Changed Law... Salved Consciences
Changed Law... Salved Consciences
"Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8)
They (His listeners) knew their hearts well enough to wince at the words… the climax was reached when He named them, and in naming them destroyed the standards which they had so carefully erected. They had taken the law and whittled it down throughout the centuries. In place of the simple commandments that cannot be misunderstood, they had substituted a complex commentary that enabled them to disobey the law as God gave it and yet salve their own consciences.
The Lord Jesus often spoke of this. He used as an illustration, in one case, the fact that they made the Word of God of none effect by saying that a gift was Corban. In practical terms this was as follows. The law said, "Honour thy father and thy mother . . ." Certainly the simplest understanding of this definite commandment would include caring for them and providing for them when they were old. But there were hard-hearted children who did not want to do this. So they got around it by saying that their resources were Corban, that is, dedicated to the temple. Therefore they could not give them to their parents to supply their needs. Thus they evaded the commandment and, of course, that which was dedicated to the temple, more often than not, was not paid. So they kept their resources as though they were holding them in trust for God, but they, themselves, collected the interest!
It was to minds capable of this type of hypocrisy that the Lord Jesus said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till Heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled" (Matthew 5:17-18). The context proves the real meaning that Christ gave to this statement. He was announcing that God would not diminish by one iota all the righteous demands of the law. These men were sinners. They knew that they were sinners, and recognizing that they had never kept the law, they tried to find their way around the law.
The Old Testament had presented the moral perfections of God’s demands, but men had failed to understand. They had grown familiar with the form of words contained in the law and, little by little, had built a detour around it, until they had made it possible to sin with impunity and keep the conscience quiet.
Dr. Barnhouse warns us to avoid such “whittling down” of God’s standards to salve our conscience. Christ came to impute righteousness but will not lower God’s standards to do so. Neither should we in our daily walk.
Further Reading: Romans 2:1-11
