The Sabbath Was Made for Man
We live in a timber frame house that mostly my four sons and I built. The advantage of a timber frame is that once the frame is up, the roof is on, and the outside skin wraps it, there is no hurry to finish. This was a necessary part of the plan.
We were living in the two-bedroom house that was on the property when we bought it. When I would come home from work in the evenings and on weekends and holidays we worked on the house. It took us six years. There is always stuff to do the finish up, and after six years we had changed our minds about some things and were starting to fix them.
One day I got home from work and told everybody to get their bedding, we were moving in. I knew we would never really get the house “finished,” and we would have to bite the bullet and make the move. Lying in bed that night I looked at the vaulted ceiling for the first time. We started seeing the house as our home instead of what needed to be done next. Some things we were talking about doing never got done, but we have been able to enjoy the house. There are mistakes that nobody notices but me. I left them because they remind me of people who helped me work on the house, and times spent with the boys learning carpentry.
Stopping the work and enjoying the house is what the Sabbath rest is like. All four gospels record controversies between Jesus and the Pharisees as to what the Sabbath is about. Jesus kept healing people on the Sabbath (frequently in the synagogue) and the Pharisees kept complaining about it.
Rabbi David Fohrman has a lot of material available (alephbeta.com) about the law and the Sabbath. In the beginning the earth was formless and void—uninhabitable. It was dark, wet, and cold; there was no place to stand. But God was doing just fine. He didn’t need to create a world for himself. He carved out an area in His world and created a space where we could live.
When God brought the Hebrews out of Egyptian bondage, He did not take them to the land of promise right away. They went into the desert to re-learn His ways. This took forty years and another generation. In the desert He had Moses build a tabernacle so Jehovah would have a special place to live in the midst of His people—a carve out inside the carve out.
God also carved out a day from the week for a Sabbath rest. He had rested on the seventh day of the creation week; now the people would rest from their creation of the tabernacle. Rabbi Fohrman points out that the 613 laws that Jews observe have to do with the work of creating the tabernacle. It required carpentry, so that is prohibited on the Sabbath. The tabernacle required fabric, so all aspects of producing fabric are prohibited on the Sabbath. The same for producing light (the lampstand) and so on for 613 prohibitions.
What started as emulating God turned into ritual and resulted in hardened hearts. When the Pharisees confronted Jesus about His disciples breaking the Sabbath rules, Jesus explained that the Pharisees did not understand the Sabbath. “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” He pointed out that the priests work on the Sabbath and that the law of Moses required circumcision on the eighth day even if it fell on a Sabbath.
Jesus never hesitated to heal on the Sabbath. All the gospels have at least one Sabbath healing, and Luke records five such events, most with the Pharisees present and usually during a discussion about what the Sabbath is about.
Doing things our way doesn’t work. Luke tells of a woman bent over by a spirit for 18 years and John relates the story of the man at the pool waiting for healing waters for 38 years. He had no one to move him into the waters when they moved but still was there day after day thinking something would change. Jesus healed them both on the Sabbath because they needed relief from terrible burdens.
Jesus brought the Kingdom of heaven to those two, but the Kingdom has come upon us all. We need to learn to stop our labors and enter in to the Kingdom.
I didn’t start enjoying my house until I stopped working and moved in. We kept doing things to make it better, but it was just a project (and some days a burden) before we moved in. That is the way the Sabbath is. You must stop working and move in. Enjoy God. Look around and see what He is doing. He carved out an amazing space for us, but we can only enjoy it if we carve out a space for Him, stop striving, and move in.