Transcript

Shelby Abbott [00:00:00]: Welcome to The Connecting Podcast with Paul Tripp. My name is Shelby Abbott and this podcast exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life, right here, right now.

Paul Tripp [00:00:13]: That's right. We're continuing our conversation about how to live an active, courageous, hopeful Christian life in this world that's gone insane, and we have been talking about how that's not just sort of the passive making sure that you're not affected by the world, but it's active as well. We're called to be part of what God is doing on earth.

Paul [00:00:48]: Now, we're going to have a bit of a topic change because it's like Jesus, in the middle of calling us to live outwardly in a certain way, wants to clarify something for us, and that clarification is this episode and the next episode.

Paul [00:01:09]: It has to do with Jesus and the law, God's law; and that has to do with what Jesus has done for us and what the law now means to us. And if you're going to live well, you've got to have that clarified. So this first episode I would call "The Fulfillment," and if you could read verses 17-18 from Matthew 5?

Shelby [00:01:44]: Yes, Matthew 5:17-18.

¹⁷Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. ¹⁸For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

Paul [00:02:06]: The first thing Jesus says is mind-blowingly encouraging. It's the heart of the gospel. You got to get this or you don't know who you are, you don't know what you've been given, and you don't know what you're offering to others. This is Gospel 101 foundational stuff.

Paul [00:02:29]: Jesus said, "I didn't come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it." The primary thing that means is that Jesus came to be on our behalf the perfect law-keeper. He came to submit Himself to God's revealed law. Although the Trinity lives above God's law, God's law isn't for Him.

Paul [00:03:07]: I mean, He can't covet. Everything belongs to Him. He can't steal. It all belongs to Him. He can't commit murder because He can take life whenever He sovereignly chooses to do that. The law doesn't apply to Him. Jesus submitted Himself to the law.

Paul [00:03:19]: Why did He do that? Because in order for us to be accepted by God, there had to be some perfect keeping of the law. Go back to the Old Testament. The animals for sacrifice had to be what? Without blemish, and so there had to be someone who, in every way, all of the time, perfectly obeyed. His track record, like the lamb, was without blemish, so He could go to the cross as the spotless Lamb of God. I love talking about this stuff.

Shelby [00:03:57]: I was going to say keep going. Preach, preach.

Paul [00:03:59]: It's just so beautiful. Now, why was that necessary? Because God knew that we would never be able to do that. The law is a holy, unreachable standard. I think of when Isaiah was standing in his vision before the throne, and the seraphim are flying back and forth, and they're saying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. The whole earth is filled with His glory."

Paul [00:04:45]: God is so holy, you couldn't say He's just holy. He's holy, holy, holy. And what's the first response of Isaiah? It's not, "Oh, cool, let me stand next to you and let's take a selfie." It's [Isaiah 6:5] "^5aWoe is me... for I am a man of unclean lips, and I [live amongst] people of unclean lips". "I'm standing before perfect holiness."

Shelby [00:05:11]: You notice your unholiness when you're in the presence of holiness.

Paul [00:05:14]: Yes, and so, we are not naturally, because of the entrance of sin, what God requires; because I don't have the ability to perfectly keep God's law, and that is evidenced every day of my life. I go to a church where we publicly pray prayers of confession because we want to remind ourselves that that week, we have failed to keep God's law.

Paul [00:05:53]: I love that we do that. It's very humbling. Sometimes those prayers are hard to read, but they're very humbling because I need to remember that I can't do this. So Jesus' perfect fulfillment of the law is not just for your justification, but it's for your entire... that whole process of sanctification because still, I'm not a perfect law[-keeper], even though the Spirit of God is living within me and still empowering me. There's still sin inside of me. I still fall below the standard.

Shelby [00:06:29]: Yes, you need the bad news in order to appreciate the good news. You need to know your condition, the truth of your condition, which is bad news. It's "I'm not perfect, and I never will be perfect." That's bad news in order to highlight the good news, to make sure you understand the beauty of what Jesus did.

