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Why I think Jesus Hates Religion
by Jefferson Bethke
It was that time of the year when you could feel a mixture of intense emotions in the air — the joy of the semester almost being done, along with the pressure of having to pass through final exams first. People were stressed. The campus was fairly quiet as students were trying to make up for all the studying they didn’t do the previous three and a half months.
I had come to expect a few breaks that included fun treats or programs during finals week that the student life department at my previous self-proclaimed Christian college make available. Sometimes there were free massages in the student lounge. Sometimes there was free food or candy.
Even though I had just transferred to a secular liberal arts university, I expected the same. While I was in my room studying — most likely Facebooking, but let’s not talk about that — I heard a knock at the door.
I answered it to be greeted by my lovely RA (resident assistant) who was holding a bucket of lollipops in one hand and a bucket of condoms in the other.
She cheerfully said, “Candies and condoms! Be safe and have a stress-free finals week!”
I remember thinking, Just what I needed to help me study for finals — high fructose corn syrup and latex birth control.
I definitely wasn’t at a Christian college anymore! Later that year they did something similar, where they taped “sex facts” and condoms to the walls of the dorm. I think they used to use staples, but as you can imagine, it wasn’t very effective.
Talk about a quick change. It didn’t take me more than a few hours to see the glaring difference between my strict Christian college in San Diego and my new liberal arts university in Portland. Whatever comes to mind when you think of Portland, that is exactly the essence of this school. It was the mecca of gay rights. They banned bottled water because it wasn’t environmentally friendly. Everyone had dreads, and none of the girls shaved their armpit hair. Well, that last one is not completely true. It was the type of university that had used books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as textbooks and dripped with a granola-liberal-progressive spirit. But I loved it. Really. I absolutely loved it. If I had to do it all over again, I would have gone there in the first place.
Now, what’s really funny is while I was at the Christian school, I wasn’t a Christian. But while I was at the secular school, I was a Christian.
You’d think I would have wanted to go back to the Christian school, right? It was the opposite.
I found the Christian school to be stuffy, hypocritical, and judgmental. I could no longer stand praying after baseball practice with thirty guys who wore crosses around their necks, knowing a few hours later they’d have a beer in one hand and a girl in the other (myself included). Weirdly, my new university felt accepting and loving. There was no guessing if someone was really a Christian or not. If you said you were a Christian at that school, it wasn’t to gain you any points — in fact, you probably lost some. There was something about that type of atmosphere that drew me in.
My senior year I was an RA — which pretty much means I was the dorm’s “dad.” I was the guy who would let you in if you locked yourself out, wrote you up if you broke the rules — there weren’t many — and would be there if you were having emotional or academic problems.
Dealing with students daily, I got a pulse on the common conceptions they held toward God, Jesus, religion, and Christians.
What constantly surprised me was the ignorance of most college students regarding Jesus. I heard things such as, “I could never follow Jesus; I still want to drink beer.” Or,
“Why would I like Jesus? He hates gays.” I remember thinking, Huh?
I still drink beer, and I don’t hate gays. My favorite was one of my baseball teammate’s responses after I asked him what he thought about Jesus: “Yeah, I love Jesus — and Buddha too. I’m a Christian Buddhist.” It took everything in me not to laugh. Christian Buddhist? That’s like saying you’re a lactose-intolerant cheese lover.
A college campus is an interesting place. Students have little to no responsibility, question everything they believe in, and live within one hundred feet of all their friends. There’s also a huge dark side to most colleges. As an RA I had a front row view of the pain in my generation. Colleges these days are breeding grounds for poor decisions, emotional brokenness, and sharp pain.
This is all behind the scenes, of course, because the girl who was raped freshman year and the guy who hates himself and struggles with depression don’t seem broken when sitting in a lecture hall debate.
