The Fulfillment Jesus Brings | Matthew 5:17-20
Brian Hedges | January 11, 2026
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture to Matthew 5. This morning we are resuming our study through the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7, in a series we began in the fall called “Heirs of the Kingdom.”
After taking several weeks off for Advent and for Christmas and New Year’s, it would probably be helpful to summarize some of where we have already been as we’ve studied the first 16 verses of Matthew 5, picking up today in verses 17-20.
- We’ve seen that the Sermon on the Mount comes to us from Jesus, who needs to be understood in three roles:
Jesus as the king who is inaugurating the kingdom of God—he comes proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom in Matthew 4, and the Sermon on the Mount is really the manifesto of the king. It is showing us what life looks like within the kingdom of God; that is, under the reign and the rule of God. So Jesus is our king. - Secondly, we’ve seen that Jesus is a sage, that he speaks as a teacher of wisdom, a sage who is actually speaking into the cultural conversation of his day and is showing us what the good life really is. What does it look like to be a flourishing human being who lives under the reign of the Father in heaven? And that’s really what the Beatitudes, these “blessed are” statements, are about, which open up the Sermon on the Mount.
- We’ve seen that, in light of the broader teaching of the Gospel of Matthew, we must also see Jesus here, of course, as the savior, the one who is bringing a new exodus for the people of God, who is delivering us from slavery and bondage to sin and death, and who’s bringing new creation as he inaugurates the kingdom of God with the power of the Spirit; and as one who in his death will inaugurate the new covenant and the great new covenant promise of the Spirit, given to the church, and the law of God written on our hearts.
It’s important for us to understand all of that as we read the Sermon on the Mount so that we put it within the broader context of the Gospel according to Matthew, as well as the broader context of the New Testament.
Then we’ve seen that the Beatitudes, these “blessed are” statements, are Jesus’ portrait of the good life, the life of flourishing; but it’s surprising, and would have been surprising to the original hearers, because Jesus here speaks about an upside-down kind of kingdom, where the citizens of this kingdom are not those you would expect—not the rich and the powerful, but rather the poor, the humble, and the meek of the earth.
We’ve seen it is an inside-out kingdom, where the focus is not merely on external righteousness, but rather on the heart, the heart that hungers and thirsts for righteousness, the heart that is disposed to mercy, the heart that is pure in its love for God and disposed towards peace in the world.
We’ve seen it is this already/not-yet kingdom, because the blessings Jesus promises, while they are largely future, yet the kingdom is already here in the person of Jesus Christ. So there’s a sense in which we are already participants in these blessings, even as we wait for the full consummation of them.
Jesus, having given the Beatitudes, then went on to tell his disciples that “you are the salt of the earth” and “you are the light of the world,” reminding us that this is a countercultural kingdom, an alternate city or an alternate community, a people of God who live in the world in a way that actually holds out the light of the gospel in the midst of that darkness and serves as a moral preservative in a society that is often characterized by wickedness.
All of this has come before, and really you could say these first 16 verses in the Sermon on the Mount are something like Jesus’ introduction to the sermon. It’s only in verse 17 that we really move into the body of the sermon. Matthew 5:17-20 really leads us into all the teaching that will follow.
It’s important for us as we study this passage today that we wrestle with a primary question that will give us an understanding of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. This question is, how does Jesus and his kingdom relate to the law and the prophets, to the Scriptures that went before, the Old Testament Scriptures? The words that Jesus says here are important words. This is a hinge statement in this sermon, and it has to be one of the most important paragraphs in the New Testament, as it helps clarify our relationship to the Old Testament Scriptures. This is the one place where Jesus speaks perhaps with most clarity about that, as we’re going to see.
So let’s read Matthew 5:17-20, and then I want to point out three truths that I think this passage teaches that will help guide us through this passage and really through the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew chapter 5, beginning in verse 17. Jesus is speaking.
