Mark 2:23-28 – Lord of the Sabbath

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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.

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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, that 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, 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, and he goes and ends up telling a tax collector to follow him.

And 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, and 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 3, this issue of the

Sabbath becomes such a big issue that it's at that point that they decide they gotta kill him. They gotta 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 gonna 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 2 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 gonna 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 2, 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. 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, 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, well, 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 going to 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. How, what does that put you in when you say, okay, for six years,

I'm going to labor, I'm going to plow the field, I'm going to do all of this. And then that seventh year, I'm going to 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 that, but what do you, what do you do when you're, you're a pastor and Sunday is the busiest day of the week for a pastor.

That is, but it's 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, 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 going to 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 devoted to the

Lord. You know, it's kind of interesting. Many people will often question, maybe you've seen Orthodox Jewish people and they're, 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 that the issue there that they have is out of Exodus 35 .5,

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 they, 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.

You're, your, 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, 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, to generate funds for self. The issue of the

Sabbath is, is one between depending upon God versus depending on self. This is, 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.

If you'll, you can almost always tell someone that's a religious Jewish person, or even, 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 the 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 would 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 going to 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 want to say they're living by the spirit of the law when they're really breaking it by having someone else do it for me.

And 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 2.

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 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 2 ,000 cubits, roughly 3 ,000 feet or a little over half a mile, 0 .6,

six 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, 2 ,000 cubits, on the south side, 2 ,000 cubits, on the west side, 2 ,000 cubits, on the north side, 2 ,000 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 2 ,000 cubits by measure.

Do not come near it, for if 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 2 ,000 cubits. So they would actually say you can only go 1 ,999 because you don't want to go to the 2 ,000, 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. 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, uravu,

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 a 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 2 ,000 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 uravu, 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 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 in 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 6, 1 to 5, 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. Now, what they're doing is they're going through the field and they're hungry.

We know this from Matthew 12 in verse 1. 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, 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, but 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 2 ,000 steps, wouldn't it?

Right? You have this big grain field. They're walking through and they're seeing it. It shouldn't, shouldn't these

Pharisees be doing, you know, something else than spying on the disciples? You know, my thought is

I, 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, 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, this is what they've set up as the standard. And so to them, he,

Jesus is, 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, 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 going to 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 going to be able to read all of it.

I'm just going to highlight. So you won't have to turn there because I'm going to go through 1

Samuel 19 to 22 in five minutes. Okay, so obviously we're not going to be reading, but I want to 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,

Jonathan and David come up with a plan to determine what Saul really wants to do.

And 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, 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 Abathur. 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 is nervous because he, it says he's nervous because there was no one with David.

In other words, David, 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 sword that, 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 they would, 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 Amalek 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 he,

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 Amalek, the son of Abitu, named

Abathar, escaped and fled after David. And Abathar told David that Saul had killed the priests.

And so he then stays with him. So that's some of the context behind this. Okay. Now, as we come to what we see in Mark 2, 25, we notice something is that, first off, the issue here is an issue of this bread that was offered.

That only the priest, Jesus agrees, only the priests are to eat it. Why does he bring this up?

Why does he bring up in the time of Abathar when it was Abimelech? Well, first off,

I think that it could be that with that, that Abathar became the high priest after this incident.

Now, notice that Jesus did not say, and by the way, Abathar is not mentioned in the

Matthew or the Luke passage. So this is the only time we see that he's mentioned with this. But what you see is, it could be that though Amalek is the one that gave him the bread, it was in that time of Abathar.

Notice that Jesus didn't say that Abathar gave him the bread. He said in the time. Well, who took over after Abimelech?

It was Abathar. So this is in the time of Abathar when he ended up becoming, he is not right away, but he later becomes high priest.

But it's in that time. And it may be a way of just measuring the time that his time was more noticeable and more known.

And they referred to this as the time of Abathar versus referring to it to Abimelech. But it's a way that those at the time knew that he wasn't speaking of the individual person that gave the bread.

But it was that time period. But why did David do this? Why did

Jesus bring up what David did? David did this because he was hungry. Why were the disciples eating the grain?

They were hungry. There's some comparison here. It's David as companions and you have

Jesus with his companions. So I think what Jesus is doing in bringing this scenario up is that there's some similarities between it.

But notice, what was it that David and his companions did? They broke a law of God.

What is it that Jesus did? He broke a law of men. That is the contrast that you see here.

You see, we have to dig into that background to understand why in the world does Jesus bring up this bread?

What is the bread? What he's addressing is a simple fact that the

Pharisees would not call David in sin for eating the showbread. Even though that the law required that to be a sin, the

Pharisees would not say that David was in sin. And therefore, what he's doing is he's pitting to them the contrast between their laws and his law.

And how they're willing to break God's law or allow David to break God's law and justify it and say, well, in the case of David, he was hungry and he was a man after God's own heart.