People don’t flaunt their brokenness when trying to prove themselves. But in their dorm rooms in the middle of the night after another disaster or one-too-many shots, I got to see people become transparent over and over again. They’d continually admit their lives weren’t working. They were empty. Longing. Desiring. Searching.
One friend’s sister had just admitted she was gay to the family, and it was tearing them apart because their dad refused to “have a gay daughter.” Another friend admitted she hated herself for losing her virginity to her ex-boyfriend, whom she didn’t even speak to anymore. Another felt the immense pressure of balancing school and child care because she was caring for her little sister now that her dad had left and her mom had to work.
I saw some of my peers nearly drink themselves to death or try to kill themselves — and without the ambulances showing up so fast, they just might have.
I wondered, How am I any different? Just two years before, I had struggled with depression. I had struggled with suicidal thoughts. I had struggled with the guilt and shame that so often come with recreational dating. I had spent the first year of college shotgunning beers, messing around with girls, acting like the world existed to cater to my needs, and never taking a second to pull out the emotional, spiritual, and mental shrapnel that had been lodged in my soul by the “me” lifestyle. Inside I was just a scared little boy who had been deeply insecure his whole life and lived in hopes that others would tell me I was good enough.
Of course, none of us would admit it so plainly, and for nineteen years of my life, I wouldn’t have either, but isn’t it true? Why else do we do most of the things we do?
My generation is the most fatherless and insecure generation that’s ever lived, and we are willing to sacrifice everything if we just can be told we are loved.
If only we knew just how loved we really are.
So being a follower of Jesus now, and knowing just how gracious He had been to restore me, heal me, and pursue me, I longed so deeply to share His love with these students. Over and over again, though, I’d get the same response whenever I’d bring up Jesus. Literally, the overall essence of Jesus to these students had been boiled down to whether or not someone could say the F-word. Immediately, they’d bring up periphery issues that Jesus barely mentions as their biggest opposition to him. Ironically, the reasons they opposed Jesus were sometimes the reasons Jesus opposed the religious people of his day.
Half the time, they weren’t even rejecting Jesus; they were rejecting what He rejected!
I sat in bed one night and wondered, When on earth did “hates gays, can’t drink beer, and no tattoos” become the essence of Christianity?
It hit me that my friends weren’t the ones to blame for their confusion. They had gotten this idea from people they grew up with, churches they went to as kids, or preachers they saw on TV. It was the church’s fault that they thought this was what real Christianity was all about. As I’ve heard said, “Of 100 unsaved men, one might read the Bible, but the other 99 will read the Christian.”
Ouch.
I’m sure we’d have a very different Bible if it were written simply by observing modern-day Christians.
My peers couldn’t separate Jesus from religion because they weren’t reading the Bible to learn about Jesus; they were looking to the Christian religion to understand him. What they were rebelling against was religion.
People lamented that they had tried Christianity, and it didn’t work. But last time I checked, you don’t try Christianity; either your heart has been transformed by Jesus or it hasn’t.
But you can try religion.
You can try to follow the rules.
You can try to climb up to heaven.
But all you’ll do is white-knuckle your way to religious despair. It won’t work. It never does.
That’s when I started to notice an interesting trend: When I juxtaposed religion and Jesus in my conversations, they took a different turn. It allowed people to pull back a little and see him in a different light. They no longer were just brushing him off, but were actually pursuing, thinking, and investigating the man named Jesus. And that’s when I started to write the poem “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus.”
Some of you may be thinking, Wait a minute: you can’t hate religion and love Jesus. Jesus IS a religion. To which I’d answer yes and no. If you mean by religion, “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe,” then yes and amen, Christianity is a religion. But by that definition, so is atheism. But if we mean by religion, “what one must do, or behave like, in order to gain right standing with God,” then real Christianity isn’t a religion.
I had been a Christian for about a year when I realized Jesus isn’t just one of many saviors. Following Him is fundamentally different from practicing other world religions. There was something almost upside-down or antithetical to Him.
