Fulfilling obedience

 This week's verses are Matthew 5:17-20:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish these things but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth pass away not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter will pass from the law until everything takes place. So anyone who breaks one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever obeys them and teaches others to do so will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness goes beyond that of the experts in the law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven!

 These verses come from a list someone gave me recently of "mission statements" of Jesus from the Bible. If we're supposed to follow him and be transformed into his likeness, it's useful to meditate on the things he said about himself.

In this case, he talks about the law. When we become Christians and we hear about grace, we're often tempted to think that we can ignore everything in the Old Testament as irrelevant. But while God's grace is a safety net for our failures, it doesn't magically enable us to fly. We still have to walk the tightrope of obedience carefully.

We still get fooled by grace. People get saved and they think "I'm not going to Hell for doing X! I'm free!" And they go a little crazy. They want to tear down the walls of good sense and storm their way into a life of savagery and complication in the name of freedom. People were led astray by that impulse in Jesus' days too. People accused him of undermining the Old Testament law.

Why is there a law? We can't figure it out in the context of grace. And we don't want to be "church people" who act all weird and moral all of the time. So we rejoice at our amnesty and do as we like. We want a world with no rules. We want to let ourselves go the moment we see the ring of God's covenant on our finger. But what does God want?

Jesus tells us what he wants: He wants the law to be respected, even if it is not obeyed perfectly. He died for our sins not to enable us to live as libertines, but to prevent us from being destroyed the first time we miss the mark. The righteousness we would need to be perfect would be even greater than the churchiest of church people could muster.

So, why is there a law? Think about it: God obviously chose the Old Testament laws for a reason. He didn't just pick them at random! There must be something about them that implements his plan for our world, or he wouldn't have gone through so much trouble to teach and re-teach them to Israel.

Our mercenary side would say that because Jesus died to save us from our sins, it's no longer useful to expend effort to live according to the Bible, because it doesn't affect our bottom line. We're saved either way. But that doesn't take into account the fact that God's plan is perfect, and that we can't disrespect his work and still say we respect him.

So don't think for a minute that God died so that we could ignore the Old Testament law. Doing so would disrespect the eternal God who both wrote the law and died to protect us from it's penalties. Instead, we should ask him to help us live in such a way as to perfect his plan, so that not even the tiniest piece of it would be ignored. If we love him, we should love his words too and try to take his desires into account in how we live in his world.