Nielsen’s Nook

Thirsty ones come to the waters! The Lord sees our want; he knows our deepest needs. With this intimate knowledge of us he does not exploit us; but, he seeks to fulfill us. The human situation is not simply that we “still haven’t found what we’re looking for;” but, that we are looking for all the wrong things. Why do you spend money, the prophet asks, on what you do not need? Why do you work so hard for that which does not satisfy? Before and after these questions, the Lord has wrapped us up in his mercy: you who are poor, come and eat what is good, delight yourselves in rich food, so that you may live.

This passage in Isaiah seems to be at least one of Jesus’ sermon texts in his Sermon on the Mount, namely in his introduction we commonly call the Beatitudes. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied (Matthew 5:6, author’s translation).

If the questions posed by Isaiah 55 affect you; if they thud off the emptiness that I believe we all have when we consider the lusts of our own flesh; then, I believe Jesus’ words have a most merciful weight for us.

Most of us don’t strive after the unsatisfying because we really enjoy being unsatisfied. Sometimes we do not realize just how unsatisfied we really are. Other times we know that we’re unsatisfied, but don’t feel we have any better options. In even other situations, we cannot imagine how any of this matters because we’re operating in an economy of the world that uses completely different currency than the economy of life. It is as if we have fistfuls of cash we just printed out on our home computer, funny-money, and we cannot imagine why it buys us nothing.

It is not the rich that buy what Jesus offers. In fact what Jesus offers cannot be bought at all; it is received as a gift. We see that in Isaiah 55: Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. In the language of the Beatitudes, it is the poor who paradoxically trade in Christ’s economy, for theirs and theirs only is the kingdom of heaven. These are not the blissful poor, the ignorant poor. No, they are painfully aware of their poverty, such that they mourn it.

My wife and I have a really nice set of living room furniture that we could never have afforded to buy.  If you knew my wage, you would wonder how this furniture happens to be in my home at all. It is furniture that was given to us by a most gracious friend when we bought our home. So when people pay compliment to it when they visit our home, I am quick to mention that it was a fantastic gift. I cannot boast in myself or my provision, but in what the Lord has given us benevolently.

Ultimately the couch is going to disintegrate; but it is a figure of the way God’s gifts work in the divine economy. He gives us the greatest riches in such away that we may not point to it as a result of our own labor or merit or wealth; however, what God gives us is really ours to care for and walk in.  This gives the Christian the impetus for meekness.

Isaiah has asked us why we hunger and thirst for that which does not satisfy. Jesus proclaims that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied. We of ourselves will chase after all sorts of things, all the wrong things. Christ comes to us that our affections may be recalibrated and our appetites whet for what is glorious and truly wealthy.

Righteousness is a character trait of the Lord. God is not righteous because he does certain things. Rather he is simply righteous, in and of himself. We are created as the image of this righteous God and yet we have chosen a path that is most unlike him. We live in a way that is disharmonious with our status as image and this disjunction is the root of our dissatisfaction.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:10-11 that we are blessed when we are persecuted for righteousness sake, when we suffer on his account. In these two verses the grammatical parallelism identifies righteousness as Jesus himself.

And so we come full circle. God sees us buying everything but what will truly satisfy and grow us. He is not content to placate our “bentness,” to multiply our fists full of funny-money or nice furniture. Rather, he enters our economy with his own currency, himself. It is an infinite currency that has only one bill. In God’s economy there is Christ: Christ incarnate, Christ crucified, Christ risen and exalted, Christ the Lord. He alone is the righteousness of God. He alone is the one human being who has lived as the image of God also in his likeness. As such, fellowship with God has been restored for humanity (Colossians 1:15-20).

When we see what God offers all humanity in Jesus, how foolish are we to not seek the Lord while he may be found. He calls us to lay down the fistfuls of funny-money that we have printed off for ourselves and lay hold of Christ. Why, scripture asks, do you spend your money for that which is not bread.  Jesus will later ask why do you labor for bread that perishes, “for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” (John 6:33)

Every Sunday this truth is proclaimed, reenacted, and received by faith. The Word of God is spoken, inviting all who thirst to the living waters. Every Sunday we celebrate the Word of God broken in which the bread of life is given to the eater that in mind and body, the whole person may be gratified with Christ, who alone satisfies. For it is Jesus who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Cor 4:6).

Commentary

[a] Greek αὐτῷ, him.

