Christ’s Lordship Over The Law

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

Christ’s Lordship Over the Old Covenant Law and Christian Freedom

So we heard PJ just read the text and it was a little bit different from the text that we've read so far in that it's now Christ speaking. He is responding. There's a teaching aspect to this text. And so it seems fitting as we're getting a little bit more didactic.

I want to begin our study today by placing each of us in a bit of a scenario. So I'm going to put you in a pair of shoes. I'm going to plunk you down into a situation, a bit of an apologetics type of situation, maybe a polemical type of situation.

So imagine with me for a moment that you went home later today and that as you began to unwind from your afternoon at church, maybe you settled down into your favorite spot on the couch. And just as you begin to relax and put your mind at ease, you're at once startled by a firm knock on your door.

And you think to yourself, who could this be? I wasn't expecting any visitors today. Who could be at my door? But nevertheless, you proceed to the door, and as you open the door, you'll notice this is a familiar scenario.

I think I've used this before. I'm trying to get you guys ready, by the way. As you open the door, you're greeted by two missionary types who are from the World Mission Society Church of God. And as they usually do when they come from the World Mission Society Church of God, they immediately spring upon you things like God the Mother and the historical second coming of Christ in a Korean man in 1918.

And almost immediately, you're emboldened. You think, initially, you know that these are outrageous claims, and they're easy enough to repel. They're outlandish, and they're clearly unbiblical. But as they begin to see that you're a Christian, maybe you rely on the Bible, maybe you go and get your Bible, they change their tactics.

And they start asking you questions like this. They said, did you go to church today? And you say, of course I went to church. And then they ask, well, don't you know that the Sabbath is on Saturday and not on Sunday?

And that it was Constantine who changed the day of worship for Christians from Saturday to Sunday? If you had any discernment, if you were a true believer, wouldn't you know that? They might ask you, they say, please tell me that you celebrate the Passover, right?

You do participate in the Jewish festivals, the Levitical celebratory laws of the Old Testament. You can't be saved if you don't celebrate the Passover. You can't possibly be a true disciple if you don't partake in that.

Then they might ask you, do you fast during the Feast of Unleavened Bread to actively participate in Christ's suffering on the cross? And you might say, well, no, I don't. That's not a Christian thing.

Well, don't you believe in Jesus? Don't you believe that he went to the cross? Don't you believe that he suffered there? Why would you not want to participate through fasting? And with a series of other questions, the World Mission Society, Church of God, missionaries, will try to disqualify you from the Christian faith, try to discredit your proclamation or your profession of Christ as Lord and Savior.

And you might think that this is far-fetched or that I'm stretching the truth, but if you've ever had an exchange with these individuals, that's exactly what they do. They start with their doctrine, and when they see that their doctrine isn't taking, they go for the throat.

They attack your views. And this is how they win converts, by seducing religious yet doctrinally unstable people. They seduce them into their cultic system of a merit-based righteousness. Now, for some of you, you very well might feel equipped for such a barrage of questions.

You might have an understanding of biblical theology. You might know how God's covenants work. You might know your Bible so that you can open it up. You see them coming. You excitedly open your Bibles.

You know the chapter and the verse numbers. You know how to respond. But for the average Christian, this is true. For the average Christian in every church, and I believe probably for the average Christian in this church, for the average Christian who sits in the pew on Sunday, because we live in an age of widespread biblical illiteracy, it's far more likely that as they come on with those attacks, your eyes will glaze over.

You'll stumble over your words. You'll open your Bible, but you won't know exactly where to look. And Google just isn't fast enough for the questions as they come. And for the average Christian, what probably would happen is eventually they would end the conversation.

They'd feel defeated. And those wolves, those false teachers, would leave your doorstep feeling vindicated, feeling confident in their heterodox views, and go to your neighbor and try to convince them of the same.

Now let me ask you, brothers and sisters, friends, if this scenario were to happen to you this afternoon, if someone were to try to disqualify you based on feasts and fasts and Sabbath-keeping, what category would you fall into?

Would you be there ready with your Bible, chapter and verse in hand? Or would you be there with your mouth open, your eyes glazed, and maybe Google running a result on a passage you barely know, but you hope will deliver?