“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. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
This is God’s Word.
I think there are three truths that this passage teaches us that we need to understand this morning. I want you to see:
1. The Scriptures Jesus Affirms
2. The Fulfillment Jesus Brings
3. The Righteousness Jesus Requires and Provides
1. The Scriptures Jesus Affirms
Jesus begins by addressing a misunderstanding, perhaps before it had really taken root, when he says, “Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets.”
That opening phrase is telling us something important. There probably were people who were thinking something exactly like that, that Jesus, in the radical kinds of things he was saying and doing, was somehow undermining the Old Testament Scriptures, the law and the prophets. But Jesus says, “Don’t think I’ve come to abolish or destroy the law or the prophets; I’ve come to fulfill them.”
The law and the prophets are the Old Testament Scriptures. This is a common Jewish way of speaking about the entirety of the Old Testament canon. And Jesus is emphatic: his mission is not to destroy, but to fulfill. This is showing us that Jesus affirmed the authority of the Old Testament Scriptures.
Before we explore what fulfillment means, we need to hear very clearly what Jesus is denying. He is denying that his kingdom represents a break with God’s word. He is denying that the Old Testament Scriptures have been rendered obsolete. And in fact, he strengthens the point when he says, “Until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” It’s sort of like us saying that every I must have its dot, every T must be crossed. Jesus is saying, “Until it’s accomplished, this will not pass away.”
This is showing us that Jesus had a high and reverent regard for the Old Testament Scriptures. You might even think of it like this: sometimes when we read biographies, we characterize biographies as either biographies that are focused on the events of someone’s life or an intellectual biography. An intellectual biography is a biography that’s focused on the intellectual formation of someone. It looks at the books someone read, the mentors, the teachers who trained them. It looks at the influences that formed their world, their way of thinking.
If you were to think of the intellectual biography of Jesus, his library would have been the Old Testament Scriptures. These would have been the books on his shelf. In fact, when you look at the life and the teaching of Jesus, what you find is that Jesus is immersed in the Old Testament Scriptures. He is constantly quoting and referring to them and showing his high regard for the Old Testament Scriptures.
Everything that Jesus will teach is somehow in alignment with or a fulfillment of what had gone before in the Old Testament. And this is important for us today, because we live in a time where it’s tempting for even many professing Christians to be selective with the Scriptures, to emphasize the parts they find helpful while quietly ignoring the parts they find difficult or uncomfortable.
For example, we might think of many progressive Christians today who want to do away with the Old Testament Scriptures entirely and just focus on the words of Jesus. But when you look at the actual words of Jesus, as we are this morning, you see that you can’t do that, because Jesus himself affirms the Old Testament Scriptures. “I did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets,” Jesus says. “I came rather to fulfill them.”
This is important for us as we think about our own relationship to the Old Testament Scriptures. There are things there that may confuse us. There are things that have to be carefully interpreted. But we can’t just unhitch ourselves from the Old Testament as if the Old Testament has no relevance for us or did not speak with the authority of God.
Someone once addressed a group of new staff for the ministry Young Life and essentially said, “If you believe only what you like in the Bible, what you really believe is not the Bible, you believe in yourself.” That’s something all of us need to hear. We stand under the authority of the word of God, including the Old Testament Scriptures.
Now, at the same time, Jesus is not calling his followers to a simplistic or wooden reading of the Old Testament. It will be important as we study through the Sermon on the Mount and as we study the Gospel of Matthew together to see how Jesus brings certain aspects of the Old Testament to fulfillment in a way that changes the relationship of disciples, Christians today, to the Old Testament, so that we relate to it in a way different than old covenant believers did.
I think it’s especially important for us to pay attention to what Jesus says and how best to interpret these words because in our day, when we hear words like “law,” it comes sometimes with a lot of baggage that’s not even there in the Scriptures. The very helpful New Testament scholar Jonathan Pennington puts it like this. He says it’s like a vessel on a voyage, a long voyage—think of a ship on a long sea voyage—that over time both accumulates barnacles and springs leaks. That’s kind of what’s happened with the language of law, so that it means something, often, to us that it didn’t mean in its original context.
