MJ Only Matthew 5:18

[Soyeong]

May I please offer the following link for discussion and consideration?

Did Jesus Contradict Himself in Matthew 5:17?

Hello,

Jesus did not come to abolish the Old Testament; he came to fulfill it.

"To fulfill the Law" means "to cause God's will (as made known in the Law) to be obeyed as it should be" (NAS Greek Lexicon pleroo 2c3). After Jesus said he came to fulfill the Law in Matthew 5, this is precisely what he then proceeded to do six times throughout the rest of the chapter by teaching how to correctly understand and obey it. In Galatians 5:14, loving your neighbor fulfills the entire law, so it refers to obeying the Law as it should be obeyed, and refers to something countless people have done, not to something unique to Christ. Likewise, Galatians 6:2 says that bearing one another's burdens fulfills the Law of Christ, so you should interpret it in the same way as fulfilling the Law and the Prophets, namely obeying it as it should be, not as doing away with it. In Romans 15:18-19, it says that Paul fulfilled the Gospel, which again referred to causing Gentiles to become fully obedient to it in word and in deed, not to doing away with it.

The 613 laws in the Old Testament are still recognized by Jews today, yet Christians are bound by the laws of the New Covenant: to love our Lord above all else and to love our neighbors as ourselves. The New Covenant is the permanent Covenant that God has given his children. By faith, we follow the New Covenant and Jesus Christ – and by God’s grace we are extended his mercy, forgiveness, love, and salvation. 1 Corinthians 13 well explains the beauty of the New Covenant, which is all about love.

In Matthew 22:36-40, Jesus was not asked about which laws we should follow or about what the laws of the New Covenant were, but rather he was asked about what the greatest commandment was. All of the 613 commandments of the OT and 1,050 commandments of the NT can be put into one or both of the categories of being God's instructions for how He wants us to love Him or how He wants us to love our neighbor, so the reason why the greatest two are the greatest is because they summarize all of the other commandments and the reason why all of the others hang on those two is because they are all examples of what it looks like to correctly obey them. For example, obedience to the command to help the poor looks like obedience to the command to love our neighbor, so the command to love does not replace the other commandments, but rather it is the essence of them. In other words, Christ's obedience to the greatest two commandments looked exactly like his complete obedience to the Mosaic Law, so that is how we are to love as he loved.

In Jeremiah 31:34, the New Covenant involves God writing His Law on our hearts, so it still involves following God's Law. If the way to act in accordance with God's righteousness changed when the New Covenant was made, then God's righteousness would not be eternal, but God's righteousness is eternal (Psalm 119:142), so any instructions that God has ever given for how to do what is righteous will be valid eternally regardless of which covenant we are under (Psalm 119:160). Gentiles to not need to become Jews in order to become followers of the Jewish Messiah of Judaism, but Gentiles can't follow him by refusing to follow the Law that he followed and taught his followers to obey by word and by example. In Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that faith is one of the weightier matters of the Law, and in 1 John 5:3, to love God is to obey His commandments, so if we have faith in Christ and we love him, then we will obey the Law.