Sabbath Business

“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 to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and 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.

Sabbath is not rooted in the Law, but in the Creation example. It is a day set aside to rest and meditate on the Lord.

Do we follow this practice today, even when we may not “work” on the Sabbath?

Does it matter what day we practice a Sabbath?

What if we can’t take off Sunday, but we can take another day as Sabbath?

What about the fact that Sunday is not technically the Sabbath?

All of these are important questions that we will come back to once we have a few answers. But first, let’s take a look at two examples that Luke gives us in Jesus’ life that show us:

Who is really Lord of the Sabbath - Jesus or man?

Who sets the rules - man’s traditions and laws or God?

And, what is the point of the Sabbath?

Two Encounters

1. The Grain Fields

KJV says corn fields, but from the context we know it was a grain field

The disciples were on the edge of the field by the road. Gleaning laws required that farmers not harvest to the outer edges of the field to allow the poor to come and glean.

Deuteronomy 23:25 ESV

If you go into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle to your neighbor’s standing grain.

The disciples were not stealing, They were just snacking as they walked.

The law allowed for someone to eat the heads of grain in gleaning, but not to thresh the wheat on the Sabbath. The Pharisees considered something as simple as rubbing the grain between your fingers as threshing and therefore a violation of the Sabbath.

Illustration: How many of you have ever gone on a road trip and bought a snack to eat on the way with you. Did you think you were doing work? The Pharisees would have said that if you were traveling at all for unnecessary reasons then you were working. They would also say that you were working if you snacked.

Jesus uses an illustration from the most beloved man in Jewish history. It would be like using a story from George Washington’s life today. David was the most beloved King in Jewish history, yet he ate more than just a few heads of grain on the sabbath.

The story occurs in

1 Samuel 21:1–6 ESV

Then David came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest. And Ahimelech came to meet David, trembling, and said to him, “Why are you alone, and no one with you?” And David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king has charged me with a matter and said to me, ‘Let no one know anything of the matter about which I send you, and with which I have charged you.’ I have made an appointment with the young men for such and such a place. Now then, what do you have on hand? Give me five loaves of bread, or whatever is here.” And the priest answered David, “I have no common bread on hand, but there is holy bread—if the young men have kept themselves from women.” And David answered the priest, “Truly women have been kept from us as always when I go on an expedition. The vessels of the young men are holy even when it is an ordinary journey. How much more today will their vessels be holy?” So the priest gave him the holy bread, for there was no bread there but the bread of the Presence, which is removed from before the Lord, to be replaced by hot bread on the day it is taken away.

Notice a few important Observations:

From the context outside of this chapter, we learn that David was not really on a secret mission from Saul in wartime, which would give special circumstances to eating the Bread of the Presence, but was actually running for his life from Saul. David put the priest in serious danger by being there. In fact, the priest later lost his life for giving David Goliath’s sword that had been kept at Nob.

David didn’t eat grain standing in the fields, but he at the holy Bread of the Presence. We learn about this bread by following cross-references back to . Let me show you!

Leviticus 24:5–9 ESV

“You shall take fine flour and bake twelve loaves from it; two tenths of an ephah shall be in each loaf. And you shall set them in two piles, six in a pile, on the table of pure gold before the Lord. And you shall put pure frankincense on each pile, that it may go with the bread as a memorial portion as a food offering to the Lord. Every Sabbath day Aaron shall arrange it before the Lord regularly; it is from the people of Israel as a covenant forever. And it shall be for Aaron and his sons, and they shall eat it in a holy place, since it is for him a most holy portion out of the Lord’s food offerings, a perpetual due.”

By following this verse back we discover that the day the bread was swapped out was on the Sabbath and that was the day that David ate it and gave it to his fellow soldiers.

Now, let’s not go too far down this road because of time, but we can easily see how studying one passage for the meaning of it can lead us to studying another. The point that Jesus is making here is a question that he will soon answer.

Who is greater? David or Jesus?

