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Yesterday, we established that the solution to our restlessness can be found in Sabbath-like rest from the sources of our restlessness. Tomorrow, we will look at how practically we as Christians do that in the 21st Century. But first, we must look at what Sabbath is not for today’s Christian. And the best place to start is the origins of Sabbath itself.
When God handed down the Ten Commandments to Moses at Mount Sinai, he commanded that the Israelites rest on the seventh day of each week. This was meant to be a sign of God’s covenant with His people. And, of course, Sabbath was modeled after God’s own day of rest from the work of creation on the first seventh day.
In the Old Testament, the Sabbath was observed with strict rules and regulations. For example, the Israelites were prohibited from lighting fires (Exodus 35:3), gathering food (Exodus 16:23-29), and selling goods in the marketplace (Nehemiah 10:31). And the punishment for intentionally violating the Sabbath was nothing short of death (Exodus 31:14-15).
Over time, the Israelites took the Sabbath to its most legalistic extremes, to the point in which, by the time Jesus came to earth, they even viewed healing on the Sabbath as a sin. When the Pharisees saw Jesus healing and picking grains in a field on the Sabbath in Matthew 12, they confronted him, calling out his seeming unlawfulness. Jesus responded by proclaiming “the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8) signaling that a new covenant was here in the person of Christ. In Mark’s account of the same events, Jesus is recorded as saying that “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In other words, Jesus is saying that through Him, the Sabbath is no longer a command of the Law. Instead, it is a gracious gift for the restless.
What did Jesus mean that Sabbath is now for man? How, practically, can we take advantage of that gift? And how can we rest regularly today, without making our rest legalistic and life-sucking? Those are the questions we will answer in the final day of this plan.
About this Plan
“Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.” Never before have so many of us felt the restlessness Augustine described with this famous sentence. But what is the solution to our lack of true rest? As this three day plan will show, the solution partially lies in viewing the ancient practice of Sabbath through a different lens—through the lens of “Thee”—Jesus—our ultimate source of peace.
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