Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. The debate over the Sabbath has been ongoing for centuries. The nature, the obligations, the observance, from the Old Testament to the New. One of the questions was if the Sabbath should be observed at all. In today’s podcast, Pastor Paul Nitz explains that and so much more. Matthew chapter 12.

Should Christians keep the Sabbath? There’s a lady making reels on Facebook that often show up on my feed. Pretty sure they’re sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, although there are others that identify as Torahism or Hebrew Roots theology that may be behind these. She looks to be around 60. She has long gray hair, wears no makeup at all. Maybe you’ve seen her.

The format is to overlay her short videos with a Bible verse or verses, usually from the Old Testament, and then a question, like, Why do so many Christians think it’s okay to eat pork? Or, Why do so many Christians have Christmas trees in their homes? Or, Why do so many Christians fail to observe God’s Sabbath? In that last case, the Bible verse scrolling behind her is one of the Ten Commandments about remembering the Sabbath to keep it holy. Let’s think about that one, since questions revolving around the Sabbath and its keeping come up often in Matthew’s Gospel, like here in chapter 12 in the first scenes. Listen.

At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and his disciples became hungry and began to pick and eat heads of grain. When the Pharisees saw that, they said, Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful on a Sabbath day. But Jesus replied, Have you never read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions? He entered the house of God and ate consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat on the Sabbath, but for priests alone. If you had known what this means, I desire compassion rather than sacrifice, you would have not condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.

Departing from there, the scripture goes on, he went into their synagogue, and a man was there whose hand was withered, and they questioned Jesus, Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? And he said to them, What man is there among you who has a sheep which falls into a pit on the Sabbath day and will not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep? So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. Duh. I added duh.

Then he said to the man, Stretch out your hand. He stretched it out, and it was restored to normal like the other. Then the Pharisees went out and conspired against Jesus as to how they might destroy him. Apparently, the Pharisees’ interpretation of the Sabbath commandment outweighed the thou shalt not kill commandment. Why were they so angry? Let’s back up for a minute.

Exactly how did the Jews in Jesus’ time keep the Sabbath? Well, it began typically on Friday evening, lasted until Saturday at sunset. Typically, that 24-hour period was spent resting more than usual, refraining from anything resembling work, attending synagogue services, teaching your children the Torah, and sharing special family meals together. The Sabbath for them was kind of a mini weekly vacay, a day for spiritual and emotional and physical rejuvenation. Religious Jews to this day understand keeping the Sabbath to be a vital part of their special covenant with God. Now, the Pharisees mentioned here by Matthew and their sidekicks, the scribes, saw themselves as the enforcers of the law of Moses.

They had carefully broken down the law of Moses in the Old Testament, the Torah, into 613 commandments. And by Jesus’ time, they also had another, even longer list of commandments that were not written down. They claimed Moses had received these additional regulations from God, but for some reason, he didn’t write them down. But they were memorized by Jewish scholars, and they were passed on orally from generation to generation. These oral laws were explanations or applications which fleshed out exactly how to keep all the Torah’s 613 commandments. Believe it or not, these additional oral laws numbered 4,224. 4,224 additional regulations.

The Pharisees called these additional rules the hedge around the law. The idea being, if you were careful to observe all these extra rules, they’d protect you from ever possibly breaking the Old Testament’s written laws. Sort of like a hedge protects you from accidentally trampling in someone’s garden. Get it? By the way, these additional oral laws were eventually written down around the year 200 A.D. in a book Jews call the Mishnah. Now, one of the Old Testament 613 commandments, one of the ten biggest commandments actually, is about the Sabbath.

It’s found in Exodus chapter 20 and also in Deuteronomy. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh 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 slaves or your female slaves, your cattle, any resident that stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the seas and everything in them, but he rested on the seventh day. For that reason the Lord blessed the Sabbath and he made it holy.

