Mark 2:23-28 – Lord of the Sabbath

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The Sabbath as Rest and Dependence on God

Today on the RAF Report, you're going to get a message I preached at my church, the Master's Church of Bucks County. The reason I want to give this to you is because I want to go over the issue of the Sabbath.

There's lots of discussion within Christianity on what is the Sabbath. And well, I'm going to give some things from my Jewish background that will help to explain it both this week and next week. And as a reminder, I'm taking the month of August off as I'm moving out to Pennsylvania to be closer to church.

And so there will be no RAP Report in the month of August. But check out the information that I can provide in this sermon on the Sabbath. I hope you find this helpful. Coming to you right now on the RAP Report.

Mark 2:23-28 and the Pharisees' Challenge

Welcome to the RAP Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Today's passage that we will be looking at is Mark chapter 2, verses 23 to 28. Mark chapter 2, 23 to 28. So if you look in your copy of God's Word as I read aloud what Mark, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, has said.

Mark wrote this in Mark 2, 23. And it happened that he was passing through the grain fields on the Sabbath. And his disciples began to make their way along while picking the heads of grain. The Pharisees were saying to him, look, why are you doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?

And he said to them, have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions became hungry? How they entered into the house of God in the time of Athabarth, the high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests.

And he also gave it to those who were with him. Jesus said to them, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we are amazed by the words that we see before us, for they are a claim in that culture at that time.

You were making it very clear that you were greater than anything that the Jewish religious leaders held as sacred. You were claiming to be greater than the Sabbath, that you claimed you are God. So many people in our day think that you didn't make such claims of deity, and yet it is because they do not read and understand the culture and the words that you said.

We ask, Lord, as we look upon this passage that we would realize that we, like many other cultures before us, many other people before us, have sought to take the truths of your word, the grace of the gospel, and water it down to the works of men.

And yet you stood in such contrast to that. We ask, Lord, that we would stand in contrast with you to a man-centered, man-made religious system. We would stand for proclaiming the truth of your word and the gospel of grace alone through faith alone in you alone.

We ask this in Christ's name. Amen. So we come upon a passage. Now, if you remember where we've been, we've been starting in chapter 2. We saw that Jesus did something that got the Pharisees upset. He proclaimed someone's sins forgiven.

In proclaiming the sins forgiven, what ended up happening is they realized that no one can forgive sins but God alone, and they realized exactly what he was claiming. Now, Jesus didn't back down from that.

Instead of backing down, he asked, what is easier to say, your sins are forgiven, or rise and walk? Well, saying your sins are forgiven is much easier because no one can see that. But to prove that he was who he claimed to be, who they knew he was claiming to be, that he was God, he turned to a paralytic man, told him to get up, take up his mat, and leave, showing that he had the authority to heal that person.

Therefore, he had the authority to also forgive sin, which therefore said he was God. He then did something that was an affront to the religious leaders. He goes and ends up telling a tax collector to follow him.

He ends up going on a day that should be a man-made festival, a day of mourning over the destruction of the temple. He ends up going and having a feast. They say, you're breaking our laws. But they weren't a law of God that he was breaking.

And he ends up telling them that they should also be feasting because the bridegroom, Christ himself, the Messiah that they're looking for,.

Is in their midst.

But they don't like that. They get upset with it. And now he gets to a question of the Sabbath. And as we'll see in chapter three, this issue of the Sabbath becomes such a big issue that it's at that point that they decide they got to kill him.

They got to get rid of him. Because they so hate the message that he's proclaiming compared to the message they're proclaiming, there is no way that those two can be together. We saw that in the last sermon that we had out of Mark 2 when we talked about 21 and 22.

You cannot mix the man-made religious system that the rabbis created and merge it with the gospel of grace alone through faith alone. They just cannot be together. And unfortunately for the Pharisees as well as religious leaders even today who so want their man-made system, instead of recognizing that the truth of God's word, they actually reject God for their religious system.