Nevertheless, Jesus affirms the authority of the Scriptures even as he will expose distortions of it. He stands firmly within the story of Israel as he brings that story to completion in his teaching, his person, and his work.
This means something practical for us. It means simply this: if Jesus affirms the ongoing authority of the Old Testament, then we cannot dispense with it and we must not neglect it.
Notice what Jesus says in verse 19.
“Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”
That means we can’t just ignore the parts of the Bible that are uncomfortable for us. One concrete way to respond to this is to include the Old Testament in your own devotional reading in 2026. Don’t only read the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, don’t only read the New Testament letters; also read the Old Testament Scriptures as Christian Scripture. Read the Old Testament as the Scriptures and as Jesus himself teach us to read it, understanding that Jesus stands in continuity with what went before even as he brings it to fulfillment.
2. The Fulfillment Jesus Brings
So we see the Scriptures Jesus affirms, and then secondly, the fulfillment Jesus brings. Affirming Scripture’s authority, and the authority of the Old Testament in particular, does not mean that nothing has changed for believers today. Jesus’ central claim is not merely that the law remains, but rather that it is fulfilled, and fulfilled in him. He says, “I have come that it might be fulfilled.”
That phrase “I have come” is an important statement. You find this often on the lips of Jesus as he expresses the divine intention in his incarnation and in his life, when he says things like this: “I have come to seek and to save the lost. I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance. I have come to give my life as a ransom for many. I have come not to be served but to serve.” And here he says, “I have come to fulfill what is written in the Law and the Prophets.”
Fulfillment. Fulfill. That’s one of the great gospel words in the book of Matthew. A great Bible study for you sometime would be to just read through the Gospel of Matthew and underline every time there is a fulfillment. “This was said so that the Scriptures might be fulfilled.”
What we see is that Jesus is not just ticking off Old Testament prophecies, but he is fulfilling not just specific prophecies but he is reliving the pattern and the story of Israel in the Old Testament—Jesus who comes as the new Israel, as this new Moses, as this second Adam, Jesus who is bringing all of it to fulfillment and to completion.
It’s worth our time to just think for a moment about the ways in which Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets. I find helpful Sinclair Ferguson in his little commentary. He points out four ways that Jesus brings this to fulfillment.
(1) He says, first of all, Jesus does this through his doctrine or through his teaching. And so Jesus in his teaching—and we see this in the Sermon on the Mount—is showing the true spirituality and the true intention of God’s law, of God’s teaching. And we’ll see that in the weeks that follow.
(2) But Jesus also fulfilled the law and the prophets in his deeds—that is, in his life—as he perfectly obeyed everything that God required. In every place where Israel had failed, Jesus obeys and succeeds. Jesus lives a perfect life of obedience to God’s law.
(3) Not only that, but he fulfills it through his death on the cross, as Jesus bore the curse of the law in our place and dealt decisively with the problems of sin and death. And Jesus as he offers the ultimate and final sacrifice brings to completion the entire levitical sacrificial system.
So one reason why there are aspects of the Old Testament that are not practiced by Christians today, specifically the ceremonial laws, the levitical laws, is because Jesus has brought it to fulfillment. He has completed that in his death, his resurrection.
(4) Then finally, Jesus fulfills the law in his disciples by giving them his Spirit and by forming a new people, a people whose lives reflect God’s righteousness, this inside-out kind of righteousness, as the Spirit of God writes the law of God on our hearts.
So we could say Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament in such a way that our relationship to it is now mediated through him. This is important for us to grasp and understand. We receive all of Scripture, but we receive it through Jesus. This is important, because law, apart from Christ, always condemns.
