From Sinai To Sunday: Rest, Covenant, And Christ

Transcript

Sponsor Thanks And Ground Rules

The Big Question: Sabbath And Christians

Defining The Sabbath In Scripture

Covenant Between God And Israel

Rest, Holiness, And Why It Matters

Sabbath As Celebration Not Idleness

Learning By Precept And Pattern

Double Sacrifice And Atonement

Jesus Fulfills Law And Sabbath

From Physical Day To Spiritual Rest

Why Many Worship On Sunday

Calendars, Tradition, And Clarity

Unity Beyond Worship Days

Closing And Contact Info

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's episode, a special episode of Walk With Me. I am your host, JJ. So good to have each and every one of you here. Uh, thank uh thank God for each and every one of you. Thank God for all of you who are liking, listening, and sharing this podcast. Uh, and today is a very special, well, a special episode, they're all very special, but today is another special episode because this is a question and answer uh episode. Now, the uh quick shout out to my sponsor because I gotta get that out the way, two bars of lyricists with the intro and the outro, the squizz of creations. Thank you so much for your assistance on this podcast. Thank you, thank you for your support. Thank you for each and every one of you for liking and listening and sharing. And even if you don't agree, I don't care. I know, I know I'm supposed to care, but I don't because I didn't write the Bible. The only thing I could do is tell you what it says, all right. But thank you all for being here, thank you all for walking with us today. Now, today's question, it's a very serious question. Today's question is why don't Christians celebrate the Sabbath? Now, you would think that as a Christian we should celebrate the Sabbath because it is in the Bible, um, and we're supposed to follow the entire Bible. However, why don't people celebrate the Sabbath anymore? Why don't quote-unquote church folks celebrate the Sabbath anymore? So, in order to fully understand this, we have to actually understand the question. Are you asking why we don't have church on Saturday? Or are you saying that we're not celebrating the Sabbath? So let's talk about what the Sabbath is. Now, the first time we see the term Sabbath is when Moses is talking to the children of Israel. Um, and this is just the term Sabbath, okay, and it's not we're gonna go back and talk about some other things, but the first time you see that term Sabbath is when Moses is talking to the children of Israel, and that they need to gather manna, the bread that fell from heaven, and you need to gather twice as much on this day, because the next day is Sabbath and there will be no manna. Now, just for the sake of turn, for the sake of arguments and simplicity, we're gonna say that on Friday you better gather twice as much manna because Saturday there will be no manna, right? Now, the reason why Moses begins to explain um exactly why there would be no manna that day, and is because God is actually reminding the children of Israel who have been in slavery now for over 400 years. God is reminding the children of Israel and setting a precedent, he's reminding them that when God created the heavens and earth, he did not do anything on the Sabbath, he was completed and he rested from the work that he did. Now, let's be honest. Um God doesn't need rest. God wasn't tired, he was marking the fact that he had dything he wanted to do within the first six days. So this that the Sabbath, in as they're noted in Exodus 31:16, is a covenant, is a is a sign of agreement between God and his chosen people. Now we're gonna find out later that this is only between God and his people. God never said it to anybody else. God never said observe the Sabbath to anybody else, because he specifically said it is a covenant between me and my people, between me and you. If if you and I um I don't know, take a rental agreement and you're my landlord, and I I come to um you know sign a lease. That lease agreement is between me and you. If I have a guest over and something goes awry, and I have to leave, you do not have to honor that contract because that contract is between you and me, not me and the guest that's still in the house. Okay, we we we see this a lot, so it's it's a exactly quite pertinent subject. If I go to to buy a car from you, and my wife says, um, I don't like that car, it doesn't matter what she likes or doesn't like. The agreement is between me and you. So it's important to understand this whole covenant thing. So and I want you to say that um to say that we are literally getting into an agreement with God. And if God is issuing the agreement, he's telling us who the agreement is with, then I want you to tell me why I should bring in someone else. You can't, all right. So good. So we have that, but we're now we have the old thing of the covenant, right? And the specific uh part of this covenant was not the fact that God was tired, the specific part of the covenant, and and I know I'm probably revealing my nine to five here as far as being a legal person. Um the specific part of the nine of the uh covenant here is about rest, and again, this whole rest is the seventh. Now, what the heck am I talking about? All right, so let me let me explain something. When God gave um God made heaven and