The Sabbath Question: The Nature of the Old Covenant
Selected Scriptures
We're discussing the issue of the seventh day. It starts in Genesis chapter 2 and verse 1 where it says, "After creation, the Lord rested on the seventh day," and we've already addressed that. You need only to remember that the seventh day in Genesis 2 applied only to God. By the way, I heard a well known preacher on television today say that the universe could be 15 billion years old. It's not what it says in Genesis. I continue to be amazed at that.
But God in six days created the universe as it exists now, and then He rested, and that really meant that He ceased to do His work, because it was all done. And He delighted in what He had done, because He looked at it all, and it was very good, and it brought Him great delight.
There is no mention of a Sabbath day. The word Sabbath does not appear in Genesis 2, and there was no institution of a Sabbath day there. There was no command from the seventh day of God's rest attached to man's conduct at all. Man was living in sinless bliss at that point, Adam and Even in the garden, and there was nothing from which to rest. They were at perfect rest by virtue of the fact there was no sin in the world. And so it was just a seventh day in which God, finishing His creation, took great delight in it.
Then the next time we run into the seventh day, we're in the Book of Exodus, and we begin to see the people of God, Israel, observing the seventh day as a special day of rest, and in the 19th and 20th chapters of Exodus, we get more specific as we move toward the Ten Commandments. In the 20th chapter of Exodus, God makes it a law, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy."
That's the first time you have instituted what we call the Sabbath. It is a part of the Old Covenant. It was right in the middle of the Ten Commandments, but it was a feature of the Old Covenant. It was symbolic. It identified a very special day in which the Jews were to do no work, take a break from the normal routine. They were not to carry burdens here and there, as you would do in the normal course of work, weren't to cook anything, weren't to leave their homes. They were to use that day to contemplate God and to contemplate the Ten Commandments, and mostly to contemplate how they had violated them. So it was really a day of introspection, a day of penitence.
Now, the seventh day is also a wonderful day, and I think this is what you can take out of Genesis to remember that God created the universe in six days, and we pointed that up in our first message. So whenever the seventh day came along, two things could happen. The people would remember that this was the day that God rested, and they would remember therefore that God had created the entire universe in six days, and they would glorify God for such a majestic creation done in six days.
So it was a day in which you did honor God, but when the law came down, the Mosaic law, and called upon them to keep the day holy and drew their attention to their violations of the commandments of God, it then became a day not only to praise God for the beauty of His creation, but also to take a good look at your life as measured against the law of God and do some hard examination and repent of your sins. So it became a day of penitence.
It was right at the heart of the Mosaic law, and if you observed that day, and if you did what the law required on that day, and you didn't do your normal work, and you didn't break the standards that God had established, but you took a look at your own life and measured against the law of God, you would honor God in so doing, and you would be keeping that day holy or set apart or separate from the rest of the days.
Now, when you come to the New Testament, the question is is the Sabbath law still in place, and that's where we are now. We've looked at Genesis. We've looked at the Mosaic law in the Old Testament. Now it's time to look at the New Testament and the New Covenant, and we want to ask the question at this point, "Are we under Sabbath obligation in the church?" There are some people who think we are.
There are today a group of people, somewhat prominently known in the Christian world, called Seventh Day Adventists. There are other groups beside them, but they seem to be the most notable of those who would call themselves Christians and would say they're living under New Covenant terms but are under Old Covenant Sabbath obligation. They are famous, obviously, for meeting on Saturday, and they believe that part and parcel of their obligation before God. Some of them would believe it's a saving obligation. They must keep that Sabbath day, and so they meet on Saturday.
There are other seventh day groups, Seventh Day Baptists and some other smaller groups who meet on the seventh day. And that poses the question of whether or not we in the New Covenant are under Sabbath obligation, and it's a very important question to answer, because many people ask it. And it's even important as a corollary question to ask the question, "Is the first day of the week the Lord's day on which we meet our Sabbath? And what connection does it have to the Sabbath? And is it obligatory to us in the same way that the old Sabbath was? And do the standards of the old Sabbath transition to the first day of the week and the Lord's day?" All those questions are important for us.
