Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
We tend to have negative connotations associated with law in general and the law of Old Testament in particular. Paul often wrote of the impotence of the law to save us, how, apart from Jesus, it brought death.
The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me (see Romans 7:10).
Paul insisted that the letter killed but that the Spirit gave life. We tend to set this up in such opposition as to wish to do away with anything so firm as a letter and settle instead into a loose and easy path we call Spirit, but which is often something more like sentimentalism.
Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,
not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter
will pass from the law,
until all things have taken place.
The law really does contain within it the blueprint for the blessings promised to Moses, the blessings, above all, of being a people near to God.
‘This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people.’
For what great nation is there
that has gods so close to it as the LORD, our God, is to us
whenever we call upon him?
It is true that, by itself, the law proved ineffectual. We might have the vague sense that it was arbitrary or impersonal. Even so, it actually contained great potential, but potential that could only be unleashed, not by abandoning law as such, but by its purpose being fulfilled and revealed in Jesus Christ.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Jesus did not come to do away with the letter. He came to give us the Spirit so that the true meaning of the letter could be read and understood. That same Spirit within us was to resonate and respond to what was read, drawing us onward and upward in a path of holiness. Without Spirit the law remained dead letters that condemned us. We could not even penetrate how they could be anything other than condemnation until we were given faith and Spirit with which to read them. Without the Spirit our own efforts to follow them always issued from a sense of obligation, but always we sensed that, however well we appeared to do, an inner transformation was missing. The Spirit showed us that the law itself pointed the way to this transformation. The same Spirit opened us up and made us malleable to receive it.
All that the law can now be for us is possible because of the way Jesus lived it out and revealed its divine, even Trinitarian direction, the direction by which our obedience could be taken up as something more than mere obligation, into the very outpouring of divine life that never ceases in the heart of God. The Cross fulfilled so many types of the Old Testament. In fulfilling them it showed us the way by which we, following the newly accessible spiritual meaning of the law, could by the Cross begin to share God's own love, in the very heart of God.
He has proclaimed his word to Jacob,
his statutes and his ordinances to Israel.
He has not done thus for any other nation;
his ordinances he has not made known to them.
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