We ended last time with Jesus’ warning that you cannot put new wine in old wineskins. The New Covenant prophesied in Jeremiah 31 cannot fit into the mould of the Old one. Does that mean that the Old one was somehow wrong or bad?
The problem was not with the Covenant but with us:
Paul’s argument in the 7th chapter of Romans is that the Law is good. Made by God, it could not be otherwise. It clearly showed us what is sin and what is righteousness. But by pointing out sin to the kind of people that we are, who inevitably give in to sin, the Law ends up condemning us to death. From that standpoint, what it brings us is death, not life. There is only one way to escape that death…
Romans 8:1-4 (NASB) Therefore there is now no condemnation at all for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
This is the same thing Jeremiah tells us in his chapter 31, where God says: I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, in the day of my taking them by the hand, to lead them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they broke, although I was a husband unto them, saith Jehovah.
(We broke the covenant, not Him. And therefore, the only solution is a new kind of covenant:)
For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel, after those days, saith Jehovah: I will put my law in their inward parts, and will write it in their heart.
This is a covenant we can actually keep.
It is because God will sovereignly change our hearts (if we ask him; that is, if we “take him up” on the offer of the New covenant) that Paul tells us that the requirements of the Law can be fulfilled in us now. This is a promise that has been with us since the days of Moses (Deuteronomy 30:6 (NIV)) The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.
That is what Jesus accomplished at the cross. That is the supernatural power that enters our lives when our sins are forgiven. Which is why Jesus, when talking about us receiving Salvation, tells us that we enter eternal life right now. We don’t have to wait until we die to have eternal life inside us.
John 3:36 He that believes on the Son has life eternal, and he that is not subject to the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides upon him.
John 5:24 Verily, verily, I say unto you, that he that hears my word, and believes him that has sent me, has life eternal, and does not come into judgment, but is passed out of death into life.
John 6:47,48 Verily, verily, I say to you, He that believes [on me] has life eternal. I am the bread of life.
This is present tense. This is now.
If this is true, why would we ever want to try to live as if we were under the Old Covenant. It is foolish and it is pointless. They could never keep it back then; why would it be any different with us today?
Legalism… for whose sake?
Legalism is human beings again trying prove that they can keep the Law. But we won’t admit that. We will say that all we are trying to do is honor God by living “holy” lives; that we rebuke the people of the world not because we hate them but because we love them, and we are trying to show them that it is possible to live lives of obedience to God.
Sounds good… But isn’t that like preaching a different Gospel? The Gospel should be Jesus and Jesus alone. Are we better than Paul? He had to deal with a truly messed up society when working with the Corinthian Church. Corinth was so steeped in the worship of the Greek gods and the loose morality that that worship brought with it, that errors, misinterpretations, and hostility kept rising right and left in the Church as it was being born. And yet, Paul tells them:
1 Corinthians 2:1-2 (NIV) …When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
Jesus is more than enough to convert the most inveterate sinner. My “holiness” has nothing to add. Jesus made clear what my job is: Love God above all things. Love my neighbor as myself. If I spread the Word and do that, I have done what I have been called to do.
There is a paradox in legalism. If I choose to live that way, it must be because I truly believe that the righteousness it brings out in me pleases God. Otherwise, why would I do it? But if that is the goal, should not legalism be working continually to make me a better person? When it pulls me away from sin, isn’t it accomplishing the goal? If that is so, why would I focus on other people’s sin?
Now, maybe my immediate answer to that last challenge is: “What do you mean? I don’t focus on other people’s sins.” But if that is true, I have to admit that that is extraordinary… because in Jesus’ day the Pharisees – the prime exemplars of legalism – were continually comparing their righteousness to that of others:
Mark 2:23-24 And it came to pass that He went on the sabbath through the cornfields; and His disciples began to walk on, plucking the ears. And the Pharisees said to him, Behold, why do they on the sabbath what is not lawful?
Now, would plucking ears of corn as you walked by, to eat because you were hungry, really violate the Sabbath’s prohibition against working? Was that a correct interpretation of the Law?
You might think a strict, literal interpretation would require that to be true. But the Mosaic Law is not built like that. It isn’t a set of comprehensive dictums that perfectly define the boundaries of righteousness. We would like to imagine that the Law works like that, like a fence. If we live inside that fence, then everything is fine, but if we step outside it then we are wrong.
