PP The Fourth Commandment: God Guards His Day! Text Exodus 20:8-11 Part 5, 3/12-13, 2011 Illus Years ago, in New England, a young Puritan Pastor skated his way to church along the frozen roads, creating an uproar with the Elders. It was Sunday, the Sabbath, and they were concerned that their pastor broke it! After passionately debating what their ruling should be, they decided that the Pastor could skate to church, but he wasn t allowed to enjoy it! The Fourth Commandment is the most controversial of them all So here is my appeal to us as we begin to look at the Sabbath Law: remember what Paul PP taught us in Romans 14, One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. (5-6) PP In Colossians Paul wrote, Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 2:16 If a Christian believes that the Sabbath is still in effect today, then let him/her be fully convinced, in other words, let them live according to their conscience Do not let this belief, either way, cause disunity Friends, the Ten Commandments are called by James the the law of liberty. James 2:12 We are a freed people, freed from the bondage of sin and freed to love God and people The subject of the Sabbath Command is so big, such a dominant theme in Scripture and such a cause of controversy, that it cannot be treated adequately in one sermon My hope is that this will provide a basis for understanding the significance of the Fourth Commandment to us today, and motivate you to deeper study and reflection Like all of them, this Commandment teaches us How the Redeemed of God should live? We saw in the First commandment that we must worship the right God! The second Commandment was distinct from it, we must worship the right God the right way The Third Commandment shows us that we worship Him the right way when we lift up His name, the name of Jesus Christ, through our speech and our conduct All three of these commandments were about worshiping God, and the fourth is the same The Commandment begins with: Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. PP Remember means to mark something so that you will recognize it and not forget it We mark trails so we don t get lost, and we also mark our bibles with highlighters, setting a verse apart from the rest, making it distinct so we will remember it God told His people to mark off one day of the week, separate it from the other six days and make it holy, keep it distinct, and a day to the Lord your God. (20:10) That day was to be marked, and kept distinct by making God the focus of worship So we approach this commandment carefully as it guides our worship of God PP 1-The Sabbath Commandment was a Gift from God PP In Mark 2, Jesus makes an incredible statement: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. (27) The Sabbath was a gift that was to provide for His people what they needed for life PP a) It was a gift to Remember to Rest
Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Exodus 20:9-10 PP The word Sabbath means rest, or technically, to cease from labor It was a gift and a help for the people of Israel, who had been slaves in Egypt for 400 years, and Egypt had no weekend, no Sabbath, and Israel had no day off God never designed the human body, or any animal for perpetual work The bow that is always bent (stretched taut) will soon cease to shoot straight. Greek Proverb On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. (10) Not just for masters while they make their servants and animals keep working, all of Israel Billionaire Bill Gates was asked why he didn t believe in God, and he answered Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning. The whole community is to stop work, and they were to stop together at the same time, even PP when it was difficult: Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest. In plowing time and in harvest you shall rest. Exodus 34:21 The Sabbath was a gift of rest from our hard working God, but it has consistently been distorted The Jews knew the tendency to distort and corrupt the perfect law of God, and they experienced the terrible consequences of that So they built a fence around the Perfect Law of God, a fence that at first was to protect it from people breaking in and corrupting it intentionally or unintentionally PP The Torah is conceived as a garden and its precepts as precious plants. Such a garden is fenced round for the purpose of [preventing] willful or even unintended damage. Likewise, the precepts of the Torah were to be 'fenced' round with additional inhibitions that should have the effect of preserving the original commandments from trespass." J. Israelstam, Aboth This fence gradually became considered greater than God s Word and upheld severely You see, Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy forbade work, but what was work? So the Rabbis laid down 39 different classifications called fathers of work and each one had dozens of subdivisions One father of work was carrying a burden, but what a burden was needed further defining Can a man lift his child on the Sabbath? The answer was yes, unless that child had a stone in his hand, for the stone is a burden You could only untie a knot if it could be done with one hand and you couldn t kill a biting flea on the Sabbath Today where large concentrations of Jews live, hotels are programmed to stop on every floor from Friday evenings to Saturday evenings, because pushing a button closes the electrical circuit violating the prohibition of building on the Sabbath The gift of the Sabbath became a day of prohibitions, 1,521 of them, a massive burden This spread beyond Jews, as one person in Scotland was hauled into court for smiling on Sunday The Puritans forbid shaving or combing hair on Sunday
One sea Captain was put in stocks because after a two year voyage he met his wife at the gate on a Sunday and kissed her, illegal on the Sabbath At the end of the sixth day of work, God saw everything He had made, and behold, it was very good. Genesis 1:31 God rested the following day, marking off that day from the rest of the week We image God when we work hard 6 days and when we rest well the remaining day That day of rest was blessed by God, meaning that it was a gift for us to help us live in His favor The day of rest was more than sitting around doing nothing, it was reflecting on God s hand of grace and mercy seen throughout the previous week, it was time of enjoyment with one another Is there a regular day we mark off from the rest of the week that we rest in God s grace and mercy and worship Him? PP b) It was a gift to Remember their Redemption Moses had led the people to the boundary of the Promised Land, after 40 years, but his journey would go no further, a price he would pay for his disobedience Still, he had one more task to perform: he would remind his people once more to know, and uphold the Ten Commandments, the eternal Moral Law of God We read of it in Deuteronomy 5, and all Ten Commandments have the same basic wording, Except for the Fourth There is an important change in the basis for the Commandment: You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. (5:15) While