David ate the bread of the presence on the Sabbath and gave it to his friends. Jesus allowed his disciples to simply pluck heads of grain and eat them. Jesus is saying that he is greater. That is why He makes the statement:

The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.

Before we try to apply this to our lives today, let’s first look at the second encounter.

2. The Synagogue

Jesus was doing what he does on the Sabbath. He was at church......well, at least the church they had before the church, which was called the synagogue. You could say that He was where you would expect to find Him on a Sabbath - in the synagogue reading the Word and teaching it to others.

Let me stop for a minute and say that this is exactly what is expected of the New Testament believer on the new Sabbath we observe. You should normally expect to find a believer in church on Sunday worshiping the Lord and studying His Word, the Bible, with other believers!

But back to the encounter. Jesus is there and the text seems to indicate that the Pharisees planted this man with the withered hand. We can observe that the Pharisees and scribes were watching Jesus to see what He would do with the man. The man never asked to be healed. He was just there! The Pharisees already know that he is there - most likely because the planted the man there. They knew enough about Jesus to know that He cared too much about people to leave this man like he was. They wanted to trap Jesus, because the punishment for breaking the Sabbath was death!

[Reference]

But, Jesus is smarter than they are. He gives them a lesson in the heart of the law. The intent of the law. He asks in verse 9:

Luke 6:9 ESV

And Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?”

Jesus is getting to the heart question of the law. What is the real intent of the Sabbath? He is also alluding to another portion of the Old Testament Law. We might find this information in a study Bible in the notes section. If we read the parallel accounts of this encounter and other times where Jesus is questioned about this same thing, we learn that in , Jesus says:

Luke 14:5 ESV

And he said to them, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?”

You see, in the Law addresses the common sense details of needing to do certain work on the Sabbath.

Deuteronomy 22:4 ESV

You shall not see your brother’s donkey or his ox fallen down by the way and ignore them. You shall help him to lift them up again.

These details are important to help us see that the Sabbath was not intended to restrict us under legalism, but to help us rest and meditate on who God is.

Then, masterfully, Jesus does NO work on the Sabbath to heal the man. He does what only the Lord of the Sabbath could do! He proves His point!

Jesus tells the man to stretch out his hand. This was not a violation of the Sabbath. Everyone would do that at some point in a day! Then, with only His words, Jesus speaks and heals the man!

This leads the Pharisees to furry. I love the KJV version of this verse. It says they went mad! Have you ever seen someone get so mad they acting like a crazy man? I can imagine them spitting and shouting, turning over things frustration. They were so mad, they started trying their best to put together a plan to kill Jesus.

The word really means that they were filled with such foolishness and anger that they couldn’t even use their mind. The word literally means “without the mind.”

Why? Because they had just seen the clearest demonstration of who Jesus is right in front of them as they saw this man’s hand healed with just the words of Jesus’ mouth. And despite that, all they could think about was how to get rid of Jesus!

But, enough about these Pharisees. Let’s talk about the modern day Pharisees. Now that we know what the text meant then, let’s apply to us today. The main question we want to ask is, what’s the point?

Application: What is the Sabbath Really About?

To apply this passage, let’s ask a few of the questions we started with?

Knowing now that the Sabbath is not rooted in the Law, but in the Creation example and that it is a day set aside to rest and meditate on the Lord, let’s ask the questions we started with.

We know since the Sabbath was given at Creation and before the Law was given that keeping it isn’t about religious ritual, but it’s about relationship with God. It is also a gift for us to learn to rest and not burn ourselves out. God didn’t need a recharge after He created the world. He didn’t run out of energy. He did so as an example to us.

Do we follow this practice today, even when we may not “work” on the Sabbath?

Does it matter what day we practice a Sabbath?

What if we can’t take off Sunday, but we can take another day as Sabbath?

What about the fact that Sunday is not technically the Sabbath?

Do I take a day to rest and recharge?

When I do take a technical Sabbath, am I focussing on God or just using it as a day to get things done around the house?

Related Media

Related Sermons