Words of Jesus Podcast - Sabbath Was Made For Man

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

It is often reported that the Sabbath was not kept by New Testament Christians. Not only was the seventh-day Sabbath observed by Jesus' disciples, but declared Sabbaths of the Feasts were kept as well. The most important event in the timeline of mankind, the death of Jesus, did not stop the women who wanted to care for his body from keeping the Sabbath Commandment. Read it. However, the fear of judgment for Sabbath violations led the religious leaders to "add to the law." Jesus corrected their theology, "But if ye had known what this means, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless." Keeping the Law (10 commandments) opened the door of communication between God and man. ***Chapter 17. JESUS REPLIES TO THE PHARISEES CONCERNING KEEPING THE SABBATH (Part 1)ON A SABBATH day Jesus and his disciples went through a grainfield. They were hungry; so the disciples plucked grain and began to eat. When the Pharisees saw this, they said:               “Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day.”            Jesus replied:    “Have ye not read what David did, when he was hungry, and they that were with him: how he entered into the house of God, and did eat the unleavened bread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests? Or have ye not read in the law, how that on the Sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless? But I say unto you that in this place is one greater than the temple. But if ye had known what this meaneth: ‘I will have mercy, and not sacrifice,’ ye would not have condemned the guiltless.  The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.  Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath.”***Matthew 12:1-8; Mark 2:23-28; Luke 6:1-5

Think Red Ink Ministries presents The Words of Jesus Series with Don C. Harris Hello my friends and welcome once again to the Words of Jesus series. I'm Don Harris, your host. And we here at Think Red Ink Ministries are really pleased to bring you this production and for you to be a part of what we're doing. Our goal, the goal of this show, of Synchronic Ministries in general, is to reinforce Christianity with the wisdom and words of Jesus, which, incidentally, are recorded and read in

many Bibles. Do you know what Jesus said and what Jesus did and what Jesus said to do. The series is based on Jesus, His life, His friends, His ministry, and His relationship with His Father as recorded in the four Gospels. We just finished chapter 16 in our little book. Folks want to know about this little book. As far as I know, this book called The Words of Jesus is out of print. It's a production goal for Think Red Ink Ministries to put a book like this together and as soon as that kind of thing

is available you'll find it at thinkredink.com to which we invite you to visit. So now we are in chapter 17 and this is these are the words of Christ and they have been compiled from Matthew 12, Mark 2 and Luke 6. This is Jesus replying to the Pharisees concerning keeping Sabbath. On a Sabbath day, Jesus and His disciples went

through a grain field. They were hungry. So the disciples plucked grain and began to eat. When the Pharisees saw this, they said, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do on the Sabbath day. Jesus replied, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the law how that on the Sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are blameless? But I say unto you that in this place is one greater than the temple. But if ye had known what this meaneth,

I will have mercy and not sacrifice, ye would have not condemned the guiltless. The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath. You might notice that the last, I guess this is now the third chapter. Are we going to do this in the fourth chapter? Well, perhaps not. But you probably

notice in the last three chapters the Sabbath has just been the focus of attention. I tried to take you through some of the history of the Sabbath, why the Jews were so particular or at least concerned about the Sabbath, and we learned that it was the violation of the Sabbath that caused the captivity of Israel. And so they were pretty touchy about it. They wanted to make sure that people were keeping it. And I even suggested that there was such a thing as Sabbath police. I don't know that to be a fact, but I do know that every time these guys turn around, somebody's busting them on the Sabbath. I also mentioned, and I think worthy of mention again, that there is a predominant idea in modern Christianity and conventional Christianity, and I should say Sunday-keeping Christianity, that Jesus absolutely violated the Sabbath

as an example to us that we need not keep it anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth there. Yes, you will find Jesus violating the Sabbath and all the rules pertaining to Sabbath if what you're talking about is the rules and the ideas of the religion of that day and the additions and in some cases subtractions about keeping

the Sabbath day. I think that when I decided to look into the Sabbath a little further, and actually it happened because I was looking into the resurrection and found out the Thursday following the Wednesday that Jesus was crucified was considered by the Jews as a Sabbath. And I thought, what in the world? What is that all about? Well that opened a whole world of study and discovery for me

about the feast of the Lord. The fact that the Lord has a procedure about keeping the feast days that they begin and end on what I have called, the Bible doesn't call it this, but I've named them proclaimed Sabbaths in order to distinguish them in the minds of the Bible reader that when it says Sabbath, it is not necessarily talking about the seventh day of the week. And because the Lord says this shall be, this is the way He says

it in the Old Testament, this shall be a Sabbath of rest unto you. This shall be a Sabbath. Well, it really matters not what day of the week it is if the Lord says that the beginning of unleavened bread, for example, the one that they tried to, the Sabbath upon which they tried to avoid working in the preparation of the dead body of our Lord Jesus was not the seventh day of the week at all. It was, as I said, Thursday.

