Before we examine the But I say unto you contrasts, it will be useful to list the major approaches to understanding the Sermon on the Mount. The realization that there are other options besides Dispensational Theology and Covenant Theology could help people who are having problems with their current system of theology.

1. The SOCIAL GOSPEL view: Jesus is teaching us how to live so we can earn the mercy and grace of God and become Christians. He sets forth the Beatitudes as the way to earn salvation. This is salvation by works and it contra­dicts the gospel of salvation by grace. This view denies that the cross answers the need of a blood sacrifice to cleanse guilty sinners. We reject this view as a denial of the gospel.

2. The LIBERAL view: Jesus is contrasting the true Christian view of a loving God with the Old Testament tribal concept of a vengeful God. The eye-for-an-eye type of law is sub-human and not worthy of acceptance by any enlightened person. It is paganism. This view rejects the authority and inspiration of both the Old and New Testa­ment Scriptures. Any view that pits the Old Testament against the New Testament in a way that suggests that the same God is not moving toward the same goal in both eras understands neither testament. This view does more than deny the gospel; it attacks and destroys both the gospel and biblical authority.

3. The HISTORIC DISPENSATIONAL^[1] view: Jesus is giving instruction, not to the church, but to Israel. The laws in the Sermon on the Mount are the legal rules for the fu­ture kingdom age, or millennium. The Jews rejected this earthly kingdom when Christ offered it to them, so he postponed its inception until after his Second Coming. At that time, he will enforce all of these laws. Until that time, we must not apply kingdom rules to the church. Christians may draw helpful applications from the Sermon on the Mount, since all of Scripture is written to us, even though not all of it is for us. The Epistles of Paul, which first make known the doctrine of the church, are the believer’s rule of life during the church age. The following quotation from the Scofield Reference Bible is typical of this view:

Having announced the kingdom of heaven as “at hand,” the King, in Matthew 5-7, declares the principles of the Kingdom. The Sermon on the Mount has a twofold applica­tion: (1) Literally to the kingdom. In this sense, it gives the divine constitution for the righteous government of the earth. Whenever the kingdom of heaven is established on earth, it will be according to that constitution … the Sermon on the Mount in its primary application gives neither the privilege nor the duty of the Church. These are found in the Epistles^[2]…. (2) But there is a beautiful moral application to the Christian …. These principles fundamentally reappear in the teaching of the Epistles.^[3]

As stated in chapter one, we reject this approach to the Sermon on the Mount. This view creates a tension between Israel and the church in God’s eternal purposes that makes it impossible to see the church as the true Israel of God to whom God made covenant promises through Abraham.

4. The CLASSICAL COVENANT THEOLOGY view^[4]: Jesus is giving the rules for the kingdom, but the kingdom is now, and not future. Christ in no way contrasts himself, his teaching, or his authority with Moses. He contra­dicts wrong interpre­tations of and additions to Moses by the Pharisees. Christ gives the true spiritual meaning of Moses as contrasted with the rabbinical distortions that had de­veloped over time.

We agree that this view is partially true, but it is not nearly all of the truth. It simply does not go far enough. It never touches the heart of the issue. Like Dispensational­ism, this view interprets the new in the light of the old and does not allow for a literal understanding of many state­ments in the New Testament Scriptures, especially those passages that contrast law and grace. This view confuses the unity of imaginary covenants with the true unity of the Scriptures. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in the following quotation, has voiced an accurate criticism, although at times he seems to accept this view himself:

Another view, which is perhaps a little more serious for us, is that which regards the Sermon on the Mount as nothing but an elaboration or an exposition of the Mosaic Law. Our Lord, it is maintained, realized that the Pharisees and Scribes and other teachers of the people were misrepresenting the law, as given by God to the people through Moses; what He does, therefore, in the Sermon on the Mount is to elaborate and expound the Mosaic Law, giving it a higher spiritual content. This is a more serious view, obviously; and I feel it is totally inadequate if for no other reason than that it, also, fails to take account of the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes imme­diately take us into a realm that is beyond the Law of Moses completely. The Sermon on the Mount does expound and ex­plain the law at certain points–but it goes beyond it.^[5]

One cardinal tenet concerning the Sermon on the Mount about which Covenant Theology is adamant is that in no way whatsoever will Christ ever contrast himself with Moses. Christ may interpret Moses, but he cannot add any­thing new to Moses. In no sense whatever can Christ be a new lawgiver in Covenant Theology. At most, he may give the true spiritual teaching of the law of Moses, but he can neither add to it nor raise it to a higher level with new demands. We wholeheartedly endorse Lloyd-Jones’ criti­cism. In some points, Christ may have been showing the spirituality of the Mosaic law as opposed to the Pharisees’ carnalization of it, but as Lloyd-Jones said, Christ also goes beyond the law of Moses and adds new and higher laws.

