The New Testament and the Mosaic Sabbath

Selected Scriptures

     Tonight we come back to our study on the seventh day, and I don't know about you, but I'm having a wonderful time going through all of this great material in the scriptures.  This is part four of our look at the seventh day.

     In the church of Jesus Christ, there has long been discussion about the Sabbath or seventh day, and questions relating to the weekly day of rest come up again and again.  The basic issue can be summed up like this:  Are Christians obligated to keep the Sabbath, the Sabbath of Old Testament Judaism?  Or are Christians obligated to turn Sunday into a kind of a Sabbath with similar restrictions?  Or are Christians to reject all Sabbath law and enjoy freedom from that Sabbath law and leave any other designated day alone as to prescribing any specific restrictions?  And then, a final question:  What is the Lord's day, as Sunday is called in the scripture, who instituted it, and to what degree are we obligated to it?

     Now we have been looking at this very important issue.  It has a lot of implications, as we already know, and it shall have even more implications when we get to the study of the Lord's day.  But to answer all of this, we simply need to turn to the Word of God and become familiar with what the Bible says.  Now we have done that.  First of all, we looked at the seventh day rest of God after Creation in Genesis chapter 2.  Then we looked at the seventh day Sabbath in the Mosaic law in Exodus chapter 20.  And then thirdly we looked at the nature of the New Covenant and its relation to the Old Covenant Mosaic law. 

We've already considered those three matters, and this is what we have concluded, and I'll give you a quick summary.  In looking at God's seventh day rest at the end of a six-day Creation in Genesis chapter 2, we come to this conclusion.  Only God rested, and only in the sense that he ceased the work of Creation, which he had done in six days, and that He found perfect delight in that perfect Creation.  It was a rest of satisfaction, a rest of delight.

We also learned in that study of Genesis that God rested, because there was no work to do.  His Creation was perfect.  There was no sin in his world.  The whole universe was perfect, required no work.  We also learned that no command is given in Genesis anywhere, certainly not in Genesis 2, no command is given to man to rest.  Well, first of all, in Genesis, man didn't need to be commanded to rest, because he didn't work.  In fact, man, before the fall, was in a perpetual state of rest.  He was in a perpetual state of joy.  He was in a perpetual state of delight.  He had no sin in his life.  There was no falleness in the universe.  There was no work to do.  He didn't need a day of rest.  He enjoyed a life of rest.  There was no human involvement at all in God's rest on the seventh day, and there was no command given to man to rest.

So no Sabbath observance on the part of man was instituted in Genesis 2.  That is a very critical point, because anyone who holds to Sabbath law today, whether it's the Seventh Day Adventists or Sabbatarians, Baptists who meet on Saturday, or what other group it is, they all say Sabbath law goes back to Genesis, but there is not any indication in Genesis chapter 2 that God imposed on man any Sabbath rest.  As I said, all he knew was rest, because in a perfect world, there was no work, only delight as he enjoyed the wonders of the garden.  Again, I say nothing is ever said anywhere in the 50 chapters of Genesis about any Sabbath law for man.

Now it is true that God blessed the seventh day.  We learned that.  And that means that he elevated it above the other days in a special way.  He set it apart as a unique day, as a memorial, a memorial to a six-day Creation, a testimony to the wonders of the edemic creation, so that every seventh day man would pause and thank God for the wonderful universe He had created.

The seventh day then initially was a day set apart for the remembrance of the perfection of God's original six-day Creation, a wonder of its magnificent beauty.  And we can still do that, even though the world has fallen, and the universe feels the curse.  The wondrous variety and complexity and majesty and beauty of the Creation, even in its fallen condition, is still manifest to us.  So the day was set aside for a special thanks to God for creating our amazing universe, and even today, every Saturday that comes, we should worship and honor God as Creator.