Now, there are three categories we have to move into, categories of biblical thought, to answer the question. In order to answer the question as to how the Sabbath connects to the church or how the Sabbath connects to the New Covenant, we have to look at three things. One, the character of the New Covenant. We have to understand what the New Covenant is. Number two, we have to look at Jesus' treatment of the Sabbath. That's very important.
What did Jesus do with the Sabbath? How did Jesus treat the Sabbath? He's right there in the transition between the old and the new, and He's establishing, of course, His kingdom, and He establishes the New Covenant by His blood. So it's important to look at the character of the New Covenant, and secondly to look at how Jesus treated the Sabbath, and thirdly, the New Testament teaching for the church on the Sabbath. Those three categories really do sum up the argument, and I would like to think I can get through them tonight, but I really can't. So we're gonna take our time, because when we're done with this, we're gonna have, I think, a very helpful series for us to understand on the seventh day.
Open your Bible, if you will, to Hebrews chapter 11. This is a good place to start. We could start a number of places, but I've come down on Hebrews chapter 11, because I think it gives us lunch, and then we're immediately going to go to another text and be there a while. Hebrews chapter 11 is the hall of fame, the Bible's hall of fame. It's actually the Old Testament hall of fame. Everybody mentioned in Hebrews 11 is an Old Testament saint. It starts out in verse 4 with Abel and then verse 5 with Enoch, and then verse 7 with Noah, and then verse 8 with Abraham, then verse 11 with Sarah, the long passage on Abraham and Sarah. You finally get to Isaac in verse 20 and then Jacob in verse 21 and Joseph in verse 22, and that takes us through Genesis.
And then we come into Exodus, looking at the Old Testament in terms of characters, and we come to Moses, who is, of course, the leading character in Exodus. Then you come further on into Old Testament history down to another individual introduced in verse 31, Rahab the harlot, and now we're out of Egypt, and we're headed into the Promised Land and running into Rahab. And then as the life of Israel in the Promised Land unfolds, we hear stories about Gideon, Barak, verse 32, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, the Prophets.
And it goes on to describe things that were characteristic of the lives of Old Testament saints. "They conquered kingdoms and performed acts of righteousness," verse 33, "and obtained promises and shut the mouths of lions," which would be Daniel, "and quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put armies to flight, and had women receive back their dead by resurrection.
"Others were tortured, not accepting their release in order that they might obtain a better resurrection. Others experienced mockings and scourgings and chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, sawn in half." Tradition tells us that's what happened to Isaiah, for example. "They were tempted, put to death with the sword, went about in sheep skins, goat skins, and they would wrap them in sheep skins and then thrown them to ravenous animals who would tear them apart, being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated, wandering," verse 38, "in deserts, mountains, caves, holes in the ground."
That's quite a list, quite a description of Old Testament heroes. That's exactly what it is. These are all people who lived by faith, and all the way through it says "by faith," verse 3, verse 4, "by faith," verse 5, "by faith," 7, "by faith," 8, "by faith," 11, "by faith," 17, "by faith," 20, "by faith," 21, "by faith," 22, 23, 31, and so it goes. They're all illustrations of people who lived by faith, people who trusted God. They are examples of people who lived by faith. They were great heroes, wonderful people.
But then you come to verse 39, and it's really quite an amazing statement. "And all these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised." What? They didn't receive what was promised. No matter how loyal they were, no matter how obedient to the Old covenant, no matter how righteous, no matter how faithful to God, no matter how worthy, no matter how devout, there was something in their lives that was not there. It was missing. There was some promise of something to come that they didn't experience.
Verse 40 tells us, "because God had provided something." What's the next word? Better. Better than what? Better than the old economy. Better than the Old Covenant. Something better for us, so that apart from that better thing, which has been for us who have lived since the cross, they should not be made perfect. That something better, friends, is the New Covenant. Now they had heard about this New Covenant. Jeremiah 31 had talked about the New Covenant. There are some other allusions to it in the Old Testament, but they had never experienced the New Covenant, because the New Covenant had not been ratified yet, because Jesus had not come and had not died, and therefore, the New Covenant had not yet occurred.