Would you be an able apologist or would you be a hapless victim? Do you know, dear saints, do you know why we meet for worship on Sundays and not Saturdays? Do you know why we are not bound to the Jewish feasts or to the Jewish fasts?

Do you know why we do not hold to mandatory fasting as Christians? Or if you're honest with yourselves, are these simply details that you have assumed based on the patterns and the practices of cultural Christianity?

Ask yourself that honestly. Are you ready? Well, today as we open our Bibles, the Lord Jesus Christ, interestingly enough, there's no new heresy under the sun. The Lord Jesus Christ is going to encounter the same kind of scenario.

People coming to Him, putting questions to Him about a legalistic, merit-based righteousness. And as Jesus continues to minister in Galilee and display His divine authority, the Jewish religious leaders are going to try to discredit and to disqualify Him based on their interpretation, their twisted interpretation of the Levitical laws.

And the way that this interaction plays out for us, we are the benefactors. You might read this, go over it quickly and move on, but we are the benefactors. I should say the beneficiaries, excuse me. We're the beneficiaries of this exchange because as it plays out, it's profoundly helpful as we begin to consider the Christian's relationship to the Old Testament laws.

And the Christian's relationship when people come with man-made regulations that trend toward merit-based righteousness. And so, as we study this text, the big idea, this is what we're going to find.

That here Christ displays His Lordship. We've talked about His Lordship, we've talked about His authority. Here again, Christ displays His Lordship over the Old Covenant law. His authority extends not only to the sick and to the paralyzed, but also to the very law of God.

And as Lord and God over His law, Christ tells us that He is ushering in a new order that cannot contain the old. And what this pronouncement does is it begins to foreshadow a new freedom, a new rest that Christ would bestow upon the partakers of His new covenant.

Now that was a big mouthful, but this is what our passage teaches. Christian freedom. We get a picture of the newfound freedom that Christians have in Christ. And so, let's have a look at this freedom for ourselves.

Christ the Bridegroom and the End of Legalistic Fasting

So beginning in verse 18, Christ is there and John and John's disciples, sorry, people, I better start this over again. Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting.

There we go.

And the people came and said to him, why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast? And Jesus said to them, can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?

As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment.

If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins. The wine is destroyed, and so are the skins.

But new wine is for fresh wineskins. If you have the notes inside the bulletin, you'll see that there are two principles, only two today, two principles that I want to flesh out from this passage. And the first principle that I want to show us is this.

As Lord over the law, Christ gives us freedom. As Lord over the law, Christ gives us freedom. So as we progress, as we read through chapter 2, what we're going to see is that Christ's conflict with the religious leaders continues to escalate.

When Matt preaches next week, we're going to get to see that come to a head, when the religious leaders actually begin to plot to put Christ to death. And we see this dynamic play out. So John's disciples, John the Baptist's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting.

We see that Christ was continuing to eat, he was continuing to drink, and he was going about his day freely, as were his disciples. And it would appear, if we look at this text, this caused no small disturbance among the Jews.

And to fully grasp why it was that it was such a disturbance, it's important to know a little bit about the parties that were at play, and the religious climate in the time of Christ's day. And so, when Christ came, he came during a time that placed considerable emphasis on external law-keeping.

It was a very religious, very legalistic society. And as Christ interacts with this religious, legalistic society, we see a few groups start to emerge. Last week we heard about the scribes. The scribes were essentially the experts of the law.

It was their job to study, to teach, and to administrate the law. They were the lawyers of the day. And now we see a new group amongst the scribes. We heard about them briefly, we're going to dive in a little bit deeper here.

But we see the Pharisees. I don't know how much you know about the Pharisees, and so I'll go into a little bit of depth about the Pharisees. But with the Pharisees, even though we don't know their origins, we know that they arose sometime about 160 years before Christ, during the Maccabean Revolt.

And it was by the time of Christ, when Christ came onto the scene, Josephus tells us, he was a Jewish historian, that there were about 6 ,000 Pharisees in the nation of Israel. Now that might sound like a lot, but in relation to the whole nation, that accounted for about 1 of the Jewish population.

But even as 1 of the Jewish population, their impact, their effect, their influence on the culture can't be overstated. In fact, if we were to read in passages like Matthew 23, verse 2, it was the Pharisees, along with the Sadducees, who Christ said, sat on Moses' seat.