the Exodus version told them to remember their Creator, here it is the Redeemer in mind God s people were to desist from labor, and reflect on their powerful God who gave salvation You were a slave but God brought you out PP Do you remember when Jesus was teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath and a woman who had been possessed by a demon for 18 years was there It had crippled her so she could not even stand up straight and Jesus laid His hands on her and said Woman, you are freed from your disability Luke 13:12 Furiously the Synagogue Ruler confronted Jesus for breaking the Sabbath Our Lord s reply was Ought not this woman be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath Day? The Sabbath of all days should be a celebration and a remembrance of freedom from bondage Israel was to regularly cease from work, marking a distinct day to remember that their God was a redeemer God But this eroded over time which makes Jesus first sermon in His public ministry all the more PP significant: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord s favor. Luke 4:18-18 There is a freedom available to all who are in bondage to sin, and it is through Christ PP 2-The Sabbath Commandment Pointed forward to Christ and His Work The people heard God given the Ten Commandments, the Moral Law
They begged Moses to intercede for them and Moses went up to the darkness where God was While there God taught Moses the civil law, laws that guide their social life as the people of God, and in Exodus 23:12, we see the Sabbath as part of that law Then Moses goes down and calls Aaron, Nadab, Abihu and 70 elders up on the mountain Before they ascend, Moses tells the people all that God had just taught him (24:3) Then they go up, and Moses and Joshua leave them and go up higher to and then Moses by Himself goes into the cloud of glory, and is now there for 40 days And while there, God taught him all the ceremonial law, laws that guided their worship to be the holy people of God as God is holy And at the end of the teaching on the ceremonial law, we find once again the Sabbath Command My point is that the Sabbath Law was found in the Moral Law (the Ten commandments), the Civil or social law, and the ceremonial law PP I believe we see this distinction in Leviticus 26:46, These are the statutes and rules and laws that the LORD made between Him and the people of Israel through Moses on Mount Sinai. Notice with me in Exodus 31 a repeated and important point to us: You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, Above all you shall keep My Sabbaths, for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you. 31:13 Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a covenant forever. 31:16 It is a sign forever between Me and the people of Israel 31:17 Repeatedly, God stresses that the Sabbath Law was for the people of Israel It was a sign of His covenant with them that they would be His holy, set apart people When you travel to a destination you have never been before, you look for the signs, or markers that point the way to your destination The sign of the Sabbath Commandment was pointing forward and Paul tells us the destination PP Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Colossians 2:16-17 The Sabbath Law was pointing Israel to Christ, but specifically the work of Christ that would provide for those who trust in Him, rest And when Christ came, He put an end to the civil law of the Sabbath by making the payment for Sabbath breakers And when He died on the cross, He fulfilled the ceremonial law of the Sabbath by providing our Righteousness, His blood sanctifying us and making us holy We aren t made holy by keeping the Sabbath, only through the finished work of the redemption Jesus fulfilled the Fourth Commandment as He did all the others: He is the God above all He is the image of God, the exact representation of Him His name is above all names The Old Testament Sabbath pointed to the full and final rest that can only be found in Him There is no need to strive for salvation, but rest in the finished work of Christ PP He invites anyone to Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest. Matthew 11:28 We rest in Christ, having no need to strive for our salvation, depending on His Work not our own To continue to observe the civil and ceremonial Sabbath that belonged to Israel, would be to say that Jesus cannot provide that rest for my soul The civil law has expired and the ceremonial law has been fulfilled, both because of Christ Yet the moral law of the Sabbath endures for us today God gave to Moses, when he had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God. Exodus 31:18 The Moral Law, written on enduring stone, by the infallible finger of God, endures forever because it reflects God s character and expectations PP 3-How does the Fourth Commandment apply to us today? The question that most are waiting for is What does this Command look like to us? PP One person has said this: Christ s saving work has transformed the weekly Sabbath. It is no longer the seventh day but the first, and it is no longer called the Sabbath, but the Lord s Day. PP B.B. Warfield explained it Christ took the Sabbath into the grave with Him and brought the Lord s Day out of the grave with Him on the resurrection morn. What is important, it seems to me, is that we relearn the moral reason for the Sabbath, and apply it to our lives today as live in redemptive community together It is to be a regular, consistent day distinct from the rest of the week for the purpose of rest If a job doesn t allow that day to be Sunday, then it should be another day for the same purpose It is to be a day to that sets us apart from the people of the world Israel was the only nation in the world during the Old Testament that had one day set apart from the rest of the week We are to be different than the people in the world, not living apart from them, but living differently from them It is to be a day that is a blessing, not a burden we are a freed people, not to live to ourselves, but to love God with all our hearts and love our neighbors as ourselves We should reflect on God s provision and blessings of grace in our lives and sing new songs of praise to Him It is to be a day where we reflect on how great God is that He has brought us out from the Egypt of our sin and freed us from bondage Where would we be without Christ? A day that we, as much as it is possible, worship God together and boast on His greatness It should be a day that moves us our eyes forward to the Sabbath rest that remains, that eternal rest called heaven And while that is the future rest of all Christians, now we work in the kingdom of God He sends us out to the fields, and from Christ s own example on the Sabbath, what better day is there to care for those in need and bondage than on the Lord s day? Friends, the Fourth Commandment is part of the Law of Liberty Don t let yourself be shackled into legalism and prohibitions one day a week Let that one day a week be a week that your soul finds even deeper rest in Christ!