Wednesday Night, July 1, 2020 PM

Thank you for preserving us during this heat. We pray that you would watch over all of our loved ones and continue to provide for us. We ask that you would help us tonight as we consider the truths of your word and as we pray for one another and bear each other's burdens, that you would help us to truly love the way that Christ would have us to love.

We thank you that you have given us to your son and given your son to us. And we may rejoice in a salvation full and free. And it's in Christ's name that we pray, amen. Okay, so we're gonna be in Luke chapter six and I'll be reading verses one through 11.

Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath in Luke 6:1-11

Again, for us, the key verse in this passage is of course verse five, where Jesus says that the son, and he was telling them and he was teaching them, and he was saying, so this was more than just one time, the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath.

And so as we read all 11 verses together, let's keep that verse in mind. It's the centerpiece of this portion of Luke's gospel where the teaching of the Sabbath is in direct view. So Luke chapter six and verses one through 11.

Now it happened that he was passing through some grain fields on a Sabbath and his disciples were picking the heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands and eating the grain. But some of the Pharisees said, why do you do what is not lawful on the Sabbath?

And Jesus answering them said, have you not even read what David did when he was hungry? He and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God and took and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for any to eat except the priests alone and he gave it to his companions.

And he was saying to them, the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath. On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching and there was a man whose right hand was withered. The scribes and the Pharisees were watching him closely to see if he healed on the Sabbath so that they might find reason to accuse him.

But he knew what they were thinking. And he said to the man with a withered hand, get up and come forward. And he got up and came forward. And Jesus said to him, I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to destroy it?

After looking around at them all, he said to him, stretch out your hand. And he did so. And his hand was restored. But they themselves were filled with rage and discussed together what they might do to Jesus.

So Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was incredibly important to the religious life of the Jews living in this what is called Second Temple Judaism. The Sabbath was highly regarded and central to everything that they thought and did as a people.

Now, Jesus Christ comes and he calls himself the Son of Man. He reveals himself as the Messiah. He shows that he has the very power of God as the God-Man. So when he comes on the scene, he's the law giver.

He's the law keeper. He's the law fulfiller.

And he is being chastised by the law handlers.

Whoops.

Don't you think he would know better what the law meant and how that law should look in the daily lives of the people? These law handlers are at odds with the law keeper, law giver, law fulfiller. It's kind of like if the authors of our Constitution and Bill of Rights were to come back from the dead and address the federal and state governments of today on the topic of what they meant when they forged the constitutional republic under God, you would see a kind of animosity akin to what we're seeing right here.

The very forger of the law himself stands before the law handlers and they're saying, you got it wrong. So this is the kind of conflict that we're looking at. Now, Jesus says in Matthew's account and in Mark's account, we have this story three times given to us in the Synoptic Gospels.

And when we bring them together, we can see Jesus' teaching on the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was to be a blessing for mankind. It was meant for rest. It was meant for peace.

It was meant for hope. And in fact, at the end of Matthew chapter 11, right before he teaches on the Sabbath in Matthew 12, Jesus gives a call. Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden, I will give you rest.

So his call to the people was whoever, whoever is weary, whoever is heavy laden, come unto me, I'm gonna give you rest. I will show you rest. And then he begins to expound on the Sabbath and say what the Sabbath really means.

It's about being with him. They accused his disciples of breaking the Sabbath because they were rubbing the grain between their hands. And he says, how can they be breaking the Sabbath?

They're with me.

That's impossible.

And so this is his point. He calls to whoever is weary and heavy laden to come unto him and find in him their Sabbath rest, in their abiding with him, in their communing in him, in their worship of him.

And the sad thing, of course, is that the law handlers had turned Sabbath into a work. They had turned Sabbath keeping, not into rest, but into doing a whole bunch of works to prove that, indeed, they were keeping Sabbath diligently enough.

And this, of course, is a temptation always. Many are tempted to conflate justification with sanctification to such a degree that they think that Christ only saves the sufficiently penitent. But in fact, he saves sinners.

That is such good news. He saves rotten sinners. And it's totally because of him and not because of who he's saving. And when we miss that, it's easy to prescribe an endless, hopeless groveling and call that true Christianity.

And to read about Martin Luther and his asceticism and his self-flagellation, his punishing of himself in order to be a good follower of Jesus, and then to finally see him come out of that, and just the weight that rolls off his shoulders, you can just see that in his writings when he comes to grips with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Well, the Sabbath is not meant to be a burden of legalism. It was a gift that God gave. And to know the hope of the Sabbath, we are to embrace the Lord of the Sabbath. And in this way, we're combining verses one through five and six through 11 to know the hope of the Sabbath, embrace the Lord of the Sabbath.