[b] τελειόω is a word that does not translate into English well at all. It is glossed as to complete, perfect, bring to its goal, finish, accomplish; its noun forms have been rendered as perfection or maturity. The key here is to allow the semantic field of τελειόω to be larger than one English word can convey at this point. At a crescendo in the Sermon on the Mount, having recalibrated his listeners to the descriptive substance of the Ten Commandments, Jesus proclaims succinctly in Matthew 5:48, ἔσεσθε οὖν ὑμεῖς τέλειοι ὡς ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος τέλειός ἐστιν. Therefore, you be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect (author’s translation). The idea in both of these passages is that those who are τέλειοι are those who are and do all for which they have been given to do. As the “entrepreneur” of salvation, Jesus, in becoming a man was the humanity that all human beings have fallen short (imperfection) of and so demonstrated himself perfect. Further, he was sent by the Father to save a people for himself. That mission was perfectly accomplished upon the Cross through all of its suffering on behalf of God’s people. As such, Jesus demonstrates himself the perfect savior, the one who has done what he set out to do.

[c] τὸν ἀρχηγὸν the founder, leader, one who begins (BAGD, 112). Conceptually, the idea of Captain, following the KJV seems to capture the aspect of leading and defending, which is certainly true of Jesus and his relation to the salvation of his people. However, this is another instance where there is not a simply corollary in English.  When the ESV translates ἀρχηγός as founder, there is an emphasis on the one who gave salvation in the first place. Entrepreneur is the best word I could creatively render for ἀρχηγός. While it is certainly not a perfect rendering, it encompasses the idea of the one who begins a work, the one who sustains that work, and the one who maintains it.

[d] i.e., humanity introduced in Hebrews 2:6, τί ἐστιν ἄνθρωπος … What is man/humanity?

[e] υἱοὺς certainly has the scope of “children” (both male and female) in its meaning. It is rendered “sons” here to make the literary connection to Hebrews 2:6 and the Son of Man who has made a people the children (υἱοι) of God.

Two and a half years ago I was overwhelmed by the Sermon on the Mount. An elder at my church took a few of us aside on morning a week over pancakes and taught us. Like many of us, this elder had read the Sermon on the Mount and been disturbed. We surely don’t measure up to the standards of the Kingdom of God. Righteousness is something that we are shown to lack, and yet Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:20 that if we haven’t righteousness that abundantly surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will in no way ever enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The scribes and the Pharisees were regarded as the most righteous people Jesus’ original hearers would have known. How could anyone be counted righteous before God?

The act of God justifying a sinner is where we find those who haven’t righteousness being accepted as righteousness. My confession of faith, the Westminster Standards, expresses it this way:

Justification is an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in which he pardons all their sins, accepts and accounts their persons righteous in his sight; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone.[1]

Jesus comes to us as the Incarnate Word of God and in his perfect obedience, both active and passive, he purchased a people for the Father. Humanity was created wonderful, as the image of God, to live out the likeness of God in fellowship with Him. However, what we find is that as the image of God we live out an unlikeness to God and consequently live in dislocation from Him:

…the transgression of the commandment [not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden] was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again.[2]

In the Incarnation we see both exaltation and humiliation. Christ comes and takes upon himself flesh. That God would become a human being most definitely exalts humanity immeasurably. Nevertheless, in becoming a human being (the image of God), Jesus lives out the perfect likeness of God, which was received by the Father a “full satisfaction” for the debt of sin of His people. The abundance of Jesus’ perfection and obedience, exposes our poverty, our unlikeness, bringing with it a balanced humiliation.

Apart from Christ, we are slaves to the unlikeness of God. It is like a great Egyptian taskmaster that takes away the straw, while cracking the whip across our backs to build more bricks (c.f. Exodus 5). Where we cowed to the whip in our weakness, Christ lay hold of the Egyptian taskmaster and threw him down, beating him with his own whip.

[Jesus] has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled, and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be.[3]

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Herod the Great decreed that all the male children two years of age and under in the region where Jesus had been born. Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt, having been warned in a dream (Matthew 2:19-23). Jesus comes out of Egypt, through water (Matthew 3) and then into the wilderness (Matthew 4) before he ascends the Mount from which he might bring a New Covenant with its blessing for obedience and curse for disobedience.[4]

And so Jesus presents to us that declaration of the New Covenant:
³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
⁵ “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
⁶ “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
⁷ “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
⁸ “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
⁹ “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
¹⁰ “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
¹¹ “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.[5]

While the Incarnation humiliates us, showing to us our utter poverty, we find that the motive of the Incarnation was not spite but love. For God, made himself lowly, poor in spirit, emptying himself of his divine rights and became a man. He came to his own and his own rejected him. Jesus wept. And is there any doubt that our Lord was meek? That he was one who was absolutely submitted to another? Had he not come to do his own will but that of the Father? While we hunger and thirst for righteousness that we do not have, He hungers and thirsts for the righteousness of his Father. It is our Lord who has been merciful to us. It is Jesus who is alone ceremonially pure, who has seen the Father. It is Jesus who is alone the peacemaker who restored the fellowship of his people with God through the blood of his Cross. The one who is himself Righteousness, was crowned not with gold and gems but persecuted with the thorns that cursed the ground that Adam walked.