All the other religions center on people’s righteousness — what we do and how good we are. Real Christianity centers on Jesus’ righteousness — what He has done and how good He is.
All the other religions essentially say, “This is what you have to do to be in right standing with God.” Jesus comes to earth and says, “This is what I’ve freely done for you to put you in right standing with God.”
Religion says do. Jesus says done.
Religion is man searching for God. Jesus is God searching for man.
Religion is pursuing God by our moral efforts. Jesus is God pursuing us despite our moral efforts.
Religious people kill for what they believe. Jesus followers die for what they believe.
That’s when it hit me: No wonder Christianity and Jesus’ message of salvation is called good news. It isn’t just good advice (religion); it’s good news (Jesus). It’s not declaring what we must do, but declaring what He has already done. It’s almost as if Jesus is the eternal paperboy delivering a newspaper declaring something that has already happened.
The only question with Jesus is, will we follow Him?
Now, a lot of people might fire back, saying, “Jesus didn’t come to abolish religion. He even said he came to fulfill it.”
Well, not quite. He said, “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. 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.”
When I read that, I say amen. Jesus isn’t talking about religion; He’s talking about the law.
Jesus wants to make it clear: He isn’t taking God’s moral law lightly.
The only difference is, He didn’t come to crush us with it — which religious people do, like the leaders in John 8 — but rather, He came to fulfill it for us. When something is “fulfilled,” it means it has reached its end or completion. That’s what Jesus said He was doing. He was fulfilling the righteous requirements of it, on our behalf, to give us perfect standing with God.
For example, at the time of writing this, I’m getting married in a couple of weeks. Once Alyssa and I are married we will no longer be engaged. We fulfilled that requirement, which suited us well for the time between dating and getting married. We, however, are moving on to something better.
That’s what Jesus was saying here. It’s not like He is abolishing the law. It was there for a reason. It had a purpose. The Old Testament law’s role was put in place to show us how God aligned the universe to work, and also to show us we couldn’t live up to His standard.
It’s scandalous to say, but one of the uses of the law was to show us we couldn’t fully keep it and needed a savior. It was — and still is — a mirror to show us where we need Jesus. Even the animal sacrifices mandated in the law to the Israelites were there to show them they needed a substitute. They couldn’t do it on their own, and ultimately Jesus fulfilled that requirement.
So Jesus came and fulfilled the requirements of it to satisfy God.
He lived it perfectly. And then instead of the Old Testament law becoming our standard or law, Jesus himself became our law. He gave us his perfect standing by fulfilling God’s righteous requirements and then on the cross took all our sin, failure, guilt, and shame. A pretty sweet exchange, if you ask me. And now we no longer solely live up to an external code, but rather live in relationship with a person who then shows us how to properly view that code. Jesus became the face of the Law rather than the concrete tablets Moses is always holding in those ancient depictions.
Love is the new law.
The way I think about it is this: if I’m ever tempted to cheat on Alyssa, I could motivate myself by the law — I won’t cheat on her because I might go to - I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -, etc. — or I could motivate myself with love — I don’t want to cheat on her because she is better than anything out there. So it is with us and God. Jesus ushered in a more beautiful covenant. One that is perfected in love, not in hateful and fearful obedience.
The law was just a foretaste of Jesus. To know all the shadows and pictures in the Old Testament were simply a picture of him is astounding. Sacrificing a goat seems a little weird and disgusting until you see it actually had a reason.
The sacrificial system was God’s way of saying sin breeds death. Someone must die when there is sin. Jesus’ blood covered those righteous requirements for us. He is the ultimate fulfillment of the Old Testament.
That fact is actually what led early Romans to consider the first Christians atheists. They’d ask, “Where is your temple?” to which the Christians would reply that they didn’t have a building, and Jesus was their temple. So then they’d ask, “Well, who is your priest?” To which they’d reply that they didn’t have a priest on earth, because Jesus was their ultimate priest in heaven. Finally they’d ask, “Who is your sacrifice?” to which the early Christians would respond that they no longer offered sacrifices because Jesus’ sacrifice was once for all.