That’s the actual law of the Sabbath given to Moses for the Jewish nation. However, as I tried to explain a minute ago, by the time of Jesus, the oral laws concerning the commandments got far, far more specific and demanding. In fact, there are 39 subcategories in the Mishnah of prohibitions regarding how to properly keep the Sabbath: no planting, no reaping, no weaving, no burning, no building, no carrying, no traveling, and like 30 more. Take traveling, for example. Traveling for work on the Sabbath was strictly prohibited. Personal traveling to a nearby visit for family or to attend your synagogue in your town, that was allowed.

But there was a limit spelled out for how far you could travel even for those purposes. You could travel up to about 650 yards. That was the rule. Means about 600 meters. It all got very, very complicated. Can you imagine trying to live under the burden of all these regulations?

This explains the two situations that Matthew remembers and describes in our chapter, namely when the disciples picked and ate grain as they walked through a field on the Sabbath day, and then later that same day when Jesus healed a man who was crippled in a synagogue service. Neither of these things violated any Sabbath law in the Torah, that is, the written Old Testament scripture. But according to the Pharisees, they were violations of their additional codes, their hedge laws. And it was on that point that they clashed with Jesus, because when they called him and his disciples out, Jesus told them they were dead wrong. Their interpretations were wrong, and their attitudes were even more wrong. It’s never bad to do a good thing on the Sabbath, he told them.

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. But what really torqued them off was when Jesus added, The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. In other words, even if your application of God’s law were correct, and they’re not, but even if they were, the Son of Man, referring to himself, is Lord of the Sabbath, meaning I will not only ignore your added regulations, but if I choose. I can override even the law of Moses. Oh my! Can you see the Pharisees’ eyes widen and his faces redden when Jesus said that?

Calling their traditional interpretations and attitudes all wrong, right in front of all those who looked to them as the spiritual gurus, and worse, claiming he was Lord of the Sabbath. That was tantamount to claiming equality with God. This is one of those things that angered the Pharisees enough they wanted to destroy him. Back to the lady with the long gray hair for a moment, the one who apparently believes Christians should be living under the Old Testament’s Sabbath restrictions. The Seventh-day Adventist organization, not a small thing, by the way, they claim to have over 23 million members worldwide and more than 150,000 local churches. The Seventh-day Adventist doctrine is not in the mainstream of biblical interpretation on this and several other points.

In fact, historically, they taught that worshiping on Sunday, rather than observing the Jewish Sabbath, was the mark of the beast, for real. I think they’ve softened their stance on that recently because, well, it’s the pragmatic thing to do. But that particular group has unfortunately added several peculiar ideas to the New Testament based on the teachings and writings of their so-called prophets. The first was a man named William Miller, who gained serious notoriety in the early 19th century because of his sensationalistic preaching, and especially when he set a date that he had calculated for Jesus’ second coming, the second advent of Christ, as he called it, hence the name Adventists. The date was March 21, 1843. And when it didn’t happen then, he tweaked his prediction and said, My bad, it’s really March 21, 1844.

And when that didn’t happen, made up a whole new doctrine about something special happening in heaven on that date that he had somehow mistaken for the second coming. Well, as we have learned, if self-proclaimed prophets make predictions that do not come true, they should be called out and shunned, as Jesus warned, Beware of false prophets. When William Miller’s prophesied date for Jesus’ return didn’t materialize, guess what happened? A whole lot of people got very disillusioned. It was termed at the time the Great Disappointment. But sadly, foolish false prophets are still doing this.

I saw Bill Maher on his late night TV show doing jokes in his monologue, mocking the idea of the return of Christ because, guess why? Earlier this fall, some goof in South Africa who has a small following said Jesus would return on September 23 or September 24 of this year. Of course, again, it didn’t happen, and a lot of naive people were very disappointed, and a lot of mockers mocked. But Jesus didn’t disappoint anyone. He specifically said, No one can know the day or hour of my return. By the way, what false prophets or mockers, for that matter, have to say about Jesus’ return is irrelevant.