     Now the second indication that we looked at in understanding Sabbath and its relation to the believer today is to go to Exodus chapter 20 and see there the institution of a day of rest, not instituted in Genesis, but instituted in the Mosaic Covenant, the law given at Mt. Sinai to Israel by God.  And what did we learn?  We learned that when God had formed his nation, Israel, when God had led them out of their bondage of 400 years in Egypt, when God was on the way to bringing them into the Promised Land to populate the land and establish the nation, he did institute in that now fallen world a seventh day system, a system of Sabbaths.  It included a weekly Sabbath every seventh day and many other Sabbaths, many other special days, various feasts and festivals, monthly and yearly and every seventh year and every fiftieth year.

     And God's law for all of those Sabbaths was very clearly revealed with very specific requirements.  The weekly Sabbath, very, very specific requirements were given.  And every other festival or feast Sabbath had very specific requirements, and the seventh year had very specific requirements, as did the fiftieth year of jubilee.  And any violation caused the imposition of the death penalty.

     We also learned that the weekly Sabbath, while it certainly remained a day to thank God for the wonder of His Creation in six days, the Creation by now was marred severely by what?  Sin.  And so you couldn't just look at Saturday as remembrance of Creation.  It would remind you while you were thanking God for the wonder of His Creation how His Creation had been so severely marred and scarred by sin.  So it became a day not only to consider the Creator, but it became a day to consider the curse.  It became a day to remember that Paradise found was Paradise lost, and while you could reflect on the Eden of Creation, you also had to recognize how it had been scarred by sin.

     And sin had been defined in the Law of God, the Mosaic Covenant, both in its narrowest form, the two commandments, loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and likewise, loving your neighbor as yourself, and the ten-fold explanation of the law, the Ten Commandments, and the manifold explanation, which fills much of the Penatuch.  That law was laid down in front of man so that man might see how really sinful he is.

     Now what happened on the Sabbath day, we learned, was not the seventh day when everybody went somewhere and got together, but rather on the seventh day you couldn't go anywhere.  It was mostly a day of contemplation, and while you were thanking God for Creation, you were also being made aware of his law, because the Sabbath law in the Ten Commandments was right in the middle at number four.  If you looked up, you saw the Commandments related to God and your behavior for God.  And if you looked down, you saw the Commandments related to your behavior before man.  So remembering the Sabbath day, setting it apart, meant looking at the Law of God, and looking at the Law of God meant seeing your sin.

     And so it was not only a day to remember Creation, it was a day of conviction.  It was a day to cause people to remember the Creator, also to remember the law giver.  The seventh day then identified God as Creator.  The second seventh day, the Sabbath of the Mosaic Covenant, identified God as law giver.  One view produced gratitude.  The other view produced penitence.  And many, many of the Sabbaths were specific days of sacrifice.  And sacrifice always reminded one of sinfulness.  So no week went by without that crowning day when you stopped to remember the Creator, and you remembered the curse, and you remembered the law the Creator had given and how far short of it you came.  It was a time to consider the Maker of heaven and earth and to consider, as well, your own sin.

     Thirdly, we have already discussed the nature of the New Covenant and its relationship to the old Mosaic Covenant.  We looked last time at 2 Corinthians 3 and also into the book of Hebrews, and we saw that the New Covenant spelled out in the New Testament is, in a word, superior to the Old in every way.  In fact, the New Covenant is the reality of which the Old is the shadow.  We saw that only the New Covenant saves, and we saw that there is an abandonment of the Old Covenant with all its ceremonies, all its rituals, all its external trappings.  The holy of holies is gone.  The veil was rent from top to bottom.  The temple is gone.  It was all destroyed in 70 A.D.  It's never come back again.  The whole Judaistic ceremonial ritualistic sacrificial system is gone, all of God's Law that was non-moral.

     Now God hasn't changed his morality, but he has changed the structure of the Mosaic economy in which that morality existed under the Old Covenant.  And everything about the New Covenant we saw is better than the Old Covenant.  Even the Sabbath day rest, that one day a week rest, is replaced by a life of rest when believers delight in the God of salvation all the time, when believers rejoice, aware of their sin, in the sacrifice for sin, the Lord Jesus Christ.