And as long as the law handlers did not embrace the Lord of the Sabbath, they would not know the hope of the Sabbath. Well, here's the trap in verses six through seven. On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching, and there was a man there whose right hand was withered.

The scribes and the Pharisees were watching him closely to see if he healed on the Sabbath, so they might find reason to accuse him. So here's the trap. And the setup is in verse six, and the stakeout is in verse seven.

They think they've got Jesus in a corner, as they always seemed to think. So it's another Sabbath for the teacher, another Sabbath for Jesus Christ. And he comes into the synagogue and he's teaching. Now, this should alert us that something big is about to go down.

The last time in the Gospel of Luke that we see Jesus in the synagogue on the Sabbath teaching was in his own hometown in Nazareth, and he was teaching out of Isaiah, and things were going along really well until he began to locate his audience in the judgment passages in Isaiah, and then they got really mad and tried to kill him.

So that's what happened last time he was in the synagogue on a Sabbath teaching. So here he is again. So we're gonna see what happens now in the current situation. He's probably still in Capernaum where he was when he called Levi to follow him.

This is probably the same scribes and Pharisees that saw him heal the paralytic and forgive the man's sins and go feast with Matthew, the tax collector. But there must be some level of support for him.

As we've been seeing in the Gospel of Luke, there were a lot of people who were very excited about Jesus. He must have some level of popular support because he's able to go to the synagogue and he's able to teach.

So there's a lot of people who wanna hear him. And it might just be that the scribes and Pharisees want him to teach because they're hoping to catch him maybe in some sort of false doctrine or so on. But in any case, there he is.

He's teaching. We don't know what he was teaching yet, but I think there's enough clues in the text to tell us what passage he was in. We'll come to that later. So another Sabbath for the teacher, but also another patient for the doctor because here is this man whose right hand was withered.

Now, when your right elbow is killing you, it's like, well, at least I've got my left one. All right, I can still work. I can still get things done. For the Jew, the right hand being withered meant you couldn't do work.

The left hand was unclean. The right hand was clean. And if the right hand was withered, your job opportunities withered up too. So this man was in a fix. He also couldn't visit the temple because he had a deformity.

He was cut off from worshiping at the temple. He probably had a really hard time providing for his family. And here he is in the synagogue. Was he looking out, trying to find Jesus to get healing? I mean, his reputation obviously preceded him.

Maybe he was, or maybe he was just a devout Jew who was there every Saturday anyway to worship God in synagogue. But here he is. He's very needy. And in any case, he's made in God's image though he's deformed by the curse and he's suffering in the same room as the head of the new creation.

So something good's about to happen. Jesus is gonna be able to do something amazing for this man. Now, of course, the question is, will Jesus do so even though it's a trap? Well, the stakeout is obvious in verse seven.

The scribes and the Pharisees were watching him closely to see if he healed on the Sabbath so they might find reason to accuse him.

Why?

Their principles said healing equals work. Because what was involved in healing? If you went to visit a doctor on the Sabbath and say you went to the Jewish physician and you said, I need some help today.

If it's on the Sabbath, what might that physician be required to do to help heal? Will he have to pop a dislocated shoulder back into place? Will he have to help splint a broken bone? Will he have to grind up a poultice for some issue?

I mean, he's gonna have to work on the Sabbath to provide healing. Therefore, healing equals work. Can't work on Sabbath. Whatever you're ailing from, wait till Sunday. Saturday's off limits. Okay, so that was their principle.

But they also had some exceptions to their rules, as they always did. Saving was allowed. If there was, say your sheep fell into a pit. Jesus actually mentions this in another context. If your sheep falls down into a pit, are you just gonna let it die on the Sabbath?

No, they said you could go get your sheep out of there. You know, you're not fleecing the sheep. You're not trying to breed the sheep. You're not trying to work your flock. You're just trying to keep it from destruction.

And saving, therefore, is allowed on the Sabbath. That's allowed. And you could actually even save a human life if opportunity came, provided it was a Jewish life. Can't be saving Gentile lives on the Sabbath.

But if it was a Jew and their life was in danger, you could save them. If a Gentile's house was burning, forget it. That'd be work. But if a Jew's house was burning, you'd go get them out. That'd be fine.

So those are the principles and their exceptions. And their plan here is to watch him very closely. They don't want him being really sneaky and healing this man in a way that they wouldn't notice. Their whole goal is to publicly discredit him.

