DAILY DEVOTIONAL – March 31, 2020
“The Missing Piece“
Prayer: Almighty God, You are holy and You expect us to be holy. We admit Lord that we have not and cannot live according to Your expectations. Thank You for Jesus, who has done all that we could not and who died the death our sin deserves so that we would be raised with Him through faith. Amen.
Scripture: Matthew 5:17-20
17 “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. 18 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. 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, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Devotional – “The Missing Piece”
I am not too sure why it is, and I have even tried to work on improving on this part of my life, but I find that a series of little things that go wrong tends to bother me much more than when one big thing goes wrong. I am the first to admit I am not the most patient person in the world or the most well-tempered, however, I have noticed that I manage to stay more calm when facing big problems, but lose my cool a lot faster when a lot of little annoying things happen all at once.
The comedian Kevin James did a stand up routine called, “Sweat the Small Stuff.” I remember laughing so hard it hurt as I watched because I could relate so well with his rants about everything from how people order their food to why we haven’t yet figured out an easier way to open cereal bags without ripping them in half. I do tend to “sweat the small stuff.”
I recently came across a newspaper article from the Telegraph that made me fidgety just reading about what had happened to 86 year old James Harris. Back in 2002 James received a gift from his daughter for Christmas. It was a 5,000 piece, 5-foot tall puzzle. James loved puzzles, and for the next 7 years, James would enjoy hours a day of his retirement completing this daunting task. The day that James thought he had finally finished the puzzle, he noticed that there was one tiny hole right in the middle of the puzzle. After 7 years and 4,999 pieces put together, the puzzle would be left painfully incomplete because of one small little piece.
I don’t know about you friends, but I am not sure I could survive such trauma if I was in James’ position.
As disconcerting and unsettling as missing one piece of a puzzle is, that pales in comparison to the words of Jesus in our text for today. The disciples who were listening to Jesus were faithful Jews who had lived their whole lives under the Law of God thinking that their salvation was based on how well they lived in accordance with His Law. Doing the “shalls” and avoiding the “shall nots” was how you got to heaven in their mind. To this Jesus says, “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. 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, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
The Scribes and Pharisees were the religious police of the day. They not only lorded the law over God’s people like a task-master, but they took it upon themselves to add hundreds of more man-made laws on top of that. However, the Pharisees themselves were riddled with sin just like everyone else, only giving the appearance of holiness. Later in Matthew’s Gospel, in chapter 23, Jesus would say, “2The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, 3 so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice.4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”
Thinking that one’s self has the capacity to follow God’s Laws perfectly is no doubt a fool’s errand, however, the deeper error the Scribes and Pharisees made was in thinking that even if they were able to put all of the right pieces of God’s Law in place, they would still be missing the single most important piece to the puzzle. A relationship with Jesus as the Messiah and as their Savior.
God’s Law is much more than a list of do’s and do not’s. In fact, the reason God gave us His Laws was to reveal to us the reality of our sinful condition. By giving us the Law God, showed us what a perfectly faithful and holy life should look like, not so that we would think we should or even could attain such holiness, but that we would see how impossible it is to live perfectly enough to be saved by God because we prove to be “good enough” people. If you keep reading after our text from Matthew 5 today, you will read how Jesus continued to preach and reveal an even more exacting and far more extensive demand for holiness that God gives in His Law than even the Scribe, and Pharisees could have imagined.
Before all of that, however, Jesus says right up front in verse 17 what the real point of His sermon is; that He, Jesus, is the “fulfillment” of all the Laws of God. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, did not come to die on the cross in order to get rid of the demands of God’s holy Law, Jesus came to fulfill the righteousness of the Law on our behalf by living the life of faithfulness and obedience to God that we would never and could never live.
James Harris successfully put together 4,999 pieces of a puzzle, yet, it took just one missing piece to render the whole thing useless. As Scripture says in James 2:10, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.” The hope of our salvation and the assurance of God’s presence with us even now rests not in our earning God’s favor with a good enough life, but in our faith in Christ and our trust that He has fulfilled God’s Law and expectations for us, and that through His death and resurrection He has satisfied God’s wrath against sin and declared us to be worthy because of God counting Christ’s righteousness as our own.
Jesus isn’t just the missing piece to the puzzle of salvation, He is the only piece. As Jesus said in John 14:6, “no one comes to the Father except through me.”
Thanks for joining me for another time of daily devotion in God’s Word, and remember, that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