The Dispensational view insists that the Sermon on the Mount is entirely Jewish and is not for this present age. Covenant Theology teaches that nothing in the Sermon on the Mount (or the rest of the New Testament Scriptures) is new in the area of ethics and morals. According to Covenant Theology, Jesus was giving neither new nor higher spiri­tual rules for conduct, simply because the highest possible spiritual rules had already been given at Mount Sinai on the Tablets of Stone. The law of Moses, correctly understood, is just as spiritual as anything that Christ ever taught. No teaching in any New Testament passage will be higher spiritually or more important to our understanding of holiness and moral duty than a correct interpretation of the Ten Words written on the Tables of the Covenant (Deut. 9:9-11).

A. W. Pink is representative of this view:

Christ is not here [Mat. 5:28-42] pitting Himself against the Mosaic law, nor is He inculcating a superior spirituality. In­stead He continues the same course as He had followed in the context, namely to define that righteousness demanded of His followers, which was more excellent than the one taught and practiced by the Scribes and Pharisees; and this He does by exposing their error and expounding the spirituality of the moral law.

… our Lord’s design in these verses has been misappre­hended, the prevailing but erroneous idea being held that they set forth the vastly superior moral standard of the New Covenant over that which was obtained under Judaism ….^[6]

Pink’s view of the Mosaic law forces him to consider the idea of a superior morality conveyed in any New Covenant standards as erroneous. Under the guise of protecting Moses and Covenant Theology’s concept of moral law, this view, in effect, demeans Christ and misses the higher law of Christ. Covenant Theology insists that when Christ and his apostles teach about a new covenant (1 Cor. 11:25; Heb. 8:6-13), they do not actually mean there is a literal New Covenant with any new or different laws; they really mean there is a new administra­tion of the same covenant and same laws that governed Israel. This is why Covenant Theology can claim that the Old Covenant written on the Tablets of Stone is higher and more important than even the Sermon on the Mount. Here is an example, from R. L. Dabney:

The whole Decalogue is found written out in full in two places in the Bible … It is the doctrine of the Catechism^[7] that these “Ten Words” were intended to be a summary of man’s whole duty. Why, it may be asked, is so much made of them? Why not make equal account of some verses taken from Proverbs, or the Sermon on the Mount?^[8]

Dabney frankly admits that the law of Moses is more important to him than is Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Dabney may not have intended his exaltation of Moses to minimize the authority of Christ and the New Testament Epistles. However, this is exactly what his statement does. Once we accept the idea that the Ten Commandments are the highest moral law ever given, our attitude to the au­thority of the New Testament Scriptures in the area of ethics and morals is correspondingly affected.

Dabney’s view, clearly expressed in the statement quoted above, produces a two-tiered ethic, with the Deca­logue on the higher tier. The Tablets of Stone are God’s unchanging law, and the rest of the Scripture, including the Sermon on the Mount, defers to this rock of granite. God’s laws carry more weight in the conscience of a believer than the mere scriptural advice in the Epistles of Paul. Paul’s admonitions to husbands and wives in Ephesians is good scriptural advice that we are urged to follow in order to have a happy marriage. However, the LAW of God is a different matter altogether. Under no circumstances what­soever do we dare break any of God’s unchanging moral laws. It is impossible to treat Paul’s imperative command­s as having equal authority with the law of Moses as long as Covenant Theology’s system of two-tiered ethics controls our minds and consciences.^[9]

We repeat; Dabney and others who hold to the same view may not have intended to blunt the force and effec­tiveness of the New Testament Epistles in the Christian’s conscience, but that is the inevitable result whenever any­one exalts the Ten Commandments above the rest of the Bible. The Decalogue is regarded as God’s unchanging law, and the Book of Ephesians is viewed as Paul’s inspired directives. To view the Ten Command­ments as the highest moral standard in the Bible makes everything else, includ­ing the Sermon on the Mount, subservient. In Dabney’s view, neither Christ nor any of his apostles can change or in any way add to the ethics and morality of the highest standard already written on the Tablets of Stone.

Dabney’s Covenant Theology view produces, in both preaching and practice, a two-tiered morality. You have the holy “Law of God,” the Ten Commandments, and you have the exhorta­tions, or good spiritual advice of Paul. Of course, the holy Law of God is higher and carries more weight than Paul’s words of advice. Sinai is the highest moral mountain in all of Scripture. Such a view cannot escape the mentality of mortal sins (breaking God’s law) and venial sins (failing to practice one of the principles given by the Apostle Paul), although the terminology used is never that blunt.