You say, "Well, how were they saved?" They were saved, because God applied the terms of the New Covenant to them, even though it had not yet happened. But the something better is the New Covenant. Salvation was based for them and for us and for everybody on what Jesus Christ would do to establish the New Covenant in His blood on the cross. They were not saved. Now mark this, please. They were not saved by keeping the Old Testament law. They couldn't do it. They were cursed by trying to keep the Old Testament law. They were saved by realizing they couldn't do that and pleading for God to be merciful. And God was merciful and did forgive them, because Jesus would bear their sins on the cross in the New Covenant.
It was the New Covenant. It was the death of Christ ratifying the New Covenant applied to them retroactively. They were not complete without the New Covenant, but they were not second-rate believers. Otherwise, how can you have a whole chapter full of them as models for faith? And if you come to chapter 12, we have this great crowd of witnesses surrounding us. And what do they witness to? They witness to the benefit of a life of faith. They witness to the power of a life of faith. They show us what it is to live by faith. And they're literally witnesses to us of the value of a life of faith. They're not second class. They're examples to us. But they were not made perfect by the Old Covenant. There's nothing in the Old Covenant that can save.
The Abrahamic Covenant given to Abraham promised blessing, but that blessing couldn't come unless people were saved. The Davidic Covenant promised, you will remember, to David that he would have a son, a greater son than Solomon, a son who would be the Messiah, whose throne would be forever and ever, who would establish a kingdom in Israel that would spread across the entire earth. That had promise of blessing, too. The Abrahamic Covenant was a covenant of blessing. The Davidic Covenant was a covenant of blessing. But in order to receive the benefits of either of those covenants, there had to be salvation, so that's why the Old Testament promised a New Covenant, a New Covenant that would change the heart, a New Covenant that would cleanse and wash and purge and purify.
And without that New Covenant, nobody was made perfect. Nobody was saved by anything in the Abrahamic Covenant. Nobody was saved by anything in the Davidic Covenant. Nobody was saved by anything in the Mosaic Covenant. All the Mosaic Covenant did was damn you and condemn you, because if you violated it one time, you were cursed. These people become models of faith, models of living a life of faith before God because they were saved by something that hadn't yet happened. They could never have been perfected apart from the better thing, and the better thing is the New Covenant, and it's only the New Covenant that saves.
To further understand this, let's go to 2 Corinthians, chapter 3. And I know that's somewhat review, but that's important to establish. As you come to 2 Corinthians, and this is a chapter which is like going in deep into the forest. You can stay in a long time. We'll try to resist that, but in 2 Corinthians chapter 3, you have a comparison being made by the Apostle Paul, and the comparison here being made is between the New Covenant in Christ and the Mosaic Covenant, and that is the comparison. The chapter starts out telling us in verse 3 that the Corinthian believers, and that can include all believers, as well, "are like a letter of Christ cared for us, written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on the tablets of human hearts." And there is an allusion there to the distinctiveness between God's work in the heart and God's work in writing the law on stone.
And down in verse 6, he starts to really unfold the superiority of the better thing. Now remember, Hebrews 11:39 said there was something better, and what is better is the New Covenant. Verse 6, Paul says he's servant along with other apostles and believers, servants of a New Covenant, a New Covenant. It's not a covenant of the letter. That is, it's not something written. It's not something just written down with letters. Rather, it's of the spirit. It isn't something outside of us, then. It's something inside of us. It's not something God tries to put for us and demands that we obey. It's something that God does in us to change us, to bring us into obedience. It's not the letter. It's the spirit.
And making that brief distinction, he then launches into a discussion of the difference between the New Covenant and the Mosaic Covenant. The Mosaic Covenant here is the letter. It's a written covenant, written in tables of stone and then written down by Moses, as we remember from the Penatuch. But the first thing that makes the New Covenant superior is the New Covenant gives life. Look at verse 6. The letter does what? It kills. But the spirit, which is synonymous with the New Covenant, gives life.
