In His teaching Jesus took His stand upon the Old Testament. He did not aim to introduce a wholly new religion. He clearly foresaw that some of His disciples would suppose that it was His purpose to break with the Old Testament system, and He warned them against this serious mistake by telling them that any of them who should feel themselves free to break the least commandment of the Old Testament law, end should teach others accordingly, should be called the least in the Kingdom of God (Matt.5:19). His constant manner of speaking in regard to the Jewish religion and Scriptures shows the reverence in which he held them.
There is in one of His parables a significant expression in regard to the gradual process of His truth in the world: "First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear" (Mark 4:28). This statement might be fitly applied to the whole process of revelation of which the Old Testament represents the earlier stages. It would as truly describe Jesus' idea of this process as it does the growth to which He immediately applied it. The Old Testament represents the first steps in a great course of revelation and redemption which reaches its consummation in Christ Himself.
While, therefore, Jesus builds upon the Jewish religious system, He also builds far above and beyond it. While salvation, historically considered, is from the Jews, it is nonetheless necessary that the Jewish religion should be greatly elevated and enriched. The actual religion of the people, though embodying essential and permanent elements of true religion, is not adequate to the needs of the world; it must be further developed, supplemented and completed at many points before it can became the universal, the absolute religion.
There were imperfections in the Jewish religion which were incidental to its character and purpose. It was in its very nature provisional and preparatory. it was adapted to an early and rudimentary stage of human development. A convenient illustration is found in the principle of retaliation which, within certain limits, the O.T. sanctioned. "You have heard," said Jesus, "that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say to you, Resist not him that is evil," etc. (Matt.5:38.39).
Jesus, in effect, undermined the Jewish law of clean and unclean by setting forth the principle that it is not what enters into a person which defiles, but that it is what comes out of a person, that is, from the heart, which defiles (Mark 7:15). The Levitical system of sacrifices would not long survive among those who appreciated the force of the principle that "to love God with all the heart, end with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbor as himself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings end sacrifices" (Mark 12:33). it is obvious, then, that the actual effect of the Gospel in doing away with the Jewish sacrificial and ceremonial system was a natural and logical result of the principles which Jesus laid down, and may be said to have been contemplated by Him.
But the question now arises, Did Jesus intend to abrogate the whole O.T. religious system, and, if so, by what means? This question also involves another, If He did do away with this system, how is the fact to be reconciled with His frequent assertion of its divineness? The most important passage bearing on these problems is Matthew 5:17, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfill." This passage must be read in light of the explanations and applications which follow it. Jesus proceeds to say that not a jot or tittle shall pass away from the law - a statement which, a read by itself, would seem to indicate the perpetual validity of the whole O.T. system, ritual, sacrifices and all. But to the statement in question He immediately adds: "till all things be fulfilled, or accomplished." He does not, therefore, say that no part of this system shall ever pass away (as it has done in consequence of His own teaching), but only that no part of it shall escape the process of fulfillment; that it shall not pass away till, having served its providential purpose, it is fulfilled in the Gospel. What, now, is this fulfillment which is to be accomplished for the whole law, even for its least portions?
This question is not to be answered in a single sentence or definition. The fulfillment of the old system by the new is a great historic process, the adequate understanding of which requires a careful study of the whole New Testament. Its salient feature, however, may be briefly indicated. Jesus fulfills the O.T. system by rounding out into ideal completeness what is incomplete in that system. In this process of fulfillment, all that is imperfect, provisional, temporary, or, for any reason, needless to the perfect religion, falls away of its own accord, and all that is essential and permanent is conserved and embodied in Christianity. Some of the elements of this fulfillment are as follows:
1. Jesus fulfills the law perfectly in His own personal life. The character of Jesus was the realization of the ideal which the law contemplated. He was a perfectly righteous person, and it was righteousness which the law demanded and aimed to secure. But it is not merely or mainly the personal fulfillment of the law's ideal to which Jesus refers in saying that He came to fulfill the law.
2. Jesus fulfilled the law in His teaching by setting forth therein the absolute truths of religion and the universal principles of goodness. This point may best be illustrated from the context of the passage under review. Our Lord says that the true righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees (5:20). Their righteousness consisted in punctilious observance of the bare letter of the law, quite to the neglect of its spirit. Jesus then proceeds to show the difference between such external, superficial righteousness and that which corresponds to the law's ideal. He says: You have in the O.T. the commandment, You shall not kill. It is commonly supposed that to refrain from the actual, overt act of murder is to keep that commandment, but I tell you that he only truly keeps it who refrains from anger and hate. In the sight of God, hate is the essence of murder. He thus finds the seat of all goodness, and of all sin in the heart, that is, in the sphere of the motives and the desires . . . .