Paul [00:06:48]: Well, and it also means that in our way of thinking about Christianity and in our witness to others, we shouldn't rush too fast to the cross. We have to tell the story of a world made by God, made according to His plan, people made in relationship with Him who chose to disobey Him; and that sin then is passed down to every generation since, so we stand before God unrighteous and guilty.

Paul [00:07:24]: So I mean, the cross doesn't make any sense unless you put it in the context of the larger story, and Jesus, in just a sentence, is telling us the whole story. I love that fact, and if you're reading the Bible, look for these. Scripture is dotted with gospel story summaries.

Paul [00:07:51]: A good novel is like that. A good novel gets so complicated that you'll forget the story, and so the writer will place in a summary; maybe it'll be two old guys, and they're looking back, and they, in a paragraph, tell you the whole story again. And you go, "Oh, yes, I remember the plot." You can see that on streaming services. They repeat the plot to you.

Paul [00:08:12]: Well, this is Jesus, in one statement, giving you the whole plot of the story. We're sinners; we'll never be righteous. That sin goes back to Genesis; it's been played out through all of biblical history. God sends His Son in order to do for us what we could not do for [our]self. The righteous life is as significant as the sacrifice of Christ because He had to live righteously on our behalf and He had to go to the cross as the perfect Lamb.

Shelby [00:08:46]: Because he needed to be that blemish-free sacrifice.

Paul [00:08:50]: Can we just say praise God, praise God, praise God, praise God, praise God, praise God? There it is. There's hope for us. Now, what that means is the burden of the law has been lifted. You say, "Well, what does that mean?" It means I don't have to try to stand before God based on my keeping of the law. That's a horrible burden to bear.

Paul [00:09:34]: It's like the most important person who has ever existed tells me what is needed to be accepted by Him and I realize I can't do it. The law is a heavy load. You see that in Romans 7, where Paul grieves his inability to keep the law. He talks about the law being a war and the law being a prison, and you can feel the angst inside of him.

Paul [00:10:11]: Well, Jesus, by keeping the law on our behalf, is removing the burden of the law because now I stand before God and what He looks at is the perfect righteousness of Christ that has now been given over to my account.

Shelby [00:10:32]: Yes, so again, it hasn't been abolished. It hasn't been destroyed. It's been fulfilled on your behalf.

Paul [00:10:40]: Yes, and so, the weight of the law, I don't carry on my shoulders. Romans 5:19 says, "¹⁹For as by the one man's disobedience [that's Adam] the many were made sinners, so by the one Man's obedience the many will be made righteous." There it is.

Paul [00:11:03]: I'm not made righteous by my obedience. That's an impossibility. What is the end of 2 Corinthians 5[:21] says, "He who knew no sin became sin to us, that we might be the righteousness of God." We, Shelby, should never stop celebrating what we're talking about right now.

Shelby [00:11:30]: Yes, yes, that a lot of people call that in 2 Corinthians 5 "The Great Exchange". God took all of our sin and placed it on Jesus, but it didn't end there. He took all of His righteousness and placed it on us. Thus, the big switch was made.

Paul [00:11:46]: Now, Jesus is saying this to His disciples who don't have a clue, and they're under a weighty, law-oriented religious culture. It was all about a public, prideful performance of the law, and so this law discussion is very important.

Paul [00:12:14]: The way to get into the discussion, Jesus is saying, "I don't really think you know who I am and I don't really think you know what I came to do. I came to abolish the law." That would have been shocking and radical to them, and easy for them to misunderstand. That's why He says the second part. Read the passage again. Just read verse 18.

Shelby [00:12:45]: Okay. ¹⁸For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

Paul [00:12:57]: So there's two ways of saying this. First, Jesus identifies Himself as the fulfillment of the law. Secondly, He says, "But the law is not done. The law has a good and rightful purpose." There's two ways of characterizing that purpose. The burden of the law has been lifted from me. The requirement of the law hasn't.

Shelby [00:13:30]: It's very important to remember that.