There’s a great illustration of this in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, where Christian is talking with Faithful, and Faithful talks about this experience where this man came to him and kept beating him down to the ground. And every time Faithful would try to get up the man beats him down to the ground again.
He asked him, “Why are you beating me down to the ground?” He said, “It’s because of your inclination to Adam the first.” In other words, it’s because, like his first father, Adam, he has this inclination towards sin. So this man’s beating him to the ground.
Christian asked him, “What is this man’s name?” And he said, “His name was Moses.” Moses, the representative of the law, the one who mediated the law of God. And he beats Faithful down to the ground. Every time he tries to get up, he beats him down again, because “there was no mercy in him,” as Bunyan says. But then, Faithful says, another man came and stopped Moses. And as he passed by and helped Faithful up, Faithful didn’t recognize him at first, but then he saw the holes in his hands and he knew that this man was Jesus. This was the Lord who was crucified for him, who didn’t beat him down, but actually helped him to stand up on his feet.
It’s a wonderful picture that shows us the contrast between law and gospel, between old covenant and new covenant. The law condemns, but Christ takes the condemnation for us, he lifts us up out of the dirt, and he changes us so that the law is no longer for us a slave master, but instead, through the Spirit, becomes the instinctive desire of the new heart.
I think that’s what Paul is teaching us in that passage we’ve already read this morning. I’ll read it again, Romans 8:1-4. Hear these words now in light of this understanding of what Jesus has done to fulfill the law. Romans 8 says,
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 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.”
I love the way the poet William Cowper put it. He said,
“To see the law by Christ fulfilled,
To hear his pardoning voice,
Changes a slave into a son
And duty into choice.”
Here’s the application, then. If Jesus fulfilled the law for us on the cross, and if he fulfills the law in us through his Spirit, then nothing is more important than learning to live in the power of the Spirit. This is what we are called to, to live a new life in the power of the Spirit, and that means that we move away from both self-effort and self-reliance on one hand and spiritual passivity on the other.
The Christian life is not a life of pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps, and it’s also not just sitting back and saying, “Let go and let God.” It is, rather, a life of prayerful dependence, of daily repentance, of active obedience, and trust that flows from grace. We do not obey in order to earn righteousness, we obey because righteousness has been already fulfilled, and now by the Spirit righteousness is being fulfilled in us.
Listen to how Frederick Dale Bruner puts it. I found this helpful. He said,
“The obedience of Jesus’ followers is a grateful obedience to an already-fulfilled law—so grateful that they would now like that fulfillment to have some fruit in them. Because of Jesus’ successfully fulfilled work, the law is no longer over disciples like a threatening hammer. It is now under them like an honoring red carpet.”
3. The Righteousness Jesus Requires and Provides
The Scriptures that Jesus affirms, the fulfillment that Jesus brings, and then that leads us to the kind of righteousness that marks life in the kingdom of God. So point number three, the righteousness Jesus requires and provides, Matthew 5:19-20.
So in verse 19, Jesus warns against setting aside even the least of the commandments or teaching others to do so, and then the real shocker comes in verse 20. Let’s read it again, where Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Now that just would have landed with tremendous force on the original hearers. You and I, in evangelical churches, are somewhat now conditioned to think of the scribes and Pharisees as the villain in the story, because we have the whole New Testament, we know the rest of the story, we know their opposition to Jesus, and so on. But the original hearers would not have thought that at all, because the scribes and the Pharisees, to quote a famous children’s Bible, The Jesus Storybook Bible, the scribes and the Pharisees were the “extra super holy people,” right? They were the religious scholars. The scribes were the guys who were writing commentaries. They studied the Scriptures, they studied the law. And the Pharisees were the Puritans; they were the fundamentalists, they were the separatists’ they were the ones who were most devout, most holy, the most devout religious sect of the Jews.
So when Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness is more than theirs, is better than theirs, exceeds theirs, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven,” it just would have been absolutely shocking to everybody who heard.
