I. I ask you, then, to note that the Sermon claims for Jesus Christ the authority of supremacy above all former revelation and revealers.

‘Think not,’ says He, ’that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’  And then He goes on, in five cases, to illustrate, in a very remarkable way, the authority that He claimed over the former Law, moulding it according to His will.

Now I do not propose to do more than suggest, in a sentence, two points that I think of importance.  Observe that remarkable form of speech, ’I am come.’  May we not fairly say that it implies that He existed before birth, and that His appearance among men was the result of His own act?  Does it not imply that He was not merely born, but came, choosing to be born just as He chose to die?  In what sense can we understand the Apostle’s view that it was an infinite and stupendous act of condescension in Christ to ‘be found in fashion as a man,’ unless we believe that by His own will and act He came forth from the Father and entered into the world, just as by His own will and act He left the world and went unto the Father?

But I do not dwell upon that, nor upon another very important consideration.  Why was it that Jesus Christ, at the very beginning of His mission, felt Himself bound to disclaim any intention of destroying the law or the prophets?  Must not the people have begun to feel that there was something revolutionary and novel about His teaching, and that it was threatening to disturb what had been consecrated by ages?  So that it was needful that He should begin His career with this disclaimer of the intention of destruction.  Strange for a divine messenger, if He simply stood as one in the line and sequence of divine revelation, to begin His work by saying, ’Now, I do not mean to annihilate all that is behind Me!’ The question arises how anybody should have supposed that He did, and why it should ever have been needful for Him to say that He did not.

But I pass by all that, and ask you to think how much lies in these words of our Lord:  ‘I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’  They imply a claim that His life was a complete embodiment of God’s law.  Here is a man beginning His ministry as a religious teacher, with the assertion, stupendous, and, upon any other lips but His, insane arrogance, that He had come to do everything which God demanded, and to set forth before the world a living Pattern of the whole obedience of a human nature to the whole law of God.  Who is He that said that?  And how do we account for the fact that nineteen centuries have passed, and, excepting in the case of here and there a bitter foe whose hostility had robbed him of his common sense, no lip has ventured to say that He claimed too much for Himself when He said, ‘I am come to fulfil the law’; or that He falsely read the facts of His own experience and consciousness when He declared, ‘I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do.’