Now the Old Testament law was, frankly, deadly. It was really deadly. The Mosaic law was a killer. It was a killer for a number of ways, in a number of ways. First of all, it was a joy killer. The law passed the sentence of sin on everybody. I mean, it passed the sentence of guilt on everybody. When you held your life up against the law of God, you were supposed to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself. You were supposed to keep the Ten Commandments all the time. You were supposed to keep the multiplied prescriptions that flow out of the Ten Commandments that are all through the Penatuch. You were supposed to keep those to the letter, and if you violated any of them, you basically were cursed, and you forfeited blessing and brought upon yourself cursing from God.
Now here you are. You're a sinner, and this is the law, and if you break this law, you're gonna be cursed, and you're gonna be punished by God. This is a very, very guilt-producing law, and it brings tremendous frustration, because you can't keep it. It produces grief. It produces this incessant ongoing failure without relief, a kind of living death. It kills your peace. It kills your contentment. It kills your joy. It kills your sense of fulfillment. And that is the yoke that Jesus talked about.
It's this terrible burden of trying to qualify with God for heaven by law-keeping, never being able to do that. You literally are under the massive weight of sadness and grief, the loss of peace, the loss of joy, an emptiness, an inability to achieve anything that could produce in your heart a sense of fulfillment. That's why Paul in Romans 7 says, "When I came in contact with the law of God, I died." He doesn't mean he physically died. He just meant he died inside. He just...he realized that there was just no way out. There was no hope. Just killed him in terms of his self-respect and his joy and his peace and his contentment.
Worse than that, there's a second way in which the law which is described here as the letter kills. It not only kills in a living death, it kills in a dying death, also. We remember Galatians 3, as well as Romans 3, says that if you break the law, you die, and that death means a spiritual death, being cut off from the life of God, and an eternal death, suffering forever, punishment in hell. You can't keep the law, so it's totally frustrating in this life and provides for you some sort of a living death. You can't keep the law. Not only does it give you a living death here and now, but it gives you a living death then and there in the eternity to come. It is a killer every way you look at it.
And, of course, the Jews, struggling against this slashing of the law against them, eventually came to misunderstand the law and misinterpret the law and think that somehow they could outweigh the bad by the good, and so they came up with this idea that if you've got more good than you've got bad, you know, you can kind of qualify to get in. And they, according to Romans 9, they misunderstood the righteousness of God. They lowered God's standards, thought they were more righteous than they were, so they brought God down to the level that they thought maybe they could reach. Then they elevated themselves to that level and thought they were fine. They went about to establish their own righteousness after they dropped God's righteousness down to where it was attainable.
And so what they were then living with was a distortion of the true intention of the law, which was another way they were dead. They were killed at that point. So they were killed first of all emotionally by the relentless slaughter that the law brought against them and took away their peace and joy. They were emotionally killed in this life. They were eternally killed by the curse of God, which they would bear forever. And they were intellectually killed, because they had concocted a wrong idea of the law. They had distorted its intention, and therefore they were functioning without the right knowledge. So every way you could cut it, they had died, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.
The law was a killer, but the Spirit or the New Covenant is life. All the Old Covenant did was expose sin. It just showed you you were a sinner. It just...God's standard was perfect. Nothing wrong with the law. It's "holy, just, and good," Paul says. But when you looked at your own life against the law, all it did was kill you. It just slaughtered you, and so here you are in that condition. What do you do?
Well, a true penitent under the death sentence of the law, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, cried out to God, and he was forgiven because of penitence and faith, God applying the death of Christ, which hadn't yet happened, the New Covenant back to them, even though it hadn't occurred. And it was the New Covenant that gave them life. Why? Because in Jesus on the cross, all of their sins were paid for, right? And that's why God no longer held them under the sentence of death. Jesus bore the sentence of death, paid for their sins. They were forgiven and given eternal life. Only the New Covenant gives life. The Old Covenant is a killer.