Why does Jesus say that? I think he says that because he is describing a kind of righteousness that is qualitatively different from that of the scribes and Pharisees. And when you read everything about Jesus’ life and you read Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and you see how Jesus interacted with people in his life and ministry, this becomes clear. He’s modeling for us the kind of righteousness that he is calling for. It is qualitatively different.
This righteousness is not about drawing boundaries and defining ourselves against others. It is not about moral earning or performing well enough to secure God’s favor. It’s certainly not about thinking of ourselves as better than others. Instead, Jesus here is speaking of a righteousness that is characterized by wholehearted devotion to God and love for neighbor. It is a righteousness that runs all the way through a person—their mind, their hearts, their will, their emotions, and their life. And in the rest of chapter 5, he begins to show us what this righteousness looks like.
It is anger that is addressed before it becomes violence, or desire examined before it dehumanizes others. It is truth spoken without manipulation. It is power relinquished rather than exploited, enemies loved rather than hated and destroyed. It’s the righteousness that is characteristic in the kingdom of God, the righteousness that Jesus himself lived out, and now through the Spirit is reproducing in us. Not a lesser righteousness, but a greater, a surpassing righteousness.
So here’s the key thing: Jesus requires this righteousness of us, but he also provides it for us.
It’s important for us to note here that Jesus is not simply calling his disciples to try harder. He is, rather, calling them to a kind of life that he’s already commended when he has said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” And as he goes on to say in chapter 6, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”
This is the kind of righteousness we are to seek, and we seek it as we seek for his strength, his grace, his power, which is given to us ultimately through the Holy Spirit.
Really, Jesus here is perfectly threading the needle and avoiding the two great errors that so often plague the church, the errors of legalism on one hand and license on the other.
Legalism. Legalism is the belief that by keeping the rules we can somehow earn God’s grace, right? And license is the opposite error. It is turning grace into an excuse for sin. These are the two errors that have so often characterized the church. Martin Luther one time said the church is like a drunken peasant. You know, he climbs up on his horse and he falls off on one side, then he climbs back on and he falls off on the other side. That’s kind of what the church has been like through history, often veering to one side or to the other.
But at the heart, both of these errors are rooted in the same thing. Sinclair Ferguson says these are non-identical twins that are born from the same womb. They come from unbelief, from a lack of trust in the goodness and the character of God—legalism, because legalism doesn’t really trust God’s grace, instead seeks to earn God’s favor instead of receive it as it’s freely given in Christ; and license, because it doesn’t really trust the goodness of God’s commands and of God’s direction, and so misuses grace and abuses grace, using it as a license for sin.
Jesus avoids both, just as Paul and the apostles avoid both. And we are called to neither of these things—neither legalism nor license—but rather to this new kind of righteousness that is empowered by the Spirit. But the Spirit is the key.
Let me give you another illustration. I owe this one to Matt Eby. I’ve heard him use this several times.
It’s a parable about a planet with no laughter. So a whole planet of people, and there’s no laughter because no one had a sense of humor, except this small minority. So there’s a small minority of people who have a sense of humor, and they laugh because they get the joke. And they tell jokes, they tell a funny story, but nobody else has a sense of humor, so they don’t get it. And they’re kind of mystified by these people who are laughing.
Some people decide that they want to laugh, they want to do it, and so they mimic the laughter. They try to laugh at the joke, but they don’t really get the joke, and so it always comes off as awkward and artificial and unconvincing, because, as we all know, humor arises from within.
In a very similar way, trying to obey the law without the Spirit is like trying to laugh without having a sense of humor. You’ve got to have something on the inside, and that’s what the Holy Spirit came to do; the Spirit who indwells our hearts, and he begins to create the righteousness that God requires, he creates it in us because he writes God’s law on our hearts.
