40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 40 Minutes In The Old Testament: Episode 3

Episode Date: February 3, 2015

Chad and Daniel discuss Sabbath and Sanctification.

you are listening to a podcast produced and distributed by christholdfast.com please visit christholdfast.com for additional resources this is 40 minutes in the old testament Well, thank you for joining us for another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. We are awake at a little somewhere around 5 o'clock in the morning as we tried to record this before on the road. And I was sitting in a parking lot of a coffee shop and the mobile studio didn't work out the way that I was hoping it would. and then uh try to put the studio back together and give it another shot this morning and um that didn't work out at first and so and so for a third time and i think i think this is it i think we've got it figured out here uh we're gonna try to try to get this out chad

must be saying something profoundly good uh in this episode the devil really doesn't want him him getting it out so chad are you feeling you feel like you are ready to to give it another shot yeah you bet you bet i'm uh i'm ready dan uh got my coffee and uh got my uh got my scriptures open in front of me so we got everything we we need to get going all right well take us there all right we'll do i i uh i want to first of all promise you that we are going to get out of Genesis 1 this morning. We spent the last couple weeks there, which is good. These are important passages for us to ponder over

because there's so much richness that's here. And yet, of course, we have a whole other book to cover, so we are going to move past Genesis 1 a little bit into Genesis 2 today. I do want to focus in on a couple more matters in the creation account before we get past it that I think are worthy of our consideration. And one is more of an introductory matter. I think I've mentioned a couple of times a word that we often hear, and yet we often hear wrongly. And I want to explain a little bit about what this word means. It's the word Torah.

When the Jews talk about the scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, they often talk about three parts to it, the Torah and the prophets and the writings, the Torah being the first five books of Moses. The problem is that very often when Torah is translated, it's translated as law, so the law of Moses. And it's translated like this in most English versions of the Old Testament. The issue that I have with that is that it really sets in our minds a framework for understanding the Scriptures, which is thoroughly legal that is to say if if i describe the books of moses as law well then that already tells you ahead of time what you're going to find there you're going to

find commands you're going to find demands you're going to find prohibitions so you're going to find things telling you what to do and what not to do as if that's everything that moses said well the problem with that translation of Torah as law is, first of all, that it's really not a correct translation. And secondly, it gives you a misleading caricature of what the Old Testament is about. Torah comes from the verb yara, which means to teach. So what is the Torah? It is simply the teaching this is god's revelation of who he is and who we are so the torah the five books of moses are the teaching of moses or the teaching of god through moses and of course sometimes that teaching is a command or is a prohibition but very often that teaching is the exact opposite

gift. It's good news. It's the teaching about our good and gracious and compassionate God who loves us with an undying love and who wants nothing but the best for us and gives nothing but the best to us. So what is the Torah of Moses? It's the teaching of God, who he is, and who we are it's a beautiful grace-filled word the torah is so when you hear torah hear god's teaching god's revelation to us and that torah is part of what we've been looking at in so let's ask ourselves what is god yaraing us here what is he teaching us in this in this a portion of the Torah. And one of the things we haven't talked about, but which I think is something that we need

to briefly discuss, is this theme that you see throughout Genesis 1, where God is involved in separation. If you look at each day, God is always separating one thing from another. So, for instance, in verse Verse 4, God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. In verse 6, God says, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. And on and on it goes throughout Genesis 1.

God is separating this from that. He's putting everything into its divinely designated place. Now, what's intriguing about that is that if you listen to Genesis 1, it almost sounds as if this is written from the perspective of a priest. because if you go to the next book, to Exodus, or to the next book, Leviticus, or Numbers, if you read Exodus and Leviticus, you often have language there which is strikingly reminiscent of what you hear in the creation account. And there you have these kinds of separations going on

where, for instance, the duty of the priest is to separate the clean from the unclean or make a distinction between the holy and the unholy. You also have separations that are part of the holy spaces of God. So in the temple, in the tabernacle, you have the Holy of Holies separated from the holy place and the holy place separated from the courtyard, and the courtyard separated from the camp of the Israelites. So there, too, you have these kinds of separations that take place. Now, why do I mention this?