And what this meant, essentially, is that they were regarded by the people as the authorized inheritors and keepers of the Torah. They were seen as the religious leaders, and especially the masters of the first five books of the Old Testament.

And the distinguishing feature of a Pharisee is actually aptly captured in their name. The word Pharisee comes from an Aramaic word, which means to separate or to divide. They were divisive people. They were obsessed with ritual purity, and obsessed, perseverating on maintaining their own distinct Jewish identities.

To accomplish this, what these Pharisees did was they developed a rigid interpretation of the Mosaic law. Think of someone who is a law-abiding citizen. I remember when I wanted to be a police officer.

The day I decided I wanted to be a police officer, the speed limit signs started to matter. And I didn't go 61, 62, 63 in a 60 zone. I went 60 or less. Well, here, amongst the Pharisees, they were not only content to follow the law, but they added to it.

And so, the Pharisees developed this comprehensive list of oral add-ons to the law. So, a good example that we see, a few examples that we see in our Bibles, is that they were scrupulous in their tithing.

They would tithe even from, imagine, you're sitting there at dinner time, you have your mint, and your garlic, and your pepper. They would tithe even from the herbs and spices of their meal before they would eat.

They were rigid hand-washers when it came to the ceremonial washing before a meal. It's probably relevant to the text, but they were consistent in their fasting. They would fast usually two times a week, from sun-up to sun-down, on Mondays and Thursdays.

And then, if that wasn't enough, their Sabbath observances were even more zealous. I love looking at the extra-biblical literature, because we really begin to grasp just how crazy they were in terms of their legalism.

The Talmud records that Pharisees were forbidden from looking into a mirror or lighting a candle on the Sabbath. It's kind of second-hand, but we're told that the women weren't allowed to look at a fixed mirror, lest they see a gray hair and pluck it from their head, because if they were to pluck the gray hair from their head, they would be harvesting.

Harvesting was against the law on the Sabbath. They couldn't light a candle, but they could hire a Gentile to come into their home and light a candle on their behalf. And you might find this interesting, but the Sabbath rules even extended to their livestock.

And so, if you were the chicken of a Pharisee, and you were to lay an egg on the Sabbath, this egg could not be sold to a fellow Jew. It could only be sold to a Gentile. And so, even the chickens were made to be Pharisees.

They were people that were fixated on strict adherence to the old covenant law. And while many might think that this pleased God, certainly many people in their day thought that it pleased God, it was the exact opposite.

In the sight of God, they were nothing but self-righteous hypocrites. And for this reason, we see again and again and again, Christ using the Pharisees as a negative example of those who are self-righteous, and those who put human tradition above the Word of God, thereby making the Word of God worthless.

But here, what we see is that Christ is being compared to these Pharisees, almost as if he didn't measure up to their fasting. They said, John's disciples fast, the Pharisees fast, Jesus Christ, if you are who you claim to be, why are you not fasting?

And it was in this external-based climate that Christ ministered, that fasting and prayer and almsgiving, they were considered the three main pillars of Judaism. And so, it would be like a Christian today saying, I read my Bible, I pray, but I don't go to church.

And so people would say, you need to do all three. It's not enough to just do the two, you need to do all three. And so, there were mandatory fasts that were held on the people. All this, while we only read of one true fast in the Old Testament that's mandated, that's in Leviticus 16, 29 and 30, and that was on the Day of Atonement.

And we're told that on the Day of Atonement, the people were not merely to fast, but they were to afflict themselves. It was to be a painful kind of fast. And so, here we find Jesus in this religious climate, being bound by this prescribed fasting, this prescribed afflicting of himself.

But Christ, we find here, objects. He objects to the inference that he should be fasting. And someone might ask the question, if Christ comes into Israel as the Son of God, and they fast on Mondays and Thursdays, why doesn't he just join in the fasting?

I mean, is he just being difficult at this point? Why wouldn't Christ fast? And this is what we see. Christ tells the people, he says, you cannot fast, we cannot fast, I cannot fast, my disciples cannot fast, because the bridegroom is here.

And he likens himself to a bridegroom. This would have been a picture that the Jews would have understood. The Jews understood what a wedding was like. A wedding celebration, typically in Israel, would last seven days.

