BibleProject Guide
Jesus and The Torah
About
We’re exploring the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ most well-known collection of teachings. Jesus spent most of his time with the poor and insignificant people of his day, claiming that God’s rescue of the world was beginning through him and them. Through our selfishness and contempt for others, humans have created a violent world far from the one God created. But Jesus taught that God would rescue humans from this world and into one of wholehearted love and respect for God and our neighbors. Jesus described this way of life with the word “righteousness.”
In this guide, you can learn about the theme of righteousness in the Bible and explore related videos, podcast episodes, and more.
Living Righteously in a Messy World
In the Bible, a righteous person is someone who consistently does right by God and others. And Jesus said that those who live this way will enter the Kingdom of skies.
But life is messy, and it’s difficult to know what it means to do right by everyone. Consider that Jesus and his audience were Israelites, and these people have long understood a simple and profound answer to how we can know what it means to do right by one another. To do this, we need to learn God’s wisdom. But how do you get God’s wisdom? Jesus said we do this by meditating on the Scriptures—the Torah and Prophets.
- The Old Testament (also referred to as the Torah and Prophets)
- God’s wisdom
- Righteousness
The Torah and Prophets
simply means “teaching,” though it’s often translated in our Bibles as “the Law” (Ps. 19:7).
But these books aren’t merely laws. The Torah is a story about God’s plan to partner with humans in ruling the world. And when humans ruin that partnership through stupidity and violence, God begins a rescue plan—first by choosing and then rescuing the Israelites, and then by inviting them into a covenant relationship. We read about this covenant relationship in the story of Moses on Mount Sinai, where God gives Israel a set of commands.
After the Torah come the Prophets, which continue the story of the Hebrew Bible. The prophets wrote about how Israel failed to live by God’s wisdom by violating those commands. But, with beautiful Hebrew poetry, they also proclaimed that this failure would not be the end of the story. God was going to bring his partnership with Israel to its fulfillment. Jesus and other ancient Israelites believed that the Torah and Prophets reveal God’s wisdom to those who meditate on them.
Finding God’s Wisdom in the Torah and Prophets
As modern followers of Jesus, how do we find God’s wisdom in ancient prophecies, stories, poems, and laws? It’s good to remember that the laws in the Torah were ancient even to Jesus, given centuries earlier when the Israelites could live free on their own land. In Jesus’ time, Israelites were living under Roman occupation, unable to follow many of the laws as originally stated. And on top of that, the 613 laws in the Torah are not a comprehensive rulebook. So there were many teachers of the Torah, called scribes and Pharisees, who would fill in the gaps in the law by discerning God’s wisdom underneath the commands to apply to other areas of life. For instance, the Torah said Israelites should stop working one day a week.
But what counts as work? The Torah doesn’t actually give a full definition. So the scribes would study the Scriptures and provide a comprehensive list that people could live by. They were applying God’s wisdom to everyday life so they could “do righteousness” before God and others.
Jesus’ Claim About the Torah and the Prophets
But Israel’s teachers didn’t always agree with each other, and Jesus would often wade into these debates, agreeing and disagreeing with the scribes and Pharisees. This caused them to worry—maybe Jesus didn’t take the Torah and the Prophets seriously enough. Jesus responds to this concern in the Sermon on the Mount when he says:
This is a bold claim, but as we’ll see, Jesus is offering a bold and beautiful vision of human life. He’s showing how we can build healthy communities, heal broken relationships, and transform hostility into honor and respect. And in the next section of the sermon, Matthew 5:21-48, Jesus gives six case studies showing how to do that. Each time, he’ll quote a command from the Torah and then explain how it reveals God’s wisdom so that we can learn how to consistently love God and do right by our neighbor.
What does Jesus coming to “fill the Torah and Prophets full” mean? The Scriptures tell the story of God’s plan to partner with Israel and all humanity in ruling the world. And Jesus claimed that he was taking that story forward, showing humans how to be righteous and live by God’s wisdom. Jesus even said that his vision of righteousness was more in line with God’s wisdom than anyone else in his day.
Videos
Watch our third Sermon on the Mount video, its related visual commentary, insight videos, and more.
Podcasts
Listen to these introductory episodes of our Sermon on the Mount Series.
More Resources
Find BibleProject articles as well as books recommended by our scholar team.