But they did keep that commandment and they did consider that day to be a Sabbath and thus it precluded any kind of work which would be the preparation of a body for burial. And I think it's interesting that in that particular study of the resurrection that we are talking about these women that were going to engage themselves in this preparation of the body. They said that it was a Sabbath day so they rested. I think that if there were some reason

for them resting on this day called Sabbath for, I mean if there were a reason other than what was mentioned in the scriptures that it would have told us. As a matter of fact it says that they rested on the Sabbath, and don't miss this, according to the commandment. So now we have New Testament, essentially, New Testament Christians

who are honoring the Sabbath day. They were under no impression whatsoever that the proclaimed Sabbaths of the Old Testament, the ones that begin and end the Feast of the Lord, there are other Sabbaths that are proclaimed, and whether or not they're on the seventh day of the week. They are somewhat secondary to the seventh day Sabbath, which is the one the commandment carved in stone was referencing. But I think it's interesting and I think noteworthy for modern day, if you want to call them that, modern day Christians to understand that these women who followed Jesus around for all the days of his ministry

had no delusion whatsoever that the Sabbath commandment has gone anywhere or disappeared or it's unnecessary to keep this day. So much so that they withheld this work involved in preparing the body of Jesus Christ for His burial on two separate occasions on that weekend. Now what I mean is Thursday was a Sabbath day, they couldn't do it on that day. Friday came and of course

the tomb was guarded by these Roman guards. They couldn't get to him. And even when the actual seventh day Sabbath came, it was another day that they did not prepare the body. Although that particular note that I'm mentioning now is not specifically said in Scripture, it's easily understood to be that way because they came on the first day of the week, Sunday, to prepare his body. So it obviously hadn't been prepared yet. So on two separate occasions there was a proclaimed Sabbath that was honored and then the seventh day Sabbath that was honored.

When I saw this I thought, as anybody would think, perhaps the Sabbath is something that we shouldn't have or shouldn't discard altogether because we've been told that Jesus broke the Sabbath. And let me just reiterate there for those who haven't seen the prior shows that this particular predominant preacher who preached this idea that Jesus broke the Sabbath

is probably under no delusion that Jesus Christ was, as our sacrifice, still at the end of his life, he was, could be considered, should be considered, and indeed was sinless. You can't violate the Sabbath and be sinless. So did Jesus violate the Sabbath? Well, the answer to that question is emphatically no. He never violated the Sabbath day. He was accused of it on many occasions, and this, we're reading today, is one of them.

But did he actually violate the Sabbath? We must realize that Jesus felt absolute zero obligation to obey the rites and rituals of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Sanhedrin, the religious leaders of that day. He felt no obligation to them whatsoever about their rules or whatever ideas they made up as they went along. But the commandment of his father was extremely important to him. Extremely important. He had no intention at all of violating a commandment that his father had given him and that he himself, with his own finger, wrote in rock on Mount Sinai,

what was it, 1,500 years prior. He had no intention of violating that at all. So what we have here is not an exit door, so to speak, where we can run through this exit and we don't have to keep the Sabbath anymore. What we have is a perfect example of a man who can please God, yet appear to the religious world as a violator of the Sabbath day.