That is what Jesus meant when he said, “I have not come to abolish [the Law or the Prophets] but to fulfill them.” That truth changes someone from dead, man-made religion to a vibrant relationship with Jesus and his body.
The Meaning Behind
Back in my dorm room, I was trying to put all these thoughts down for the students I was talking with who wanted nothing to do with religion. I knew we needed a common starting point for any conversation about Jesus to get off the ground and decided on this:
“So know I hate religion. In fact, I literally resent it. Because when Jesus cried, ‘It is finished,’ I believe He meant it.”
While the poem did resonate with my peers, I need to clarify that when I say I “hate” religion, I am not saying I hate the church.
I’m not saying I hate commandments, traditions, or laws. I’m not saying I hate organizations or institutions. But what I am saying is that I hate any system that upholds moral effort or good behavior as the way in which we can have a proper relationship with God. My main problem with religion, how I defined it, is if that is possible — the fact we can just be “good enough” for God — then that is spitting in the face of Jesus. That’s mocking Him, saying His sacrifice isn’t good enough and wasn’t necessary.
I started to notice this vein in a lot of strong theologian-type people, people who are seen as giants of the church. People like John Owen, Tim Keller, Oswald Chambers, and A. W. Tozer. Even the famous German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wanted to get to a place of “religionless Christianity.” In 1944, while he was in prison for trying to sabotage the Nazis, he wrote, “We are moving towards a completely religionless age; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.
Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’”
Bonhoeffer knew that the term religious had become stale, so he fought for something entirely new. He actually found it helpful to juxtapose religion and Jesus.
Now, I love the word religion, in its true sense, and it’s helpful in some cases, but I’ve also noticed it’s the easiest way to expose someone who trusts in their own works, which is a major problem today. In a postmodern world where all religious activity is seen as what we do for God, we need to proclaim Christianity is about what God has done for us. This would take people’s focus off of their behavior and put it on Jesus.
When you distinguish Jesus the God-man from the religion that developed around Him, people investigate the person of Jesus rather than the rules of Christianity.
And the truth is, when someone is pursuing, investigating, and attempting to understand the Son of God, he or she is pursuing truth personified, and that Person will find him.
The minute I started to frame the discussions in this way, there was an interesting change. A lot of people didn’t want to talk about religion, but seemed fine talking about Jesus.
When we studied Jesus, we could actually look stuff up. He said what? He did what?
And the facts often shocked my friends.
The Jesus of the Scriptures is so much more radical and subversive than we realize.
When religious discussions are broad and consider the ideas of theologians rather than the facts about Jesus, they generate apathetic views of Jesus. Changing the focus of the conversation from religion to Jesus actually invites people to face Him and the grace He provides. It lets His grace so confront them that they have to address it.
The response that proved this is when I’d ask my friends about Jesus and they’d say, “He’s a nice guy.” Or, “He had good moral principles, but He’s not God.”
Sadly, that’s one of the most unintelligent things a person can say.
If Jesus claimed to be God, claimed to forgive sins, and claimed to heal the sick, then He either did those things, or He was a despicable liar. Either He is who He says He is — God — or He has deceived billions and billions for the last two thousand years.
That wouldn’t make Him a good moral teacher; it would make Him the most - I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -able person on earth. Either He’s God, or He deserves to be cast into human history as one of the worst. And that’s why, in my conversations with others, I take the focus off what we do for God and put it on what He has done for us so we have to actually deal with Him.
We can talk theory until we are blue in the face. We can talk about what the word God even means. But you start investigating and pushing into this guy from Nazareth who lived two thousand years ago, and you will get somewhere. You will have to face up to who He is, what He has done, and what you will do about it.
