Lord of the Sabbath Part 1

If you have a Bible, go ahead and open up with me to Mark 2:23-28. I know I said last week that we would go into chapter 3 but we are actually going to save that for the next time that we are together because I also want us to spend some time in John 5. Now why is it that in a study on the Gospel of Mark that we would spend time in the Gospel of John? Remember what I said way back when we started in chapter 1 that there are times where one Gospel writer will write about something that the other Gospel writers don’t write about? Jesus did a lot in His life so it is understandable that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John don’t cover every little thing that He did and even if they wanted to, it is likely that they wouldn’t be able to. John himself says at the end of his Gospel in John 21:25 “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.” Jesus accomplished so much in really what was a relatively short amount of time that there is not enough paper in the world to write all that He did. Look at it in this way, if every single miracle that we have seen in these first few chapters of Mark was given a chapter in the Bible, how long would our Bibles be? Remember back at the end of Mark 1 that entire towns are coming to Jesus to be healed and this is just at the beginning of His ministry! That doesn’t even cover all that He would teach and what He would pray! So, when we look at events that happen in the Gospel, we have to understand is that while there are four Gospels, they all cover 1 life and none of the 4 contradict what happens in any of the others and that which is in 1 can be helpful for us to better understand what is in one of the other 4. So, that is why we are going to look at John 5 today. What I want to do tonight is work backwards chronologically. The events of John 5 take place before the events in Mark 2 but I want us to read Mark 2 first even though John 5 happens before it. Last week we talked about fasting and I said that unless you grew up in the church or had a background in Christianity, the next few weeks we would be talking about some things that you probably hadn’t heard of or were not super familiar with and that’s ok. One of the reasons that I love preaching verse by verse through books of the Bible is for exactly that reason: so we do not keep hearing the same thing over and over or hear the things that you might already know. Tonight we will be looking at another concept that we don’t hear very much about but I am sure that we are all familiar with the principles behind the word and we will do the same thing in 2 weeks after Spring Break. The word that we will be looking at tonight is Sabbath. Right off the back, who knows what the Sabbath is by a show of hands? If you paid attention in the fall when we did the 10 commandments, we talked about it. Even if you aren’t sure about what the Sabbath is, you are probably aware of its principles without even realizing it and here’s how: How many of you have heard of Chik-Fil-A? Is Chik-Fil-A open 7 days a week? Nope it is famously closed on Sunday and despite being closed on Sunday, it is one of the most profitable fast food restaurants in the world. So, why are they closed on Sunday? It is because the Truett family that founded Chik-Fil-A recognized the importance of a day of rest, a day spent with loved one’s, and they wanted to give their employees ample opportunities to go to church. The founders of Chik-Fil-A recognized the importance of making sure that their employees had a day of rest. Where did they get this mindset for a day of rest from? They got it from Scripture and they got it from the observance of the Sabbath. So, what I want to do tonight is spend some time talking about what the Sabbath is, what Jesus does on the Sabbath in John 5, and what Jesus being Lord of the Sabbath means for us today so let’s go to the Lord in prayer and then we will start to define what the Sabbath is and read Mark 2:23-28

Mark 2:23–28 NASB95

And it happened that He was passing through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples began to make their way along while picking the heads of grain. The Pharisees were saying to Him, “Look, 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 he and his companions became hungry; how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests, and he also gave it to those who were with him?” Jesus said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. “So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

What is the Sabbath?