5. The NEW COVENANT view: Jesus asserts his unique and final authority as the new lawgiver by giving a new and higher canon of conduct to the church. This view starts with the New Testament Scriptures and allows them to mean exactly what they say. Christ, at times, may correct perversions of the Pharisees. However, we must establish this idea exegetically from the Sermon on the Mount in order to use it as a valid interpretive filter. Where does the Sermon on the Mount clearly state or even imply that Christ definitely and deliberately is correcting pharisaical distortions in this particular discourse? When we research all of his it was said statements, we find that each is Mosaic in its origin and is not a pharisaical distortion. Christ is responding to doctrines that Moses taught. Christ in no way is contradicting Moses, but is saying that the law given to Moses was good and necessary for that time; however, the citizens of the new kingdom need higher laws.

The Pharisees had indeed distorted the teaching of Moses at many points. Jesus openly rebuked them for teaching the doctrines of men as if they were the com­mandments of God (Matt. 15:1-9), but how do we know that was his purpose in the Sermon on the Mount? What is there in the text that leads us to that conclusion, and what specific distortions does Christ correct? We find no textual support for the pharisaical distortion view. Our Lord is not primarily interested in bringing a correct view of Moses over into the New Covenant in order to maintain the unity of the one Covenant of Grace. Rather, he is seeking to show how much further his new kingdom laws go when com­pared to the old. He is giving new and higher truth that Moses never taught. Christ sometimes applies the same truth that Moses taught, but does so in a manner that Moses could not have done. At other times, Christ makes new and more spiritual demands on his disciples because they are now under a covenant characterized by enabling grace. Neither Moses nor the law covenant could have made these demands or laws.

This fifth view finds truth and error in both Dispensa­tional Theology and Covenant Theology. New Covenant Theology is based on a biblical understanding of the nature and relationship of the two major covenants in Scripture (the Old Covenant with Israel at Sinai and the New Cove­nant that replaces it: Jer. 31:31-33; Heb. 8:6-13; Gal. 4:21-31). This view sees Christ establishing a distinctly New Cove­nant in his blood and inaugurating a new age with the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. It also sees this pre­sent new age, in which we live, as the inauguration of the kingdom promised in the Old Testament Scriptures. We now live in the times of Messiah envisioned by Old Testa­ment prophets. Everything under the New Covenant is completely new, but at the same time, all of the new things are the very things prophesied and promised in the Old Testament. We agree with Covenant Theology; “the New is in the Old concealed and the Old is in the New revealed.” However, we do not mean that in the same way a Cove­nant Theologian usually does.

It seems to us that Dispensationalism cannot let Moses into the New Testament in any sense, and Covenant Theol­ogy cannot get Moses out of the New Testament in any sense. One system has Christ contradicting Moses and the other system has Christ merely rubber-stamping Moses. Perhaps both systems are half-right and half-wrong. Maybe both contain some truth, and we, by taking an either/or approach, impose a false disjunction that excludes com­plementariness, and thus we lose a part of God’s truth.

When I first entertained the thesis of this book as a pos­sibility, I determined to avoid the two major errors usually connected with the study of the relationship of the Old Testament to the New. I put an imaginary stake on the left-hand side and said, “If Christ ever contradicts Moses in the sense that Moses was wrong, then I have gone past this stake and I am denying the basic unity of the Scrip­tures.”^[10] I put another imaginary stake on the right-hand side and said, “If I make Christ nothing but co-equal with Moses as a teacher of God’s truth, or worse, if I subordinate Christ to Moses as Dabney does, then I have gone past this stake and I am denying the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ and the New Testament Scriptures.” I was sure that Christ never contra­dicted Moses, but I also knew that our Lord was more than merely one among equals with Moses in the area of lawgiving. The results of my study are the conclu­sions that led me to the position set forth in this book.

We will examine the Scriptures themselves and see if they prove our statements. We will look carefully at the four texts in the Sermon on the Mount quoted at the begin­ning of chapter one and see exactly what Christ meant when he said, “But I say unto you.” We will consider the methods used to explain each of the four texts, and see that in all four cases, the usual explanations will be only par­tially satisfactory. They will not deal with all the textual evidence, nor will they usually address the heart of the issue. In some instances, the explanations are essential to maintain a specific theological system, even though the arguments contradict other passages of Scripture.

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