JULY 13th, 2025 PASTOR DON PIEPER
Jesus' Kingdom Message Rom 7:7,14,21-8:4/Matthew 5:17-19,27-37
“YOU HEARD IT SAID, BUT...!”
There comes a time in most peoples lives in which we pause to ask life's big questions: What's my purpose in life? Why am I here? What were we put here on earth to do? Inquiring minds....!
Calvin: (as Hobbes walks up) Say, Hobbes, why do you suppose we're here?
Hobbes: Um..., because we walked here?
Calvin: No – no! I mean, here on earth.
Hobbes: Because earth can support life.
Calvin: No, I mean why are we anywhere? Why do we exist?
Hobbes: Because we were born?
Calvin: No – I mean – oh, forget it!
Hobbes: You mean our sense of purpose? We're here to devour each other. I'm here to devour!
Calvin: Great. …......Anyone up there got a better answer?
Actually..., someone does. In his sermon on the mount, Jesus pauses to share his divine sense of purpose, to answer the question of why he is here and what he is on earth to do – the implications of which, shed life-giving light on the reason you and I are here as well.
He tells the crowds: “Don't misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to fulfill them.” (Matthew 5:17)
Apparently they were trying to make sense of what he was saying and doing and thought he was suggesting that the Law and the prophets no longer had any bearing on their lives.
Many draw similar conclusions today. Some discount the Old Testament convinced that Jesus' gospel of love and grace contradicts or dismisses the O.T and its relevance. But Jesus makes it clear that is not the case: “I assure you, until heaven and earth disappear, even the smallest detail of God's law will remain until its purpose is achieved..., for anyone who obeys God's laws and teaches them will be great in the Kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:18-19)
Here Jesus connects his sense of purpose directly with the law and the prophets. In the Gospel of Matthew, this is particularly significant. Matthew writes for a Jewish-Christian community and so he takes extra effort to show how Jesus fulfilled God's Old Testament promises and prophecy.
Matthew begins his gospel, not with the birth of Jesus, but with a genealogy summarizing the Old Testament story in terms of Jesus' ancestry, divided into three eras of history, from Abraham to David, from David to the exile, and from the exile to Jesus, who brings to an end the O.T. story.
The O.T. story leads to Jesus and he completes it, gives meaning to it. His story reveals that we were created to live in a dynamic relationship with God in which He reveals himself & His love for us!
Jesus came to shed light on that story and embody the fullness of God's love and self-revelation: “These are the Scriptures that testify about me,” he told his enemies,“yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” (John 5:40) With the light of Christ we're able to perceive the Old Testament with crystal clarity. As St. Augustine put it: “The new is in the old concealed. The old is in the new revealed.”
(Augustine of Hippo)
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Matthew begins his gospel by tying Jesus' conception, birth and early childhood to the Hebrew Scriptures. In doing so Matthew celebrates how God's promises thru the prophets are fulfilled in Jesus. His virgin birth in Bethlehem, the response of Israel's king, his early life in Nazareth, his message of hope, his miracles of healing, his betrayal & suffering, his death between two thieves, his atonement for our sins, his burial in an unused grave, his resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon his followers were all predicted in the Old Testament hundreds of years in advance. He fulfilled over 300 prophecies, including 29 in a single day, spoken by different voices over a 500-year period.
In fact one of the first things he did, after rising from the day, “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” (Luke 24:27)
In addition, Jesus reveals the full depth and meaning of the Old Testament law. The law was intended for their good, to protect them from harm and as a means to bless them. It was not a means of salvation, but a response to salvation. In keeping the law they would show their trust in God. For Jesus
the law was vital to living life with purpose. So passionate was Jesus about living out the heart of the law that he often resorted to shock statements to jar his audience out of their complency, such as: “If your right eye causes you to sin (to break the law) gouge it out! Better be blind than go to hell!”
