Jesus According to Matthew

I have been a Christian most of my life, and like many Christians, I was raised to diligently read my Bible and pray. Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to two challenges. First, I often am so familiar with a passage that I start to day-dream while reading it. Second, I usually use some kind of Bible-reading program which chops books up into pieces. Having a disciplined approach to reading the Bible can be a very good thing, but sometimes it causes us to miss the forest for the trees.

So to combat this tendency, I decided to read through the gospels as if they were stories – no chapters or verses or study Bible footnotes. In fact, some publishers are producing entire Bibles formatted this way (see here for an example)!

I started reading Matthew, and was completely surprised! Matthew begins by explaining the backstory – the genealogy of Jesus, John the Baptist, the calling of the 12 apostles – and then immediately launches into the sermon on the mount. The first real picture Matthew gives of Jesus is about his teaching – and it is the longest unbroken teaching of Jesus on record.

What makes this even more impactful is the content of Jesus sermon. It is all about the Hebrew law, and how it just isn’t sufficient to establish righteousness. In fact, he completely contradicts the Mosaic law, by which his audience thought they could be right with God! The law establishes lex talionis – the idea that a punishment should be commensurate with a crime. If someone assaults you and puts out your eye, their eye should be put out in punishment. But Jesus says, no, instead you should suffer harm without returning evil. These are hard sayings! Jesus even says that we are supposed to be perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect! Obviously we aren’t perfect, but thanks be to God that we have Christ’s perfection. When God looks at us, he doesn’t see our sin, he sees the righteousness of Jesus. That, my friends, is good news.


~John