During that time, the guests, in the presence of the bride and the groom, had absolutely no responsibilities except to enjoy the wedding festivities. It was a time of song and dance, of food and drink, of celebration, even when the rabbis would come to a wedding.

There's oral tradition that says that the rabbis were to stop teaching, and they were to let loose and have fun. So even the religious leaders and the teachers, as one commentator says, a wedding was not the time to abstain, but to live it up.

And so Christ says, the bridegroom is here. We're not going to mourn, we're not going to afflict ourselves, we're going to celebrate. And then when he makes reference to himself as the bridegroom, probably what many people in Christ's day missed, and certainly what most people, most Christians today, miss in their reading of the Bible is this, that Christ is using imagery.

Not just celebratory imagery, but he's using divine imagery. He's using imagery that would be used to describe or ascribe divinity to a person. The picture of the bridegroom coming to his bride is not used primarily in the Old Testament of angels.

It's not used of prophets. But the picture of a bridegroom coming to his bride is used of God and God alone. And so if we were to look in our Old Testament, and we're dealing with biblical theology, maybe I'll just pause myself for a second.

We're dealing with biblical theology, and what it means is we're going to be in the Old Testament a lot. And you might miss some of my references because I have to go fast, otherwise we'll be here all day.

But if you need to come to me afterwards and ask me for the passages, please do. And I'll bring them up. But Isaiah 62 .5 says,. For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your sons marry you.

As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you. You have God the bridegroom. Ezekiel 16 .8. And if you were here when we were doing our study in Ruth, you'll find this interesting.

When I passed by you again and saw you, this is Ezekiel 16 .8, behold, you were at the age for love, and I spread the corner of my garment over you, picture that from Ruth, and covered your nakedness.

I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord, and you became mine. Hosea 2 .19 says,. And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy.

And so when Christ says that we cannot fast right now, he's saying you cannot fast because God is here, because God the Son is in your midst. John Piper in his book on fasting, he writes,. You simply cannot fast in this situation.

It's too happy and too spectacularly exhilarating. Fasting is for times of yearning and aching and longing. That's at least the Jewish fast. Longing, aching, yearning, but the bridegroom of Israel is here after thousands of years of dreaming and longing and hoping and waiting.

He is here. The absence of fasting was a witness to the presence of God in their midst. And so what we see here is this. You've got this question about fasting. If you want to do some subheadings, you've got this external law-based system of righteousness that Christ comes into.

You've got Christ, God in human flesh, coming into the situation. And what Christ is about to do is this. He's going to give us an internal grace-based system, a grace-based order of living. So Christ says in verse 20, When the bridegroom is taken away, then they will fast.

And he describes cloths and garments and wine and wineskins. And someone might ask, what does all of that mean? What he says is this. He says that when you use the imagery of a new patch sewn on old clothing, moms, you know the situation.

Your kids burn out the knees in their pants. And so if you were to take a new piece of cloth without having washed it and dried it, I remember this. I learned this from Nicole when she was mending our children's clothes, and some of mine.

You need to wash and dry the fabric before you put it on the pants. Otherwise, when the cloth shrinks, it destroys the pants. You can't put a new cloth on old pants. Same with wine. You can't take new wine that is going to be fermented and put it into an old brittle wineskin.

It needs a new wineskin that can expand with the wine. If there's no give in the wineskin, the wineskin will break. It will ruin the wineskin, and it will ruin the wine. And so what Christ is saying here, what he's trying to get at, is that here, these people, they live in an external law-based system, and Christ, the author of the law, the author of the covenants, has come to his people, and he's bringing a new system.

A new system that the old system can't handle. A new system that the old system can't hold. And so you could say that Christ spells the coming end of the old covenant, and therefore the coming end of the old covenant law.

So when those men and women come to your door, they're coming to you with old covenant laws. They're coming to you with Old Testament demands. They're coming to you with a system of belief. They're coming to you with old wineskins.

They're coming to you with old clothes. And what Christ is saying here is, I'm giving you new wine. I'm giving you new cloth. And we see this prophesied in the Old Testament. Stay with me, brothers and sisters.

I know we're going deep here, but Jeremiah 31 -33. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them. A new covenant with the law inside an internal grace-based system.