We're going to see that even more so here. But before we can get into the passage, there's some things that I think we need to first understand. Those of you who were with us on Wednesday night, we happened by God's providence to be in Genesis chapter two in the first three verses this week.

And so we talked about the Sabbath.

So for those who were here on Wednesday, this will be a little bit of a review, but we're going to go into more detail. But I want to encourage you guys to be at the Wednesday night as we go through Genesis.

It's hopefully very helpful in our understanding of the book that's the foundational book for the rest of the Bible. But as we think about the Sabbath, the Sabbath is a day of rest. We see it in Genesis chapter two, as I mentioned, where the seventh day was established as a day of rest.

But rest from what? Rest from work. Now we end up seeing it was a day that we should not work. We see this in Exodus 34, 21, where it says, you shall work six days, but on the seventh day, you will rest even during plowing time and harvest, you shall rest.

Why do people end up questioning this so little in the sense of what they don't understand the meaning of it? Because what we end up seeing is we have become desensitized, I think, to the idea of the Sabbath week.

The reason I think we be desensitized is because in most countries now, you have a week where people work five or six days and they take a day off from work. But if you think about those people who work where every day they work, they get paid, the more they work, the more they get paid, there is a tendency to say, if I work that one day, I get more money.

We were talking Wednesday night and it was brought up the fact that Chick-fil-A gives up, I forget the number, but several millions of dollars every week by not being open on Sunday. And that's a good picture of what the Sabbath is.

It is the idea that you could be working every day and making more money every day, but at one day, you're gonna devote to God and depend upon him to provide. You see, the Sabbath was not just the seventh day.

In fact, the Sabbath was the seventh day, the seventh year, and also the day of Yom Kippur, the day of Passover. You had several Sabbath days in the culture of Judaism. Now, the seventh year was a year that they would have a Sabbath rest for the land.

Think of it yourself as a farmer. What does that put you in when you say, okay, for six years, I'm gonna labor, I'm gonna plow the field, I'm gonna do all this, and then that seventh year, I'm gonna do nothing.

That takes dependence on God. You're trusting that God will provide that seventh year enough in those six previous years that you could store enough away for that seventh year. You have to have dependence upon God, and that's really what the Sabbath was.

We think of the Sabbath as a day that you should not work, and it was brought up Wednesday night, but what do you do when you're a pastor? And Sunday is the busiest day of the week for a pastor. That is, but the idea there is not about the specific work that we do, but that is what Judaism turned it into.

The idea of the Sabbath is a day that when you're not trying to make money, you're not doing things just to get an extra day or an extra year of generating for self, but it is depending upon God for the Sabbath rest of the week, it is a day to worship God, to say, I'm gonna put my work aside so I could focus on the things of God, that I won't be trying to make money for myself,.

But devote it to the Lord. It's kind of interesting.

Many people will often question, maybe you've seen Orthodox Jewish people, and they're walking to synagogue on a Saturday, and I get asked this question quite a bit is, it seems like walking requires more work than driving.

I mean, it's much easier in our day and age to just hop in a car, start the engine, drive to synagogue, and people don't often understand the issue there that they have is out of Exodus 35 five, which is, you shall not kindle a fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day.

The idea there is that, it's not that walking or driving, which one's more effort, it's about the idea of starting a fire, which when you start your engine, that's what you're doing. Your pistons and your spark plugs are creating a spark, and that's how the engine works.

So, what you end up seeing is that they will not start a fire, so they're not going to drive a car. And even though the thought we think of is a thing of effort with work, but that's not the concept here.

It's the concept of doing something that to generate funds for self. The issue of the Sabbath is one between depending upon God versus depending on self. This is something that changed between biblical Judaism and rabbinical Judaism, between grace and legalism.

See, the Old Testament, we have a gospel of grace. We have a Sabbath rest devoted to God. But what the Jewish rabbis ended up doing was turning it into a system of works, a system of legalism, do's and don'ts.

