SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/5/2020 8:44 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-4
“Intro to Matthew 5:17”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 5:17
Message of the
verse: “17
"Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not
come to abolish but to fulfill.”
We continue with the last part of
John MacArthur’s comments from his commentary on the introduction to Matthew
5:17. “We cannot live the righteous life
or be God’s faithful witnesses by lowering His standards and claiming to follow
a higher law of love and permissiveness.
Whatever is contrary to God’s law is beneath His law, not above it. No matter what the motive behind them, standards
that are unbiblically permissive have no part either in God’s love or His law,
because His love and His law are inspirable.
The key, and the only key, to a righteous life is keeping the Word of
the living God.
“Jesus’ warning, ‘do not think,’
indicates that most, if not all, of His hearers had a wrong conception about
His teaching. Most traditionalistic Jews
considered the rabbinic instructions to be the proper interpretations of the
law of Moses, and they concluded that, because Jesus did not scrupulously
follow those traditions, He obviously was doing away with the law or relegating
it to minor importance. Because Jesus
swept away the traditions of washings, special tithes, extreme Sabbath observance,
and such things, the people thought He was thereby overthrowing God’s law. From the outset, therefore, Jesus wanted to
disabuse His hearers of any misconceptions about His view of Scripture.
“Throughout the gospel of Matthew,
more than in the other gospels, Jesus repeatedly uses Scripture to contradict
and indict the superficial and hypocritical scribes and Pharisees. Though not always specifically identified as
such, it is primarily their beliefs and practices that Jesus exposes in Matthew
5:21-6:18.
“Kataluo’
(abolish) means to utterly overthrow or destroy, and is the same word used of
the destruction of the Temple (Matt. 24:2; 26:61; etc.) and of the death of the
physical body (2 Cor. 5:1). The basic
idea is to tear down and smash to the ground, to obliterate completely. In several places, as here, the word is used
figuratively to indicate bringing to naught, rendering useless, or nullifying
(see Acts 5:38-39; Rom. 14:20). Doing
that to God’s law is the antithesis of the work and teaching of Jesus.
“In the remainder of verse 17 Jesus
focuses on the preeminence of Scripture as God’s perfect, eternal, and wholly authoritative
Word. By implication He suggests three
reasons for that preeminence: it is
authored by God, it is affirmed by the prophets, and it s accomplished by
Christ.”
This concludes what John MacArthur
had to say in the introduction of Matthew 5:17.
7/5/2020 9:06
AM
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