And I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they will be my people. When Christ came in human flesh, and when he was carried off, when he was taken away, as he says in this passage, and when he died in our stead, Christ delivers every Christian, every true Christian, from slavery to the old covenant system of feasts, fasting, and dietary laws.

That's why Mark can say, when he puts in a little parenthesis in Christ's teaching, in Mark 7, verse 19, thus he declared, all foods clean. Like the old covenant tithe. That's why we don't teach tithing in this church.

Because it's old covenant.

It's old law.

It's old wineskin. Like the old covenant tithe, like Christ who replaced the mandated practice of fasting and affliction. Like the old covenant tithe, Christ replaced the mandated practice of fasting as an act of affliction to usher in a type of fasting that is characterized by freedom and worship and serving after God.

Paul wrote to the Romans in Romans 6, verse 14, he says,. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law, but under grace. We have died to that law. He wrote to the Galatians, Galatians 3, verses 24 -26,.

So then the law was our guardian.

How long?

The law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith.

So what we see when people come, if they try to hold the Passover feast over you and say, If you were a true Christian, you would hold the Passover. If you were a true Christian, you would fast on the Day of Atonement.

Or in the case of the World Mission Society, you would fast on the Day of Unleavened Bread. It's kind of an interesting thing that when the Jews would be eating, they're not eating. But such is heterodox theology, I suppose.

We have been spared. We've been rescued from the law. And yet, perhaps more than ever, Christians are more susceptible than these heresies than ever, because we don't know our Bibles, because we don't know the difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, and Christ fulfilling the Old Covenant, that He might usher in the New One, that He would make the law obsolete with its legal demands, in order that we would live no longer by the letter of the law, but by the Spirit.

Now it begs the question, Christ says this partway through, He says, the days will come, in verse 20, when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. So here we have a whole bunch of theology.

I'm going to give us some application. Is there a true Christian fast? Is it biblical for times past when we've said, we as a church, we're going to fast together. Or we encourage you to pray and fast.

We're going to teach you how to fast. Is that biblical, or should we just throw out fasting as an Old Testament practice? Old wineskin, we throw it out. Christ says, when Christ is taken, when He is taken, then they will fast.

And what we see is this, that God, that Christ, in coming in human flesh, He rescued us from slavery to the law, from bondage under the Old Covenant, and dear saints, He has freed us now to fast, not as an act of affliction, a lashing of ourselves on the day of atonement, trying to seek out our own justification, but He's given us the gift of fasting, that we would worship God, and that we would seek hard after Him.

And we see that in the New Testament. Fasting is not listed a whole lot in the New Testament, but Christ gives us some instruction in Matthew 6, verses 16 -18. In Acts 13, verses 1 -3, that's where you'll remember Paul and Barnabas and the church in Antioch gathered together in fasting and in worship, and then God sent them out.

In Acts 14, verse 23, when they went to appoint elders, when they sought hard after God to know who they should appoint and to seek His blessing on those whom they appointed, they went to Him in prayer and fasting.

If we look, I'm going to bring a little bit of early church history into this, because oftentimes these groups, these heretical groups, these false teachers will say, but so-and-so brought that in, it was the Catholic Church, it was this Roman emperor, it was this, it was that, it was this.

You can say, no. In the Didache, which is essentially written almost comparatively with the writings of John, essentially an early church history, it says, let your fast be, let not your fast, sorry, be with the hypocrites, speaking about the Pharisees and of these religious zealots, for they fast on Mondays and Thursdays.

But the new church, they said, but do your fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. So it's to say, we're going to continue the worthwhile practice of fasting, but we're not going to do it like the hypocrites, and we're even going to do it on different days to distinguish ourselves from them.

New wine calls for new fasting. And it makes me ask the question, how many of us fast? Is fasting a practice in your life? And if not, why is it not a practice in your life? Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, he says, fasting is to be turned into feasting and misery into joy.

And he says, I wonder whether it has even occurred to us that we ought to be considering the question of fasting. The fact is, is it not that this whole subject seems to have dropped right out of our lives and right out of our whole Christian thinking?

Most Christians do not think about fasting. Edward Farrell provides his commentary. He says, when the sense of God disappears, fasting disappears. Could it be that we do not fast because we do not have a big sense of God?

