The Sabbath

"Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath." Mark 2:27,28

 

Does this text mean that the Ten-Commandment Sabbath was done away with?  No my friend, the Jesus of the Old Testament is the same Jesus in the New Testament. So to understand this text, let’s go back to the Old Testament and lay the foundation for the Sabbath. When we lay the proper foundation, which is Jesus Christ and what He taught, then all the worldly philosophy will drop off.

 

Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Always keep that first and foremost in your thinking. "Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray." 1 John 3:7

 

To begin our study of the Sabbath, we must go right back to the beginning of time. Genesis 2:2, 3 – "By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from all His work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that He had done."

 

The seventh dayis the only day God blessed and made holy. 

You will find no text anywhere else in the Bible where God blessed any other day. Yet, if you look at a calendar, you will find that the majority of the worldly churches do not keep holy His one and only blessed and sanctified seventh day.

 

On the other side of the coin, no where in the Bible does God remove that blessing and holy sacredness from the seventh day. Yet most of the worldly churches bend over backwards in attempting to change the Sabbath from the seventh day of the week to the first day of the week. But you will never find the change in the Bible.

 

As you will learn later, it was the Catholic Church that changed the Sabbath from the seventh day of the week to the first. This was in order to accommodate the pagans who worshiped on the first day of the week.

 

"The seventh day of the Jewish week--from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday — the Sabbath commemorates the seventh day of creation, on which God rested. It is a divinely appointed day of rest (Exodus 20:8), to be devoted to prayer and study, and its observance is a mark of Jewish faith."*

 

"Christians have generally considered the Sabbath to be fulfilled by Christ's Sabbath rest in the tomb and celebrate, instead, the Lord's Day (Sunday) as a weekly day of worship. It is the first day of the new week, symbolic of the unending Day of the Lord, the day of Christ's resurrection and of his expected return. Some Protestant groups traditionally call Sunday the Sabbath and apply to it the Old Testament Sabbath regulations (Sabbatarianism). In many places these have been given the force of civil law (BLUE LAWS)."*

 

The above quote is from the secular world. The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. Yet it is not from God. My Bible tells me that we are not to accommodate the world. In fact, we are not to live as the world in any way. We are to walk the very narrow path of obedience to Jesus and Jesus only.

 

Many claim that the Sabbath was given only to the Jews. That it is a Jewish institution. The rest of the world can make up their own day of worship. It is claimed by many churches that since it was a part of the Ten Commandments given to the Jews on Mount Sinai that we don’t need to keep it.

 

Let us continue with that line of reasoning.

Since "Thou shalt not steal" was also given on Mount Sinai to the Jews, then it also is not for you and me. Therefore, I can make up my own rules for what I can and can not steal or take from you. If I like your car, I guess it is OK to take it from you. Right?

 

Or, how about the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not murder." Is it OK to murder since it was not given to the world, but to the Jews? Evidently God only wanted them to live without murdering, stealing, committing adultery and coveting. Only they were to honor their parents, keep the Sabbath and honor God by not worshiping other gods.  None of that applies to you and me, according to the worldly churches. So it is OK for me to rob you, rape and kill your family. Not a problem with the churches.  Right?

 

But that is not the case. The same righteous laws that were given on Mount Sinai to the Israelites, were also given to the world. The Israelites, as we learned earlier, were only the depositories for the Law that was to be radiated through them to the world.