What Did Jesus Do?

Seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Scriptures told us that God would magnify the Law and make it honorable (see Isaiah 42:21). During the time of Christ, we see a dishonored Law—a Law that had been made void by the traditions of men (see Mark 7:6-13). It had been stripped of its power to bring the knowledge of sin (see Romans 3:20) and to show sin to be exceedingly sinful (see Romans 7:13).

The religious leaders had desecrated that which had been entrusted to them. They warped its holy precepts and twisted the strictness of its ordinances. They nullified its incredible power to do that for which it was intended. In neglecting the "weightier matters of the law" (Matthew 23:23), they instead strained at gnats and swallowed camels, limiting its precepts to a mere outward piety. They worshiped God in vain because they had laid aside the Commandment of God and instead taught the commandments of men (see Mark 7:7-9).

But Jesus reminded them of what they had neglected, straightened what they had made crooked, and magnified what they demeaned. He also reestablished the Law's permanency.

This was the Law that God Himself had written in stone.

Despite man's amendments, it would not change—not one jot or tittle. Instead, it was the stony heart of man that had to change.

It was at this time that the Law was magnified and made honorable by the Messiah, particularly through the Sermon on the Mount. As we will see, Jesus opened up the Law's true nature for a purpose.

In his book Holiness, J. C. Ryle writes:

Let us expound and beat out the Ten Commandments, and show the length, and breadth, and depth, and height of their requirements. This is the way of our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount. We cannot do better than follow His plan. We may depend on it:  men will never come to Jesus, and stay with Jesus, unless they really know why they are to come, and what is their need.

Those whom the Spirit draws to Jesus are those whom the Spirit has convinced of sin. Without thorough conviction of sin, men may seem to come to Jesus and follow Him for a season, but they will soon fall away and return to the world.