The problem with that expectation is that it doesn’t work with human beings We will always be looking for a loophole and finding it. And every time such a loophole is found, then a new law would have to be enacted to plug it. Until the next loophole is found. And so forth. That this is reality is easy to verify by looking at the laws that govern any country… over time the number of laws fills volumes and volumes of books… precisely because we try to build a framework that holds absolutely, that is spelled out comprehensively in the letter of the law.
But the Law was written by God to be understood by people created in His image. We are expected to understand the spirit of the Law. Otherwise, we could claim that it is full of internal contradictions.
So, suppose you are walking outside on the sabbath and you see your neighbor’s donkey fallen into a ditch? Wouldn’t it be hard work to pull it out?
Exodus 3:4-5 “If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to return it. If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help them with it.
So, which commandment are you going to obey, the commandment that prohibits work on the Sabbath or the commandment that says, “love your neighbor” (even if he is your enemy)? To a mind bound to the letter of the law this quandary would require deep thinking to resolve (maybe even mathematically.) But to the spirit, the answer to this moral question is obvious. (In fact, Jesus uses this very question to make His point later, as told in Matthew 12:11.)
Here, faced with the pettiness of the Pharisees’ objection, Jesus chooses to take the question to an extreme: He is going to put to them the same quandary but not by pitting two laws against each other…
Mark 2:25-28 And *He* said to them, Have ye never read what David did when he had need and hungered, *he* and those with him, how he entered into the house of God, in [the section of] Abiathar [the] high priest, and ate the shew-bread, which it is not lawful unless for the priests to eat, and gave even to those that were with him?
And He said to them, The sabbath was made on account of man, not man on account of the sabbath; so that the Son of man is lord of the sabbath also.
By pitting David’s decision (and actions) against a law, Jesus is automatically putting his listeners inside the question. This is no longer a theoretical question, it is a “what would you do?” kind of question. Every Israelite living in Jesus’ day, venerated David, whom scripture called a man after God’s own heart, the man whose “Son” would be the Messiah that would set the nation free. They all would hope to be able to emulate him.
So, Jesus picks a story from a time of David’s life which, unanimously, led him to be praised as a righteous man: though he was innocent of any treachery, King Saul kept trying to kill him; but when he had a chance to kill King Saul, he did not take it because Saul was God’s anointed; and even as his life was constantly at risk in the wilderness, he still took time to he defend his people against their enemies; and so on. But right during that time, the episode Jesus cites took place. There is no doubt that the Law declares the showbread in the tabernacle as only to be eaten by the priests. And here not only does David eat of it, but he feeds it to the men with him. The letter of the law clearly indicts David as a lawbreaker.
This is quite a challenge. And from the way this passage in Mark ends, we can infer that no one tried to answer Jesus’ question. Who would dare to impugn David?
Jesus did more than give them a riddle they could not answer. Jesus made them see that the position they had placed themselves in was untenable, when they took upon themselves to judge and condemn Jesus’ disciples. For, if it were tenable, if that were the right thing to do, then surely they could apply the same principle to another scenario. So, Jesus gives them another scenario, another opportunity to do the same: “Go ahead, judge and condemn David… Surely, if you are qualified to judge my disciples, you are qualified to judge David… Right?”
This is quite a challenge… and it bites because it exposes them as bullies and cowards.
But isn’t that what we are, any time we choose to judge another person?
Who made me a judge? Who am I to take that responsibility and power unto myself? If, as Jeremiah says, the human heart is deceitful, including to the point that I often deceive myself, what makes me think I am qualified to judge someone else’s righteousness?
And then Jesus ends his rebuke of them by revealing that, on the other hand, He can judge correctly. This is something we know Jesus said in the gospel of John… He did not come to judge, and He did not want to Judge, but the Father gave Him the power and authority to judge because He is the Son of Man.
So, as the Son of Man, He explains to them why all their fuss about the Sabbath was way off. The Sabbath was not meant to enslave man to a set of rules. It was made to remind man of the freedom he has: freedom to worship God and to depend on Him completely.
Legalism reveals itself in its lack of Love
Mark 3:1-6 And he entered again into the synagogue; and there was there a man having his hand dried up. And they watched him if he would heal him on the sabbath, that they might accuse him.