He will return as he promised and in God’s perfect time. But who knows how many people have been turned away from biblical Christianity because of these foolish, self-proclaimed false prophets all throughout history. Nevertheless, many naive people just kept following along. After William Miller, among the Adventists, along came a woman prophetess named Ellen G. White. She claimed to be having visions from God, and what she claimed she was shown in the visions became the basis for a number of new Adventist beliefs.

In fact, Mrs. White’s personal writings became the basis for the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. She died in 1915, but is considered by the Seventh-day Adventist organization to this day to have been a divinely inspired prophetess, and her writings are revered by them as inspired by God. Another huge red flag to all of us who understand that the New Testament writings alone are God’s full and final revelation for our time. So today that organization, following William Miller and Mrs. White and a couple others, holds to some really out-of-the-mainstream, to put it kindly, beliefs.

Prominent among them is the teaching that their members must live under the Old Testament laws, including the Sabbath law. But Paul, keeping the Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments. Yes, but here’s the problem. Jesus said he came to bring new wine, remember? The old wineskins could not contain it, that God was going to do some things differently in the New Testament era. The fact is, nowhere in the New Testament Scripture do we see Christians or churches instructed to keep the Old Testament Sabbath laws.

On the contrary, when the church was born, as we read about in Acts, the Christians met for worship on the first day of the week, Sunday, Jesus’ resurrection day. That wasn’t commanded by Jesus or any of his apostles. It’s just how things developed because it was Jesus’ resurrection day, and also the church itself was born on a Sunday. So the early Christians called Sunday the Lord’s Day.

Furthermore, when Judaizers, remember those guys, the false teachers who wanted to make Gentiles live under Old Testament laws, when Judaizers invaded churches the apostle Paul had planted, he wrote in response to one of them, this is Colossians chapter 2, Do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, referring to Jewish dietary regulations, or with regard to religious festivals, observing Jewish feast days, holidays, or new moon celebrations, which were specific sacrifices offered each month, or Sabbath days, Paul said. These things were only a shadow of what was to come. The reality is found in Christ. So, in inspired New Testament scripture, in Colossians, among other places, we’re told that the Old Testament rituals, dietary laws, and he specifically mentions Sabbath observance, are not a required part of the new covenant initiated by Christ.

The New Testament has its own instructions for believers, and thankfully, they’re not as complex and as burdensome as the religion of the Pharisees in Jesus’ time, or even modern-day Judaizers like the Seventh-day Adventist Church. You know, when I was growing up, and I’m sure this is still taught in some very conservative churches and probably widely still believed in the Bible Belt, I heard it often preached that Sunday was now for Christians the day of rest and worship, as if Sunday just replaced Saturday and became the Christian Sabbath. That was an accepted idea in America for much of our history, up until pretty recently. So much so that businesses and restaurants and stores were not open on Sundays when I was a kid where I lived. That was in Pennsylvania, not in Alabama or someplace. That probably surprises you if you are a relative youngster.

There were so-called blue laws in Pennsylvania, which were enacted to enforce Sunday as a day of rest and worship. That’s a quote from AI Overview directly from a Google search I did. It goes on, The laws prohibited many commercial activities like car sales, alcohol sales, most forms of entertainment on Sundays. These laws were in effect in Pennsylvania from the 17th century clear up until they were determined to be unconstitutional and repealed in the 1970s. I remember this very well because that’s the era I grew up. Stores were closed on Sundays, most restaurants, most businesses.

It was the Christian Sabbath for all intents and purposes, even according to state law. But listen to this part carefully. While it’s no doubt a good thing to keep a day or two each week for more rest and recreation, time to be with your family, certainly good to prioritize times for worship and learning God’s Word each week, there’s nothing mandated in the New Testament saying these things must be practiced a certain way or on a certain day of the week. The Sabbath was a special observance for the Jewish people during the era the nation of Israel was under the law of Moses. That is, from the time God gave Moses the law, which was written down in the Torah, until the time Jesus came and initiated the new covenant, so for approximately 1,450 years. It may well be a good pattern and a good example for us today, but we are not obligated to live under any such Old Testament laws.

