The Lord of the Sabbath

Here is a sermon I preached some time ago on the subject of Sabbath observance from Mark 2:23-28. Enjoy!

“A few years ago a friend telephoned me with an urgent request” writes Philip Ryken. “‘Phil’, he said, ‘I’m calling to ask a favor. I need the most precious thing you have’.” (Philip Ryken, Written in Stone, pp 101) What do you think he was asking for? The most precious thing he had? It was some of his time of course.  Time is a precious commodity. We have to prioritize what we can and can’t do with our time. In fact, I’m sure you’ll agree that the way we use the limited time resources available to us says a great deal about the true priorities about our lives. How we invest our time unmasks what is really dear to us. It is a sad and alarming mark of the contemporary church’s true spiritual condition, therefore, to observe that Sunday has been reduced to the Lord’s hour instead of the Lord’s Day.

Now there are those who resist the idea that one day in seven is to be set apart wholly to God, for the spiritual benefits of our souls. It is too hefty a tax on my time, we tell ourselves. Sunday is ‘me-time’, and you’ll be restricting my enjoyment of ‘me-time’ if you call me to set the day apart for ‘God’. It is enough for me to turn up at church, surely? By mid-day I feel I have paid my religious dues. And after that my time is mine, to be spent in whatever way I prefer, and God had best keep his hands off.

Confronted with the idea of Sabbath our immediate reaction is to think about all the fun we are going to miss out on isn’t it? We think of the Sabbath as a burdensome, ugly, heavy, unhappy day, marked by morbid introspection and arid, joyless, bare duty; a day where none of the things we really like to do are permitted. Well, interestingly that view of the Sabbath shares some central common convictions with the Pharisees who met Jesus in our passage for today, in Mark chapter 2. Will you look at it with me? Mark 2:23-28.

What was the Pharisees’ trouble here? They caught Jesus and his disciples picking and eating ripe grain on the Sabbath day. They considered that a form of ‘work’ and saw it therefore as a transgression of the Sabbath law. Now these guys were so zealous for Sabbath observance that they had developed a whole system of additional regulations, over and above the simple command of God, designed to ‘help’ people stay as far away as possible from breaking the Sabbath. They had thirty-nine distinct categories of prohibited activity on the Sabbath, and number three on the list was ‘reaping grain’. The disciples were guilty of reaping grain on the Sabbath. So they level their accusations, with just a touch of glee, no doubt.

And Jesus’ response is fascinating because it reveals what is wrong both with the Pharisees’ thinking about the Sabbath, and the common ground those of us- who hate the whole idea of a Sabbath day share with them. Will you look with me at Jesus’ reply?  He defends himself by explaining three things that they had failed to properly grasp: First he shows them scriptural precedent in verse 25-26. Secondly he shows them the Sabbath’s purpose in verse27. And then finally he explains his own identity in verse 28. (The scriptural precedent, the Sabbath’s purpose and the savior’s identity)

So first, let’s notice the scriptural precedent Jesus offers in his own defense. Look with me at verses 25-26, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and hungry, he and those with him: how he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the showbread, which is not lawful to eat, except for the priests, and also gave some to those who were with him?”

Isn’t it interesting that Jesus does not do here, what we sometimes do when we are challenged over the issue of Sabbath breaking? He doesn’t dismiss the Pharisee’s questions out of hand as little more than nit-picking. He turns to scripture. Now that is the way to address any issue of controversy. There is no other route to a quiet conscience than this one. We must not simply say I reject this because I don’t like it, or it doesn’t suit my lifestyle, or it makes me uncomfortable. We must ask instead- ‘what does the mouth of God say on the matter? What does the Lord say about it in his word? God alone has authority to bind my conscience’. Settle your duty squarely on the word alone.

Well Jesus does just that. He takes the Pharisees to 1 Samuel 21:1-6. King David was laboring to establish the kingdom of God. Weary, hard pressed, and starving, the only available bread was to be found on the altar in the temple of the Lord. No-one was allowed into the Temple or to eat that bread except the priesthood. Yet, Jesus, says David’s action in taking the bread and eating it was no sin.