Be careful when you pursue truth, because you just might find Him.
by Jefferson Bethke
It was that time of the year when you could feel a mixture of intense emotions in the air — the joy of the semester almost being done, along with the pressure of having to pass through final exams first. People were stressed. The campus was fairly quiet as students were trying to make up for all the studying they didn’t do the previous three and a half months.
I had come to expect a few breaks that included fun treats or programs during finals week that the student life department at my previous self-proclaimed Christian college make available. Sometimes there were free massages in the student lounge. Sometimes there was free food or candy.
Even though I had just transferred to a secular liberal arts university, I expected the same. While I was in my room studying — most likely Facebooking, but let’s not talk about that — I heard a knock at the door.
I answered it to be greeted by my lovely RA (resident assistant) who was holding a bucket of lollipops in one hand and a bucket of condoms in the other.
She cheerfully said, “Candies and condoms! Be safe and have a stress-free finals week!”
I remember thinking, Just what I needed to help me study for finals — high fructose corn syrup and latex birth control.
I definitely wasn’t at a Christian college anymore! Later that year they did something similar, where they taped “sex facts” and condoms to the walls of the dorm. I think they used to use staples, but as you can imagine, it wasn’t very effective.
Talk about a quick change. It didn’t take me more than a few hours to see the glaring difference between my strict Christian college in San Diego and my new liberal arts university in Portland. Whatever comes to mind when you think of Portland, that is exactly the essence of this school. It was the mecca of gay rights. They banned bottled water because it wasn’t environmentally friendly. Everyone had dreads, and none of the girls shaved their armpit hair. Well, that last one is not completely true. It was the type of university that had used books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as textbooks and dripped with a granola-liberal-progressive spirit. But I loved it. Really. I absolutely loved it. If I had to do it all over again, I would have gone there in the first place.
Now, what’s really funny is while I was at the Christian school, I wasn’t a Christian. But while I was at the secular school, I was a Christian.
You’d think I would have wanted to go back to the Christian school, right? It was the opposite.
I found the Christian school to be stuffy, hypocritical, and judgmental. I could no longer stand praying after baseball practice with thirty guys who wore crosses around their necks, knowing a few hours later they’d have a beer in one hand and a girl in the other (myself included). Weirdly, my new university felt accepting and loving. There was no guessing if someone was really a Christian or not. If you said you were a Christian at that school, it wasn’t to gain you any points — in fact, you probably lost some. There was something about that type of atmosphere that drew me in.
My senior year I was an RA — which pretty much means I was the dorm’s “dad.” I was the guy who would let you in if you locked yourself out, wrote you up if you broke the rules — there weren’t many — and would be there if you were having emotional or academic problems.
Dealing with students daily, I got a pulse on the common conceptions they held toward God, Jesus, religion, and Christians.
What constantly surprised me was the ignorance of most college students regarding Jesus. I heard things such as, “I could never follow Jesus; I still want to drink beer.” Or,
“Why would I like Jesus? He hates gays.” I remember thinking, Huh?
I still drink beer, and I don’t hate gays. My favorite was one of my baseball teammate’s responses after I asked him what he thought about Jesus: “Yeah, I love Jesus — and Buddha too. I’m a Christian Buddhist.” It took everything in me not to laugh. Christian Buddhist? That’s like saying you’re a lactose-intolerant cheese lover.
A college campus is an interesting place. Students have little to no responsibility, question everything they believe in, and live within one hundred feet of all their friends. There’s also a huge dark side to most colleges. As an RA I had a front row view of the pain in my generation. Colleges these days are breeding grounds for poor decisions, emotional brokenness, and sharp pain.
This is all behind the scenes, of course, because the girl who was raped freshman year and the guy who hates himself and struggles with depression don’t seem broken when sitting in a lecture hall debate.
People don’t flaunt their brokenness when trying to prove themselves. But in their dorm rooms in the middle of the night after another disaster or one-too-many shots, I got to see people become transparent over and over again. They’d continually admit their lives weren’t working. They were empty. Longing. Desiring. Searching.
