We need to know the One that fulfills the Law and the Prophets.  This need may not immeadiately confront or confound us.  Jesus, however, was tuned in to our need to know Him as the One who fulfills the Law and the Prophets and warns that we are not to miss it.  The Law, Torah, is both the account and the promise of God’s activity to form a people for Himself; through Covenant-making, God forms a people who are to know Him and thereby reflect His character in their lives; His Presence and reality it to permeate their lives with Love for God and Love for People.  The Prophets, are simultaneously the record of God calling the nations and His people back to Himself when they have strayed and an active voice in the community in real-time.  The Prophets provide a megaphone for hearing God and a lens for seeing God’s perspective on Himself, His People, and the World; the Prophets create the expectation of God’s redeeming and judging activity in the future.

Jesus says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."  (Matthew 5:17)  So in his "sermon" he alerts his listeners that his basic message, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near" (Matthew 4:17) does not do away with the Law and the Prophets.  Instead his entrance into their lives has ushered them into the possibility that the Law and the Prophets can be practiced and taught from the heart.  Jesus brings them into a new righteousness of transformed life, the Kingdom life, in which the change of heart is so dramatic that anger, lust, throw-away relationships, empty or manipulative words, and revenge seeking give way to the ruling presence of God’s love in the heart.  His people living in His presence live the Law and the Prophets.

The Devil’s submission-hold here, is lawlessness, an attitude of the heart.  (See 2 Thessalonians 2:5-10)  He grapples with us by having us abandon The Law and The Prophets.  Now I am not proposing that we must become Jewish in order to apprehend the Christian movement.  The Church confronted this question in the book of Acts.  Instead what I am proposing is that we must in some measure recover the The Law and The Prophets in order to understand what is right about God and people and to understand what is wrong and broken with the World and people.  Sin, as a category for evaluating human behaviour and attitudes is illusive in public discourse.  We don’t know what is wrong with us, don’t want to know what is wrong with us, and attack or close out of our lives anyone who diminishes our sense of well-being by suggesting that there is a God who cares about what is wrong with us.

The Church, a people gathered under the new covenant of grace, cannot also be a Prophetic community, unless they are able to uphold the holiness and knowledge of God as a reality and vision from which people have departed.  In such a state of denial about sin, we will be unable to cooperate with the Spirit who convicts (John 16:7-11); we will rob the cross and resurrection of its power.  We will fail to be in absolute awe that Jesus actually fulfills The Law and the Prophets.  We will silence or alienate the prophets from our gatherings.  And most unfortunate, I believe, "conversion" will not be accompanied by capitulation to the Lordship of Jesus.

I am not sure of all the ways we might seek to recover a vision of Jesus, the One who fulfills the Law and the Prophets.  However, I suggest two excercises.  First, I think we can start by actually reading the Law and the Prophets with eye towards grasping God’s heart for people and the unrelenting dominance or jealousy for His glory in the story, prescriptions and prohibitions contained there.  And second, I believe we can also practice the discipline of examination, whereby we read His Word and invite the Holy Spirit to search us; David prayed, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting"  (Psalm 139:23-24).  Finally I would suggest meditating on James 4; James seems to be keenly tied to an awareness that Jesus is the One who fufills the Law and the Prophets.