The Gospel in Real Life

This is the last of three posts that I’m writing about conversations I recently had with two orthodox Jews. One thing that stood out to me most in my time with them was the response I got when I implored them to wrestle with who Jesus is. They remained very gracious and kind when I mentioned the name of Jesus and my belief that Jesus is God and that God became a man in the person of Jesus in order to die a substitutionary death on the cross to pay for the sin of all who believe. As we continued to talk about the gospel, they resonded by telling me that they viewed Jesus as a good example of keeping the Law. Who can disagree with that? Of course he was (is). He kept the Law perfectly as the true spotless lamb of God. On that point we agreed. But when I took them beyond the concept of seeing Jesus as simply a good man who did a good job of keeping the Law, we agreed to disagree. To my surprise, it was then that they pointed me to Matthew 5:17-18:

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. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

To my Jewish friends, Jesus’ words, “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” simply meant that he came to keep the Law and little or nothing more. I agree that he kept the Law perfectly, but that is not all that is in view in this passage. In Colossians 2:13-14, Paul gives us more information:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.

Ephesians 2:14-16 is parallel in many ways with our Colossians text. The context is the bringing together of Jew and Gentile into one new man, the Church:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

Something happened between Matthew 5 and Colossians chapter 2/Ephesians 2 that resulted in the Law of Moses losing its fatal grip. It was abolished at the cross because it stood opposed to the formation of the Church. That’s Paul’s meaning in Ephesians. The Law of Moses kept Jew and Gentile apart – it was hostile to the church and it needed to be taken out of the way in order for Jew and Gentile (non-Jews) to become one new man (the church). That event was the cross (Colossians 2:13-17) and it was at the cross that the Law of Moses meets its fatal end in order to remove the hostility that it created between Jew and Gentile. There is much more going on in Matthew 5:17-18 than Jesus’ perfect law-keeping, as true as that is.

My Jewish friends were fine with a Jesus who is all about obeying the Law, but when our discussion turned to Jesus’ deity and his Messiahship, the reaction was not what I had hoped it would be. They were unable to come to grips the idea of a crucified Messiah or the Deity of Christ. They correctly reasoned that if Jesus is God, then God died a sacrificial death on the cross. This is a concept that their Old Testament theology won’t allow because the Old Testament keeps it veiled or hidden. In other words, my Jewish friends are worshiping a revelation of God that is 2,000+ years old and incomplete. The New Covenant Scriptures give us the complete revelation of what God is like in Jesus Christ. To borrow a phrase from Paul Harvey, they tell the rest of the story. We must love God as he has revealed himself completely in both the Old and New Testaments. Anything less keeps us out of heaven.

We ended our last conversation talking about the gospel, summarizing all that we had said prior to that, and how Scripture fits together. The Old Covenant was in many ways, a picture of the New Covenant. The Law is both fulfilled and abolished by Jesus at the cross and has lost its death grip when we come to Jesus by faith alone. Everyone who wants to find acceptance with God by observing the Law of Moses will end up experiencing its curse instead because the Law demands perfect obedience all the time. I hope my Jewish friends will consider seriously what I told them.