Did Jesus Christ upgrade the Law of Moses? We’ve been asking that question on the previous two Little Lessons. We’re going to ask it one more time today. I can’t review too much, but the law to love your neighbor as yourself is an Old and New Covenant Law, and it’s the highest moral law that relates to how we treat each other.
We find that in Jesus’ “You have heard it was said, but I say to you” statements, He doesn’t always accurately cite the Old Covenant Law as people claim. He often quotes the Pharisees and their twisted teaching that’s based on the Law of Moses.
Jesus Was Correcting the Pharisees, Not the Old Testament
Jesus in all of the so-called corrections that He gives is actually correcting the false teaching of the Pharisees. Why would He ever correct the Law of Moses? Why would He ever contradict the Law of Moses? Think about that for a second.
The scribes and Pharisees were often testing Jesus to see if He would endorse the Law of Moses. They decided, and rightfully so, that if He doesn’t endorse the Law of Moses— if He contradicts the Law of Moses—He can’t possibly be from God. He can’t be the Messiah.
So Jesus, right at the offset at the Sermon on the Mount, says “Don’t think I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I didn’t come to abolish them. Oh my Goodness, I gave the Law! I inspired the Prophets! That’s Me speaking through people in the Old Covenant. I didn’t come to abolish that. I came to fulfill everything in the law and the Prophets. Not just to fulfill the Messianic Prophecies, no. But to fill to the full people’s understanding of the moral and ethical principles, to rightly divide the Word of God.” Because the scribes and Pharisees had so twisted the Word of God.
Raising the Standard Back to Where it Was Meant to Be All Along
It’s so obvious in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus is correcting the teaching of the Scribes and Pharisees. The whole section that has all those “You have heard it was said, but I say to you” phrases in Matthew 5 all being in Verse 20, where Jesus says,
For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
So naturally people are thinking, “Oh my goodness, Jesus just said that all of our spiritual teachers are going to Hell, and if we don’t do better than them, we’re going to go to Hell as well.”
The Pharisees’ Perverted Teachings
So then Jesus begins to specifically talk about where they’ve got to do better than the scribes and Pharisees.
It’s so obvious that at times He is not citing Moses’s teaching under the Old Covenant. He’s citing the Pharisees perverted teaching.
In one of the cases He said, “You have heard it was said whoever divorces his wife let him give her a certificate of dismissal” (see Matthew 5:33).
Now is that honestly what the Law of Moses taught? Whoever divorces his wife, make sure you give her that certificate? Are you kidding me? No! The idea of the certificate for divorce is found kind of as an incidental thing in part of the law in Deuteronomy 4, in the first four verses. You can read it for yourself, but that’s not the emphasis at all.
The Pharisees’ Easy Divorce System
But that was the emphasis of the scribes and the Pharisees. And it’s very plain that the scribes and Pharisees believed that it was lawful to divorce your wife for any cause at all. That’s in the Bible. Read Matthew 19.
They came to Jesus and asked him that question. Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause at all? Because that’s what they believed, and if you study Jewish history at the time, that’s what was being taught by the scribes and Pharisees.
They had a whole list of things for which it was lawful to divorce your wife, and it was anything. If your wife spoke to another man in public, you can divorce her. If a man saw a woman who was more attractive to him than his wife, he could divorce her lawfully because that made her “indecent” in his eyes, and Moses did talk about a man finding an indecency in his wife and divorcing her.
So that’s where the Pharisees were coming from. Divorce your wife for any cause. Easy divorce. Such a lax policy on divorce. You don’t even find that with unsaved people in the world anywhere! But in Jesus’s time, that was the mentality amongst the spiritual leaders of Israel. And so Jesus said, “You guys and your easy divorce thing. Whoever divorces their wife, just give her a certificate. Divorce for any cause. No way!”
Read Matthew 19 and see how Jesus corrects that. He says God never intended anyone to get divorced. It’s never been that way from the beginning. The only legitimate reason to get divorced is because of immorality, etc. And so in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says basically that same thing. You divorce your wife for any cause other than immorality, you’re committing adultery. Boy, and he was jabbing it right to them because these guys did believe that adultery was wrong.
The Pharisees’ Twisting of the Law of Moses
It was the Pharisees that brought the woman caught in the act of adultery before Jesus and said, “the law says we ought to stone such a woman” (see John 8:1-11). So they all knew and preached and believed that adultery was wrong, and condemned people who committed adultery.
Yet, they would divorce their wives for any reason, and Jesus said that’s no different than divorce. So He’s correcting them on that, and He even goes deeper and says, “If you look to a woman to lust for her, you’re committing adultery already in your heart.”
Was that a new standard? Are you kidding me? In the Ten Commandments it says, “Do not covet your neighbor’s wife.” Why do men covet their neighbors’ wives? Is it because of their cooking ability? We’re talking about lust there.
Job, in perhaps the oldest book in the Bible, knew that lust was wrong. He said in Job 31:1, “I Have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?”
Because everyone’s always known in their conscience that it’s wrong to be mentally undressing a woman who’s not your wife, lusting after her. Everyone’s always known that’s wrong. That’s not a new standard. For us to say that Jesus was introducing new standards in the Sermon on the Mount, you’d have to say that lust wasn’t wrong under the Old Covenant. That’s crazy!
Correcting Misinterpretations of the Law of Moses
Jesus was correcting the Scribes and the Pharisees. He said, in Matthew 5:33-37:
Again, you have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not make false vows, but shall fulfill your vows to the Lord.’ But I say to you, make no oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is the footstool of His feet, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. Nor shall you make an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. But let your statement be, ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything beyond these is of evil.
So, is this something new? Is telling the truth and letting your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’, and your ‘no’ be ‘no’, some kind of a new moral under the Old Covenant? Was God okay with people not telling the truth under the Old Covenant?
If you read Matthew Chapter 23:16, you will see a whole list of things that Jesus rebuked the Pharisees and scribes for because of this incredible concoction that they had come up with, stipulating when you had to tell the truth and when it was okay to lie.
Whoever swears by the Temple, you don’t have to keep your vow then, but if you swear by the gold in the Temple, then you have to keep your vow. That’s what the Pharisees and Scribes were teaching. Jesus corrected that. He rebuked them in Matthew 23. It’s the same thing here.
At the very end of the Sermon of the Mount, they were amazed, the Bible says, that He was not teaching as their scribes and Pharisees, because He was contradicting their twisted teaching.
Okay, we’re out of time. I’m sorry for this amount of time that we’ve had. I don’t want to go more than three times on Little Lessons, but you can look into my teaching on the Sermon on the Mount, where I go into this in much greater detail. All right? Thanks for joining me for today’s Little Lesson. God bless you!