Secondly, Paul wants us to understand that the New Covenant not only gives life, but it provides righteousness. In verse 7, he calls the Old Covenant the ministry of death. It's a good name for it. It's the ministry of death in letters engraved on stones, and we know we're talking about the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, which is the summary of the Mosaic or Sinaitic Covenant. He says, "this is a ministry of death. It did have some glory if it came with glory. Obviously, it had some glory, because, of course, it was the will of God. It does reflect God's righteousness. It is a glorious law. It is holy, just, and good."
There is nothing wrong with it at all in itself. All it does is show what's wrong with us. But if it came with glory, so much glory that the sons of Israel couldn't look intently at the face of Moses because of the Glory of his face, if it came with glory, at which glory, the glory of the God of the Old Testament, you remember, shining on the face of Moses in the book of Exodus? Then, if that's true of the old, how about the new?
Verse 8, "How shall the ministry of the spirit," which is a term designating the New Covenant, "fail to be even more with glory?" If the Old Covenant is a killer, and it has glory, but the New Covenant gives life, and it has glory, how much more glory? How much more glory? Verse 9 sums it up. "If the ministry of condemnation has glory, much more does the ministry of righteousness abound in glory." And that's the great truth that the New Covenant provides, righteousness, and I said that to you this morning.
What happens in the New Covenant is Jesus takes the penalty for your sin and gives you His righteous life. That's the righteousness provided in the New Covenant, and that's exactly what happened to the Old Testament saints. If they came penitent, they pleaded for God, believing in Him, trusting in God as their only hope, as their only Savior. "God save me. I can turn to no one. You must forgive me. You alone must forgive me. I cast myself on your mercy and your forgiveness." And they did that, and God would forgive them. Their sins were then borne on the cross by Christ, and the perfect righteous life of Christ was imputed to their account. And God looked at them as if they lived that perfectly righteous life which Christ himself had not yet lived in time, but which God was fully able to apply even before Christ came.
The wonder of wonders is that the New Covenant provides what the Old Covenant couldn't. The Old Covenant couldn't provide life, and it couldn't provide righteousness. All it could provide was death and condemnation. It is called in verse 9 "the ministry of condemnation." And further, I might add, the New Covenant is permanent. The New Covenant gives life, the New Covenant provides righteousness, and thirdly, the New Covenant is permanent...permanent.
You notice at the end of verse 7, it reminds us of that incident with Moses when he saw the glory of God, and he came down the mountain. You remember? In Exodus 33. And it says that "the face of Moses had glory, but it was fading glory...it was fading glory." That is also repeated in verse 10, "For indeed, what had glory in this case has no glory on account of the glory that surpasses it, for if that which fades away was with glory, much more that which remains is in glory." Just an interesting kind of analogy here.
Moses goes up. He sees God in Exodus 33. He sees the glory of God. He's tucked back in a rock. You can read that account. The glory of God passes by, and it gets on his face. It's the glory of God sort of radiates off his face. He goes down the mountain, and he's gonna talk to the people of Israel who are down there waiting for him to come back with the law of God. He comes down, and he has seen God, and here he is with a shining face, but he puts a veil over his face. You remember this story.
He puts a veil over his face, as referred to also in verse 13 here, because the glory is fading, and he doesn't want the people to see the glory fading. But it's a fading glory. That is to say it's a glory that passes away. The Mosaic economy had its moment in time. It had its place, but it was a fading glory. It was glory. It was glory, because it reflected the will of God, but it had no saving power. There was nothing in the law that could save you. The law gave you no help. The law gave you no space. It gave you no grace. It gave you no mercy. And so it couldn't save at all, and God has a saving purpose. Its purpose then came and was fulfilled, but its place was a fading place. It faded from Moses' face, which is sort of a metaphor of its impermanence.
It had glory, verse 10, "but it doesn't have glory to compare," end of verse 10, "with the glory that surpasses it." That's the glory of the New Covenant. "That which fades," verse 11, meaning the Old Covenant, "did have its glory, but much more the New Covenant, which remains," and that's the permanence of it. It's permanent. You say, "What do you mean, permanent? It's always been in place." And this is amazing to think about.