(Matthew 5:29)
As Jesus teaches on the law in Matthew 5, he is not his refuting the law but taking issue with the scribal misinterpretation of the law. They had found 248 commands and 365 prohibitions in the Law to which they had added hundreds of additional legalistic rules and regulations.
In saying that he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, Jesus is saying that he has come to reveal its full depth and meaning. He shows what the law really means in terms of anger, lust, fidelity, integrity and care for others. He was not contradicting it, but building on it, surpassing it.
With each teaching on the law, Jesus begins, “You have heard the law that says, but I tell you” (Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28, 31-32, 33-34, 38-39, 43-44), and with each new teaching Jesus provides, he doesn't dismiss them but actually makes them even harder to keep. He equates speaking in anger with murder, links looks of lust with acts of adultery, comes down hard on divorce and condemns the prac-tice of making oaths, and in all this, in effect, makes keeping the 10 Commandments unattainable. His point in doing so becomes clear later as his sermon reaches its climax. “Narrow is the gate that leads to life, and the road therin is narrow and hard, and only a very few ever find it.” (Matthew 7:14)
His point is to reveal that not a one of us is keeping the law as God originally intended. Not a one. Some look for loopholes and others to enforce a moral code but neither reflects God's will. As Paul would later point out, the law reveals our desperate need for help...
“It was the law that showed me my sin.. The trouble is not with the law, for it is spiritual and good. The trouble is with me! I'm all too human - a slave to sin! Oh, what a lost cause I am!
The answer is Jesus Christ! After all, now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus, and because you belong to him, the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death. So God did what the law could not do. He sent his only Son...so that the just requirement of the law would be fully satisfied for us...who follow the Spirit.”
(Romans 7:7, 14, 24-8:4)
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Jesus later summarized the heart of the law as loving God with all you've got and loving your neighbor. His teaching on the law reveals how far off the mark we really are. And so he clarifies his sense of purpose – that he came to fulfill the law and the prophets, through whom God promised to empower us to love God and one another as Jesus does. He clarified this in his final teaching to his disciples: “If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commands and remain in his love. My command is this: love each other as I have loved you.” (John 15:10, 12)
In this way, he gives life a profound sense of purpose. In him you come to discover why you are here – what you were put on this earth to do – to embrace your story as part of the biblical story, to love the author of that story and those around you with everything you've got, living lives of integrity, marital fidelity and honesty, one in which your word is trusted and your morals are unquestioned.
As only God's timing could manage it, that truth was echoed in my daily devotions:
“In His Word we're reminded that God has placed eternity in our hearts. (Ecc. 3:11) Yet ocean waves and mountains kissing the sky aren't enough to tell His story. God's heart couldn't be fully known until His Son appeared – God on the ultimate search, appearing in human flesh; God coming down with a sense of purpose – to redeem and restore his fallen creation.
To us, ready or not, Jesus came. To us, worthy or not, he appeared. The story of God's involve-ment in human history has reached its climax. And so, as promised, Jesus came, and in his own words, He came “to seek and save what was lost”. (Luke 19:10) He came because God wants you to know Him. Jesus, “the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being”, (Hebrews 1:3) walked this earth in plain sight so that anyone seeking God could find him.”
God wants you to know who He is...and who you are...and why you're here. He wants you to know that you're the object of His affection, created in His image, made by and for Him. Every last one of us has been created with a searching soul, designed that way by God so we would find no rest until we find our rest in Him. And the fact is, God is seeking after you as well.
Louie Giglio, author and pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, put it best, when he wrote:
God is seeking you so you can know what you're created to do. He's seeking you so you can find Him and value Him with all your heart. This is why Jesus came. To complete the game of hide and seek that began back in the Garden of Eden. He came to give meaning to your story thru His story, which he made crystal clear, was rooted in the biblical story of the Old Testament.
He came to connect you to the One who thought you up, to the author of your story, and to awaken you to the possibility that the meaning of your life is realized as you return glory to Him, loving Him with all you've got and discovering in Him what and who really matters most!”
(from Louie Giglio's The Air I Breathe)