One friend’s sister had just admitted she was gay to the family, and it was tearing them apart because their dad refused to “have a gay daughter.” Another friend admitted she hated herself for losing her virginity to her ex-boyfriend, whom she didn’t even speak to anymore. Another felt the immense pressure of balancing school and child care because she was caring for her little sister now that her dad had left and her mom had to work.
I saw some of my peers nearly drink themselves to death or try to kill themselves — and without the ambulances showing up so fast, they just might have.
I wondered, How am I any different? Just two years before, I had struggled with depression. I had struggled with suicidal thoughts. I had struggled with the guilt and shame that so often come with recreational dating. I had spent the first year of college shotgunning beers, messing around with girls, acting like the world existed to cater to my needs, and never taking a second to pull out the emotional, spiritual, and mental shrapnel that had been lodged in my soul by the “me” lifestyle. Inside I was just a scared little boy who had been deeply insecure his whole life and lived in hopes that others would tell me I was good enough.
Of course, none of us would admit it so plainly, and for nineteen years of my life, I wouldn’t have either, but isn’t it true? Why else do we do most of the things we do?
My generation is the most fatherless and insecure generation that’s ever lived, and we are willing to sacrifice everything if we just can be told we are loved.
If only we knew just how loved we really are.
So being a follower of Jesus now, and knowing just how gracious He had been to restore me, heal me, and pursue me, I longed so deeply to share His love with these students. Over and over again, though, I’d get the same response whenever I’d bring up Jesus. Literally, the overall essence of Jesus to these students had been boiled down to whether or not someone could say the F-word. Immediately, they’d bring up periphery issues that Jesus barely mentions as their biggest opposition to him. Ironically, the reasons they opposed Jesus were sometimes the reasons Jesus opposed the religious people of his day.
Half the time, they weren’t even rejecting Jesus; they were rejecting what He rejected!
I sat in bed one night and wondered, When on earth did “hates gays, can’t drink beer, and no tattoos” become the essence of Christianity?
It hit me that my friends weren’t the ones to blame for their confusion. They had gotten this idea from people they grew up with, churches they went to as kids, or preachers they saw on TV. It was the church’s fault that they thought this was what real Christianity was all about. As I’ve heard said, “Of 100 unsaved men, one might read the Bible, but the other 99 will read the Christian.”
Ouch.
I’m sure we’d have a very different Bible if it were written simply by observing modern-day Christians.
My peers couldn’t separate Jesus from religion because they weren’t reading the Bible to learn about Jesus; they were looking to the Christian religion to understand him. What they were rebelling against was religion.
People lamented that they had tried Christianity, and it didn’t work. But last time I checked, you don’t try Christianity; either your heart has been transformed by Jesus or it hasn’t.
But you can try religion.
You can try to follow the rules.
You can try to climb up to heaven.
But all you’ll do is white-knuckle your way to religious despair. It won’t work. It never does.
That’s when I started to notice an interesting trend: When I juxtaposed religion and Jesus in my conversations, they took a different turn. It allowed people to pull back a little and see him in a different light. They no longer were just brushing him off, but were actually pursuing, thinking, and investigating the man named Jesus. And that’s when I started to write the poem “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus.”
Some of you may be thinking, Wait a minute: you can’t hate religion and love Jesus. Jesus IS a religion. To which I’d answer yes and no. If you mean by religion, “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe,” then yes and amen, Christianity is a religion. But by that definition, so is atheism. But if we mean by religion, “what one must do, or behave like, in order to gain right standing with God,” then real Christianity isn’t a religion.
I had been a Christian for about a year when I realized Jesus isn’t just one of many saviors. Following Him is fundamentally different from practicing other world religions. There was something almost upside-down or antithetical to Him.