The man was starving. His men needed food. Don’t you get it, Pharisees? God desires mercy not sacrifice. If we interpret the law to exclude extremes of human necessity- so poor men starve- we distort the law, and we malign the character of the God whose righteousness is exemplified in it. The passage about the morally justifiable action of David, which nevertheless contravened the explicit letter of the law, is one the Pharisees seem to have missed apparently. They had becomes sticklers for the letter of the law and careless about the spirit of it. They had become passionate about doing the external acts the law requires and forgetful of the inner attitude of heart the lawgiver demands. The law more than the Lord ruled their lives. Like David and his men of old, Jesus says that he and his disciples understood the true intention of the law better than the Pharisees ever could.

And that takes us to the second thing Jesus says in reply to them. Look at verse 27. Here’s the conclusion he draws from his reference to David, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”

Now notice that. He takes them back before David, to creation itself, and he points to the original purpose of the Sabbath.

Here we get to see the fundamental agreement that exists between the Pharisees on the one hand, who were zealots for the minutiae of external Sabbath observance, and those of us today on the other hand, who are desperate to avoid the Sabbath principle altogether. Just like the Pharisees we think the Sabbath is about things you don’t get to do. That is the common presupposition that we share with Jesus’ opponents.  The Pharisees loved the Sabbath for precisely the same reason many of us hate it: they thought it was  restrictive and prohibitive and focused altogether on things you were not supposed to do  on that day. But here is the thing: when we think like that we show that we don’t understand at all why God gave the Sabbath in the first place.

We think, like Pharisees, that the Sabbath is a burdensome restriction placed upon human beings to limit them and proscribe certain behavior. But Jesus says you’ve got it all backwards. You were not made to fit the Sabbath law, as if God were some cosmic sadist who had come up with a cruelly restrictive idea and made human beings, like lab rats, to torture with it. No, no, the Sabbath was given for your good. God made the Sabbath for you, for your rest, for your blessing, for your joy.

It is one day in seven, ring fenced for the cultivation of your soul, the restoration of your body, and the refreshing of your mind. It is one day when the Lord calls us to look up from the daily grind to the heavenly glory, to fill our horizons with Christ and not just with our crises.

Every single day Jesus stand before you in the gospel and says ‘come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden I will give you rest’. But on the Sabbath day he comes closer and speaks louder than on other days. The Sabbath day is intended to be a sign etched into the weekly rhythm of our lives, a pattern, regulating how we function, that drums into our minds the intimate connection between coming to the Lord in worship, and finding rest for our bodies, minds, and hearts.

The Puritan Thomas Watson says of the Sabbath, “When the falling dust of the world has clogged the wheels of our affections, that they can scarce move towards God, the Sabbath comes, and oils the wheels of our affections, and they move swiftly on… The heart which all the week was frozen, on the Sabbath melts with the word… The Sabbath is the market day of the soul, the cream of time.” (Thomas Watson, The Ten Commandments, pp95, 97)

It is the market day of the soul the cream of time. Your frozen heart melts with the Word on the Sabbath. The Sabbath, in short, was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. It is a day of grace. It is the servant of the gospel. It is the day for soul renewal and refreshing. Today Jesus calls you to come to him, with the megaphone of his word preached, to find rest for your soul.

The crucial mistake the Pharisees made in their legalism, and we make in our defensive selfishness, is that we think the Sabbath is about what you don’t get to do any more, when the truth is, it is about making time, for just one day in your week, each week, to give yourself to the richest and best, most beautiful and joyous thing you can- the pursuit of God and the savoring of Jesus Christ.

“Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong but too weak”, writes C. S. Lewis. “We are half hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”  (cited in Piper, Desiring God, p99)

One of the biggest reasons we find the Sabbath, not a delight, but a drudgery, is that our desires are too weak. We are too easily pleased. We are fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joys are offered to us. We protest that the Sabbath is a burdensome obligation that will spoil our joy. I answer that you don’t understand why the Sabbath was created. It was created precisely for your deepest joy- the joy of communion with God in Christ by his Spirit through the gospel in the company of his people. The Sabbath is a glimpse and a type of the eternal rest of heavenly bliss. There are tasters of eternal pleasures at God’s right hand forevermore available to you on the Sabbath day.  If we really understood that, we would gladly forsake whatever ordinary employments occupy us on the Lord’s Day in order to give ourselves to the pursuit of the deeper joys available today.

Now at this point- almost certainly some of you are arguing with me. You are just not persuaded that the Sabbath continues to bind Christians. ‘After all that was an Old Testament thing wasn’t it?’ The Pharisees probably expected Jesus to say something like that in reply to their challenge of verse 24. They thought Jesus would say- ‘The Sabbath? No. Now that I have come, you can forget about all that’. That is what they were hoping for, because then they could pounce!  But he doesn’t do that at all. What he does do is offer an important argument for the perpetual obligation of the Sabbath principle. Look at what he says again.

First he takes them back to creation. It’s not primarily a Mosaic thing, in other words- as if the Sabbath was the creation of the Old Covenant law and that was all. Nor is it first of all a ceremonial thing- as if the Sabbath was a feature of the rituals of Old Covenant worship and nothing more. It’s not merely an ancient Hebrew civic thing- as if the Sabbath has its roots in the social regulations of ancient Israelite jurisprudence and little else. It certainly took on all of those dimensions in time, but the Sabbath itself is founded on something more enduring and more ancient and universal than that. It is rooted in creation itself. In Genesis 2:2-3 we read, “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. ³ Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” The pattern of one day in seven is set into the roots of creation itself.

From the Creation to the Resurrection, the Sabbath day was the seventh day of the week. From the Resurrection onwards the day we find being set apart, and called the Lord’s Day, is the first day.The seventh day marked the end of creation, when God rested from his work. The first day was the beginning, the day the Lord made light. The Lord’s Day is the first day of a new creation when Jesus rose again to bring life and immortality to light.

So Jesus’ beef with the Pharisees was really not over whether the Sabbath ought to continue, now that he has come. It was over what the Sabbath is all about. Is it about law and external does and don’ts and burdensome restrictions designed to repress joy, and display personal fervor, so that everyone will know how holy you are by the rigor of your Sabbatarianism? No, it’s about setting aside lesser pleasures for the pursuit of deeper pleasure: the relief and rest of your soul in Jesus. The Sabbath is for our time what a fast is for our diet. We put ordinary dietary norms aside in a fast as a way to say- ‘Lord I want you, your presence, your fellowship, your blessing, your intervention, so much that it is more basic to the nourishment of my life than food is to my body.’ Fasting is an expression of the soul’s longing for God.

In much the same way, in the fast of our time called ‘the Sabbath’, we set aside one whole day, that we might draw nearer to God throughout the week. We step away from other things that might ordinarily and legitimately occupy our time in order to get the one thing needful, and like Mary in the gospel story, to give up our Martha-esque busyness for a time, in order to just stop and sit at the Master’s feet and learn from him.

Then thirdly notice that Jesus points to himself in verse 28. “Therefore the Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath.” First he points to the scriptural precedent, then he points to the Sabbath’s true purpose and finally he points to the Savior’s true identity. And what is immediately clear, right on the surface of the text, is that Jesus is making an extraordinary claim. It’s staggering! He is the Lord of the Sabbath. Now what does that mean?

There are two complementary versions of the Ten Commandments, in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. In the fourth commandment in Exodus 20:9, which calls us to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, we read the reason annexed to the commandment, “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 LORD of the Sabbath here, do you see, is the creator who made the Sabbath day and consecrated it for holy purposes? In the Deuteronomy 5 version, there’s another reason annexed to the fourth commandment. This time we are told to “remember you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD your God brought you out from there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath.” So in the Deuteronomy 5 passage the Lord of the Sabbath is the God who redeemed Israel from bondage and saved them and set them free.