And so they want to show this man does not obey the law of God. And if they can do that, well then maybe they get some of that attention back to themselves, and they will not lose their power, their influence, and their authority.

Also remember their passion in this. One of the main reasons God listed for the exile of the Jews from their land to Babylon, one of the reasons they lost their land, one of the reasons why Solomon's temple was destroyed, one of the reasons they lost the Ark of the Covenant, and they lost the kingship, and all of that, God said was because the people did not observe the Sabbaths.

They didn't observe Sabbath. They didn't observe Sabbath years. God promised that the time that the Jews spent away from their land in exile, the land would finally have its fill of Sabbaths while they were away.

It was expressly stated in more than one location in the Old Testament that that was why they lost their land and had all those horrible things happen to them. So you may imagine that when they got back to the land, they would be super strict about following the Sabbath.

And they were. And you'll find this in Ezra and Nehemiah, how dedicated they were not only to rooting out all idolatry, but also being very strict with the Sabbath observance. And those things continued on in the life of Second Temple Judaism all the way down to Christ, so much so that they were, well, they had added a lot of rules.

They had fenced the law to make sure that they didn't break Sabbath and they weren't idolatrous. Well, here's the thing. If Jesus, if the people are listening to Jesus more than they're listening to the Pharisees and the scribes, and he's breaking Sabbath, as he's already proven with his disciples and them rolling grain up in their hands, and if the people follow Jesus' way of doing things, then everybody's gonna be breaking the Sabbath, and then where will we be?

We're already under the oppression of the Romans. We'll get wiped out for sure. You see their thinking. So they're very intent on this. This is why down at the end of the passage, they're ready to plot and kill Jesus because they figure the way he's going and the way that people are following him, he's going to bring death and destruction and another exile.

That's where their passion is. So here's the test. Jesus knows that there's a trap, so he springs the trap and provides a test that exposes his opposition. Verse eight, he springs the trap. He knew what they were thinking, but he knew what they were thinking, and he said to the man with a withered hand, get up and come forward, and he got up and came forward.

So Jesus knew the score. He knew their jealousy. He knew that they valued public holiness more than actually helping the man. He knew that they were whitewashed tombs. He knew that they had set a trap, so he sprung the trap.

He knew the score, and he still played the game. So he had been teaching. We see that. He had been teaching, and I believe at this point, he makes a practical application right in front of everyone of what he had been teaching, and we'll come to the passage he was in in a moment, but what he does right here is in full consistency with the word of God.

So he calls the man forward. There had been a lot of sideways glances, some whispering going on about the man with a withered hand and the healers in the room, so let's watch what happens on the Sabbath.

So he just takes the elephant in the room, puts it dead center, and puts a bunch of spotlight on it. Enough with his sneaking around, enough with his, you know, the deception. He just puts everything right in the middle, and he has no fear in doing this.

Why not? Because he doesn't fear a man. He doesn't fear a man. So he just makes the controversial issue in the middle so everybody can talk about it. He has the truth, so why does he have to fear the deceivers?

He has no reason. He just takes up the truth. He's been preaching that day, and he plays on their own exceptions for Sabbath observance, and then he asks them this loaded question. So the trap is sprung, and then here's a loaded question.

Verse nine, and Jesus said to them, I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to destroy it? Now why even ask these Pharisees and scribes a question? Why even give them a voice?

Why even invite them to respond? I mean, and what could they say to such a question? They could complain somehow that he had made a false dichotomy, that the question was not really between doing good or harm on the Sabbath.

It was between obeying or disobeying God's Sabbath laws, but were their rules actually God's laws?

They weren't.

They had added a bunch of things to it, but they weren't really God's laws. They could scoff and protest and say something. Well, who said anything about destroying this man? Healing his hand isn't exactly saving his life, and so they were plotting against Jesus, however.

At the end, we see that they're ready to destroy Jesus in, is it Mark's account? It says that they were plotting with the Herodians about what they might do to do away with him. So Jesus is asking, is it right to save a life or to destroy a life on the Sabbath?

Well, he knew it was in their hearts. He knew they were gonna plot to destroy him on the Sabbath. That's not a really great use of the Sabbath, to conspire to murder. So Jesus knew their hearts, and he knew this man's condition better than they did.

Now, if Jesus said healing the man's hand was saving his life, then it was so. They didn't know whether what was wrong with his hand was gonna spread to the rest of his body. They didn't know his actual physical condition.