Here we see a second paradox of legalism: If the avowed purpose of living a life obedient to the letter of the Law, is to please God, then how could it ever lead to a heart that does not love God’s other children? Regardless of whether they are righteous or not, they are God’s children. They are His. He is more than able to deal with them.
And yet here, the people watching Jesus, knowing that He is likely to heal this man – in fact, apparently, convinced that He can do it (you would think that that is the definition of faith) – instead of rejoicing for the man, all they can think of is that that healing, being the work of a physician, is surely prohibited on the Sabbath and therefore they will be able to indict Jesus.
But the same way that Jesus took the question about His disciples’ unlawful eating and turned it around by asking them to judge David’s unlawful eating, He turns this question (unspoken, but clearly in their hearts) around: They have already decided that Jesus’ healing of this man is wrong because of the Sabbath, even though it would be doing good to this man. So, Jesus asks them, Why?
I mean, this is a valid question that we all ought to be ready to answer when the Lord makes us face our presuppositions: “Explain yourself. What is your logic?”
And He says to the man who had his hand dried up, Rise up [and come] into the midst. And he says to them, Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill? But they were silent.
Again, Jesus is making them see that the Law must have a spirit. If according to the Law the Sabbath is holy and good, then it must be lawful to do good on the Sabbath… because if it is not lawful to do good on the Sabbath then it must be lawful to do evil on the Sabbath. But that would contradict the holiness and goodness of the Sabbath.
The essence of the argument is that the Sabbath law cannot possibly be arbitrary because God is not arbitrary. The Sabbath law must have a reason for being. It cannot possibly be just one more box that we must “check off” to keep God happy. It is not “value neutral”. Therefore, it is either meant for our benefit or our injury. Which one do you think God intended?
Again, just as in the case of the complaint about unlawful eating, they have no “come back”. Rather than being proven wrong, they stay silent. But silence won’t do because when God challenges our presuppositions, our misconceptions, our errors, our sins… He deserves an answer.
And looking round upon them with anger, distressed at the hardening of their heart, he says to the man, Stretch out thy hand. And he stretched [it] out, and his hand was restored.
I think it is interesting that Jesus did not touch the man. In fact, He did not even tell the man He was healed. He told the man to do something that any other man could do, the man obeyed, and he was healed. I think Jesus did this on purpose. He, as it were, took Himself almost completely out of the equation so that His accusers would have nothing with which to accuse Him.
I mean, can you imagine them going before the Sanhedrin to accuse Him? The priests and elders would ask for the evidence against Jesus, the eyewitness testimony that shows He healed this man on the Sabbath. What evidence is there?
And the Pharisees going out straightway with the Herodians took counsel against him, how they might destroy him.
The tree is known by its fruit
And this is the bottom line. Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus made this point:
Matthew 7:15-20 But beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but within are ravening wolves. By their fruits ye shall know them. Do [men] gather a bunch of grapes from thorns, or from thistles figs? So every good tree produces good fruits, but the worthless tree produces bad fruits. A good tree cannot produce bad fruits, nor a worthless tree produce good fruits. Every tree not producing good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire. By their fruits then surely ye shall know them.
There is nothing wrong with desiring to live a life that is pleasing to God. By definition, that would be a life that is righteous. But as I embark on that journey, the first question that I need to answer is: Where does this righteousness come from? (How do I get it?) And the second is: How can I know that I have attained it?
The second question is the easy one to answer because of that passage in Matthew 7: All I need to do is look at the fruit that my chosen life is bearing. Is that fruit Love? Because if it isn’t, I have a problem: the two greatest commandments are strictly about Love: Love God and love my neighbor. Those two, Jesus said, contain all the Law and the prophets. Those two.
I cannot go about my life saying that my righteous living, my holiness, proves I love God if that same life does no good for my neighbor.
The first question reminds us of the promise in Deuteronomy 30 and Jeremiah 31: Our righteousness comes from God… if and only if we accept and believe (have Faith in) His New Covenant. That is it.
Once He has changed my heart, I have Hope: a Hope assured by God’s own word because He won’t go back on His word; and a Hope that is proven to me by the fruit that I see coming out of my life: as works of Love.