In Romans 14, again addressing the bad influence of Judaizers in an early Christian church, the apostle Paul felt the need to write this: One person considers one day more sacred than others; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, and they give thanks to God. And whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. He goes on to admonish the Christians to not judge others who hold different convictions on these things than their own.

So the New Testament says, when it comes to holiday observances or what you eat and drink, when you worship, how much you work, and so on, these are personal decisions. Develop wise convictions about them in the spirit of the New Testament’s comprehensive commandment: whatever you do, in word or in deed, let it all be done to the glory of God. How much we work, how much we rest, how much recreation we get, how much special time we devote to being with our families, time we devote to worshiping and serving God and getting together with other Christians, all of these things, all of these things, all of our lives are to be done for the glory of God. So develop your own convictions in all of these things, and be sure your convictions glorify God. That’s the principle for Christians today.

In closing, in the interest of balance, when we think about the Sabbath observance in Old Testament times, it ultimately came from God’s example from creation, where it says, He created for six days and then He rested. So is there any relevant application of that for our time? I think so. I saw a telling USA Today poll a while back. George Gallup has also done surveys recently yielding similar results. The study was just about the effects of what has become this typical fast-paced, crazy American lifestyle.

According to the survey’s responses, the percentage of Americans who say they need more rest and relaxation in their lives, 68%. Those who say they could use a vacation, 67%. Those who often feel stressed out, 66%. Those who feel crunched for time each week, 60%. Those who feel pressured to succeed and to spend more time at their jobs, 49%. Those who feel just overwhelmed by life, 48%.

That sounds pretty accurate. Maybe fits a lot of people you know. Maybe somebody you know really well, who looks exactly like you, who has the same name as you, and who resides at your address. In our technologically driven world, the demands of our life seem to never stop. Ours is a world of deadlines, traffic jams, interviews, meetings, bills to pay, stuff to fix. It’s a world of too many obligations, too much input, too much noise, too many things coming at us all at once.

And if we’re not very disciplined, the demands of life start controlling us 24/7. We never get away from them. Our work follows us home because we’re tied to our machines, our smartphones, our personal computers. It relentlessly follows us. Has every generation needed something like the Sabbath rest as desperately as ours? So, no, we’re not under a Sabbath law as Christians with scores of regulations to worry about observing.

But don’t you think that developing our own version of a Sabbath principle is probably wise about setting aside adequate time for rest, for family activities together, for worship, for quiet reflection times, for times of fun and recreation. New Testament principles, I believe, would encourage that. For example, a friend of mine who owned a restaurant locally became convinced that he should rest more, spend more time with his family, and prioritize time to worship and learn God’s Word with his local church family. So, he took a major step. After many, many years of being open seven days a week, he closed his restaurant down on Sundays. It was what he was persuaded in his heart was right for him.

Initially, he worried about how that would affect the bottom line, but this was many years ago now, and he’s told me several times since that decision, he said, That’s the best thing I ever did for my physical, spiritual, and emotional health, and his business didn’t even suffer as a result. That’s the way it should be for Christians. The Sabbath for us isn’t about legalistic obligations, but the principle of building a time for needed rest, recreation, learning, worship into our lives. We should do so carefully considering what we believe honors God, what’s good for our families, what’s good for our bodies, what is healthy for us spiritually, and always in line with the New Testament principle: whatever we do, do it all for the glory of God. This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul.

I don’t think you can get any clearer than that regarding the Sabbath. So where do you fall in all of the percentages that Paul mentioned about this fast-paced, stressed out, overwhelmed, and crunched-for-time lifestyle we all tend to lead? There was no one who was busier than Jesus, and yet he modeled the important principles of solitude and prayer. Those two habits bring us closer to God and ultimately are the benefit of what the Sabbath was supposed to be. If you haven’t put into practice the aspect of solitude and prayer, you’re missing out on a critical component. Share this podcast with others, repost it on your social media, and help us share the Word as we fulfill the Great Commission project together.

From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.