SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/5/2022 10:10 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 “The
Incident”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 12:1
Message of the
verse: “1 At
that time Jesus went on the Sabbath through the grainfields, and His disciples
became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat.”
I believe that we have written about
how the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders of this time period mislead the
people about the Sabbath, that God has included in His Word, and made it more
of a tradition as to how that day should be honored. Jesus struck a raw nerve as we see from this
verse.
John MacArthur writes “Both the
English Sabbath, and the Greek sabbaton
transliterate the Hebrew shabat,
which has the basic meaning of ceasing, rest, and inactivity. At the end of creation “God blessed the
seventh day and sanctified it, because it He rested from all His work which God
had created and made’ (Gen. 2:3). In
honor of that day, the Lord declared it to be a special time of rest and remembrance
for His people and
incorporated its observance into the requirements of the Ten Commandments
(Ex. 20:9-11).”
This law found in the Ten
Commandments is the only one that is non-moral and purely ceremonial; and it
was unique to the old covenant and also to the people of Israel. As we look at the other nine commandments we
will see that on the other hand they pertain to moral and spiritual absolutes
and are repeated and expanded upon many places in the New Testament. However the Sabbath observance is never
recommended to Christians, much less given as a command in the New
Testament. I would like to say that I
have listened to at least parts of sermons on how the spirit of this
commandment is practiced in the church age.
I remember that my dad use to talk about not working on Sundays, and I
guess he got that by thinking that Sunday was a Sabbath day.
As Jesus began His ministry the old
covenant was still in effect and all of its requirements were binding to the
Jews, who were the special people of the old covenant. Jesus did observe every demand and met every
condition of Scripture, and this was because it was His own Word, which He came
to fulfill and not to destroy as seen in Matthew 5:17 “"Do not think that
I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to
fulfill.’” Now here is the problem and
that was for several hindered years the various schools of rabbis had added regulation
after regulation, as they went far beyond the teaching of Scripture and in many
instances actually contradicting it as seen as an example in Matthew 15:6, 9. “he is not to honor his father or his mother.’
And by this you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your
tradition” (Jesus speaking here). “‘BUT IN VAIN
DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN.’" MacArthur adds “In no area were those
additions more extensive and extreme than in regard to Sabbath observance.”
I am not saying that the Jews of
that day were not to do the things pertaining to the Sabbath day found in the
Bible, but not the thousands of things that the Pharisees added over the hundreds
of years before the time when Jesus Christ came to earth. The problem is that most of the Jews of His
day did not understand what the Scriptures had to say about the Sabbath, only
what the Pharisees said about it. The
Sabbath was to honor God, and the Jews missed the point of that truth
altogether. The Sabbath observation
during our Lord’s time that came from the Pharisees became a day of incredible
burden, and the reason was because of the thousands of man-made restrictions
regarding it, and so the Sabbath was more tiresome than the six days devoted to
one’s occupation. The problem was it was
harder to rest than to earn a living.
1/5/2022 10:37
AM
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