Paul [00:13:32]: So I don't stand before God afraid because I can't keep the law, but the requirement of the law is still there. I am called to keep God's law. In fact, I'm empowered to keep God's law. So, burden done, requirement remains. Burden done, requirement remains.

Paul [00:13:59]: We do not believe in easy-believism antinomianism. Antinomianism is against the law, and that philosophy goes way back in church history: that we have no obligation to keep the law anymore. Jesus, the minute He says "I'm fulfilling the law," He wants to clarify that for His disciples. "Oh, wait a minute."

Shelby [00:14:26]: Yes, "Let me make sure you understand what I'm saying."

Paul [00:14:29]: "Fulfilling the law doesn't mean I've abolished it." There's a second way of looking at that: the ceremonial law in the Old Testament all the feasts and sacrifices has ended because their purpose was that they were a placeholder until Jesus. They are a finger pointing to Jesus.

Paul [00:14:58]: When the fulfillment comes, the foreshadowing isn't needed anymore, and so we're not responsible for Old Testament Jewish law anymore because Christ is the sacrifice that ended all sacrifices, but, again, the moral law (God's ethical will for us) remains. So: burden lifted, requirement remains, ceremonial law ended, moral law remains.

Shelby [00:15:45]: That's really good.

Paul [00:15:45]: Those distinctions are really, really important.

Shelby [00:15:49]: And so many people get lost in the weeds with that kind of stuff. They don't know how to pull things out. They don't understand what Jesus is saying. They don't know how to live their life and so, this is really, really valuable stuff that you're talking about here.

Paul [00:16:01]: So when I get up in the morning, I don't get up with a burdensome fear of God that He will put His curse on me because I failed in some aspect of keeping His law, because that burden has been lifted because Christ is my righteousness.

Paul [00:16:22]: But I don't wake up in the morning and say it doesn't make any difference because Jesus says, "even the smallest dot." In Hebrew there, words change by the dots that are around the letters. The dots are very, very important so, "Even the littlest thing is important in My law."

Paul [00:16:54]: I wake up not with the burden of the law, afraid of God, but I wake up with a sense of requirement to keep the law. I wake up not looking for a lamb to sacrifice because Jesus is the final sacrifice, but I know God's ethical standards for me still remains. Can I just put this in the streetiest terms?

Shelby [00:17:22]: Again, I don't know why you ask these questions. You're going to do it.

Paul [00:17:26]: The way you live does make a difference. It does make a difference. You can't say it doesn't make any difference.

Shelby [00:17:32]: Yes, it makes a difference because it's not only just about doing the things. It's a reflection of who we are on the inside, what we actually truly believe.

Paul [00:17:40]: Let me do another play of words. Grace doesn't remove your responsibility. Grace empowers you for your responsibility.

Shelby [00:17:54]: Yes, say that again.

Paul [00:17:56]: Grace doesn't remove the responsibility, like I can live however I want to live. Grace empowers me to live responsibly as God has chosen for me to live.

Shelby [00:18:07]: Yes, it's a total paradigm shift. It's not like "what can I get away with?" It's now, "I've been given this gift in order to live in a way that honors God and gives Him glory."

Paul [00:18:16]: And Jesus says that's down to the smallest thing. Maybe we would think murder is a big piece of God's law and being a little bit impatient is the dot, but that dot is important in God's eyes. It has meaning and purpose.

Paul [00:18:39]: So praise God that Jesus is my righteousness. Praise God, I don't stand in fear before Him. Praise God that I am righteous before Him, but know that my life doesn't belong to me. The way I live is important, that His law, in that way, still stands.

Paul [00:19:01]: It is a divinely erected map and guardrails for me; and so every morning, I thank God that I don't carry the burden anymore, that I'm righteous in His eyes and then, I set myself to do what He's called for me to do in His law.

Shelby [00:19:26]: Yes, and then, He's given you the grace to be empowered to live the way that He's called you to live.

Paul [00:19:32]: Yes, what an important vignette in Christ's teaching!

Shelby [00:19:35]: So good.

Paul [00:19:36]: So, so important.