Again, to borrow from John Piper, in his book on fasting, he talks about a time when he was dating or courting his soon-to-be wife, and he was in South Carolina teaching at a Bible camp, and she was up being a waitress several hundred miles away, and he would write letters to her from the camp.

And every day, just before lunchtime, they would have a mail call. So you can picture this. He said he never felt as homesick as he did in that Bible camp, being away from his then-girlfriend Noel. Yes, Noel.

And every day, just before lunch, when they would call his name during the mail call, he would see the little lavender envelope that his future wife Noel would write for him, and he would take that envelope, and rather than staying for lunch, he would go off into the forest, just alone, so that he could read that letter from this woman that he loved.

And if you've been in that kind of love before, you know what that is like, just to long for that person. And he longed to hear from her more than he desired to have food. And that is really the Christian fast.

It's desiring God so much that I can put away with my worldly appetites for a time, so that I can seek after God, seek hard after Him, to know Him, not to afflict myself, but to feast, to use Martyn Lloyd-Jones' words, to feast on His goodness.

John Piper says this. I'm going to move fairly quickly here. He says, if you don't feel strong desire for the manifestation of the glory of God, it's not because you've drunk deeply from the word of God and are satisfied.

It's because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great. God did not create you for this. There is an appetite for God, and it can be awakened if you invite, I invite you, sorry, to turn from the dulling effects of food and the dangers of idolatry and say, through fasting, this much, O God, I want you.

And so, saints, we're going to move along, but let me encourage you. If you've never tried fasting, give fasting a try. And Paul even, he speaks about a different kind of fasting. If you can't abstain from food for health reasons, abstain from your phone.

Abstain from TV. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7, 5, that husbands and wives, for the purpose of prayer, can abstain from marital intimacy. But seek hard after God. God has ransomed you. He's rescued you from slavery to bondage, from slavery to the law, and he's opened himself up to you, that you would approach him with boldness and with great confidence.

I heard a story of a missionary in a mission field in Korea that I think beautifully demonstrates this. There was one experience in this missionary's life that was emblazoned on his mind. And he said it showed the sacrificial dedication to prayer and fasting in Korea.

He said,.

I'll never forget that. Brothers and sisters, are we as dedicated as that man, crabbing along so that he can seek God in prayer and fasting. The psalmist says in Psalm 63, 1, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

So we have been ransomed from that old covenant system of feasts and fasts and festivals. Next we see this, verse 23. He and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar, the high priest, and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priest to eat.

Also, he also gave it to those who were with him. And 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. We don't really understand this story the way that it could be understood.

Just because our modern Western mindset places very little emphasis on Sabbath observance. But let me transport you back. Kids, if you're paying attention, let's get back in our time machine and go to 1st century Israel.

To the nation of Israel in the 1st century, the Sabbath was profoundly important. Along with the mark of circumcision, the Sabbath was one of the defining characteristics of the people of God for thousands of years.

In Exodus, I believe it's Exodus 31, it is said to be a sign of the Mosaic covenant between God and the nation of Israel. And our English word for Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word Shabbat, which essentially means to stop, to cease, to rest.

And it was expected that in every Jewish household, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, the Jews were to put down their tools, they were to walk away from their work, and they were to dedicate themselves to solemn rest and remembrance before God.

And this was based on God's example in the creation week and on the initial giving of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, verses 8 to 11. And because Christ came to a Jewish people that were insistent on external, law-based righteousness, they had to add to the Sabbath.

They had to add. And so if we, again, look at the Jewish Mishnah and the Talmud, we see extra observances of the Sabbath. For instance, it was not only impermissible to work on the Sabbath, but it was forbidden to tie or to loose knots.

It was forbidden to sew more than one stitch. And so if your pants tore, you could sew one stitch and that was it. If someone was in a building, if we were in this building on the Sabbath, and the building collapsed, they were permitted to look for us to find survivors.

But if they saw that there were people that were dead, they would leave it until the day after the Sabbath. If you can place yourself in Christ's context, if I were to dislocate my foot on the Sabbath and both of my parents were doctors, they would have to wait until Saturday at sundown or Sunday to reset my foot.

It was illegal to heal on the Sabbath according to the Mishnah and the Talmud. The Sabbath regulations also placed, and picture Christ now walking through the fields, placed limitations on exercise and travel.