DIVINE DECLARATION - Oswald Chambers
His Mission, vv. 17-19. ” I am come … to fulfil.” An amazing word! Our shoes ought to be off our feet and every common sense.
mood stripped from our minds when we hear Him speak. In Him we deal with God as man, the God-Man, the re presentative of the whole human race in one Person. The men of His day traced their religious pedigree back to the constitution of God, and this young Nazarene Carpenter says I am the constitution of God, consequently to them He was a blasphemer.
Our Lord places Himself as the exact meaning and fulfilment of all Old Testament prophecies. His mission, He says, is to fulfil the law and the prophets, and He further says that any man who breaks the old laws because they belong to a former dispensation, and teaches men to break them, shall suffer severe impoverishment. If the old commandments were difficult, Our Lord s principles are unfathomably more difficult. Our Lord goes behind the old law to the disposition. Everything He teaches is impossible unless He can put into me His Spirit and re- make me from the inside. The Sermon on the Mount is quite unlike the Ten Commandments in the sense of its being absolutely unworkable unless Jesus Christ can re-make us.
There are teachers who argue that the Sermon on the Mount supersedes the Ten Commandments, and that because we are not under law but under grace it does not matter whether we honor our father and mother, whether we covet, etc. That, in practical application, is sentimental dust-throwing. To be not under the law but under grace does not mean I can do as I like. It is surprising how easily we can juggle ourselves out of Jesus Christ s principles by one or two pious sayings repeated often enough. The only safeguard is to keep personally related to God. The secret for all spiritual understanding is to walk in the light, not the light of my convictions, or of my theories, but the light that God is in. (1 John I. 7.)
His Message, v. 20.
Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Think of the most upright man you know, the most moral, sterling, religious man (e.g., Nicodemus was a Pharisee, so was Saul of Tarsus ” blame less” according to the law) who has never received the Holy Spirit, and Jesus says you must exceed his righteousness, i.e., you have to be not only as moral as the most moral man you know, but infinitely more to be so right in your actions, so pure in your motives, that God Almighty can see nothing to blame.
Is it too strong to call that a spiritual torpedo? These statements of Jesus are the most revolutionary statements human ears ever listened to, and it needs the Holy Ghost to interpret them to us; the shallow admiration for Jesus Is it too strong to call that a spiritual torpedo? These statements of Jesus are the most revolutionary statements human ears ever listened to, and it needs the Holy Ghost to interpret them to us; the shallow admiration for Jesus Christ as a Teacher that is taught to-day is of no use.
Who is going to climb that ” hill of the Lord? To stand before God and say My hands are clean, my heart is pure? Who can do it? Who can stand in the eternal light of God and have nothing for Him to blame in him? Only the Son of God, and if the Son of God is formed in me by regeneration and sanctification, He will exhibit Himself through my mortal flesh. That is the ideal of Christianity ” that the life of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.
Your disposition, says Jesus, must be right to its depths, not only your conscious motives but your unconscious motives. Now we are beyond our depth. Can God make me pure in heart? Blessed be the Name of God, He can! Can He alter my disposition so that when circumstances reveal me to myself, I am amazed? He can. Can He impart to me His nature until it is identically the same as His own? He can. That and nothing less is the meaning of His Cross and Resurrection.
Except your righteousness exceed.” The right eousness of the scribes and Pharises was right not wrong; that they did other than righteousness is obvious, but Jesus is talking here of their righteousness which His disciples are to exceed. What exceeds right doing if it be not right being ? Right being without right doing is possible by refusing to enter into relationship with God, but that cannot exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus message here is that unless we exceed their righteousness in doing (the Pharisees were nothing in being), we shall never enter into the kingdom of heaven. The monks in the Middle Ages refused to take the responsibility of life, all they wanted was to be and not to do and they shut themselves away from the world, that does not exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. People to-day want to do the same by cutting themselves off from this and that. relationship. If Our Lord had meant exceed in being only, He would not have used the word ” exceed,” He would have said ” Except your righteousness be otherwise than. …” You cannot exceed the righteousness of the most moral man you know on the line of what he does, but only on the line of what he is.
The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount must produce despair in the natural man ; if it does not, it is because you have paid no attention to it. Pay attention to Jesus Christ s teaching and you will soon say “Who is sufficient for these things ? ” Blessed are the pure in heart.” If Jesus Christ means what He says, where am I in regard to it? Come unto Me says Jesus.
