Jesus does not warn only against wholesale rejection of Scripture. He warns against relaxing even the least commandment. The word ‘relax’ is telling. Nobody announces that they are abandoning the Bible. The drift is quieter than that. It happens one small accommodation at a time, always with a plausible-sounding explanation: that command was cultural, that passage has been misunderstood, we have come a long way since then.
Fitzpatrick, in Counsel from the Cross, describes this tendency in what she calls the ‘happy moralist.’ This person recognizes that God has made certain demands on their life, but quietly reduces those demands to two or three outward duties, assuming that God is pleased as long as the obviously serious sins are avoided. The inconvenient commands, the ones that press into the heart’s deepest desires or the structures of a preferred lifestyle, quietly receive a polite exemption.
Adams is direct about where this leads: ‘The Pharisees relaxed the commandments by misusing, misinterpreting and misapplying them. They shaped the commandments to make them say whatever they wanted them to say. And many still today attempt to make the Bible say whatever they want it to say to support their lifestyle, their agenda.’ This is not a new problem. It is as old as the garden, where the first question raised about God’s Word was, ‘Did God actually say?’
The danger is not always outright unbelief. Often it looks like sophisticated nuance. But the fruit is the same: a self that sits in judgment over Scripture rather than submitting to it. And here Jesus is unsparing: those who relax God’s commands and teach others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom. Grace is never a license to set aside any portion of God’s Word. Every command is there because God loves us and the world he made.