Now I have to say that I have personal experience with this because I was conventional in my Christianity for so many years and my family was, a little town I lived in, all my friends, all my family who lived there, they all knew me, and they knew that I had a level of dedication to my spiritual life that was, I mean, it was obvious to everyone who knew me. Well, all of a sudden, they're driving to

church on Sunday. They come by the house and blow the horn, and they see old Don out there in his shorts and T-shirt and tennis shoes mowing the grass. And they think, well, he's lost his faith. What in the world is he doing out there working on the Lord's day? And so here you have a guy, in this case, myself, who wants to honor God, wants to honor his commandment, wants to do the right thing, doesn't want to willingly violate a commandment of God who is accused of doing that very

thing. And the truth is that I mowed the grass on Saturday. Well, I couldn't do that anymore because I had dedicated myself to keeping the Sabbath day. I'm not going to work on that day. Now, of course I didn't go to church on that day. Now, of course I didn't go to church on that day. When you do decide to keep the Sabbath day, you will be inundated with people who

supposedly keep it themselves and word gets around and all of a sudden you're visited by this group or that group or the messianics, they take a poke at you and the Seventh-day Adventists come and they want to share their doctrine with you because they figure you're coming to their side, right? And so I was constantly finding myself in a state of well, it was a very lonely place

to be because I simply wanted to obey the Scriptures. I found Jesus there most all the time. As He went through life, He well, I know that, I mean, the wisdom of this man Christ, I know that it didn't take him by surprise that the Pharisees would consider the plucking of corn, rubbing it in their hands, and

getting the kernels off of this corn, I assume it was barley, and eating it. This was considered, as far as the Pharisees were concerned, work. And they defined work as essentially anything that you do with your hands or with your feet. As a matter of fact, they kind of defined work as action. Well we know that

can't be so, but how are you going to go to the scriptures if these stories weren't here, how would you justify that? You'd have to just kind of, you'd have to go by what the religious leaders say, wouldn't you? But here you have Jesus finally appearing on the earth saying, look here boys, you know, he's over there rubbing this corn in the hand and getting the kernels off and let's have lunch.

And he knows fully well that if a religious person sees him doing this, he's going to be accused of violating the Sabbath day. But finally, he comes and says, this is not like we all thought it was. Now, you're going to go in your barn, and you're going to take oats, and you're going to go in your barn, and you're going to take oats, and you're going to put them in a bucket, and you're going to carry them out there to your animals, or whatever you're going to do.

You're going to feed your animals on the Sabbath day, but this particular work of getting yourself something to eat, you're not going to do because it's a Sabbath day. And he says, you know, what you've done is you've taken the Sabbath day and you've turned it into something very, very miserable. The Sabbath day is not misery. The Bible says that the commandments of God are not grievous. That means they're not hard to do. They shouldn't make you sad.

They shouldn't make you feel, they shouldn't make you feel restricted. You need to understand that the Sabbath, as a matter of fact, if you look in the Old Testament where he said, these are the feasts of the Lord, these are the celebration times of the Lord, you know what's first on the list? The Sabbath day. It's a time of feasting. It's a time of rest. It's a time of worship and essentially a happiness and communication with God. It's a wonderful time to do this. And so I'm sure that he was not surprised that he'd been pinned, he'd been busted by these people,

but it really didn't bother him so much. He tried to explain this to them and to his disciples, because you know his disciples, growing up in this ever since they were kids, they saw those Pharisees come by with turbans on their heads or however they dressed to show themselves to be holy men with their big long phylacteries and their enlarged garment borders and these holy men and here they come and here I'm

standing with corn in my hand after having plucked it and now I'm over here preparing it to eat. I'm in big trouble. You know they had those thoughts. You don't erase that in just a couple of days. And even when you have somebody with the authority of Christ saying, don't worry about that. These guys, man, they're just blind leaders of the blind. You know, they're going to come over here and condemn us. They're going to have something to say about this. But Jesus decided to take it in hand and not only teach

his disciples, but teach them. And he ends his lesson with, you need to understand that the Sabbath was made for man. This sounds like a gift to me, doesn't it to you? The Sabbath was made for man. Man wasn't made for the Sabbath. Now people who don't feel the necessity for keeping Sabbath because they're New Testament Christians or the law's passed away or it's antiquated or whatever reason they have

for not keeping the Sabbath day, for continuing to work on the Sabbath day, they have to work on the Sabbath day. They have taken this scripture and said, you see there? The Sabbath was made for man. So what does that mean? That we can violate it anytime we want? I'm afraid our logic really kind of stinks here. The Sabbath was made for man. You can't take that and just, you know, and run with it and say, you see there, you know, it's all up to us. We can do whatever

