Jesus came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets
“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.” Matthew 5:17
Jesus came to earth, born as we were. But why?
He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets. These are words directly from Jesus to the people that got to hear the words of what we call the Sermon on the Mount. He had just finished telling them “blessed are the…” and “you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.” And then he says this: don’t expect me to get rid of the Law and the Prophets.
Now for the Jews hearing him at the time, it meant something very different than it does to us today. For us, the Law and the Prophets are the Old Testament. The way people lived to know and honor God before Jesus all hung on the Law that God gave and the messages he sent them through the prophets.
For us, most seem antiquated, words from another time that don’t fit what we understand today. But Jesus wanted us to know– he didn’t come to get rid of it. He came to fulfill it.
The Law was everything that is just and true. We just couldn’t live up to it. Our sinful selves had no hope of being able to meet the righteous expectations that came from it. That’s where we were before Christ. But it doesn’t nullify the importance of what God said through them. The fault lies with us.
The only way we would be able to live up to the Law was if someone did it for us.
That’s Jesus.
That was the plan for centuries. And that’s why he came.
“For 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.” Romans 8:3-4
Because Jesus came, he fulfilled every part of the requirements of the Law. He was fulfilling the prophecies made. He, the Son of God, was making them complete.
And how does Jesus continue to talk about the Law and the Prophets? He calls it doing to others as we would want them to do to us (Matthew 7:12), loving God above all else and loving our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:37-40).
So when Jesus came, he turned the world upside down. He didn’t get rid of the Law and the Prophets. But they were no longer the end-all. Jesus is the end-all. He alone has the authority to complete the Law and the Prophets and he alone can make us right in the sight of God.
He alone could do it. He alone could fulfill the Law and the Prophets. And he did.
Jesus came.