It is this one, the Righteous One, who has humbled himself and in becoming a man he proclaims to us the New Covenant. It is in this proclamation of the New Covenant that the one who made himself poor, declares to those enslaved to the unlikeness of God, that there is blessing for the poor, for those who mourn, for the meek, and the hungry. Indeed, we find that the Incarnate God has made a way for the captives to be free. That way is by grace alone in Christ alone through faith alone. For paupers have nothing else by which to lay hold of the Incarnate God who came near to save a people for himself.

[1] Westminster Larger Catechism, Question 70. I took the liberty to modernize the language a little bit here.

[2] St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation : The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 29-30.

[3] St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation : The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 35.

[4] N. T. Wright. Matthew for Everyone. 2 vols. 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004) v1, 37.

[5] Matthew 5:3-12 (ESV)

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Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII

IV. Christ-the Essential Description of Righteousness

So we are faced with the fact that God has spoken definitively in His Law, in His word. We are ourselves subject to the same self-deception and self-righteousness of the Pharisees. And here is God’s Incarnate Son explaining to his hearers that they do not rightly understand the Law. If we care about discipleship, this should be alarming. If those most zealous for keeping the Law of God can not only go so far off course but also lead countless numbers of people with them, how do we reckon that we will not find the same in our own lives?

“Our Lord has not come to make it easier for us or to make it in any way less stringent in keeping [the Law’s] demands upon us. His purpose in coming was to enable us to keep the Law not to abrogate it.” ~ D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, Sermon on the Mount, p. 174-75.

To ask what the role of righteousness is in the believer should be to ask what the role of Christ is in the life of the believer.

If you are one who struggles with self-righteousness (and we all do), the answer is not for me to preach to you that you must stop being self-righteous. No, that is only preaching a different flavor of the same prescriptive parsimony – a variation on the same wretched theme. What Christ is offering is far more abundant! It is a liberal outpouring of nothing less than the totality of God Himself. What the self-righteous need is the gospel in which the impoverished are made rich in Christ. Our appetite for cheap imitation is then swallowed up by a hunger and thirst for the Righteous One. As we abide in Christ we bear the fruits of Christ, which is nothing short of an ongoing miraculous work of God in our lives. We are called to greater things than spiritual forms of Russian roulette.

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Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII

C. Christ Our Righteousness (Mt 5:17-19)

So far we have said that one must have righteousness that abundantly surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. We have also found that the nature of this righteousness is essential, relating to the core of our beings. Further, we considered that the Law of God has always been a description of righteousness to which humanity as God’s image is to emulate as salt is salty and light is lumi-nous. Finally, we have said that while the Law of God has always been concerned with the heart, it lacks the power (as the Apostle Paul teaches us) to circumcise our corrupted hearts.

Matthew 5:17-19 (ESV) 17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For 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 ac-complished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

Jesus as the Fulfillment and Goal of God’s Law

Jesus begins this section following his description of Kingdom citizens with an imperative that his hearers not think that he had come to destroy the Law. This presents us with a distinct challenge. Apparently, Jesus anticipated that his teaching on His Father’s Law would sound to his hearers as if he was going against everything that they knew to be true about the Law. This is often the case when Jesus invades our lives is it not. We find that he challenges all that we know to be true about re-ligion and all of life.

A Misunderstanding the Purpose of the Law

By saying that he did not come to destroy the Law but to fulfill it, Jesus is cluing us in that perhaps his hearers did not understand the Law as they thought they did. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law. Paul tells us that the Law was given as a tutor to point us to God. The Law reveals to us the righteousness of God that is alien to us. Jesus comes and ful-fills this Law from the heart perfectly.

The Law Exposes Us as Idolaters

Second-rate obedience will never save us. That is what the Ser-mon on the Mount is all about. Israel had settled for second-rate. They had redefined the Law so that it might be fulfilled in terms of outward appearance. God’s interest in their hearts, in the core and totality of who they were, had been swept away as prescriptive parsimony.