Because this is very fascinating to me, and I hope it will be to you, too. We'll talk more about this as time goes on, but I want to at least kind of cover the basics here. What is fascinating to me is that there are parallels between the creation account in Genesis 1 and the creation account of the tabernacle in the latter chapters of the book of Exodus. For instance, in the latter half of Exodus, as God is telling Moses how he wants the tabernacle to be constructed, there are seven speeches that comprise that creation account of the tabernacle. And there's, of course, seven days in Genesis 1. And the seventh speech that God makes to Moses about how he wants a tabernacle to be made is a focus upon the Sabbath day. And of course, when you get to go back to the creation account, it ends with the seventh day being the day of the Sabbath.

So if you put these two together, what you have presented to you is the creation account and the creation account of the tabernacle, the making of the tabernacle. When you look at these two in concert, what you see is that the tabernacle was the one place in a lost and fallen creation in which God promised to be present with his people for their ongoing recreation. So in a world which is full of sin and death and destruction and everything that is not good,

you had this one place at the tabernacle where the creator continued to offer goodness good gifts to his people here he would bring them into communion with himself and he would sanctify them that is to say he would make them holy just as he is holy he would remove their sins their impurities by means of his words by means of his sacrifices so it's as if genesis 1 is perpetuated in the tabernacle itself now to take this a step further if you go to the gospel of john chapter 1 john writes that the word became flesh and tabernacled among us and then a few chapters later while jesus is debating with The Pharisees, he says that if you destroy this temple, I will rebuild it in three days.

And he was talking about the temple of his body. So Jesus is the fulfillment of the tabernacle. He is the fulfillment, the incarnation, if you will, of the tabernacle and the temple. Now, put all that together, and it's fascinating about what we understand, who we understand Jesus to be in relationship to creation. You have the creation account. You have the perpetuation of the good creation in the tabernacle of the Old Testament where God is present with his people. And this all comes to its climax, to its apex in Christ himself, who is the new temple, the new tabernacle, where God is present to recreate us, to regenesis us so that we are the very good people created in his image and likeness that he wants us to be. So I wanted to plant that seed in your mind now and come back to it when later on we talk about Exodus and the tabernacle.

Because already in the creation account, we see hints of how God is going to be working later on in the Old Testament and then finally in the incarnation of his son. So that's one thing that I definitely wanted to get in there about Genesis 1. The other is that as you look through Genesis chapter 1, you see more and more of a focus upon the earth and upon, within the earth, the creation of man and woman. So you begin with God creating everything, the heavens and the earth And of course it talks about the lights that he places in the heavens But as you progress through the account, there's more and more of a focus upon this world Upon the earth, and then as you get to verse 26 and 27 you have more and more of a focus upon the creation of man and woman.

So it's like a series of concentric circles where you have everything, the heavens and the earth, and then as you move in closer and closer within this account, you have a focus upon really what is most significant here. the purpose for which creation was made in the beginning. And that is for God to make Adam and Eve as the king and the queen of creation. Now, the reason this is significant is because

this is very different from a lot of the other accounts of creation in the ancient world. Of course, many cultures, religions, They have their own creation myths about how everything came into being. But what's unique about the biblical account is that these other accounts are focused upon how the gods are warring with each other. They're fighting for control, killing each other. And the creation of man and woman are really insignificant. They're a minor part of the story.

but when you get to genesis when you get to the the true biblical account of creation instead of having all this focus upon the celestial there's a focus upon the terrestrial upon the earth and upon the creation of man and woman on the earth and this fits with the whole rest of the theme of the scriptures. In fact there's plenty of theology in the Bible but there's also a ton of anthropology. That is to say there's a lot of talk about who God is but there's also a lot of talk in the scriptures

about who we are. And that makes sense because we are the ones for whom God made this world. and we are the ones whom he has placed as the king and the queen of creation so god makes the heavens and the earth in order that he might make man and woman and he makes us in order that he might give good things to us we talked about this last uh the last episode that god created us Not that he would have servants or not simply for his glory, but God created us in order that he might have someone upon whom to bestow his blessings, someone to give his good gifts to. and that fits with really the theme of Genesis 1 where you have this narrowing focus upon God's work in this world

and then God's work in this world of making us and forming us in his image and likeness so that we might be in this world a reflection of who he is So that's a couple of, I guess what you might say are major themes in Genesis 1 that I wanted to focus in on. The other particular aspect of Genesis 1 that I want to spend a little bit of time on is actually not in Genesis 1. It emerges over into Genesis 2, and that is the subject of the Sabbath. So if you're looking in the Bible following along in Genesis 1, you'll notice that the closing verse of Genesis 1 is that God saw all that he had made,

and behold, it was very good, and there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. And then you begin chapter 2. I have no idea why the folks who originally divided the Bible divided it the way they did here. Sometimes it makes no sense where they put the divisions in. Of course, the verses that we have and the chapters that we have are something that was added much, much later. And here it really would have made much better sense for them to finish Genesis 1 three verses after they actually did. But anyway, we're stuck with the divisions that they made. So we're actually drifting over now into Genesis 2, talking about the last day.