     Now to further explore the issue of whether Sabbath law is required in the New Covenant, let's come to a fourth point.  I'll give you a fourth and a fifth tonight.  This is a very important point, because it provides a transition for us.  It is this:  Jesus' treatment of the Sabbath.  I want to know how Jesus dealt with the Sabbath.  He is the mediator of the New Covenant, which is a better covenant.  He is the one who knows the significance of the Sabbath.  He knows what it is intended to do, and He is the only also who knows the New Covenant.

     So the question is, "How did Jesus treat the Sabbath?"  And it is a really important question and a somewhat common question in the gospels.  It's important to note that this issue of Sabbath observance was the major hot button that set off the volatile hatred of the Jewish leaders toward Jesus and finally resulted in His execution.  There were two things that galled the Jewish leaders.  One was that He called Himself the Son of God, which they saw as making Himself equal with God.  It was saying He was of the same nature as God. 

The second galling thing that Jesus did that led to His execution was that He paid no attention to Sabbath law.  When you ask the question, "How did Jesus treat the Sabbath," there's only one way to answer it...any way He wanted.  And that is not an off-the-cuff statement.  That is the conclusion to my study.  Jesus treated the Sabbath any way He wanted.

Now let's begin by looking at Matthew chapter 12, Matthew chapter 12.  Now, obviously, we could get wrapped up in a lot of things here, but we'll try to go through this as quickly as we can.  I think you'll get the point.  Matthew 12, "At that time Jesus went on the Sabbath...it says that...through the grainfields."  Now, one thing we know about the Sabbath, there's one thing you can't do.  What's that?  You can't go somewhere.  You can't take a trip.  Jesus went out wandering through the grain fields with His disciples, and Old Testament law said that couldn't happen.  At least that is the way the Jews understood it and interpreted it.

"And while they were going through the grainfields, His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat."  Well, now the Jews would have a second problem, because you weren't allowed to do any harvesting on the Sabbath.  You weren't supposed to do your normal common work on the Sabbath.  And verse 2, "When the Pharisees saw it," now it just so happens that Jesus did this in the face of the Pharisees.  He must have known some were around and mostly likely did it for the very purpose of exciting their legalistic rankor.  "When the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, 'Behold, your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.'"  Can't do this. 

Now there is nothing specifically in the Old Testament law that says you can't do this very thing, but the Old Testament law did forbid traveling, and it did forbid doing your normal work, which for people in an agrarian society would be plucking grain and eating it.  In verse 3, He said to them, "Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God?"  You think this is bad?  David went in the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread.  Show bread, the loaves of presentation.  It wasn't lawful for him to do that, nor for those with him, but for the priests alone.

Now no cooking was also prescribed for the Sabbath, but it didn't apply to the priests.  And no eating of show bread did not apply to someone desperately hungry and in great need of food.  Jesus is saying to us Sabbath law is not moral.  There are times when reasonable people will set it aside.  In verse 5, "Have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests of the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent?"  For example, He says, "Priests break the Sabbath every Sabbath.  They work on the Sabbath."  But that's okay, because Sabbath law is not moral.  It is not a substance.  It is not a reality.  It is a shadow.  It is a picture of another reality.

So Jesus, right in the face of the Pharisees, breaks their understanding of the Sabbath law, takes a trip through the fields with His disciples, plucks the grain, and eats it.  And then when they question Him, He even makes it legitimate for somebody who's hungry enough to go and eat the show bread, the consecrated bread, in the temple service.  And all of these indications show that Jesus did whatever He wanted on the Sabbath.  Why?  Go down to verse 8, "For the Son of Man is...what?...is Lord of the Sabbath."  Well, that is a finee.  That is the final statement.

