SABBATH
"The Son of
man is Lord of the Sabbath."
Luke 6:5
He did not revoke the Sabbath. He did not come to set the Sabbath
aside; but He did come to interpret---its meaning, and to safeguard it from
misinterpretation.
The doing of anything that is really necessary for the sustenance
of life does not violate the command that there shall be no work done on the
Sabbath. Of course, it must be really necessary. There is a quaint story told
in England of a farmer who was given to making use of the Sabbath for getting
hay in. A godly old man, a farm laborer, simple and uneducated, went to work
for that particular farmer. Soon there came hay time, and one Saturday the
farmer said to him: "We must get
this hay up tomorrow." The old man said, "I cannot come tomorrow, it is Sunday." "But,"
the farmer said, "this is a work of
necessity, and it must be done. Your Master said if an ass or an ox fell into a
pit on the Sabbath day you were to get it out." "Yes, sir," he
replied, “but not if you put it in on
Saturday night!" No work is permissible, if it can be done on another
day.
The Sabbath principle is far older than Judaism. It is as old as
humanity. It is rooted in the inherent necessity of human nature. Go back to
Genesis, and there you find it. There the Sabbath of man was the seventy day in
the creative process; but it was the first in human existence, because the
seventh day of creation was man's first day of life. Thus originally man's
first day was' his Sabbath day, it was not the seventh day. It was God’s
seventh day of work, and His seventh day of work was man's first day of life,
and was his Sabbath. Out of the first day of rest, man went to his work. Under
the Hebrew economy it was the seventh day; man worked his way into rest. The
resurrection changed everything, and men of the new race went back to the
original ideal of the first
We are no longer working into rest. We are resting and working as
the result of our perpetual rest. But, the principle of the Sabbath abides; and
our Lord has revealed here the fact that the principle of the Sabbath day is
certainly a provision for rest, but principally for worship. That is the
profound underlying meaning of the Sabbath. It is not indolence; it is not
doing nothing; but it is ceasing all the work necessary for the here and, the
now, for the temporal and the material, in order that we, may enter into His
courts, that we may hold fellowship with Him. Christ has not violated that. He
says He is Lord of that; but He broke through the super-added traditions that made
the Sabbath a burden that could not be kept.
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