The Upper Register Blog

I was reading I. Howard Marshall’s new book on New Testament theology, and I came across this helpful summary of Jesus’ teaching on the Law in Matthew:

The law limited revenge to “an eye for an eye”; Jesus leaves that limit standing but insists that people should not take revenge at all and in that situation the law would be superfluous. The law forbade adultery; once again that law remains in force, but if people were to overcome lustful desires, the law would not be necessary. Where the law commanded love to neighbors, Jesus extended it to love to enemies. The whole law can be said to hang on the two great commandments to love God and your neighbor and your enemy. Thus the law is both internalized and radicalized. It is not abolished … Rather … the law is taken up into a new expression of the will of God as taught by Jesus, and at the end of the Gospel the disciples are to teach people “to obey everything that I have commanded you” – with no mention of the law.

[I. Howard Marshall, New Testament Theology (IVP, 2004), 119.]

Can’t put it any better than that:  “The law is taken up into a new expression of the will of God as taught by Jesus.” Many other contemporary New Testament scholars agree with this interpretation (e.g., Donald Hagner, Seyoon Kim, Douglas Moo, Frank Thielman, and Stephen Westerholm). It is a commonplace that even the areas of continuity between the ethical teaching of the old covenant and that of the new are subsumed within a fundamental discontinuity. For even the areas of continuity are “taken up into a new expression of the will of God as taught by Jesus.” In other words, the moral/ethical content may not have changed dramatically, but the locus of authority is dramatically new:  Christ himself.

Perhaps an analogy may help. The constitution of the United States and the constitution of England may have many points in common. I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the constitution of England (even if based on common law) contained similar provisions concerning civil liberties such as the right to freedom of religion or freedom of speech. But are citizens of the United States bound by these provisions in the constitution of the England? No. We fought a Revolutionary War, broke from England, and we are now bound by the constitution of the United States. The fact that there are points of similarity and continuity doesn’t change that fundamental legal fact. We can trace lines of organic, historic continuity from the Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights. But, legally, we Americans are not under the Magna Carta or the constitution of England.

So with the new covenant. We Christians are members of a new polity called the new covenant. We are not bound by the constitution of Israel (the Mosaic Law). We are not Jews. Are there points of similarity and continuity between the old covenant and the new? Of course. Every moral teaching contained in the old covenant is carried forward into the new. Christians are still obligated to flee idolatry, sexual immorality, murder, and so on. If anything, our view of what is entailed by God’s moral law is expanded and heightened in the new covenant. The prohibition against murder entails a prohibition against hating our neighbor in our heart. The prohibition against adultery includes the prohibition against lust. Neighbor-love is expanded to enemy-love. And so on. But in reality, even these heart attitudes were always a part of the moral law. They are just more clearly seen in Christ and made more explicit through his teaching. 

“So, then, what difference does it make?” you ask. It makes all the difference in the world. For it grounds our Christian obedience in a new dynamic within the context of a new covenant. We are disciples of Christ, not Moses. Our loyalty is to serve Christ as those who have been bought with his blood. It is a matter of loyalty and love. We are blood-bought servants of Christ. He loved us and gave himself for us. He died that we might be dead indeed unto sin and alive unto God. Jesus Christ, the incarnate, crucified and exalted Son of God — he is our Lord, our Master, our Husband. We love him because he first loved us. We desire to listen to his voice, to obey his sweet commands, to place ourselves under his light yoke. We long to please him, to receive his “well-done, good and faithful servant” at the last day. We do not obey because it is required under threat of judgment. We obey because we have already been judged in forensic union with Christ and have come out the other side to walk in newness of resurrection life, the life of Christ beating in us and through us by his Spirit.

We do not obey in order to enhance our assurance of God’s favor. We obey because we have already received the ultimate, definitive verdict, pronounced in the cross and resurrection, that we are perfectly, irrevocably righteous in God’s sight and entitled to enter heaven on the basis of the perfect righteousness and merit of Christ. The gavel has come down, the sentence has rung out throughout the universe:  You are mine! No one can snatch you out of my hand! You are my blood-bought servant, a brand snatched from the burning! No angel, no demon, no sin can take you out of the favor of being accepted in the Beloved!

And so, in reliance on that immense grace, I strive to obey everything that Jesus, lover of my soul, commands me. I cannot bear to look at the naked law of God in its rigor as a covenant of works without immediately being struck with terror and wilting under its crushing weight. But when I gaze upon my Savior’s face, when I see the wounds in his hands and feet and side, when I see his gracious eyes of love, knowing that I am his and he is mine, then I am ready and willing to leap up in joy to serve him at his every beck and call. Lord Jesus, I am ready. Command me! I will follow. I long to do your will. I will not do it perfectly. I will fall on my face. But you will uphold me and set me back on my feet. You will reassure me that I belong to you even when I stumble and sin. And you will enable me, by your Spirit, to begin, in some small measure, to put to death the misdeeds of the body and to bring forth the fruit of righteousness to the glory of your name.

That is why it is so important to hear the six antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount:  “You have heard that it was said … but I say unto you.” The great Christological, authoritative ego (”I”) of Jesus was shocking to his hearers. They had never heard the scribes and the rabbis speak with such immense authority. They were disciples of Moses and of the elders of the great syngaogue which handed down the oral law. The rabbis could only say, “Rabbi Jonathan says that he heard Rabbi Simeon say that he heard Rabbi Akiba say so-and-so.” But Jesus simply issues the definitive revelation of the will of God for the new covenant people of God with a majestic “But I say unto you.” And after his resurrection, he enjoins the apostles to go into all the world and make disciples by baptizing them under the authority of the Triune God and ”teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you.” Baptized into his name, we are now placed under a new locus of authority, even the authority of King Jesus himself:

“When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne … Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world’” (Matt 25:31, 34). “Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master” (Matt 25:21).