This truth He next illustrates by reference to a more subtle distinction. He cites the commandment which requires men to speak the truth, and to perform their vows to God. It appears that under cover of this second requirement the Jews permitted themselves to make subtle distinctions between oaths taken "to Jehovah," and those taken, for example, "by the heaven," or "by Jerusalem." Oaths taken in Jehovah's name were regarded as more sacred and binding than those not so taken, and thus an easy way was opened for disregarding the real sacredness of vows and promises. Jesus strikes at the root of all these hollow and dishonest distinctions, and discountenances altogether the use of oaths in apparent confirmation of one's word. Such oaths, He says in effect, are either meaningless or irreverent. Let your simple word be enough. Esteem that to be as binding as if you had coupled your statement with Jehovah's name. The Jews had made the commandment of truthfulness an instrument of untruthfulness; Jesus insists upon a truthful heart which, to use a modern phrase, makes one's "word as good as his bond" . . . .
As a final example of fulfillment He cited the commandment: "You shall love your neighbor" (Lev. 19:18), and joined it with the popular addition which was derived by inference from it: "and hate your enemy" (Matt. 5:43). Jesus, on the contrary, set forth the ideal import of the commandment and illustrated and enforced the duty which it enjoins by showing that the love of God, which is the type of all true love, is not stingy, but large and generous. He then concludes: "You therefore shall be perfect (that is, complete in love - generous, helpful, and forgiving), as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt.5:48). Luke's version of this saying is, "Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful" (6:36).
These are examples of the way in which Jesus fulfilled the law in His teaching, both by rescuing its true import from the perversions and exaggerations to which the scribes had subjected it, by recognizing the ethical imperfections in the law itself, and by replacing them with absolute principles of truth and right which are universally applicable.
3. This fulfillment preserved all that was of permanent value end validity in the O.T. system for religion. Jesus taught that this whole system, in all its parts. was involved in the process of fulfillment. He did not illustrate in detail how the fulfillment applied to the various parts of the law. We must ascertain this from the nature of the Gospel end from the history and teaching which the N.T. records. Whatever there was of moral or religious significance in the various regulations of the O.T. religion will be found to have been conserved in the comprehensive principles of Jesus. He fulfills the prophets by realizing their highest ideals of religion no less than by accomplishing their predictions. The great fact in this connection is that Jesus fulfills the Jewish history as a whole; in Him the development of revealed religion culminates; He is its realization and its goal. The aspirations and hopes of the nation had been directed for centuries to some great consummation, some wonderful expansion of the Kingdom of God; this Christ came to accomplish, but into its realization the greater part of the Jewish nation, through blindness and perversity, did not enter.
4. The process of fulfillment involves the passing away of the O.T. system as such. As the fulfilling of the blossom by the fruit involves the passing away of the former, so does the new system replace the old. This view of the matter is abundantly recognized in the teaching of our Lord and His apostles. He described His truth as new wine which must not be put into the old bottles of Judaism (Matt.9:17). He said that His Gospel was not merely a new patch which was to be sewn onto the old garment of the law; it was rather a new garment complete and sufficient in itself (Matt. 9.16) . . . .
This teaching is quite in accord with what the prophets themselves, in their highest aspirations, had discerned and intimated concerning their own religious system. They frequently recognize its inadequacy and temporary character, and predict that it is to pass away by being merged into something higher. What religion, besides Judaism, ever predicted its own abrogation? It is one of the most significant facts of prophecy that the loftiest spirits in the nation were led to look for the dawning of larger truth, and for a more complete form of the Kingdom of God.
This subject has important practical bearings upon Christian thought and life, to which a brief reference may here be made. The Christian world has never very clearly perceived what was its relation to the Old Testament religion. How discordant and inconsistent have been the prevailing views on this subject. Commonly some rough distinction has been made between those parts of the system which were supposed to be binding and those from which the Christian was believed to be free, but this distinction rested on no well-defined principle. The discrimination has ordinarily been perfectly arbitrary, having no better grounds than those of practical convenience. No Christians, in our time, hold that they must observe the O.T. rules respecting meats and drinks, or suppose that they are bound to observe the sacrificial system. But this was not always so. In the apostolic church there was a large party who held that it was necessary for the Christian even to keep the whole law of Moses in order to be saved [see Acts 15].
Their view was that Christianity was a kind of addition or appendix to Judaism and that their former religion, in all its particulars, was in full force and perpetually binding. Paul had his sharpest conflicts with this party. He showed that they were quite consistent, though consistently wrong. In insisting on the necessity of a continued observance of circumcision, they logically committed themselves to the keeping of the whale law. But it was impossible that Christians should long continue to observe the whole Mosaic ritual, and the effort to do so was less and less consistently made.
In modern times we not infrequently find Christians who have conscientiously placed themselves under some part of the old system, believing that, for some special reason, it is binding on them, while from the observance of its other regulations they readily excuse themselves. It may be the law of tithes, which is regarded as still binding, or the regulations relating to marriage or to the Jewish Sabbath - which are considered to be of perpetual obligation. But the question arises: On what principle is one requirement of the system observed while the others are neglected? Did Jesus specify those which were temporary and those which were perpetually binding? If He did not, how are they to be distinguished? It is common to make a distinction between the ceremonial and the moral parts of the law, and to suppose that, while the former are done away, they latter are still binding upon Christians. But this distinction is recognized neither in the O.T. nor in the New; it is a modern division of the law which is quite convenient and natural for us to make, but one of which a quite unwarranted use is commonly made . . . .
