How Did Christ Fulfill the Old Testament?
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish these things but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth pass away not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter will pass from the law until everything takes place. So anyone who breaks one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever obeys them and teaches others will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness goes beyond that of the experts in the law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven!”
Matthew 5:17-20
Have you ever read this passage of scripture and left sitting there, scratching your head, thinking, “What in the world does this mean?” Is Christ saying what I think He is saying? That if we are to inherit the kingdom of God, we must obey the commands of the Old Testament Law? By doing so, by obeying the Law, my righteousness is supposed to exceed that of the very experts and interpreters of that Law?
What does it mean for Christ to fulfill the Law? If “fulfill” here means “safely ignore” or “not applicable,” which is how it is most often interpreted on a practical level, the words “fulfill” and “abolish” become virtually synonymous, which can obviously not be the case here.
To try to understand what Jesus is getting at here, I want to back up a little and clarify what I think He does NOT mean in this passage.
During the Reformation, John Calvin developed a method for dividing the Law into three distinct categories: civil, ceremonial, and moral. The civil law addressed how the Israelites would be governed, including how punishments would be administered to lawbreakers. Ceremonial laws explained in detail how to perform sacrifices and rituals throughout the year; some dealt with sin, and some remembered what God had done for them. The moral law focused on things such as “thou shall not commit murder, steal, covet,” etc. This method of dividing up the Law was an attempt to make sense of passages like these.
Most curiously, no such distinction is made in the Scriptures themselves. Any one of the commandments of the Law can have moral, civil, and ceremonial implications at the same time. Moral laws have civil consequences if broken; ceremonial prescriptions that are not followed are viewed as moral wrongdoings. To give a concrete example of this: “If a man commits murder, he shall be put to death unless he offer a ram and a young lamb as a sin offering.” In this one sentence alone, we have a moral offense followed by a civil consequence, which can be addressed by offering a sacrifice. We see that the Law makes no threefold distinction, and neither does Christ when he says not one of the commands will pass away until everything takes place.
I don’t mean to pick on Mr. Calvin, but it is important to see why this distinction isn't actually helpful for understanding what Jesus is saying in this passage. If we follow this threefold distinction to its logical conclusion, which many Reformation-era writers did when trying to interpret passages like Matthew 5:17-20, we will find ourselves just as confused as we began. Using this method, Jesus is said to have fulfilled the civil law by never having sinned; therefore, Christ was never subject to them, which, we are supposed to conclude, somehow makes them fulfilled. The other two types of laws, the moral and ceremonial, were fulfilled by Christ, who kept them perfectly, thereby letting us off the hook. But wait, what most who adopt this method actually teach is that, even though the ceremonial and moral laws are “fulfilled” in the same way, we are still supposed to hold to the moral laws.
It is difficult to come to these same conclusions if we stay faithful to the text: Christ said that He came to fulfill the Law, the whole Law. What “fulfill” here means for one of these apparently distinct parts of the Law must mean for the others. Fulfill literally means to “fill to the full,” even to overflowing, or another way of thinking about fulfillment here is to bring something to its intended purpose, its perfect end. What Jesus has done through His life, death, resurrection, and ascension has filled the Law to the full, brought it to its intended purpose. And we, as the Church, get to participate in that fulfillment as His body, as His ministers in the world.
Again, we must be careful not to take what Jesus is saying here to mean that we can ignore the Law, or deem it inapplicable to daily Christian life. What Jesus has done for us is “given us a lens through which to read them and see them fulfilled”, as Stephen De Young puts it. When Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard it said, ‘Do not murder’, but I tell you if anyone is angry with a brother will be subject to judgment.” Does this mean that Jesus has done away with the command “Do not murder”? Of course not! Jesus is revealing that the commandment “filled to the full” means murderous action begins with murderous rage and anger that festers and grows over time.