As we see here in Mark 2 and as we will see in a couple of minutes in John 5, the Sabbath is a pretty important talking point or pressure area for the Pharisees. So what was it when God instituted it and what was it that the Pharisees, the rabbi’s, and the religious elites turned it into by the time of Jesus? Where does the concept and command of the Sabbath come from? As we saw in our time going over the 10 commandments, the Sabbath was not something that was new in the time of the New Testament. Instead it has ancient origins going even past the 10 commandments and Moses and finding itself right at the beginning of the book of Genesis. You may be familiar with the account of God creating the universe but to quickly summarize, we believe that God created everything in six literal days and then on the 7th day, God rested. God did not rest because He was tired but He rested from His work as an example for mankind to follow. In Genesis 2:2–3 we read: “By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” What we see here in Genesis 2 is that the underlying principle of the Sabbath already existed even before Moses receives the Law in Exodus 20. We see in Genesis 2 that God designed a day for man to rest from his work and to have a day set aside for worship. Then later on in Exodus 20:8–11 we see the Sabbath command as part of the ten commandments. Moses writes, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.” The Sabbath was given for man to recognize his limitations and to recognize his need to worship the One that has given man rest. To break the Sabbath command, to do work on the Sabbath was a huge deal. To break the Sabbath was punishable by death as is seen in Exodus 35. There the Lord says in Exodus 35:2 “For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy day, a sabbath of complete rest to the Lord; whoever does any work on it shall be put to death.” In Numbers 15 we see a man that is out gathering sticks on the Sabbath Day and the Lord has him put to death for breaking the Sabbath commandment. The Sabbath was to be taken seriously. To work on the Sabbath was a direct challenge to the God who has given to man a day of rest. Now all of this does not mean that man was not allowed to do anything on the Sabbath. God is clear that He does not forbid everything by observing the Sabbath but He does forbid doing a full day’s work so to speak. Now as time would progress, the question in the minds of the rabbi’s and the pharisees became: “What is considered by work? What’s the limit that we can go? When God says you shall not work but will have a day of rest, just how far are we allowed to push that?” Well what the Sabbath would become in the eyes of the 1st century Jews was practically nowhere close to what the Sabbath was originally to be. The Sabbath was given not necessarily as a long list of do nots but was given to remind man of his need for rest and to have a day devoted to the Lord. Now what these 1st century Jewish religious leaders would do was that they would basically just start pulling things up out at random and saying, “You can do this but not this. This far not that far, etc.” So, what would these leaders say? Some of it is just ridiculous. They developed this overly complex system of regulations to build a wall around the Law of God. They said that the Law forbid taking 2,000 steps on the Sabbath so that meant that you were allowed to take 1,999 steps and it wouldn’t be considered work. However, if you took 1 more step, you were a Sabbath breaker. Where’d they get that from? Not the Bible! To put that in perspective, last week when I was working on this lesson, I checked my watch at around 11 am and I didn’t put it on until 8 am that morning and it said that between walking around the house, walking across the street to my office, walking from my office to the sanctuary to a classroom to the bathroom and back, that was already 1,166 steps. And I hardly went anywhere and that’s not counting me being up and making breakfast, letting the dog out, and cleaning the dishwasher before work. So by lunch time, I can’t go anywhere else and I hadn’t even gone further than across the street! The pharisees would say that if I got to the middle of the road between the church and my house and I was at 1,999 steps, that I just have to stay in the middle of the road or risk breaking the Sabbath! But they didn’t stop there, it got worse! In fact, Douglas Sean O’Donnell said that there were at least 39 different classes of work categories that they put into place so that they could make sure that no one broke the Sabbath. Were they allowed to whiten or bleach wool on the Sabbath? Not at all! Is that in the Bible? Nope! What about hunting? Pharisees said nope can’t do it. Can you blow out a candle or extinguish a flame? Nope, not according to the pharisees. It was so bad that even if your house was on fire on the Sabbath, you would not be able to put the fire out on your house because the Pharisees saw that as work. What about writing a letter? They said you could write a letter, you just couldn’t write 2 letters. It would be like saying, “You can send 1 text and that’s ok but if you send a 2nd text, that’s breaking God’s Law!” Some of us just today would be dead a thousand times over! What about sewing? Were you allowed to sew on the Sabbath? Yeah you were. Just as long as you didn’t sew two stitches. You could do one stitch but not two because that’s work. You couldn’t separate more than 2 threads, you couldn’t carry an article of food bigger than a dried fig, you couldn’t even pluck a head of grain. I love what O’Donnell says, he said: “The Pharisees made much work of not working!” Now all of these work-based commands had nothing to do with what the Sabbath was originally. The Pharisees hold the Sabbath to be this all divine, all sacred, perfect day that has to be more focused on not doing work than it is on keeping the day holy. John MacArthur said, “What God established as a day of reverence toward Him and refreshment from work, the Pharisees and scribes transformed into a day of stifling regulation and restriction.” That’s why we see them have such a problem with the disciples picking up pieces of grain to eat in Mark 2 but this isn’t the first time that they have a problem with Jesus and the Sabbath, the first problem seems to come from an incident that is recorded in John 5.