And so what you end up seeing in there is you'll end up seeing that they made everything about this long list of stuff that you should do or not. You can almost always tell someone that's a religious Jewish person, or even not.

My own parents who are now practicing atheists will not spell out the word God. They'll put a G, a dash, and a D.

Why?

They'll do that because they don't want to use God's name in vain, so they won't even spell out the word. This is how come we have a word that we pronounce as Yahweh or Jehovah. We don't know what it is.

Why?

Because in Hebrew, there were no vowels written. The vowels were pronounced. And so you only have the consonants for this name of God. We don't know what the proper vowels would have been because no one actually said the name.

They replaced it with another name for God, Adonai. And so that's what you end up having is this system of, well, we don't want to use God's name in vain. So what we're going to do is not spell it.

Or not say it.

And yet the irony of that is my parents who to this day will not spell the word God, will use God's name in vain all the time in a form of blasphemy. It's interesting to see because what you see is they have the legalism that the rabbi set up with the Sabbath with all of these rules.

And then you end up seeing the difference between the way they act. And Jesus is going to be addressing that very thing. So the Sabbath day was not one day a week. It was a one day a week. It was one in seven years.

It was different festival days. It had to do with the matter of depending upon God for rest, depending on God and having a time devoted to him and not working. So the same that we see here, we see that it's clear that God did not want the Jewish people to have workarounds with this either.

You can look in Exodus 20 verse 10 or in Deuteronomy 12, 14. And both of those passages,.

What you see is that.

Not only was the Jewish person not to work on the Sabbath, but his servants who were not Jewish were not allowed to work on the Sabbath either. Almost as if God knew that the Jewish people try to find a workaround.

See, this is the way people would do things, right? Well, okay, I won't work on the Sabbath day, but I'll get some servants who aren't gonna honor the Sabbath anyway. They'll go do that. They'll worship or work on the Sabbath day.

And I can feel justified and spiritual because I'm not doing it. This is something we see within human nature, right? We see this all the time where people wanna say they're living by the spirit of the law when they're really breaking it by having someone, well, I'll let someone else do it for me and then that way I don't feel as bad.

See, breaking the Sabbath was so serious that it actually carries a death penalty. You see this in Exodus 31 verses 14 to 15, 35 verse two. You also see an account in Numbers 15, 32 to 36 where someone is caught working on the Sabbath and they bring him before Moses and they determine that the consequence for this work is the death penalty.

That sounds pretty serious. Just because I'm working on the Sabbath, the Sabbath because of this death penalty was seen as being something that was very serious and it should be if it carries a death penalty.

And for some of us, we think that that may seem unreasonable just because we're not working. Well, the thing is what is the Sabbath to represent? It is a day where we put God first. It is supposed to be set apart for God.

So really what makes it so severe is not that you happen to work on that day. What makes it so severe is that you're stealing and robbing from Almighty God, taking the time that he wants us to be devoted to him and stealing it for self to make money.

Rabbinical Judaism changed what the Sabbath was. They changed it into a set of rules. The Sabbath became a legalism to determine a genuine status of a member of Israel. In other words, if you weren't honoring the Sabbath, they would question whether you're really an Israelite.

It became a standard or a measuring rod. It was a way of seeing, and this is what we see at this point, what the Pharisees are doing with Jesus is they're really questioning, are you really, you claim to be a rabbi, a teacher of the Jewish people, the Israelites, and yet you don't, we can't check off this most essential thing of Sabbath keeping.

The Sabbath was set up with a very long list of rules in Judaism that are there even today. Yet many of these rules have loopholes. They set up the rules, for example, there is something called a Sabbath day's walk.

Sabbath day's walk is about 2000 cubits, roughly 3000 feet or a little over half a mile, 0 .6 tenths of a mile. You can see this in Exodus 16, 29, Numbers 35, 5, in Joshua 3, 4, where it will say in Numbers 35, 5, you shall also measure the city on the east side, 2000 cubits, on the south side, 2000 cubits, on the west side, 2000 cubits, on the north side, 2000 cubits, with the city in the center, that shall become their pasture lands for the cities.