Jesus is simply saying, "I'm in charge of the Sabbath.  I'll do whatever I want.  I'll do anything I want with the Sabbath."  Now this is the very claim that infuriated them. 
"What do you mean you're Lord of the Sabbath?  That is a claim to deity."  Unquestionably.  Jesus said, "I can do anything I want with the Sabbath, because I'm God.  I can institute it.  I can hold men to it by obligation with the death penalty if I choose.  Or I can set it aside.  I can do anything I want with the Sabbath."  Now friends, this is a pretty serious transition taking place here, and these Pharisees are choking big-time on this, because they are so fastidious in their observation of the Sabbath.

Turn to Luke 14.  Luke 14, at the beginning of the chapter again.  "He came about when He," being Jesus, "went into the house of one of the leaders of the Pharisees on the Sabbath to eat bread that they were watching him closely, and there in front of him was a certain man suffering from dropsy.  And Jesus answered and spoke to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, 'Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?'  But they kept silent, and He took hold of him and healed him and sent him away.  And He said to them, 'Which one of you shall have a son or an ox fall into a well and will not immediately pull him out on the Sabbath day?' and they could make no reply to this."  Just shut their mouths.

Now Jesus appears purposely to have chosen the Sabbath day for his healing, because He struck such a blow at the legalism of the Jewish system.  They might have said, when He asked the question, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?" they might have said, "No," but they couldn't have given any Old Testament support, because there isn't anything in the Old Testament that forbids healing on the Sabbath, because nobody could heal.  What are they gonna say? 

At the same time, if they said, "Yes," then they would free Jesus up from a Sabbath violation, and they didn't want to do that, because they wanted to continue to indict Him for everything He did, so they just stood there with nothing to say.  Healing was no violation of any Old Testament Sabbath law, because nobody could heal.  But again, you see, he's traveling around.  He went to the house of one of the leaders.  Why did he do that?  He's not supposed to be traveling around.  It's almost as if he picks the Sabbath to strike a blow at the Sabbath.

Now go back to Mark's gospel chapter 2, Mark's gospel chapter 2 and verse 23.  This takes us back to the Matthew account.  It's most likely the parallel to that, as you'll see.  "It came about when he was passing through the grainfields on the Sabbath, His disciples began to make their way along while picking the heads of grain, and the Pharisees were saying to him, 'See here.  Why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?'  And He said to them, 'Have you never read what David did when he was in need and became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, the show bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests, and he gave it also to those who were with him?'" 

And then He said this, and this is crucial.  He was saying to them, "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath."  The Sabbath was never some kind of moral law that couldn't bend.  Never.  He gave it to man as a blessing.  He gave it to man as a legitimate way to have a day of rest and not work and stay home and enjoy the love of his family and give his body a day of rest and recovery.  It was a day when he could sit back and enjoy as God's divine Creation, a day when he could examine his own heart before the Law of God, and he could come before God and receive forgiveness and the resultant joy and peace and salvation.

"I never intended to take the Sabbath and turn it into some kind of a hammer to beat people down," which the Pharisees had done.  But in verse 28, he adds, "Consequently, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath."  What is He saying?  He's saying, "I'm greater than the Sabbath."  If He says He's greater than the Sabbath, then He's greater than Moses, and He's greater than the Mosaic law, and that again is absolutely intolerable to them.  But what He's saying is, "I'll make the Sabbath whatever I want to make it.  I'll do with the Sabbath whatever I want to do with it.  It is not moral.  It has a purpose, but I'll determine that purpose, and I'll determine when that purpose begins and when that purpose ends.  It began with Moses, and it's ending."  That's what you see in this transition, Jesus beginning to dismantle the Sabbath.

Now go to the gospel of John.  We've looked at Matthew, Luke, Mark.  Let's go to the gospel of John.  Each of the gospel writers plays up this.  In John 5, there was a feast of the Jews.  Now this is one of those times in the gospels when we can't reconstruct what feast it was, but it was a feast, which was also a Sabbath.  "And Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool which is called in Hebrew Bethesda," which is familiar to all of us.  It had five porticos or porches there, and in these lay a multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, and withered.