the Sabbath day so if you're looking along I'll be reading the first three verses of chapter 2 of Genesis you know I had a

I have a Bible that has no chapters and verses at all and it doesn't have the columns either you just kind of read straight across the page the way a regular book would read and and you wouldn't think that that would make much of a difference at all um but it's it's a

very different uh experience reading the bible without without it um obviously not opposed to it and it's obviously helpful for being able to find things and locate things and memorize things but when you're reading the old testament uh text or if you're reading the epistles um when you read it that way it is it is it does it does have a different feel to it you know as they're as it's not broken up and and you realize you realize a lot there are a lot of places where where things where things keep going there's extent that there's not that some of those breaks aren't as natural as you would think they are and and there's things that jump out then you say well this all this is all together i don't know if you i assume do you have have you read

Have you read one of those? No, I'm glad that you mentioned that, though. That's fascinating, and I'll have to get my hands on a copy of one of those. I've never seen them, but I can definitely see how that would be a very different reading experience. Because I think really a lot of what goes on when we read the Scriptures is unconscious. We really don't think about the fact that we have these verse divisions and chapter divisions, but it makes a difference in our understanding because the mind processes things differently when we have these sectioned off the way they are. Yeah, you almost think that every verse is sort of a pause, and your mind kind of pauses momentarily. One thing you'll notice if you ever read it like that, and obviously this would happen if you read it in the original language as well,

but when you're reading it in English and you take out the verses and the chapter provisions, you also realize what long sentences Paul uses. i bet so yeah they just go on and on and on if we uh if we really wanted to uh uh to see what it was like to read the the original scriptures if we looked at them in uh in the original hebrew or greek uh people not everyone might realize this but there were there were really no uh there were not even spaces between the words in the original i uh i recall taking a class uh at hebrew union college in in cincinnati on the on the dead sea scrolls and part of the class uh we had uh these huge screens that they would project images of the original dead sea scrolls so we could actually see the scrolls and the challenge

was for us to read and to translate the Hebrew off of these original scrolls and it's very challenging because all of the words run together. There are no spaces between them. But for an English reader, I can definitely see how that version of the scriptures would be helpful It's just opening up a different way of reading the text when you don't have these man-made divisions of verses and chapters there. So looking back at the creation account then and drifting over into chapter 2, we have these words.

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed and all their host. and 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. So let's talk about the Sabbath day for a minute. Because it's important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the Christology, is the teaching about Christ that is implicit in the Sabbath day.

One word that I want to focus in on just for a minute is in verse 3. It says, God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it he rested from all his work. The word sanctified is a great word. It's a word that's full of hope and healing and grace. Unfortunately, it's oftentimes twisted around to mean something that it doesn't. The word itself simply means to make holy. So if you sanctify something, you make it holy. Oftentimes you'll hear Christians talk about the life of sanctification.

So what does this mean? Well, I guess to get us to thinking rightly about it, just consider this. And oftentimes to sanctify or sanctification is understood in a very narrow legal kind of sense to where if you're living a life of sanctification, then you are living a moral life, a life that is in conformity with the law. And the impression is given that really what you're doing is you're sanctifying yourself. You're making yourself holy. There are lots of problems with that, not the least of which it's impossible to sanctify yourself, to make yourself holy by your own actions. But to start with, let me impress upon you the fact that the sanctifier, the one who sanctifies, is always the one who is himself holy. So sanctify means to make holy.