All the other religions center on people’s righteousness — what we do and how good we are. Real Christianity centers on Jesus’ righteousness — what He has done and how good He is.
All the other religions essentially say, “This is what you have to do to be in right standing with God.” Jesus comes to earth and says, “This is what I’ve freely done for you to put you in right standing with God.”
Religion says do. Jesus says done.
Religion is man searching for God. Jesus is God searching for man.
Religion is pursuing God by our moral efforts. Jesus is God pursuing us despite our moral efforts.
Religious people kill for what they believe. Jesus followers die for what they believe.
That’s when it hit me: No wonder Christianity and Jesus’ message of salvation is called good news. It isn’t just good advice (religion); it’s good news (Jesus). It’s not declaring what we must do, but declaring what He has already done. It’s almost as if Jesus is the eternal paperboy delivering a newspaper declaring something that has already happened.
The only question with Jesus is, will we follow Him?
Now, a lot of people might fire back, saying, “Jesus didn’t come to abolish religion. He even said he came to fulfill it.”
Well, not quite. He said, “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. 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.”
When I read that, I say amen. Jesus isn’t talking about religion; He’s talking about the law.
Jesus wants to make it clear: He isn’t taking God’s moral law lightly.
The only difference is, He didn’t come to crush us with it — which religious people do, like the leaders in John 8 — but rather, He came to fulfill it for us. When something is “fulfilled,” it means it has reached its end or completion. That’s what Jesus said He was doing. He was fulfilling the righteous requirements of it, on our behalf, to give us perfect standing with God.
For example, at the time of writing this, I’m getting married in a couple of weeks. Once Alyssa and I are married we will no longer be engaged. We fulfilled that requirement, which suited us well for the time between dating and getting married. We, however, are moving on to something better.
That’s what Jesus was saying here. It’s not like He is abolishing the law. It was there for a reason. It had a purpose. The Old Testament law’s role was put in place to show us how God aligned the universe to work, and also to show us we couldn’t live up to His standard.
It’s scandalous to say, but one of the uses of the law was to show us we couldn’t fully keep it and needed a savior. It was — and still is — a mirror to show us where we need Jesus. Even the animal sacrifices mandated in the law to the Israelites were there to show them they needed a substitute. They couldn’t do it on their own, and ultimately Jesus fulfilled that requirement.
So Jesus came and fulfilled the requirements of it to satisfy God.
He lived it perfectly. And then instead of the Old Testament law becoming our standard or law, Jesus himself became our law. He gave us his perfect standing by fulfilling God’s righteous requirements and then on the cross took all our sin, failure, guilt, and shame. A pretty sweet exchange, if you ask me. And now we no longer solely live up to an external code, but rather live in relationship with a person who then shows us how to properly view that code. Jesus became the face of the Law rather than the concrete tablets Moses is always holding in those ancient depictions.
Love is the new law.
The way I think about it is this: if I’m ever tempted to cheat on Alyssa, I could motivate myself by the law — I won’t cheat on her because I might go to - I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -, etc. — or I could motivate myself with love — I don’t want to cheat on her because she is better than anything out there. So it is with us and God. Jesus ushered in a more beautiful covenant. One that is perfected in love, not in hateful and fearful obedience.
The law was just a foretaste of Jesus. To know all the shadows and pictures in the Old Testament were simply a picture of him is astounding. Sacrificing a goat seems a little weird and disgusting until you see it actually had a reason.
The sacrificial system was God’s way of saying sin breeds death. Someone must die when there is sin. Jesus’ blood covered those righteous requirements for us. He is the ultimate fulfillment of the Old Testament.
That fact is actually what led early Romans to consider the first Christians atheists. They’d ask, “Where is your temple?” to which the Christians would reply that they didn’t have a building, and Jesus was their temple. So then they’d ask, “Well, who is your priest?” To which they’d reply that they didn’t have a priest on earth, because Jesus was their ultimate priest in heaven. Finally they’d ask, “Who is your sacrifice?” to which the early Christians would respond that they no longer offered sacrifices because Jesus’ sacrifice was once for all.