Therefore, it was okay that he did what was not lawful. But God himself in human flesh with his disciples, they say, no, that you can't do.

Do you see the contrast that Jesus is bringing with this? And if we don't dig into 1

Samuel, you may miss that. But what he's trying to bring out is the contrast between the man -made laws and the divine -made laws.

And so the Pharisees who would not call David in sin for eating the showbread would not allow

God to eat of bread,

God in flesh. They would accuse Jesus, who's God Almighty, of not obeying their man -made laws.

So they accept men disobeying God's law while judging and accusing

God for breaking theirs. That's the contrast. They accept men disobeying

God's law while judging God for breaking theirs. That's what

Jesus is trying to point out at this point. That's what he's trying to address with them.

They've set their laws actually higher and above God's law. They're saying that their law is more important.

Now, there's something Jesus says that we see that's in between verse 27, between 26 and 27 there.

We see there that after he explains this, the thing with the bread, in verses 27, 28, it says, and Jesus said to them, the

Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord over the

Sabbath. Now, we see verse 27 where he says the

Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. That appears only in this passage in the comparing gospel accounts.

Only in Mark 2 do you have that. In Matthew 12, we have something that doesn't appear in the

Mark or Luke verse. And so Matthew 12, verse six says this. But I say to you, something greater than the temple is here.

But if you had known what this means, I desire compassion and not a sacrifice, you would not have condemned the innocent.

So what we have him saying here is all of this. We have what we see in verse 27 in Mark 2, what we see in Matthew 12, verse six, and then what all three of the passages have in verse 28 of Mark 2.

So what is he saying? Well, first, let's deal with what we see here in Mark. Jesus turns to them and says, the

Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. In other words, the

Sabbath was something that God designed for men to have a day of rest, not as a thing that was a chain around their neck.

It wasn't something that was to restrict them. In other words, the idea that you have to understand in Judaism is that the

Sabbath was eternal, that the Sabbath is something that was set up before there was a foundation of the world.

So the Sabbath, in the Jewish way of thinking, the Sabbath came before mankind.

Now, we know from our study in Genesis chapter two, that mankind came in day six, and the

Sabbath came in day seven. Now, this isn't rocket science. I think you guys all could figure this out. It means that man came before the

Sabbath, right? The Sabbath wasn't something until the seventh day, man existed on the sixth day.

So that's really what's at the heart of this is that they ended up setting up so many rules here that when they ended up saying that the

Sabbath here, and the idea is that when it says the Sabbath was made, or the

Sabbath came into being, is the way the Greek would say it, is that it came into being for the sake of man, not that the man was for the sake of the

Sabbath. So you see the Sabbath, God established the Sabbath for the sake of man, so that man would have that.

But what the rabbis did is they made it all about the legalism. They made it all about those rules that became confining to the

Jewish people. And that's what Jesus is addressing here. He's addressing the fact that they're now stuck in this religious system.

When you see people who are stuck in cults that control people, anytime you see that, you see that they can't do anything outside of what the religious leaders say.

And that's what you have here with the rabbinic law. It restricts people and controls people.

So he's saying that they don't even understand the Sabbath, the very thing they're saying he's breaking. But then in chapter 12 of Matthew, what he ends up saying there is something even stronger, which is even a greater offense to them.

He's basically saying they don't understand the Sabbath. Then he says this. He says,

But I say to you, something greater than the temple is here. He's claiming that there's the temple, the holiest thing in all of Israel, the thing that where you have the temple and the holy place and the holy of holies, the most holy place on earth is in the holy of holies, where even the high priest, one man can only go once a year.

And Jesus is saying there's someone greater than that. Right here standing before you.

And then he says, So the son of man is even Lord of the Sabbath. He's claiming that he's not only that they don't understand the

Sabbath, but he claims he's greater than the temple and then states that he is the

Lord of the Sabbath. In other words, he's claiming to be above the temple. He's claiming to be above the

Sabbath. He's claiming to be God. That's what he's doing right here.

He's claiming that he is superior to everything that the Pharisees hold as sacred.

Everything that they say is holy. And he's saying he's above it all. This is exactly what we see in the book of Hebrews.

The book of Hebrews goes throughout that book, basically showing that Jesus Christ is superior to everything that the

Jewish people would hold sacred. Everything that the religious leaders said was holy and sanctified and set apart unto

God. And Jesus is greater than all of it. And this is Jesus saying it himself.

Jesus saying that he's greater than the Sabbath, greater than the temple. He is Lord of the

Sabbath. In other words, what he's claiming here is that he created the Sabbath.

To be creating the Sabbath would make him God. To be God, to be the creator,

I should say, it means that he alone is God. Why would I say that? I would say that because in Isaiah 44, 24, it says this.

God says this, and the word for Lord here is Yahweh or Jehovah.

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb. I, the

Lord, am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by myself and spreading out the earth all alone.