They were obviously content to let him wither away. And Jesus says, I'm gonna save his life, and he did. But the question forces them, and everybody in the church is gonna say, is everybody present in the synagogue to ponder the purpose of the Sabbath?

Was the Sabbath really about restraining with all restraint, or was it meant for some kind of good? Was there any kind of hope in Sabbath for folks with withered hands? I think it's kind of ironic that he made a man able to work on the Sabbath.

I think that's just funny. Now, the meaning of his allusion, he alludes to a passage of scripture here in verse nine. Again, Jesus said to them, I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath to save a life or to destroy it?

Now, some key words in that question belong to a passage in Isaiah, which is the only Old Testament passage where we find the key terms son of man and Sabbath together. Three times in the Gospels, Jesus says, he says, the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath.

You take son of man and Sabbath, and you do a search on it, there's only one passage in the Old Testament that has all that together. And it's the very same passage that supplies the details of this question that he asks in verse nine.

So I'm thinking he's alluding to a particular passage of scripture, and I'm thinking he was teaching out of this very passage of scripture from Isaiah at this time. So Isaiah 56, Isaiah 56, verses one and two.

Last time he was in the synagogue in Luke's Gospel, he was teaching out of Isaiah. It is unsurprising if he's teaching out of Isaiah once again, Isaiah 56, verses one and two. Thus says the Lord, preserve justice and do righteousness for my salvation is about to come and my righteousness to be revealed.

How blessed is the man who does this and the son of man who takes hold of it, who keeps from profaning the Sabbath and keeps his hand from doing any evil. We're hearing some connections here. On the Sabbath, the one who is blessed is the one who keeps from profaning the Sabbath and keeps his hand from doing any evil.

In other words, in the Hebrew word for evil also means harm, doing any harm. So when he asks, is it lawful to do good or harm on the Sabbath, and he's just been teaching the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath, these are clues, these are allusions to this passage out of Isaiah chapter 56.

So who preserves justice and does righteousness? Who is the salvation just about to come? In whom was God's righteousness revealed? Out of verse one. Well, we don't have to search hard in the Bible to find that out, it's Jesus Christ.

Last time he was in Isaiah, he was reading Isaiah and saying, I'm here, it's being fulfilled. But it would be unsurprising if he's doing that very same thing again as he's preaching the gospel of the kingdom.

So who is the man who does the work of righteously saving? Who takes hold of God's own righteousness? Well, it's Jesus Christ. He is the son of man who as the Lord of the Sabbath keeps Sabbath and refrains from doing any evil.

And the necessary flip side of the coin to not doing any evil is what? To do good on the Sabbath. He's just making application of Isaiah 56. So there's a cripple present who needs good done for him on the Sabbath.

A cripple again, he's withered in his right hand, he's unclean, he can't go to the temple, he can't go there to worship. He's as outcast in that day and age as the Gentiles were because they had refused to allow the Gentiles in.

Anybody who was deformed or maimed, or any Gentile was not allowed into the temple to worship God. It's one of the reasons Jesus was upset when he cleansed the temple and says, my father's house, you've turned my father's house into a house of trade.

It's supposed to be a house of prayer for all peoples. And they had denied that. Well, it's fitting that in Isaiah 56, verses three through eight, after the two verses we just read, offer hope to the maimed and to the Gentiles to rejoice in God's Sabbath as well.

And at the very end of those verses, it says, verse seven and eight, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples. The Lord God who just gathers the dispersed of Israel declares yet others, I will gather to them to those already gathered.

So here's Jesus gathering his flock to himself where they would find rest in God's Sabbath. It is a great grace to be called the Sabbath rest of God. We're not called because we deserve it. We're not called because we have earned it.

We're not called because we can handle it very well. You're called to it because Christ has accomplished it. Withered hand, eunuch, Gentile, weary, heavy laden, thirsty, hungry, with no money. What does it say?

Come to the son of man who is laid whole to the whole of God's righteousness, justice and salvation. Come to the Lord of the Sabbath and find your rest. Colossians 2 .16 says we are not to let any man be our judge in regard to the Sabbath.

Why?

Because we already have the Lord of the Sabbath ruling over us. That's his job. So here's the truth of it in verses 10 and 11 in Luke. After looking around at them all, he said to him, stretch out your hand.

Then he did so and his hand was restored. But they themselves were filled with rage and discussed together what they might do to Jesus. I think it's possible that the leaders were kind of angry upon reflection when they considered his use of Isaiah 56 and his inclusion of this cripple into the joy of the Sabbath.