That is what Jesus meant when he said, “I have not come to abolish [the Law or the Prophets] but to fulfill them.” That truth changes someone from dead, man-made religion to a vibrant relationship with Jesus and his body.
The Meaning Behind
Back in my dorm room, I was trying to put all these thoughts down for the students I was talking with who wanted nothing to do with religion. I knew we needed a common starting point for any conversation about Jesus to get off the ground and decided on this:
“So know I hate religion. In fact, I literally resent it. Because when Jesus cried, ‘It is finished,’ I believe He meant it.”
While the poem did resonate with my peers, I need to clarify that when I say I “hate” religion, I am not saying I hate the church.
I’m not saying I hate commandments, traditions, or laws. I’m not saying I hate organizations or institutions. But what I am saying is that I hate any system that upholds moral effort or good behavior as the way in which we can have a proper relationship with God. My main problem with religion, how I defined it, is if that is possible — the fact we can just be “good enough” for God — then that is spitting in the face of Jesus. That’s mocking Him, saying His sacrifice isn’t good enough and wasn’t necessary.
I started to notice this vein in a lot of strong theologian-type people, people who are seen as giants of the church. People like John Owen, Tim Keller, Oswald Chambers, and A. W. Tozer. Even the famous German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wanted to get to a place of “religionless Christianity.” In 1944, while he was in prison for trying to sabotage the Nazis, he wrote, “We are moving towards a completely religionless age; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.
Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’”
Bonhoeffer knew that the term religious had become stale, so he fought for something entirely new. He actually found it helpful to juxtapose religion and Jesus.
Now, I love the word religion, in its true sense, and it’s helpful in some cases, but I’ve also noticed it’s the easiest way to expose someone who trusts in their own works, which is a major problem today. In a postmodern world where all religious activity is seen as what we do for God, we need to proclaim Christianity is about what God has done for us. This would take people’s focus off of their behavior and put it on Jesus.
When you distinguish Jesus the God-man from the religion that developed around Him, people investigate the person of Jesus rather than the rules of Christianity.
And the truth is, when someone is pursuing, investigating, and attempting to understand the Son of God, he or she is pursuing truth personified, and that Person will find him.
The minute I started to frame the discussions in this way, there was an interesting change. A lot of people didn’t want to talk about religion, but seemed fine talking about Jesus.
When we studied Jesus, we could actually look stuff up. He said what? He did what?
And the facts often shocked my friends.
The Jesus of the Scriptures is so much more radical and subversive than we realize.
When religious discussions are broad and consider the ideas of theologians rather than the facts about Jesus, they generate apathetic views of Jesus. Changing the focus of the conversation from religion to Jesus actually invites people to face Him and the grace He provides. It lets His grace so confront them that they have to address it.
The response that proved this is when I’d ask my friends about Jesus and they’d say, “He’s a nice guy.” Or, “He had good moral principles, but He’s not God.”
Sadly, that’s one of the most unintelligent things a person can say.
If Jesus claimed to be God, claimed to forgive sins, and claimed to heal the sick, then He either did those things, or He was a despicable liar. Either He is who He says He is — God — or He has deceived billions and billions for the last two thousand years.
That wouldn’t make Him a good moral teacher; it would make Him the most - I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -- I AM A POTTY MOUTH -able person on earth. Either He’s God, or He deserves to be cast into human history as one of the worst. And that’s why, in my conversations with others, I take the focus off what we do for God and put it on what He has done for us so we have to actually deal with Him.
We can talk theory until we are blue in the face. We can talk about what the word God even means. But you start investigating and pushing into this guy from Nazareth who lived two thousand years ago, and you will get somewhere. You will have to face up to who He is, what He has done, and what you will do about it.
Be careful when you pursue truth, because you just might find Him.