So who is Jesus claiming to be here in Mark 2:28? He is claiming to be the Lord, the creator and the redeemer, the maker of all things and the savior of sinners. Creation is a reason to keep the Sabbath but so is redemption. Redemption of course finds it climactic expression, not in the Exodus under Moses, nor in the sacrifices and rituals of the Sabbath under the Levitical priesthood, but in the Cross and Empty tomb of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That is why it fits that the Lord’s Day replaces the Old Covenant Sabbath. The seventh day Sabbath looked forward to the final rest when all the work was done, redemption was accomplished and creation made new. The first-day-Lord’s-Day makes a new start, initiates a fresh creation, with a redeemed people, and a resurrected second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ. The work has been done. ‘It is finished’ was his shout. Christ has come. He died. Sin’s dominion has been overthrown. Sinners have been bought and paid for. And he has risen so that new life might come to all who rest in him. The Lord’s Day is a gospel day, a day of gracious opportunity. Christ, who rose today 2 millennia ago, meets with his people today still. He comes to us today, he offers himself to you today. He can give you rest of soul from the torment of guilt and shame, of self accusation, or the drive of pride and performance. He can give you rest from the constant demands of slavery to appetite, or from bondage to pride. He can set you free.

Today is the Lord’s Day. The Lord of the Sabbath calls you to come to him and enter his rest. The Sabbath, Jesus, says is about me. Come to me and I will give you rest.

Let me close with some simple practical steps you can implement to help you use the Lord’s Day to the benefit of your souls.

1. Prepare the night before. Pray for the Sabbath day. Pray for the preaching and the worship, the quiet times and the family times. Prepare your heart. Get plenty of rest so that you will wake excited about all God has in store for your soul on the Lord’s Day.
2. Never forget that the Sabbath day is a gospel day. It is about grace not guilt. Use the day to come afresh to Jesus. You have spent the day well if you have fled from yourself to him.
3. Use the day for quiet prayer and reading the Bible and other Christian books. Maybe you complain that all the week long reading, rest, prayer time gets squeezed. Not today. Use the day to lift your eyes to the Lord.
4. Take time to be with family. If you have young children, do you use the catechism at home to teach them the essential of the faith? Help them to love the Lord’s Day and call the Sabbath a delight. Make it a day of fun with things that only happen on Sundays, so that Sunday is a day to look forward to.
5. Do not forsake the meeting of yourselves together as some are in the habit of doing. Get to church. And can I encourage you to come back again at night? A helpful way to keep the day separate and distinct and set apart for spiritual blessing for you and your family is to bracket the whole day in the exercises of morning and evening worship. It is the Lord’s Day not the Lord’s hour.
6. Turn off the TV. I’m not collapsing back into Pharisaism here. I’m not saying that it is always wrong absolutely to watch something edifying or relaxing or fun on the Lord’s Day. I am saying that you have six days to pump your head with TV. Do your soul a favor and on this day fill your head with sustained thoughts of God and give your eyes, and ears, and brain a rest from endless sound bites and action packed imagery.
7. Take time for fellowship. Fill your day with Christian friends who will laugh with you. Feasting on the Sabbath day is most appropriate. It is a day of celebration and an anticipation of the eternal feast to come. Eat with friends. Laugh with them. And talk about the Lord Jesus with them.  Come to the manse on Sunday nights and join us as we try to practice exactly that.
8. Get some rest. Play with the kids. Go for a walk. Have lunch with friends. Read. Pray Sing. But get some rest. It is a day for resting.

Today is the market day of your soul.  Are you going to use it to stock the larder of your mind and heart and affections with the riches of gospel grace available to you in Jesus? Or will you glut your spiritual appetite on the white bread of empty second best self serving and ultimately not very satisfying instant pleasures?

Amen