What Jesus Does on the Sabbath in John 5

Remember that what happens in John 5 takes place before the events of Mark 2. In John 5, Jesus goes up to a feast in Jerusalem and while He is there He goes to a place in Jerusalem called Bethesda and Bethesda is the name of a pool that was claimed to have healing powers and it was here where John says that there laid a multitude of people that were sick, blind, lame, and withered and at the moment Jesus is there, there is a man who had been sick for 38 years and we learn that this is another paralyzed man. As this man is laying there, Jesus comes by and asks Him, “Do you wish to get well?” Now that might seem like a pretty obvious question right? Like if you were at a hospital suffering from cancer, wouldn’t it be kind of weird if the doctor came in and say, “Do you want to get better?” Like no doc, I wanna keep being sick! Why does Jesus ask the question then? I don’t thing it is necessarily to find a willingness in the man to get well, I think that He asks mainly because by getting well, there are no more reasons for this man to get help anymore. He is asking beyond just the question that we might hear of, “Do you want to go to Heaven.” Pretty much 99% of people will say that they do. But what is attached to that question? Do you want to go to Heaven God’s way? Do you want to submit to His Lordship, leave your sins behind, seek forgiveness, love your neighbor, and worship with your whole heart? Are you willing to lay your life down? Leave friends, family, career, and security for the sake of Jesus? Are you willing to die for Jesus? That’s where the question gets a little more complex right? Because not everyone wants to do that! Could it be that Jesus is asking something similar? To be well means to be more than just able to stand up, it implies a whole plethora of issues that come about. So, the sick man says to Jesus, Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool and he says this because he thinks that Jesus is going to try to help him get into the water so he can maybe get healed eventually but Jesus doesn’t do that. Instead in John 5:8 we read “Jesus said to him, “Get up, pick up your pallet and walk.”” Then almost like he is taking a lesson from Mark in writing style, John says in John 5:9 “Immediately the man became well, and picked up his pallet and began to walk. Now it was the Sabbath on that day.” That’s important to remember at the end, it’s the Sabbath. John wants to make sure that we know that. In verse 10, the Jews complain to the man that was cured and they say to him, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not permissible for you to carry your pallet.” But the man says in verse 11, “He who made me well was the one who said to me, ‘Pick up your pallet and walk.’” He doesn’t even know it was Jesus that healed him because right after he was healed, Jesus slipped away into the crowd. Eventually Jesus finds him again in the temple and the man then goes and tells the Jews that it was Jesus that made him well and this is what we read in John 5:16 “For this reason the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because He was doing these things on the Sabbath.” They’re angry that Jesus is doing this act of kindness towards this man but the greater problem for them comes in what Jesus says 1 verse later in John 5:17–18 “But He answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working.” For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.” You see the issue that the Pharisees have with Jesus here is that He was doing good things for people on the Sabbath but the reason that they wanted to kill Him was because of what He said. To call God His Father was to say that He Himself was God. He that has authority to heal a paralyzed man has the authority to correct false understandings of the Sabbath that He put into place. Now word of this gets back to the Pharisees that we see in Mark 2.

Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath

We will sort of quickly go through this. The pharisees complain in verse 24 about the disciples doing what they considered unlawful on the Sabbath. Look at Mark 2:25–26 again: “And He said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions became hungry; how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests, and he also gave it to those who were with him?”” Understand that for the Pharisees, what Jesus is saying is pretty insulting. It’s as if He is saying, “Look, you guys are supposed to be the religious elite right? Well haven’t you read the Bible before? Don’t you remember what David did?” He’s questioning if the elite bible scholars of the day have actually read that which they taught. By appealing to what David did when he and his companions were in need, Jesus is making these men recognize that their mindset is completely wrong. They saw David as the pinnacle of what the man of God was supposed to be, the Lord Himself refers to David as a man after God’s own heart. Were the Pharisees willing to admit that David did wrong? Did David have a choice? To understand what David was going through at the time that Jesus refers to, David is on the run. His son Absalom is trying to kill him and he has no supplies so he goes to the temple and the priests give to David the bread that was meant just for the priests. Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, “Did God strike down David for doing this? No! Why not? Because God understood that the necessity to provide, the necessity to love, the necessity to preserve the line of David for the Messiah, was more important than a legalistic approach to the Sabbath and tradition!” We know this is true based on what Jesus says in verse 27: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” What does he really mean by that? He means that when God instituted the Sabbath, he did not create the day for man to serve it but He created it for man to rest. He made the day for man to recognize the goodness of his Creator. R.C. Sproul said, “The Sabbath is a gift from God to His people, a gift to keep them from wearing out their bodies, their animals, their servants, and their fields. However, the rabbinic tradition has turned the Sabbath from a great gift to a laborious burden. People had to take greater care not to overstep the boundaries the rabbis had set.” Jesus is saying that man’s law cannot take the place of God’s law. Who gets to decide that? Who gets to designate what the Sabbath is for? It’s the One that established it. That is why Jesus says in verse 28, “So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” Jesus is again claiming to be God. If Jesus is not really God, then what He just did is a far worst crime than breaking the Sabbath because it’s blasphemy. To be Lord of the Sabbath is to claim the authority to designate what the Sabbath is for which only the One that created it is able to define and be Lord of the Sabbath. We can’t say that Jesus never claims to be God in the Gospel because He clearly does hear. He clearly did in John 5 and He is going to clearly establish His authority as Lord of the Sabbath in 2 weeks when we look at Mark 3. Like the Pharisees, we are all guilty of adding to God’s Law. We are all guilty of denying what God has put forward to us in His word and we are all guilty of thinking our way and our interpretation is the true interpretation. The question that I want to leave with you as we close is this: Have you found that you are guilty of creating your own rules rather than obeying the rules that God has already given to you? Remember, there is one interpretation of the Word of God and that is God’s interpretation. There is one interpretation but so many applications. Every word of this book is ultimately for our good. Let’s pray.