earth, he made it in six days, he worked six days and he rest the seventh. Again, six plus one is at the day of rest. Now, this is important because God said it in several different ways. In 3114, he told us that the matter the Sabbath was a matter of being holy and a matter of being sanctified by God Himself. In fact, uh, again, it is the very first commandment God gave the children of Israel remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Didn't say anything about remembering the Sabbath and stay in bed. So this is pertinent because upon leaving Egypt, the children of Israel was in bondage and in slavery, was forced to work seven days a week, 365 days a year, two weeks a year, year after year, decade after decade, you know, so century after century. They were literally forced to work all the time. Now, one thing that we have to understand is that God is very, very, very big on teaching us things through several different ways. He's going to teach us through his law, he's gonna say, Hey, JJ, you shouldn't steal. And I'm gonna say, Okay, well, I shouldn't steal. Then he's gonna teach us through experiences because if I decide to steal, there will be consequences, and then he's going to teach us through revelation. So if I go to steal, um, it's consequences. I go to jail and I sit in jail and I say, you know what? If I had not stolen, I would have a better life. So this is the revelation part. So, and following that pattern, and because pattern recognition is something that God gave us, and this is what separates us from everything else. God gave us this, right? So, following that pattern, following that example, when God brought his children out of Egypt, he the first thing he did was sought to drill in them the importance of rest, why it was important, and why it has to do with holy. So, in order to do that, he told us that he rested on the seventh day, and that we should keep that seventh day holy. And this is where the whole Sabbath thing comes from. So I'm I'm laying up groundwork, so just stick with me here, y'all. So, not because God needed a nap. Again, I keep saying this because we we kind of kind of put flesh on God, like God gets tired. No, God does not get tired, he didn't need a nap, but he was finished. Now, and and I want you to keep keep that word finished on your uh clipped onto your brain. We're gonna come back to that word finished now. Bekeeping that day holy, it was all about us observing that there's a rest coming. Um, and so important was this this concept of rest to God from way back then up until now, that he sprinkled it all through the law, not just the fourth commandment. You you see it in in some of the laws that that God's bond offers that this Ten Commandments, like the law of Jubilee, uh, like laws on how that's the seventh year, you're not supposed to farm that field, you're supposed to let that field rest and recover. And then you have the 50th year, and then and then you're setting servants free on the 50th year, so forth and so on. There is a recurring theme down through the Bible as far as um what that rest means and what that jubilee means, and how often it coincides with the number seven. So the Sabbath was meant to be a day of celebration, not just a day to sit around and be mopey, not a day to sit around and stay in your tent and look out the tent left, or sit in your house and look out the window. Although I do love a good vegetation day, don't get me wrong, y'all. I do. Sometimes your body just your body will tell you the flesh that God made you will tell you that sometimes you just need to sit down and chill out, right? So even now, so we have to remember that the Sabbath day was meant to be a holy day, and we have kind of even more that word holy day into the word that we now call holiday. But this is literally the root of that word, holy day, and we kind of attach these holy days or holidays to a lot of different things, such as Christmas or Veterans Day, or Fourth of July, and or Thanksgiving if you're here in America. I know 4th of July is an American thing too. So we attach these concepts to these quote unquote holy days, but we're doing it to celebrate and commemorate the thing that happened on that day, right? So-and-so's birthday, your birthday, my birthday. We we want to treat it like a holiday, a holy day. But we are doing this to celebrate it, but then when it comes to God's Sabbath, we don't we want to kind of make sure that uh we don't do anything, we don't even pick up the stick, we don't do anything, and this is where the Jews got it messed up. This was supposed to be a day of celebration. We're gonna talk about that more. Just stick with me here. Um now I I get it, I get it, I get it. We we kind of we most certainly lost the reverence uh behind a lot of the majority of the holidays, and and now we just kind of make up holidays at will. Um, but remember now when we talk about holidays or holy days, we're only talking about it in the strictest biblical sense when we're talking about the Sabbath. So God really begins to um reveal a lot of things. So let's recap some things, some concepts that we've talked about so far. We have resting, we have holiness, we have celebrating, and we have uh finishing. Resting, holiness, celebrating, and finishing. We have four concepts. We're gonna we're going