Another concrete example is the Old Testament instruction on tithing (Numbers 18:21-28, Deuteronomy 14:22-27, Leviticus 27:30-32). The Israelites were told to give a portion of their harvest and livestock, usually 10%, to provide for the priests, the poor, or the temple. All of which ultimately belonged to the Lord. In the New Testament, specifically Acts 4:32-35, there was no strict 10% rule; rather, they gave as the Spirit led them. In some cases, it led them to sell all of their possessions in service to the broader Christian community. Interestingly, many claim that such Old Testament commands do not apply to us under the New Covenant, yet hold to this 10% number dogmatically.
Staying in the same book, in Acts 15, a council was convened to address an issue arising as the Gospel began to spread more widely in the Gentile world. That issue was this: Did the Gentile converts need to be circumcised and follow the commandments of the Law, in other words, become Jewish, to be accepted into the Church? Because this was a sensitive issue and it caused such dissension, the leaders of the Church needed to reach a unanimous decision. How relevant were the commandments of the Torah to the growing Church? The Apostles present at this council were fully aware of Christ's perspective on the Law: it was to be fulfilled, not abolished. To ignore the commandments altogether, or to declare them as inapplicable wholesale, was not the solution, for this would be going against the very teachings of Christ. Their conclusion was not a rejection of the commandments but a close reading of them, now called the “Holiness Code” in Leviticus 17-23. Among the many commandments, prohibitions, regulations, and rules of conduct given to the Israelite nation, there are only four that are directed to both the Israelite and the “foreigners” living among them, aka, Gentiles. Those four were to abstain from idolatry, sexual immorality, consumption of blood, and eating meat that still has blood in it. I think that the first two are obvious: Christians are not to be idolaters or sexually immoral, but what about the last two about blood? Both of these are connected to pagan ritual worship; the drinking of blood and not draining the blood from sacrificed animals was all a part of the worship of the gods of the surrounding nations; to take part in this was to take part in idolatry. Far from telling these Gentile converts not to worry about the Law, the Spirit guided the Apostles to instruct them to do what God-fearing Gentiles have done since the law was given: abstain from idolatry, sexual immorality, eating of blood, and meat that has been sacrificed to idols.
But what does this mean for us today? Does this mean that Christians have to stop eating their blood sausage and overcook our steaks? As I mentioned above, the ritualistic eating of blood and meat that has been offered to idols was seen in the ancient world as an act of worship of that specific god or idol. However, both in Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 and 10, Paul goes to great lengths to discuss the very issue of meat offered to idols. Because we don’t live in societies where almost all the meat we buy is connected to pagan idol worship, we don’t have the same issues as the ancient Church did. Paul, guided by the Holy Spirit, comes to this conclusion in Romans 14:20-21: “Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for you to make others fall by what you eat; it is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother or sister stumble.” Our chief guide in deciding on whether or not we are going to partake in this or that is not based upon our individual Christian liberty, for no Christian lives on an island by themself; their actions affect their immediate community they are a part of. Paul makes a distinction between “eating at the table of demons” in 1 Corinthians 10 and buying meat in the meat markets. Paul was instructing the Christian community to be aware of those with weaker consciences, so as not to make anyone stumble, and not to partake in pagan idolatry.
When we gather together to take communion as the Church, we take part in the perfect sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ (Hebrews 10), thus fulfilling the Old Testament sacrificial system. Peter, in 1 Peter 2:9, says that we are a part of a holy priesthood. He draws this from passages in Exodus, Isaiah, and Malachi. What the priesthood foreshadowed in the Old Testament is what we now get to take part in. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount dug down to the roots of the Ten Commandments and showed us they are not abolished but rather revealed what they were pointing to. We, filled with the very Spirit of God, are enabled through Christ to join in that fulfillment. Be careful not to make the mistake of mischaracterizing the relationship between the Old and New Covenant. The God of the Old is the same God of the New. Something new has indeed come, but it has much more to do with those promises first spoken thousands of years ago than we may have been brought up to believe.
“Do not think I have come to abolish the Law; I have come to fulfill it!” We need not run down the list of commandments asking, “Which one of these apply to me and which do not?” The question we need to ask and pay attention to is how the New Testament writers, indwelt by the Spirit of God, viewed and lived out those commandments in the New Covenant fulfilled in and by Christ, and how we can follow their example.