we want to do. They'll even go over to, is it Corinthians 14? Perhaps it's Romans 14, not sure, but where it says one man regardeth the day and another man doesn't regard the day. You need to know that the man who regards the day regards it unto the Lord. And the one that regardeth not the day to the Lord he doesn't regard it. You see there? It's all up to, it's your frame of mind. No, no, no. You're missing this completely. First of all, those chapters whichever one is correct, I'm sorry about that, but

it's talking about fasting. It's not talking about Sabbath day at all. It's saying that these fast days that the Pharisees involved themselves in, you want to be involved in those fast days? Fine. Do that if you want to. Just be kind to one another. If a man doesn't keep the day, to the Lord he doesn't keep it. If he does keep it, to the Lord he keeps it. This is talking about fasting, not the Sabbath. There is no way you can

to the Lord violate a commandment of God. Could we, would we take any other commandment? You know, some people murder, some people don't. You have to understand that when this person murders, to the Lord he murders. And this man over here, when he doesn't murder, to the Lord he doesn't murder. There is no way that anybody would take any other commandment and do that with and try to apply that kind of logic to it. But the Sabbath day

it gets whacked every time. I understand it being the least commandment. You would do a lot more damage by hating your brother or certainly by murdering him or stealing his wife or his wallet or anything else. Certainly you do damage, much more damage to your fellow man and perhaps even to yourself than you do by violating the Sabbath day. But what we have to do is understand that Jesus says even though he perhaps put this

into the category of least commandment, he says anybody who doesn't keep the least commandment and teaches men so, he'll be called least in the kingdom of heaven. So this was obviously very important to him. So important that he made a statement like that. And later on we find the apostles saying you need to understand that if you violate one commandment it's just like violating all of them. This is a package deal. Well, I know this is difficult for people who have never done

this, who have never considered this, but make sure that if you're not considering this, that it's not for some silly, plastic, manufactured, theological, or doctrinal reason. You say, well, you know, I like going to church on Sunday. Go to church on Sunday. This scripture has nothing to say to you about what day you go to church. It's got nothing to do with it. Fine, go to church on Sunday. What difference does it make? As you start studying paganism, you might find that Sunday worship has roots that you're not proud of, but this has nothing to do

with the Sabbath day. Sabbath day is the day that we ought to set aside, not work, and we ought to set aside that time for communication with God. Now, Jesus talks about something in this scripture that we don't have time to do today, but he's saying that, you know, you Pharisees, there's something missing in your theology, and I want to help you with this. I know that you feel like that the more you sacrifice and the more you deny, you know, whatever it is you want in life. And I mean, this is equivalent to, you know,

fasting or what I call hunger strike fasting, pole sitting, you know, cutting yourself with stones or tying yourself up or being a penitent in some way that you're, you know, abusing yourself. I know you feel like all those things make you, all the sacrifices that you make and the punishment of your bodies is helping you with your relationship to God. But here's what you should know. I want you to stop all this thinking, and I want you to go, and I want you to read your scriptures,

and I want you to find where my father makes it very clear that I want mercy and not sacrifice. Everywhere you find the Lord speaking personally about sacrifice, he speaks about it as this is a stopgap measure. This is something that we've instituted that I don't even like it. I don't want it. Here's what I want. First, I already have a body prepared.

I already have the ultimate sacrifice prepared for you. It's my son. And he's on his way. So, you know, number one, you know, the blood of bulls and goats and stuff like this, stopgap measure. That's all. That's all.

The blood of bulls and goats is not going to take away sin. The blood of my son will. Number two is that if you're not careful, you can find yourself in the business of the sacrifice of religion. Oh, you know, my life is, I've worked so hard for Jesus. I've given up so much for Jesus. No, no, no, no. Here's what I want, the Lord says. What I want you to do is exercise mercy toward your fellow man. Now there, there's a sacrifice that we can deal with. There's something that I can use. All right, folks, it looks like time has gone for this particular episode, and we're going to continue next time. We really appreciate you being a part of what we do here.

If you have a question or a comment, can you write to me? All you have to do, Don, at ThinkRedInc.com and I'll be glad to answer your email. Write to me, will you? Okay, till next time. We'll see you. Bye-bye. ThinkRedInc.com. That's ThinkRedInc.com. Join us again for the next episode in the Words of Jesus series. you