Because what would that make them according to Isaiah 56? Well, you just keep reading, right? Verses three through eight are about including the eunuch or the maimed. The eunuchs weren't allowed into the temple either.

Anybody who was maimed or deformed couldn't go into the temple. And the Gentiles weren't allowed in the temple. But verses three through eight invite all such folks into the joy of the Lord's Sabbath.

And this is what Jesus is there doing as the son of man. Well, what would that make these scribes and Pharisees then? Well, verses nine through 12 of Isaiah 56. All you beasts of the field, all you beasts in the forest come to eat.

Now listen, his watchmen are blind. All of them know nothing. All of them are mute dogs unable to bark, dreamers lying down who love to slumber. And the dogs are greedy and they are not satisfied. They are shepherds who have no understanding.

They have all turned to their own way, each one to his unjust gain to the last one. Come, they say, let us get wine. Let us drink heavily of the strong drink and tomorrow will be like today, only more so.

So the balance of Isaiah 56, we discover that the watchmen, think of the imagery. The watchmen are dreamers who love to sleep. Great way to lose your job if you're a watchman, if you're a dreamer who loves to sleep.

The shepherds are described as dogs who love to feed on the flock. And this is the way that Jesus saw the religious leaders of his day. He called the people of Israel sheep without a shepherd. They were being harried by wolves.

The religious leaders in the name of keeping Sabbath profaned the Sabbath through their lack of faithfulness, in their failure, in their drunken stupor, the predators of the forest come to eat freely out of the flock.

But Jesus comes as the good shepherd. He will do what is right and he will tell the truth. So he defies the deceit and he heals the man. Verse 10 says he looked around at them all. Mark's gospel says that he looked around at them all with anger because he was grieved at their hardness of hearts.

They would rather use the witheredness of the man for their own ends than to actually see the man helped. And he's grieved the hardness of their hearts. So he does the right thing. He heals the man and this, you know, telling the truth, the necessary corollary of telling the truth is that it defies deceit.

It doesn't affirm deceit. It doesn't cushion deceit. It doesn't give room for deceit. It just simply defies deceit. If we're committed to being the salt and the light of the earth, the light of the world, the salt of the earth, is there anything in all of scripture that suggests that that being the salt of the earth and the light of the world, that therefore it is necessary that we mute the truth, that we will not be able to be salt of the earth and we will not be able to be the light of the world or a city set on a hill unless we mute the truth.

All opportunity to be salt of the earth and light of the world will be lost unless we mute the truth. Is there anything in scripture that substantiates that approach?

None at all.

The reason why they got angry was because Jesus failed to properly contextualize the gospel.

That's what happened.

He didn't make it comfortable for them. He didn't say it in the way that they would notice what he was saying. He said it in the way that he said it. And they got enraged, verse 11, but they themselves were filled with rage and discussed together what they might do to Jesus.

So why were they filled with rage? Why did they try to figure out how to murder Jesus? Liars get enraged when truth is told. Liars get enraged when truth is told. And in this case, Jesus had, we'll say to them later that their father was the devil and their father was the father of lies who was a murderer from the beginning.

So they lie and deceive, they seek to ensnare, and when that fails, they murder. If you think about the story of the Pharisees in the scriptures, that's exactly what happened. They lied and then they deceived.

They tried to ensnare and when that failed, they murdered. And that's why Jesus said that they were the children of the devil. So when we think about this, is there somebody in your life who would blow up in anger if you attempted to speak the truth to them?

Why would they do that? Would they act violently, would they act vehemently if they were called to be accountable to the word of God? Well, we are called to speak with wisdom and to season our speech as though with salt that we may know how to answer each one, but that does not mean that we avoid the truth or that we do our best to defuse every single situation.

If you'll notice, as we're watching Jesus and how he handles things, Jesus is not the one who goes around defusing the bombs. Do we see that? The Pharisees keep on setting up bombs, snares. They keep on, there's a ticking time bomb sitting right there in the room.

They do this time and time again. They put the bombs right in front of him and he does not defuse them. He just doesn't. He goes in there and he cuts the wrong wire every time so that the truth must be dealt with.

So as we think about the hope of the Sabbath, Jesus knew that it was more important that the people be delivered from an enslavement to the legalism of the Sabbath, that they would understand the hope of the Sabbath, that the Sabbath, that rest, that the promise of Sabbath, the ultimate one being Hebrews 4 and 9, that there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God is even for people with withered hands, even for people who would otherwise be left out.

Okay, any questions or thoughts before we close? Sorry, time in this passage. All right, well, let's take some prayer requests now.