And then Joshua 3, verse 4, it says, however, there shall be between you and it a distance of about 2000 cubits by measure. Do not come near it, that you may know the way which you shall go, for you have not passed this way before.

So this is where they get this 2000 cubits. So they would actually say you can only go 1 ,999 because you don't want to go to the 2000. Got to be one short. And so they have these rules that are set up.

In fact, the Talmud contains 24 chapters of laws just for the Sabbath. There's several volumes in the Talmud, and one is devoted just to the laws of the Sabbath. And so there's 613 laws that we see in the Torah in the first five books.

Well, the Talmud has a whole lot more, thousands more that were added. And so in the first century, if someone needed to walk beyond the Sabbath day's walk, which is about six tenths of a mile, they had ways around that.

What they would do is they would go maybe the day before and leave a piece of bread at someone's house. And by leaving the bread there, what that actually did was it allowed you to go on the Sabbath day.

You went to the neighboring house in the neighboring village. You would go and you'd eat the bread there. That makes that home. Now you can go another six tenths of a mile. And so you could extend that.

That's no different than today. In fact, today, there's a thing called a uravah, or a view. I can never pronounce it right. But what this is, it is an enclosure that they develop. And the idea that we end up seeing in the Talmud is that they have a way of determining what is your property.

If you have homes that are close enough within 70 and two thirds cubits from one another, then those houses are considered to be contiguous. Therefore, your house and the house next to you just extended your property.

Only for the Sabbath day, by the way. This only counts for Sabbath day's walk. But what you end up seeing is that it ends up going where they'll have a whole city. This is that will consider the whole city to be within the Sabbath day's walk.

So now you can go 2000 cubits beyond the city. This is, by the way, where when you see Orthodox communities, their houses are right on top of each other. This is one of the reasons, because they can extend it.

But how do they go from one city to another? Well, they would set up this urvu, which is a structure that they could go from their home, their city, and extend it to go to this structure. And then from the structure, go beyond.

Similar to what they would do with leaving bread at a house. And so what you see is that they find ways to work around this. And they do this because they're looking for ways to not follow the law, but to get around the law.

And it's the same thing. It's a law that they created. And so they have several ways around this. And the thing that I find interesting with this is that as we look at all these laws that they come up with, we see this and realize that they are doing this,.

These laws that they have.

This is something that they've invented. They've replaced what God said for what they would prefer to follow. And then they make workarounds for those very things that they can't keep. So with that as a background, we come to the Sabbath.

Now, the Sabbath being this extremely important event within the Jewish mindset, especially for the religious leaders. And it says, verse 23, and it happened, he was passing through the grain field on the Sabbath.

And his disciples began to make their way along picking the heads. And actually, if you see in your scriptures there,.

It just says heads.

The of grain is in italics, which means it wasn't there in the Greek. So where did they get it from? Well, simple logic. They were in a grain field, so it's probably heads of grain, right? Well, when we look at the other passages, for example, Luke six, one to five, there it does say that they were picking heads of grain.

So I think it fits because just for us to understand the reading, this is what they're picking. What they're doing is they're going through the field and they're hungry. We know this from Matthew 12 in verse one.

In that passage, it says, and at the time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath and his disciples were hungry and began to pick the heads of grain to eat. And so they're picking the grains.

Now, some people might accuse them of stealing because they're taking someone's property here. However, the law allowed for this. In Deuteronomy 23 verse 25, it says, when you enter your neighbor's standing grain, then you may pluck the heads with your hand, but you shall not wield a sickle in your neighbor's standing grain.

So in other words, as you went through a grain field, the law allowed for you to take some grain and be able to eat what you can take. You can't take it with you. So in the verse before that,.

It would talk about grapes.

You can go to a vineyard and you could pluck the grapes from a vineyard, but what you could not do is put it in a basket. In this case, you can't take a sickle.

