We were made to work … but we were not made to work all the time.
This goes all the way back to the beginning of all created things. Our Eternal God created the world in six glorious movements, then rested on the seventh day. This created a pattern for people created in His image. Work six, rest one.
And what are we to DO with this day of rest? Well … rest!
Let’s examine the example of the Israelites who lived under the law in the Old Testament. God used groupings of seven to reinforce the need for rest among His people. God instructed them to let the land “rest” every seventh year by not farming it (a Sabbath year of rest for the soil.) God also instructed His people to rest on every seventh day. This rest accomplished a number of things: it allowed them to remember the God who created this world and to worship Him, it also allowed the people to rest and trust in His provision AS THEY rested, and it also allowed sufficient margin in their lives to rest their perishable bodies and not wear them out.
What does all this add up to? The day of rest was a gift given by God to the people. This day of rest was modeled by and created for them by a loving God.
What was this day called? The Sabbath. (The English word “sabbath” comes from the Hebrew word “shavat” which means “to stop”). The Sabbath was celebrated each week on the seventh day (from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday). On this day the people were not to work, but to rest and to worship.
Fast forward to the first century A.D. … the days when Jesus lived out His public ministry in the land of Israel. By this time, the religious elite had taken God’s gift of the Sabbath and made it into another form of a religious score card. They added 39 specific categories of things that were not allowed to be done on the Sabbath. The public nature of these prohibitions and their regular occurrence (Saturday came around every week!) made them a particularly favorite marker of one’s religious reputation as judged by the first century Pharisees.
What God had created as a gift FOR His people, the Pharisees had tricked up (like Frankenstein’s monster) something that had some resemblance to the Sabbath, but with scary self-righteous consequences. They certainly would not have characterized it like this, but (in some ways) they made their rendering of the Sabbath their god and they lived to serve that lesser ideal!
Proof positive of this flip was their use of their understanding of the Sabbath to regularly judge Jesus. Imagine that … Jesus CREATED THE SABBATH and GAVE IT TO THE PEOPLE who so misunderstood its purpose that they used their 39 rules as a way to condemn Jesus to death on more than one occasion!!!
Now, why do I go into all this? Well, I say this today because on Sunday, May 24 at Wildwood Community Church in our 8:30, 9:45, and 11:00 services we will be looking at Luke 6:1-11 in part 7 of our “Launch Day” sermon series. In these verses we will investigate what the Pharisees got wrong about the Sabbath, what Jesus clarified about the Sabbath, and what this means for you and me.
Do you have questions about the Sabbath? Questions like, “is this why Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sundays?” “Why do we primarily gather to worship on Sundays and not Saturdays?” “Why is the fourth commandment (about the Sabbath) the only one of the ten commandments NOT repeated in the New Testament?” “Is there any application on the Sabbath for followers of Jesus today?” If so, this passage and message may prove helpful for you!
Also, we will be celebrating the Lord’s Supper together in our services this Sunday. Hope you can make it Sunday … and bring friends!