And then there is a disputed section here that isn't in the better manuscripts.  It may reflect a traditional belief that it says, "They were waiting for the moving of the waters.  The tradition existed that an Angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, stirred the water.  Whoever was first into the water after the stirring was made well from whatever disease with which he was afflicted."  As I said, you'll notice it's in brackets in the NAS, and it well should be, because it's best not to accept is as an accurate representation of truth, but it may well reflect a tradition.

Anyway, it's the blind and the sick and the lame and the withered are all gathered around there, and perhaps they did believe this, even though it wasn't the case.  There was a man there, to show you that either he was slow, or this didn't work.  He'd been 38 years in his sickness.  This is a very sick man with a chronic condition.  Now remember, this is a feast of the Jews.  "When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been a long time in that condition, He said to him, 'Do you wish to get well?'  The sick man answered him, 'Sir, I have no man to put me in the pool when the water is stirred up.'"  That is inspired and does indicate that perhaps that tradition exists, "but while I'm coming another steps down before me."  He was in some way incapacitated by his sickness and not quick enough to get in the water.

"Jesus said to him, 'Arise.  Take up your pallet and walk.' And immediately the man became well and took up his pallet and began to walk."  Thirty-eight years he's been in this kind of sickness.  Thirty-eight years may indicate some kind of paralysis of some kind, and in a moment in time he is told to pick up his pallet or bed and walk.  Now end of verse 9, "It happened to be the Sabbath that day," which suits Jesus just fine, because this is another opportunity to dismantle the common understanding of Sabbath and to indicate that the Mosaic economy is coming to its end.

Old Testament law did forbid the normal customary work, but Rabbinic tradition had developed at least 39 different forbidden activities according to the mission, the codification of Rabbinic law, 39 different forbidden activities, one of which was carrying your bed.  Jesus just went right head-on, said, "Carry your bed, my friend.  Pick it up, and walk out of here."  Now it wasn't a bed for you.  If I said for you to do that, you'd have to dismantle the frame, pick up the box spring, unload the mattress, gather the sheets, and you'd need a small truck to get your bed out of there.  No, what they slept on in those days was a flat mat, very small, barely larger than the human body, filled with straw, and it could be rolled up and put on the shoulder, and it was very lightweight.  He says, "Roll up your mat.  Walk away."

Well, verse 10 says, "The Jews were saying to him who was cured, 'It is the Sabbath, and it is not permissible for you to carry your pallet.'"  I mean, get the picture here.  It doesn't matter to them that the guy is healed.  Thirty-eight years he's been sick.  All they can say to him is, "Put down that bed."  This is a very narrow perspective they have.  They didn't say, you know, "We're so happy for you.  I mean, let us help you carry the thing."  Shows you their hard attitude.  But verse 11, He answered them.  He said, "He who made me well was the one who said to me, 'Take up your pallet and walk.'  I'm under command to do this, and by the way, the one who told me to do this healed me.'"  Bottom line, you know what he's saying to them?  "'I have just met a higher authority than you.  I've been here 38 years.  You never healed me.'" 

They asked him, "Who is the man who said to you, 'Take up your pallet and walk'?  But he who was healed didn't know who it was."  And you know what I get from that?  That it wasn't, at that moment, it wasn't important that the man know Jesus.  It was only important that Jesus interrupt the Pharisees' view of the Sabbath.  He wasn't trying to convince the man of anything in particular.  At that moment, he was showing the Pharisees that the Sabbath was in the process of being dismantled.  He didn't know who it was, because Jesus, verse 13, said "had slipped away while there was a crowd in the place.  But afterward...I love this...Jesus found him in the temple."  He wasn't done with him, but for the moment all he wanted was the Pharisees' reaction. 

"And he said to him, 'Behold, you have become well.  Do not sin anymore so that nothing worse may befall you.'"  The man went away, told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well, and for this reason, the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath.  And then he said something that was just too much.  He answered them, "My Father is working until now, and I myself am working."  What is He saying?  God and I can do anything We want, any day We want to do it