Why?

The idea is it's not stealing. You're going. It's sort of like when my wife and I would go to the apple orchard out here. We'd go each year and you could, as many apples as you can eat while you're there, you can eat for free.

But the ones you take with you, you have to pay for. Now, my kids and I used to make sure we were good and hungry before going. And we made sure we got our money's worth out of the ones we bought because we finished quite a number of apples.

While we were there.

But that's the idea is while they're walking through the field, they're not breaking any law by eating the grain. But what the disciples were upset with is that they were not just eating the grain. It is that we see in Matthew that they were, they were, sorry, in Luke 6 verse 1, it says they were rubbing them in their hands and eating the grain.

So they're taking the heads and they're sifting it in their hands, getting rid of the chaff and then eating the grain. Well, according to the rabbis, that was work because they're sifting. That is not something that they would have allowed.

Now, you were not to be harvesting on the Sabbath. That's true. But this was them eating. But what got the Pharisees upset was putting it in their hands and shifting it. Now, think about this for a moment.

This is always good to do is don't just read scripture, think your way through it. How did the Pharisees see the disciples doing this in the grain field? Because that would have been beyond the 2000 steps, wouldn't it?

Right?

You have this big grain field. They're walking through and they're seeing it. Shouldn't these Pharisees be doing something else than spying on the disciples? My thought is I kind of wonder if they were not in the synagogue like they typically would have been or was synagogue over and they're now seeing the disciples in the field and they're going after them looking for them to see what they would do.

Now, this is a man-made rule. There's nothing in the scriptures that we know of that says that they could not feed themselves. But there is stuff that we see in the rabbinic law. So Jesus is not breaking a divine law.

He's breaking a law that men have established. And this is very upsetting to the Pharisees because this is what they've set up as the standard. And so to them, Jesus and his disciples are breaking like the cardinal rule.

Now, they end up in verse 24. It says the Pharisees say to him, look, why are you doing what's not lawful on the Sabbath? And again, it's not lawful because they've said it's not lawful, not because God has said it's not lawful.

But I want you to look at what Jesus says because he gives an answer. And this is a very interesting way that Jesus will often deal with challenges. And he asks questions. When he's challenged, he often will turn and ask a question.

Now, okay, Jesus being God, he can ask questions that knowing the hearts of men, you and I cannot do that. We can ask questions not knowing the answer, but Jesus being God always has the right question to ask.

But you see, he wants people thinking. He asks this question, it's in verse 25. And he said to them, have you never read what David did when he was in need and his companions were hungry? How he entered into the house of God at the time of, I don't know, I'm gonna mispronounce it again, sorry, but Abathur, I keep trying, but sometimes I'm bad with names, so forgive me.

Abathur the high priest and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone except the priests. And he gave it to those who were with him. Now, first off, this has got to be for those who think that Jesus always spoke nicely and always encouraging words, to turn to a religious leaders, to people who say they are the elite religious leaders in all of Israel and say, have you not read?

That has to be putting them in their place. They're claiming they're the teachers of the law. And he's like, have you not read this? Have you not read what's happened here? No, this is a puzzling thing to think about because we see this mentioned and we have to go back.

To understand this, we have to go back to 1 Samuel. And actually, we're not gonna be able to read all of it. I'm just going to highlight. So you won't have to turn there because I'm gonna go through 1 Samuel 19 to 22 in five minutes, okay?

So obviously we're not going to be reading, but I wanna give you a highlight of what he's referring back to. So you understand the history of what he's assuming the Pharisees should know as the history.

So here you have David. If you remember the account, David and Saul, Saul was the king. David was a shepherd who came, he killed Goliath. He ends up being someone who King Saul likes to have playing harp.

And he's playing the harp and that soothes the king because the King Saul often had an evil spirit with him. And so here you have David that would be with him. He would go out to war with King Saul. He married King Saul's daughter, which made him the king's son-in-law.

