Matthew 5:18

Verily. — The first occurrence in the Gospel of the word so common in our Lord’s teaching seems the right place for dwelling on its meaning. It is the familiar Amen of the Church’s worship — the word which had been used in the same way in that of the wilderness (Numbers 5:22; Deuteronomy 27:15) and of the Temple (Psalms 41:13; Psalms 72:19, et al). Coming from the Hebrew root for “fixed, steadfast, true,” it was used for solemn affirmation or solemn prayer. “So is it,” or “so be it.” For the most part, the Greek LXX. translates it; but in 1 Chronicles 16:36, and Nehemiah 5:13, it appears in its Hebrew form. From the worship of the synagogue it passed into that of the Christian Church, and by the time the Gospels were written had become so familiar that it was used without hesitation by all the Evangelists, sometimes singly, sometimes (uniformly in St. John) with the emphasis of reduplication.

Till heaven and earth pass. — The formula was probably one in common use by our Lord to express the unchangeableness of the divine word. It was afterwards used, we must remember, by our Lord, with even augmented force, in reference to His own words (Matthew 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33).

One jot or one tittle. — The “jot” is the Greek iota (0, the Hebrew yod (’), the smallest of all the letters of the alphabet. The “tittle” was one of the smaller strokes, or twists of other letters, such, e.g., as distinguished ד (D) from ר (R), or כ (K) from ב (B). Jewish Rabbis used to caution their scholars against so writing as to cause one letter to be mistaken for another, and to give examples of passages from the Law in which such a mistake would turn a divine truth into nonsense or blasphemy. The yod in its turn was equally important. It distinguished Joshua from Hoshea, Sarai from Sarah. The Jews had indeed a strange legend that its insertion in the former name was given as a compensation for its exclusion from the latter. The meaning is obvious enough,” Nothing truly belonging to the Law, however seemingly trivial, shall drift away and be forgotten until it has done all that it was meant to do.”

Till all be fulfilled. — Literally, Till all things have come to pass. The words in the English version suggest an identity with the “fulfil” of Matthew 5:17, which is not found in the Greek. The same formula is used in the Greek of Matthew 24:34. The “all things” in both cases are the great facts of our Lord’s life, death, resurrection, and the establishment of the kingdom of God. So taken, we find that the words do not assert, as at first they seem to do, the perpetual obligation even of the details of the Law, but the limit up to which the obligation was to last; and they are therefore not inconsistent with the words which speak of the system of the Law as a whole as “decaying and waxing old, and ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13). The two “untils” have each of them their significance. Each “jot” or “tittle “must first complete its work; then, and not till then, will it pass away.