When it is said that the O.T. system is abrogated in the new, it is of capital importance to observe that the new replaces the old, not by destruction, but by fulfillment. The new does not reject and discard the old; it preserves and embodies it, just so far as it has elements of permanent value for the world's religion. The fulfillment is, therefore. an organic process: the new comes out of the old by a natural and orderly process of development. In that process what is unessential falls away of its own accord, while all that is essential and permanently useful is taken up into Christianity, more completely developed and applied, and reinforced by higher motives on the plane of broader principles.
Christ did not fulfill a part of the law merely, but the whole of it. He did not complete the ritual part of the O.T. alone, but all its moral parts as well. This is but to say that it was not merely the ritual element of the law which was imperfect and temporary, but the moral element also. Many a moral maxim and practice of the O.T., as we have seen, was below the plane of Jesus' ideal morality. If He fulfills the system in all its parts, then must the system as such pass away. And this is the fact in the case. On no other supposition can the N.T. references to the subject be naturally explained; on no other view can a clear definition be given of the relation of the two Testaments.
The conclusion, then, to which we are led is that the whole O.T. system, in all its parts, was taken up into the process of fulfillment, and that all its elements of permanent value and validity have been made part and parcel of the Gospel. To the old system as such we have no need to go back because the Gospel is its completion, and we have no occasion to supplement Christianity by additions from Judaism. But the O.T. has not thereby been destroyed, but fulfilled. On this distinction between destruction and fulfillment turns the true solution of the question under consideration. The fulfillment is, by its very nature, a conserving process; it rejects nothing which it can use, but embodies it in its perfect result. All the essentials of the O.T. are preserved in the New, and it is as parts of the Gospel of Christ that they are binding upon the Christian. The believer is not under the O.T. system, or, to state the case more fully, he is under only so much of a as has been taken up and incorporated into Christianity, and he is under that because it is part of the Gospel, not because it is a part of the O.T. religion. If it is asked, Is not the Christian under the authority of the ten commandments? the reply is, In their O.T. form and as a part of that system, he is not. The essential substance of the ten commandments consists of changeless principles of righteousness, and is therefore a part of Christianity; in that sense the Christian is under the commandments, and in no other. The duty to obey parents, for example, is as urgently inculcated in the Gospel as in the commandments, and is, of course, perpetually binding, but the reason by which it was enforced in the O.T. - that by obedience one would win a long residence in the land of Canaan - is not applicable to us.
The truth which we are considering, stated on its positive side, is that the Gospel is complete and sufficient in itself as a guide to faith and action. The whole philosophy of the subject is in that most expressive figure of Jesus to which we have referred: His Gospel is not a patch to be sewed on the old garment of Judaism, but a wholly new garment. We might carry out the figure a step further by saying - quite in harmony with His thought - that into the texture of that garment have been woven all the elements of the O.T. which are adapted to become parts of its permanent and perfect structure.
While, then, we are not under the old system at all, it must always have the greatest value in helping us to understand historically its own fulfillment in the Gospel. To speak in Paul's language, the O.T. is glorious, but not with "the glory that surpasses" (2 Cor.3:l0); that is, it has its true glory in the fact that its mission was to prepare for and usher in a more perfect system. It was glorious, not so much in itself, as in the great end which it contemplated.
In this view it will be seen that the old system could well be both temporary and divine. Its glory lay in the very fact that it was to give itself up to decay in order that from it, as from the seed, a larger life might spring. Had this truth been clearly seen by the Church of the apostolic age, many great controversies and alienations would have been avoided. It was naturally hard for those who had been reared and trained as Jews to see the sufficiency and independence of the Gospel, and to recognize the complementary truth that the Jewish religion had waxed old and was ready to vanish away. To this difficulty of transcending their ancestral religion and of apprehending the newness and sufficiency of the Gospel, Jesus refers in the saying: "No person having drunk old wine desires the new; for he says, the old is good" (Luke 5:39). It required a vision to convince Peter of the largeness and newness of the Gospel, and even then he did not continue with consistency in his conviction. The whole dispute about circumcision which so tried the soul of the apostle Paul would have been settled in an instant if all could have seen Christ's truth of fulfillment. It was incapable of real settlement except upon Paul's bold principle that the Christian is not under the law, either in whole or part . . . .
From this view of the Pauline doctrine of the law, it follows as an inevitable consequence that the Mosaic law does not retain under the Gospel the same prescriptive moral authority which belonged to it before. It is completed in the Gospel. All its elements of permanence are taken up into Christianity, which is complete in itself and does not need to be supplemented from any previous incomplete stage of revelation . . . . According to Paul, revelation is complete in Christ. The Gospel is lacking in nothing that was of permanent value in the law. God has taken away the first [old covenant]; He has established the second [new covenant]. He has completed the old in the new, as the blossom is completed in the fruit.