's Gospel says that the law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. So which is it going to be for you? The law or grace and truth? You want to get one or the other. Choose this day whom you are going to serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. you

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