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B. Essential Righteousness (Mt 5:13-16)

The connecting thoughts between the Beatitudes and Jesus’ staggering statement about righteousness in Matt. 5:20 are the rest of the passage we are considering together. He begins by using two metaphors to explain the nature of true righteousness - righteousness that actually corresponds to the righteous standard of his Father - the righteousness that abundantly surpasses that of the Scribes and Pharisees.

1. Statements of Essence Mt. 5:13-16

Matt. 5:13-16 (ESV) 13 “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. 14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Jesus is making a descriptive statement about citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. Just as salt in and of itself is salty, so Kingdom citizens have certain innate properties as Kingdom citizens, matters of fact, for those who are His subjects.

In other words, if you saw a white grainy substance on a table and when you tasted it you found that it was sweet, you would not conclude that the substance on the table was salt - even if it was in a saltshaker! You would make these conclusions because there are certain properties that salt has simply because it is salt. The same is true for light. Jesus is making statements of essence, describing a Kingdom citizen at their most basic level.

2. Two Approaches to Righteousness

There is a continuum of responses we can give to Jesus’ teaching on righteousness at this point. On the one hand, we can either cry out to God because we see that we are immeasurably poor in spirit, unable to bring about the essential heart change that the Law required. Or on the other hand, we can work to redefine the Law of God, to say in effect, “Define Righteousness” as if it were somehow ambiguous or vague.

The former is a description of one who has been converted by the gracious and saving power of God’s transforming Spirit. The latter is a Pharisee, who would reduce righteousness to their own subjective rules of preference; thereby contorting God’s uncreated righteous standard to the perverted standards of their own created imaginations.

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III. The Teaching of Christ

A. Righteousness that Abundantly Surpasses … (Mt 5:20)

We have reviewed the Law of God and saw that the Old Testament presents it as a description of the Righteousness of God. We then turned our attention briefly to the Law of the Pharisee, which we have said was a perversion of the Law of God, having twisted it into a prescription for attaining righteousness. So now we come to contemplate together the meaning of Jesus’ teaching in our passage.

Matt. 5:20 is the exclamation point, the conclusion to which the rest of our passage is flowing (Mt. 5:13-20). It will serve us well to begin there and then consider the preceding verses. In this way, we will better appreciate what Christ is teaching us along the way if we have His destination in mind.

Matt. 5:20 (ESV) 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds [abundantly surpasses] that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never [in any way ever] enter the kingdom of heaven.

Three Implications For Righteousness In Matt. 5:20

When Jesus says that a person’s righteousness must abundantly surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees he is making subtle and powerful implications.

Insufficient Righteousness

First he is saying that the righteousness of the Pharisees is insufficient. They write checks and have nothing in the bank to show for it. Imagine how this would have shocked not only the Pharisees, but also the masses that thought of them as being icons of righteousness in the community.

Non-Existent Righteousness

Second, the Gentiles, who were there from the surrounding territories, were of course aware that in the economy of Jewish religion the Pharisees were considered wealthy in currency of righteousness. Therefore, it is safe to say that Jesus is also implying that none of his hearers - Jew or Gentile- had any righteousness whatsoever of which to speak - their righteousness was non-existent. Paul in great unity with the thought of our Lord tells us in Romans 3:9-20 that there is none who are righteous - and he had previously been a Pharisee of Pharisees (Phil 3:1-11).

Remember how Jesus began his sermon:

Matt. 5:3-6 (ESV) 3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. 6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

The Beatitudes give us the paradigm for understanding the entirety Sermon on the Mount. Therefore, they speak to our passage (Mt. 5:13-20). We find here that it is precisely those - and only those - who are poor in spirit and hunger and thirst after righteousness who are heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven and who will be satisfied in their appetite for righteousness.

What is profound about Jesus’ statement is that he describes those who hunger and thirst after the righteousness that they do not themselves have! It is these, who know their own righteousness is insufficient and non-existent, who are the ones who are blessed; it is these - and these only - who will be the sons and daughters of God! The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those - and those only - who are poor in spirit.

Pharisaic Self-Deception

Jesus exposed the righteousness of His hearers as insufficient and non-existent. The problem is that many of His hearers were convinced otherwise. And so we come to the third powerful implication that Jesus teaches us in Matt. 5:20 - that of self-deception.

Jesus is exposing the self-deception of the Pharisees. They are deceived in themselves about what righteousness is on an essential or most basic level. Consequently, the Pharisees are deceived in their understanding of what the LAW OF GOD actually taught. They believed that they were rich in spirit because of the cacophony of their ‘righteous acts’. They had printed off Monopoly money by the ream and then declared themselves rich!