He ended up being a warrior with the king. And the words were going out that Saul would kill the hundreds and David the thousands. So Saul did not like that David was being praised above him. He became aware that Samuel had consecrated David as king.

And so Saul knew that David was Samuel because of what Samuel did was God's pick to replace him as king. And he wanted that to go to his son, Jonathan. But Jonathan loved David. They had a kindred spirit because they both had a love for God.

And that mutual love for God brought them together. And so in chapter 19 of 1 Samuel, you end up seeing that basically Saul tries to kill David. And Jonathan is defending and saying, father, why would you do this?

He's done nothing wrong. And David is convinced by Jonathan that his father doesn't want to harm him. And so he's there playing the harp one day. And all of a sudden Saul just takes a spear and throws it at him because an evil spirit came upon him.

And David realized, I don't think it's good for me to be in this situation. I think the king wants to kill me. And so they end up in chapter 20 of 1 Samuel, you end up seeing that he ends up saying, okay, Jonathan and David come up with a plan to determine what Saul really wants to do.

So they come up with this plan that David is going to stay hidden away, that he wouldn't go to a feast that he should do, and he'd be absent from the king's table. And Jonathan was supposed to say to the king, I sent David away to go to be with his family.

And so the first day of the feast, David's not there, nothing is said. The second day of the feast, the king asks where David is. And Jonathan says, I sent him away. I let him go to his house in Bethlehem.

And the king gets upset and he ends up cursing Jonathan, his own son, accusing him of choosing David over himself, over his own family, over his own kingdom. This becomes an issue where King David now wants to kill his own son.

So Jonathan realizes that, no, this is something that his life is at risk. So he goes and does what they had already set up beforehand. The way to let David know whether Saul actually wanted to kill him or not was that David would stay hidden.

And Jonathan comes with a young lad and he says, I'm going to shoot some arrows. And if I say to the lad, no, come here with the, you know, the arrows are closer, come here. That means that David could come out and the king isn't looking to kill him and he's fine.

But if he says to the lad, go further, it is a signal to David to get out, to go away. The king does plan to kill you. So he tells the lad to go further. He ends up saying to the lad, he gives the lad his bow and arrow, sends the lad away.

And David comes out of his hiding place. They greet each other and they leave. They know that David has to go into hiding. So David goes and he's in a rush. He doesn't have time. So what does he do in chapter 21?

He goes to Abimelech. He goes to the place where the temple is, where they would have the, or the tabernacle is. He goes to where they have the elements and he goes to the priest Amalek. Now remember this name Amalek because it's going to be different than what we read in Mark.

In Mark is Abathah. And so here it's Amalek. There's some question here that we'll get to. But here he comes to Amalek and he says,.

Do you have any food? Do you have any weapons?

And Amalek, Abimelech is nervous because it says he's nervous because there was no one with David. In other words, it was David and his men, but not the king's men.

And David lies to Abimelech.

He lies to him. He says to him that the king sent him on a mission and it was so urgent. He had no time to take food and he had no time to take a sword and he needs food and needs a sword. So he's given the sword of Goliath.

It was the only weapon that they had. And he's given food. What food was he given? He was given the food that was meant only for the priests. The priests would put out what's called Shobed or the bread of presentation.

And they would end up having that out there. And then that was for the priests alone to eat. It would be a violation for anyone else to eat it. But it was given to David. And Abimelech says, if all your men are clean, you haven't been with women, I'll give this to you.

And so he says they were, they eat the bread,.

They had no food.

So they take that, they take the sword, they go upon their way. But there was someone there that ended up reporting back to Saul what had happened. And so Saul calls for the priests to come to him. And so he gets upset and he says that the priests are aligned with David and therefore he has them all killed.

And it is at that point that we end up seeing at the end, toward the end of 22,.

Chapter 22,.

That we end up seeing that Abathar ends up escaping. Okay, verse 20 it says, but one son of Abimelech, the son of Abittu named Abathar, escaped and fled after David. And Abathar told David that Saul had killed the priests.