Well, what does holy mean, or what is holiness, or who is holy? The scriptures affirm, without doubt, that there's only one who is intrinsically and essentially holy, and of course that's God. He is the Holy One, as the angels sang in Isaiah's vision, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth. So God is the only one. This cannot be stressed enough. God is the only one who is essentially, intrinsically, forever and ever holy. It's part of the essence of who he is. So, if you have a day that's holy, like the Sabbath day, or if you have a place that's holy, like the Holy of Holies in the temple,

or if you have people who are holy, like the people of God, all of that holiness is a gift it's a gift that the sabbath day is holy it's a gift that the holy of holies that inner sanctum within the tabernacle is holy and it's a gift that we are holy so anything that's holy is holy by virtue of the fact that god has declared it to be holy made it to be holy by giving it this connection to himself making it especially belong to him and now in this case you have a day that's especially his it is sanctified it is not just set apart at sometimes the way we translate sanctified it's it's not it's not so much set apart as it is brought into this special kind of communion with God

so that it shares his holiness. His holiness is almost a physical thing. It's almost contagious when you look at it in the Old Testament so that holiness can be transferred onto time and to place and to people by virtue of its connection to the source of holiness that is God himself. So we have sanctified, the very first occurrence of sanctified, happening in connection with time, the Sabbath day. This is the day that God has made holy, has brought into connection with himself because it is on this day that he rested.

And then ever after that, in the rest of the scriptures, when people are celebrating the Sabbath day, they're celebrating a holy day, a holy time. And you have this continued and really expanded in the rest of the Old Testament where you have other holy times. You have the major festivals of the Israelite year such as Passover and Pentecost and Tabernacles. and still in the in the church today we talk about holy times uh not necessarily times that we have in the new testament which are which are mandated for us to keep but there's still sacred times like christmas and easter for instance or the the seasons of the of the church here the these are these are sacred times because it is in these times that we focus upon the holy work of our holy God who sanctifies us in this time by drawing us into communion with

himself. So sanctifying, making holy, and sanctification itself has to be understood from the perspective of the source of holiness, that is, God, so that when something is truly made holy, when it is truly sanctified that is always a divine work and anytime that we attempt it on our own anytime that we think that we have somehow earned holiness or made ourselves holy by virtue of our own actions we're really transferring the source of holiness to ourselves and we're saying that we can somehow create our own holiness which is which is an impossibility it's like saying we can make ourselves god because holiness always comes from the one who is the source of holiness

itself there's a few more things about the the sabbath today that i think are are are significant the most important of which just to focus in on on it is how it relates to our understanding of who Christ is. The verse that immediately comes to mind when I think of the Sabbath is from the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus says, Come unto me,

all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Now you hear that rest and if you have a mind that has been formed by the Old Testament. You can't help but think of that rest in connection with the Sabbath. So what is Jesus saying to us?

He's saying, come unto me, all of you who are burdened by your sins, who are weary, who are broken down, and I will be the Sabbath rest that you need. And the great news is that it's not a one-day thing. For the Israelites, the Sabbath was the seventh day. In Christ, every day is the Sabbath day. Because every day in him we find rest from our labors.

We find rest from our sins. We find rest from all the burdens that we place upon ourselves and others place upon us. that the law places upon us, that our guilt places upon us, when we enter into Christ as the Sabbath rest, we enter into a true rest in which we find freedom, in which we find liberation from all of the things that oppress us in this life. Because in Him we find the place where God wants us to be. We are, as Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.

That is the one who finally brings us to the place that he wants us to be. So the Sabbath day is already a foreshadowing of the true Sabbath rest that we find only in Christ, who brings us finally to the fulfillment that he wants us to have. And one more thing about the Sabbath that I think is very interesting is something that the church fathers did with the Sabbath day. You'll notice that in the prior six days that every one of them concludes. There was evening and there was morning, day one. There was evening and morning, the second day, all the way up to the sixth day.

But once you get to the seventh day, there's something missing. It's like it never ended. There's nothing that says, and there was evening, and there was morning, the seventh day. Now, the church fathers saw this omission, and they ran with it. They said, here's what's happening. It's as if the seventh day is waiting for its fulfillment. And it finds that fulfillment when God himself rests within the tomb. So you have Christ being crucified on Friday, but what does he do on Saturday?

