The law and the prophets [were] until John from that time the glad tidings of the kingdom of God are announced, and every one forces his way into it.
The Lord has just told a story about a dishonest manager and warned that no one can serve two masters. The money-loving Pharisees sneered, and His answer draws a line through history at John the Baptist: one age ended, and the news of God's kingdom now goes out.
John was the last messenger God sent before Jesus came.
John, the forerunner of the Lord, was the last of the long line of the prophets of the past dispensation. With him, God's words under the old covenant reached their full stop. With Christ, the new words began.
So what exactly stopped at John? Not the Old Testament writings themselves.
"The Law and the Prophets" was the standard name for the Old Testament as a whole — the Scriptures of an age already past, though they had not passed away with that age. They were past as the sole and governing truth. What they had been preparing the way for had now come, or at least was near. This new truth must be the higher truth. But for that very reason it must bear witness to what came before it, and confirm it. No truth can pass away.
The Pharisees had built their standing on keeping the law. These words were devastating for them.
The law was given to a people who were already God's people, and the prophets called that people, owned as His, back to the law. John closed this scene. Now a kingdom was set up, and entry into it came by the energy of individual faith. So the door opened to all who had that faith from God. This changed everything. It was not law nor prophets, but God's kingdom announced to all who had faith to enter in. Those who clung to the flesh and to self were left behind. Men might accept them, but the Lord left and deserted them in His kingdom.
This way of thinking did not stop with the Pharisees.
The religion of the world always stands on the same ground as the Pharisees. It assumes, more or less, that God favours it now, and it treats worldly rank and wealth as the sign of that favour. Faith looks away from present things since sin came into the world.
Notice the verb in the verse: the kingdom is preached. That word tells us what the kingdom was not yet.
The kingdom was not established. If it had been, the power of God would have settled everything. Order and peace would have reigned. But it was not so. It was preached — preached by prophets, and by those who were more than prophets. These prophets were insulted and rejected. For them the wilderness and death were a home or a reward. The hypocritical nation would have nothing of it. Only the energy of faith, going through suffering, could take hold of it.
Luke's "forces his way in" and Matthew's "violence" describe one and the same test.
The testimony about the kingdom, in either form, was putting everyone to the test. It meant the path of a rejected Christ, outside the world. On that path a person must deny self and take up the cross to follow Him. And all this against the opposition of every principle of man and his world. It needed the holy energy of faith to break through every obstacle. That faith is wholly for Him, whose claim on His own is absolute.
Some read the verse as sinners forcing their own way into salvation by sheer effort.
No. The violent who take the kingdom by force are not unsaved sinners who seek salvation and must seize that salvation by force. Salvation is by grace. It is God's free gift. The sinner is not saved by his violent efforts, but by believing in the Lord Jesus Christ.
The word everyone reaches beyond Israel to the Gentiles, the nations outside the Jewish people.
Luke had already spoken of the highways and hedges. His wording opened the door to the Gentiles, without naming them outright as the "whoever" so often quoted by Paul. "Everyone," he says, "forces his way into it." It was a matter of preaching and of faith. So the Gentile who would listen to that preaching and have that faith would enter in, like anyone else.
Matthew records a similar saying, but with a different weight.
It is not the same here as in Matthew 11:12, where "the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force." There the question is the true hope of Israel, and the need to break through all that opposes faith. But here much more ground is opened to man if he believed.
- Until — the law and the prophets ruled up to John. They are not cancelled, only no longer the last word.
- Since — good news is preached, not a kingdom set up in power. Its messengers met scorn and death.
- Everyone — the door is faith, not family line. So the word reaches past Israel to the Gentile who believes.
- Forces — entry costs something. Faith breaks through a world that rejected Christ. But no effort buys salvation; it is God's free gift.
- Left behind — men respected the money-loving Pharisees, yet they stood outside the kingdom they assumed was theirs.
But it is easier that the heaven and the earth should pass away than that one tittle of the law should fail.
Jesus had just told the Pharisees that the kingdom of God is now preached, and that the law they boasted in was giving way to it. He guards at once against a wrong conclusion: not the smallest mark of that law will fail.
Jesus is answering men who prided themselves on the law while ignoring the preaching of the kingdom around them.
The law they boasted in was being replaced by the kingdom of God. The law had laid down what was needed for man's life on earth, and the prophets had foretold God's coming kingdom on earth. The time of the visible, world-wide kingdom had not yet come. But it was coming in another form, through preaching, and already in this spiritual form men were beginning to press into it. The Pharisees were blind to all this, and were staying outside. But, though the kingdom was replacing the law in this way, not one stroke of the law was going to fail. In its own sphere it still stands in full majesty.
An era can end without the law that ruled it being at fault.
This was not because the law had failed: it had not, but man under it had proven a total failure. The law is the word of God: not one iota of it can fail, though all temporal things (heaven and earth) pass away.
You might expect the law to lapse at two points: when the thing it pointed to came, and when Christ tightened what Moses had allowed.
The passing of that old order did not mean that the law had failed. It could not fail. Heaven and earth might pass away sooner than one stroke of the law fail. It did not fail when the thing it pointed to came. Nor did it fail when the allowance Moses made for their hard hearts was put right, and the new order perfected what the law could not enforce.
The "dot" in this verse points to the smallest marks in the written text.
The iota is the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, like the yod in Hebrew. The tittle is a hook-shaped mark. In Hebrew it separates letters that would otherwise look the same. If, as our Lord says, not even the smallest parts of the written law will pass away, how much less the instructions God once gave!
Because this promise covers even a stroke of the pen, writers draw from it a conclusion about how God gave the Bible.
The suggestion that inspiration is not verbal destroys the absolute authority of the Bible.
The next sentence applies the claim where His hearers were slack.
The Pharisees had used the permission of divorce to approve a licence that the whole spirit of the law spoke against. Now all this was to be put right. A man who divorced his wife and married another would now commit adultery, and so would the man who married a divorced woman.
If the law itself had expired, this verse would be untrue. One writer presses that point against a common misreading of Romans 7.
The law is not dead. If it were, our Lord's words would be proved false. And not only one stroke of the law but the whole of it would have failed before heaven and earth pass away… We are the ones dead to the law; the law is not dead to anyone. Romans 6 shows the believer dead with Christ to sin, and Romans 7 shows him dead to the law, "so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code."
So the new thing Jesus brings never comes at the law's expense.
The grace of God never conflicts with His law, but, on the contrary, maintains its authority in its own sphere. Nothing clears, establishes, and proves right the law — and every other principle of God — like His grace.
- Era — The kingdom of God is now preached, and the law the Pharisees boasted in was giving way to it. They were the ones left outside.
- Failure — The old system passed, but the law never failed. The failure was in man under it.
- Stroke — The promise reaches down to the smallest letter, and to the mark that tells one letter from another. That is why writers read it as a claim about how God gave Scripture.
- Test — Christ proves it at once. Their easy divorces were a licence the law's own spirit condemned.
- Death — Nothing here has died except us. We are dead to the law, not the law to us; grace vindicates it rather than voiding it.