Isn't There Some Other Way to Understand This?

Read Matthew 5:1-20

     Some teach that the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) was designed by Jesus only to drive us to the grace of God.  By pressing the demands of the moral law of God, and sometimes intensifying them, they say that Jesus was only trying to bring his hearers to the point of despair, stricken with the inescapability of their own moral guilt so that they would cry out, “What shall we do?” (Acts 2:37). 

      But that kind of reading has a practical effect of softening the moral demands of the Sermon on the Mount.  It takes the sting out of Jesus’ severe warning that “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (5:20).  It would be too clever by half to tell yourself that the scribes and Pharisees were scoundrels deep down.  Jesus’ point is not that they were not good – it is that they were not good enough.

      It is true that the Apostle Paul says that God’s law reveals our need for a Savior (Romans 3-4; Galatians 3), but he also insists that a personal and realized righteousness will characterize every person who will enter God’s kingdom (Galatians 5:19-20). 

      As you read these verses and those that follow in the Sermon on the Mount, try to “hear” them without explaining them away in your mind.  Feel their force, and resolve to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12b-13).