See, Yahweh had no help in the creation of the universe. He did it alone.

And here is Jesus claiming that he is the Lord of even the Sabbath. He's the one that established that.

He was the one on that seventh day that said that man should rest. That said that he rested from his work and therefore man should rest.

You see, we said this in the Genesis study. God could have created everything, the universe, the stars, the earth, the water, the land, the plants, the animals, everything, man.

He could have created all of it in a split second. The question is, what took him so long? He could have done it really quick, but instead he took seven days because he wanted a pattern for you and I that we would work for six and have one day that we would have rest where we wouldn't do our work and be devoted to God.

And that's why he took so long. But what is at stake here, what

Jesus wants us to understand and what the Jewish leaders needed to understand, and what we see even today when you study different religious systems, when you study different cults, when you study even different groups of people, you will see people that will do the same thing that the

Pharisees do. If you think about those who were in the

Sunday school, which if you weren't in Sunday school may encourage you to come a little bit early to church and join

Sunday school. But Paul in Sunday school went through an illustration of a lighthouse or a saving station that because they got so focused on being a club, they forgot their mission.

And this is what you end up seeing within many churches. They become a culture, a club,

I mean, just a kind of a society. They just forget about the mission of the gospel and what it is

God tells us to do. And they start to focus on just fellowshipping with one another and they no longer care about the dying world around them.

And they end up just being a social club. And when you see that happen, we'll see that with that, they start going away from what

God actually says and focusing on what man could do. And so they'll end up missing the grace of God for the words of men.

This is no different than with the Pharisees. You see this time and time again. God gives us something that you and I can never, ever keep.

We have to be absolutely perfect. Word, thought and deed. None of us could do that. That is an impossible standard. But there's two options.

God provides grace. He provides a way of escape in himself on the cross.

But so many people, even here we see, here's God in their midst. I mean, just think about that.

Here is almighty God in human flesh in front of them. And what do they want to do? They want to rely on their man -made way to get to heaven.

We see this countless times with different world religions that they will set up their own way, their own rules to get to God.

Because they think those rules are easier to keep. And even with the Pharisees, they set their own rules and then they figure out workarounds around their own rules.

So what good are their rules? This is what man does. We don't like God's standards, so we set up our own.

And what we end up doing is no different than the Pharisees. We accept men disobeying God's law and then judge

God for breaking ours. That's what Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, and it's something that we still see today.

Let me close with this. A simple way, when we look at different religious systems, a simple way of knowing if it's divine or man -made is to really focus on who's the center.

Who does all the work? Every single man -made religion, you're going to see man being the real center.

Man is the one who does that ultimate thing that gets them right with God. So they may have faith, but it's faith plus their works.

Maybe they do one good thing to outweigh the 10 bad things. Maybe they might do bad things, but as long as they're following a bunch of rules, they're going to be good.

Those are all man -made ways to God. The divine religion is the one that says

God does all the work, and you and I do nothing. God alone did the work.

God died on that cross as a payment of sin in our place that we would be set free.

That's how you can tell the difference. Who is at the center of that gospel? God. He gets all the credit, all the glory, all the honor, all the praise.

But in man -made systems, who ultimately gets the credit? Man does. Because even if God did 99 percent, if you do that one percent, that one percent is what gets you ultimately to be right with God, then man gets all the praise.

If God doesn't do it all, then we don't have a divine religion. That's what Jesus is saying to these

Pharisees, these religious leaders who should know. He's telling them that they're breaking God's law and condemning him for breaking theirs.

They have it backwards because there is one that is greater than the Sabbath that they hold so sacred standing before them.

What we're going to see next week is that their reaction to this was that they bowed their knee and repented.

No, unfortunately, that's not the case. They come to the point that they say we must kill him because they don't like the message.

That's no different than our day and age where people want to silence Christians and silence the gospel because they don't like it any more today than they did in Christ's time.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we know that when we come to your word and we see the richness of the full counsel of God, we see that over and over you had a message that is repeated.

And I think you repeat it because so often we need the repetition. We need the reminder. Lord, help us not to be just going every which way with the world, that the world would not drive us to how we should think and react and act.

That we would look to your word as a firm foundation. We have something from an ultimate authority.

May we reach out into the world with the truth rather than letting the world influence the church.

Lord, far too often we see that churches, just like the Pharisees, focus on the outward religiosity.

But Lord, you are concerned about the things of the heart. Work on each of our hearts. Oh Lord, each one of us, myself included, can sit here and look very good on a

Sunday. But then all week long we could struggle with things. Lord, there could be a tendency that we could want to look good on the outside to those that are in church with us.

But then we're home alone when no one's watching. We want to do things we know you would call sin and we want to justify it.

Lord, work on our hearts that we would repent of such things. Work on our hearts that we would be more concerned with obedience to you even when we're alone and no one's watching.

We ask this in Christ's name, amen. Thank you,

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