Holy Boldness

on the Mount laid the foundation for an understanding of the fulness of divine intention of God’s law. Jesus came to change everything including the popular understanding of the scriptures. Earlier we discussed where Jesus claimed to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy found in Isaiah 61. Here again, Jesus claimed that He had come to “fulfill” the scriptures, only this time it was not just one specific scripture, rather, He claimed to fulfill but all of them, the whole law and the prophets. In other words, He claimed to bring both law and prophets, the entire body of teaching and prophetic declarations of the Old Testament to completion in Himself. I suppose it is impossible to fully comprehend everything that Jesus meant by that statement. Jesus did not come to nullify the scriptures or to make lite of them but to highlight and illustrate their significance and meaning through His personal life and the collective witness of His disciples. He came to give their full meaning, their ultimate intention, what they were actually pointing to as a focus and fulfillment. Furthermore, when Jesus claimed to bring the scriptures to fulness, He was announcing the fulness of times and therefore a fulness of meaning. His life represented a time of filling things up, of wrapping things up and sealing them off and finishing with a specific purpose to make room for whole new dimensions of understanding, meaning, and purpose. It was the announcement of a new era. “I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.” Not only did His words announce a new reality with the fulfill ment of the old, but it also established a new demand and expectation from His hearers. In this new season, Jesus declared, “For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” (v. 20) The scribes and Pharisees were the keepers and protectors of the religious traditions. They watched to make sure everyone was keeping the law. However, as Jesus would reveal, their teaching actually put people in religious bondage instead of setting them free. The scribes and Pharisees were hindering fulfillment rather than helping it. Essentially, Jesus’ sermon on the mount was a strategic launch to establish a new understanding of the scriptures and beyond that a new perspective of the entire purpose of God. Jesus exposed the fallacy of

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