Jesus hammered his point home even further by praising the person who practices and teaches the least commandments:
He who practices and teaches [these least commandments], he will be called great in the kingdom of the heavens (Matthew 5:19).
Perhaps, we might infer, this includes those Christians who take the Old Testament so seriously that they try to learn from the book of Leviticus, which the rabbis taught young Jewish boys first and said was the most important book in all the Hebrew Bible. And if the Old Testament was Jesus’ Bible—of which there is no doubt—then perhaps we should particularly study Leviticus to understand our Messiah. If we do, and teach others to do the same, we will receive Jesus’ praise.
Did Jesus reject Jewish law? Or suggest that his followers should “unhitch” themselves from the Old Testament, as Andy Stanley has famously put it?
Quite the opposite. For he himself lifted up the Old Testament as inspired by God (John 17:17) and its commandments, even the least of them, as binding on his followers.
The Old Testament is mysterious in many ways. Its relation to the New Testament is not always easy to understand. But the point we should learn from this is to examine the ways that Jesus and Paul regarded the Old Testament. And among those ways is perhaps the most critical—Jesus’ own insistence that his followers should beware of disregarding the First Testament and its commandments.
Leonardo da Vinci (attributed) Salvator Mundi between 1506 and 1513 oil painting on walnut panel.
An exceptional genius pic.twitter.com/ac1OP980lc— Faudon Marie (@FaudonM) February 12, 2023