What does he do on that Sabbath day? He rests. He rests in his tomb, the one who was crucified for us. And then he rises the next day, which for the church fathers was not the first day, but it was the eighth day so they have this uh this whole theology that's built up around the eighth day which is the day of the new creation where christ brings us through crucifixion through our rest with him in the tomb into this new day of a new creation in which we are reformed his image and likeness so that the sabbath day in genesis chapter 2 finally has its evening

when christ rests within the tomb and then he breaks forth on easter day to bring us into the new creation into this eighth day creation which is a day that has no end because it's the eternal day of grace that we have in having christ yeah that's that's fantastic i was i was thinking as you were talking about you know the sabbath and and what jesus had said about you know come to me all who are all you are weary and heavy laden and i'll give you rest and and you hear you hear this come and i'll give you true sabbath and um and also when he when he tells you know the pharisees that you know that the sabbath that man uh the sabbath was made for man and not man for sabbath can you can't help but hear this that that i i became incarnate for you

uh not not vice versa that they know there's this language of uh i i can't i came to serve not to be served this kind of thing and so obviously you have jesus who who is the sabbath and and he comes for man he comes to he comes to give not not to receive but to that to serve not to be served Yeah, it's a complete reversal of what we often think when we think of the Sabbath, as if the Sabbath is a work for us to perform rather than a gift that God gives us to receive. I love the way that Christ turns that around, and he says the Sabbath was made for man. It's God's gift to us. And then when you think of the fulfillment of that in Christ as our true Sabbath,

then you really it all comes together the Sabbath was made for man Christ comes as the true Sabbath for us like you said he comes not to be served but to serve to Sabbath us to give us that rest that we can't find

apart from him let me throw this out there I can hear the objection to something you were saying earlier of the sanctification thing being sanctified or holy so I can hear it now so we so maybe you can address it we've got a couple minutes left but i can hear someone saying

well you know uh what about those those places where where those you know uh those imperatives are where what about those places in you know uh leviticus where it says you know to consecrate yourself what about those places and what about matthew where it says you know be perfect or be holy like your like your father in heaven is is perfect or holy how how does that fit in then and And so I'll let you answer that objection that I can hear being issued. I'm glad you brought it up because it is something that comes to mind. And this is my answer. When you hear words like be holy or consecrate yourselves, you hear really two different things being said.

You hear a command. you hear God saying you are to be holy this is how I want you to be you are created in my image and likeness and so as I am holy so you are to be the same and when you hear that

you're hearing a word of law you're hearing a command and anytime that you hear a command beneath that command is also an accusation the law always accuses So this law also accuses us. So when God says, Chad, be holy, my confession back is, but I'm not.

I've failed in manifold ways to be holy. And so when I look at myself, all I see is unholiness. I don't see the sacred. I see that which is not sacred, in fact, that which is profane, that which is unclean. And so, on the one hand, when I hear, be holy, I hear an accusation. I hear a command that I have not and really cannot keep because I fail continually to live up to this sanctified life. That's one thing I hear, but there's a much better word that I hear that drowns out that other word. And it is God saying, be holy, not as an accusation, but as a gift, as a declaration.

It's God saying to me, you are holy. I have made you to be holy by uniting you to my son, who is the Holy One of God. He is the one who has come down to live the same life that I live, to be a man just like I am, and yet to do so perfectly, to live the sanctified, the holy, the sacred life that I and all of us have not. So that by our unity with him, by coming to him who is the Sabbath rest, by being baptized into him, by being brought into this communion with the Holy One of God, we are sanctified.

We are made holy. It's like Paul uses the image of our bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit. Just as God dwelt within the temple and the tabernacle, so God dwells within us. And where God is, there is holiness. There is sanctities. So God brings with him and gives to us the very holiness that he demands of us. So God, as the source of holiness, is the giver of holiness. He grants this to us.

He sanctifies us. He brings his holiness into us that we might be as he is. So when you hear be holy, you're really going to hear two different words. You're going to hear the word of law, which shows our unholiness, but you're going to hear the greater word of the gospel, the grace of God sanctifying us, making us to be holy, and doing so by bringing us into communion with his son, the Holy One of God. This is the good God that we've been talking about since the beginning of this podcast, a God that supplies what he demands. He gives the very thing that He demands of us, and that is tremendous news because we can't provide it ourselves, and God has perfectly provided it for us in the person of His Son. That's what the church is all about. That's what the gospel is all about. That's the message of the Scriptures.

Not do this, but it's already done. Not be some way that you can't be, but instead that God has been for us what we cannot be ourselves. Isn't it funny how we read something even like the Sabbath, and we see do nothing, and we ask ourselves, well, how do you do that? Yeah, that's right. I want you to rest. Well, that rest is ironically found in a work, in the work that God does for us by laboring on our behalf to give us true Sabbath rest. Well, we are out of time, so thank you, Chad, and thank you guys for joining us again, and we will be back next week where we'll be in Genesis 2, I assume. We'll see you next week.

Thank you.