Jesus explains that they hunger and thirst after something other than righteousness. In fact, they are only playing religious games. They play a kind of Religious Russian Roulette with a fully loaded revolver.

Unless your righteousness abundantly surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees you will never in any way enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

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Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII

II. The Law of Pharisee

If the Law of God was the description of True Righteousness but lacked the power to transform the deadness at our very core, the Law of the Pharisee was something subtly other than that.

The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day who had won the esteem and the fear of the masses by vigorously establishing the Jewish culture over against the pagan cultures that were impinging upon it. They saw the Law of God as a prescription of what one was to do in order to be righteous (i.e., a list of things to do and not do). For example, the Law required that a person fast once a year. The Pharisees would fast twice a week and make sure that everyone understood that they were the religious over-achievers.

They did not understand that since the creation of the world, God has always been primarily concerned with our hearts, with the inner disposition that His creatures have with Him as their Creator. In Matthew 23 Jesus will call the Pharisees hypocrites, play-actors and whitewashed tombs, being polished shinny on the outside and full of the rancor and stench of death on the inside.

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I. The Law of God

First and in a very cursory way, let us consider the Law of God. The Law of God is the verbal revelation written down for us as a lasting description of who God is essentially, at the core of His being. The Ten Commandments are not a prescription by which God must abide in order that He might be righteous. He is himself righteousness and the Ten Commandments describe this to us.

Second, the Law of God has always been concerned with the renewing of the heart. In Deuteronomy 10:16, God tells the Israelites that they must circumcise their hearts. In Joel 2 we find that God wishes that the people would ‘rend their hearts and not their garments’. At least these Israelites had reduced religion down to outward appearance and had thereby redefined it. Yet again, Deuteronomy makes plain that it would ultimately be God who would circumcise the hearts of His people and their offspring with the purpose that they would love the Lord their God (Dt. 30:6). Such language as ‘circumcision of the heart’ should sound familiar to us. It echoes the language that Jesus used with Nicodemus, telling him that he “must be born again” (Jn 3).

Further, while the Law of God has always described righteousness as something that God desires to find in us on a heart-level, it lacked the power – as a description – to renew the core or ‘heart’ of a person. Indeed, “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Ro 8:3-4). So we see that the LAW OF GOD was always a description of True Righteousness, while at the same time, as a description, it was powerless to transform us, to circumcise our hearts.

For now, let us keep this paradigm or framework of the Law of God in our minds. In this way, I believe we will begin to see the great incompatibility that the Law of God has with the Law of the Pharisee.

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This begins a serial posting in which we will reflect and contemplate Matthew 5:13-20.

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For 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. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Mt 5:13-20 ESV)

Introduction: Russian Roulette

There are some things in this world that are as foolish as they are deadly. Russian Roulette is a brutal and devilish game that is played by taking a revolver which holds six bullets and placing a single bullet in one of the cylinders, spinning the cylinder with the bullet inside, placing the gun to one’s head and then pulling the trigger. The participant has a 1 in 6 chance of killing himself or herself.

Now imagine that someone put one bullet in each of the six chambers in the cylinder of that revolver so that it was fully loaded. The odds would be impossible. The participant would have a one hundred percent chance of ending his or her life.

I do not know why anyone in his or her right mind would engage in this activity or even think of it in terms of a game. I suggest to you that this is precisely the parallel to the inevitable outcome of playing the “Self-Righteousness Game” - a spiritual version of Russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver - to which Jesus has directed his attention in the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus has given us a paradigm here in our text for understanding what righteousness truly is. He gives us a description of those who in fact hunger and thirst for righteousness. He further exposes the destructive consequences of following our own self-made prescriptions for righteousness (i.e., for playing spiritual Russian roulette).

In verse 20, Matthew makes clear for us that Jesus is emphatic that there is no way ever that anyone who does not have righteousness that abundantly exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Apparently Jesus’ understanding of righteousness was fundamentally different than that of the Pharisees who were the Bible Teachers and Preachers of the day.

In order for us to understand the meaning of Jesus’ words in context, we must consider three things by way of introduction:

1. We need to understand what the Law of God taught.
2. Next, we will consider what the Law of the Pharisee is and how it essentially differed from the Law of God.
3. Then, we will consider what bearing Jesus’ words here - in the Sermon on the Mount - have on the Law of God and the Law of the Pharisee.