The good news of the gospel is not only that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, a righteousness has been secured for us, that is, credited to us by faith—a great Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, that’s gloriously true. But the good news is also that in the gift of the Holy Spirit, the great new covenant blessing of the Spirit, that we are transformed, that we are changed from the inside out as the Spirit begins to make us and remake us into the image of God. This is the righteousness that Jesus both requires and provides.
Now, what does that look like practically? We’re going to spend most of the rest of the series unpacking that as we continue through the Sermon on the Mount, but here’s a little preview, if you just think about some of the things Jesus will say in the rest of Matthew chapter 5.
Practically, righteousness means that we deal with anger in a certain way. We’re not content simply to refrain from murder, but we deal with anger and with hatred in our hearts. That means that we bring it to the light, that we seek reconciliation rather than quietly nursing grievances. That has some real cash value in your everyday relationships, so that you’re seeking to reconcile when there’s a disruption with a spouse or with a child or with a parent. You’re not harboring anger in your heart. Or when you’re mistreated at work or on the job, instead of getting so angry that you’re lashing out at others or you’re just quietly nursing hatred of other people, you’re seeking to do good to them in Jesus’ name.
Look at what Jesus said about how we treat those who persecute us and who do evil to us. He says, “Overcome evil with good. Pray for your persecutors. Pray for your enemies. Love your enemies.”
Or consider sexual faithfulness, as Jesus teaches us that it’s not enough to simply refrain from adultery, but we must deal with the desires in our hearts. Bring those desires into submission to the lordship of Christ, so the desire is ordered. For married Christians, that means faithfulness to our spouses. For single Christians, it means chastity and abstinence, faithfulness to Christ.
Think about what Jesus says about our words, how we are to speak our words. He says, “Let your yes be yes and your no be no.” We’re not constantly adding oaths and curses and swearing to try to give force to our words, because we’re so characterized by honesty that our word counts for something.
This is the kind of righteousness that Christ calls us to, but it is a righteousness that flows from a changed heart. It is inside-out, not outside-in. It’s righteousness that is dependent on the ministry and the grace of the Spirit of Christ within us.
We’ve seen these three things this morning. We’ve seen the Scripture that Jesus affirms. Jesus affirms the authority of the Old Testament Scriptures. We’ve seen the fulfillment he brings, which means our relationship to the Old Testament Scriptures is always mediated through Jesus, the great fulfiller of the law and the prophets. And we’ve seen the righteousness that Jesus both requires and provides for us as he gives us his Spirit.
I want to ask you this morning, do you know what it is to follow Jesus as king? Do you know what it is to follow Jesus as a wise teacher? Do you trust his words? And have you embraced the grace of Christ as Savior, who not only fulfilled the law for you in his death and resurrection but is now fulfilling the law in you through the work of his Spirit? That is the life into which we are called as disciples of Christ, and I invite you to it this morning. Let’s pray together.
Gracious God, we thank you this morning for your word. We thank you for the great truths of the gospel that we see in your word and the great comfort it is to us that Christ has come to do what the law could not do, to fulfill the law in our place, and now through the Spirit to change us, to remake us, so that we are renewed and transformed and begin to live the kinds of lives that you have called us to and designed us for.
Lord, we pray that these would not just be words that we hear this morning but it would be the lived experience and reality of our lives, and that this week as we seek to walk with you and to follow you in our jobs, our families, homes, our relationships, that we would do so in the power and strength that Christ supplies through the Spirit. Lord, would you help us grow in our daily dependence on you in our ongoing lives of repentance and faith? Help us, Lord, to be nourished in the word of God, in the truths of the gospel, to feed on those truths, so that they give us strength.
Lord, show us where repentance may be needed in our hearts or lives this morning. As we come to the table, would you renew our faith once again as we see the signs of your grace at the table. May we at the same time feast our hearts on the grace that’s given to us through the gospel of Jesus Christ. So we ask you now to draw near to us, to work in our hearts that which is pleasing in your sight, and to be glorified in our worship and in our lives. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