somewhere, just stay with me. So now God begins to reveal his plan in Isaiah 28, 9 through 13. Whom shall teach, who shall he teach knowledge, and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? Remember now, God is talking to us through Isaiah from them that are weaned from the milk and drawn from the breast. In other words, when you're a little child, for a precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little, for with stammering lips and another tongue, he will speak to his people, to whom he said, This is the rest wherewith we may cause the weary to rest, and this is the refreshing, but they would not hear. This entire four four verse set is incredibly crucial to understand what God is talking about here when he's kind of trying to convey to us the the whole idea of Sabbath. Who's gonna teach you? Remember, we talked about how God teaches us. You just do law, do revelation, do experience. So if He's if He's teaching us, he's gonna teach us a little at a time. And a lot of times I I find that I do this a lot when I'm speaking. Sometimes I find myself just information dumping because there's just so much about the Word of God that I want to talk about. So, and I don't ever let me get up with no notes, trust me, it'll be an hour and a half. But I will information dump, but you can't information dump because it's it's like it's like dumping a lot of water onto dry ground, a lot of it will just run off. So God gave it to us in little drips here and there, and he built the foundation, and this is where we really see what God is trying to do. He wants to learn it intrinsically, he wants to learn how to recognize the pattern, and he wants to know why coming to save us was going to be so important, and it builds a found solid foundation because um it helps us retain a lot of the knowledge, you know. Paul said, train up a child and the and you know, train up a child in the way he must go. When he's old, he will not depart from it. It's also he's actually quoting Proverbs because it's in Proverbs too. So it God is really consistent when he thinks about how we are to be learning things and how to be training, it's it's never, never instantaneous. God'll take a hundred years to teach us a lesson. So I know we have this instantaneous microwave Jesus, but no, this is not the way God always works. So look at it, kind of look at it this way. If you can remember back to when you were in school, how they taught you how to read, or at least how they taught me how to read, was that they learned they they learned um how to build words from the basic level. You learned letters, and then we learned consonant sounds, and then we learned how to um uh combine consonants together, like T H is a dust sound, and then they put an E on it and they they call that an article, and then we started learning basic verb sounds, A-E-I-O-U, and prefix, base words, and suffixes, and then so forth and so on, until you started learning the pattern so well that if you came across a word that you had not ever seen before, you could kind of recognize it and break it down to the word the word could possibly mean. So, and and what role it would play in that sentence if you ever encountered that word. So, we have this pattern of recognition, we have breast, we have finished, we have celebrating, and we have holiness. And now that we have this foundation, we have one more brick to add to the Sabbath. This is the foundation, this is the foundation. The fact that there was a double sacrifice to be done on the Sabbath. Why was there double sacrifice? Numbers 28, 9 and 10. On the Sabbath day, two lambs of the first year without spot and two tents deals of flour for a meat offering, mingled with oil and the uh drink offering thereof. This is the burnt offering of every Sabbath, besides the continual burnt offering and his drink offering. So, this is a very crucial part of the Sabbath. Again, you're not just sitting around looking out the window, you're not just sitting around on your boat, not saying that not saying that's a bad thing, I'm saying this is not celebrating the Sabbath, right? Um, so you have resting, celebration, holiness, sacrifice, finished, completeness, and atonement. Now, don't tell anyone, but if you just counted that, that's seven things. So when Jesus said on the Mount of Beatitudes in Matthew chapter 5, 17 and 18, think not that I have come to destroy the law, or one of the prophets. I'm not coming to do away with any of that stuff, but I have not come to destroy it, but I have come to fulfill. And verily I say unto you, until heaven and earth pass, one jot, one till, in no wise shall pass the law, until all be what's the word that's what is the most critical word that I have not said yet, must all be fulfilled. Now, that word fulfillment. Now he's talking about all the commandments, not just the ten commandments. Um, and a lot of times we we will consider um that there are ten, and we kind of missed the point of what Jesus is trying to make. There were many prophecies he sent us to kind of lay that that foundation, the line upon line, and the precept upon precept. And laying around the fact, the laying out the fact that um the punishment for breaking these commandments was offering more sacrifices, and in depending on how bad you broke the commandments, was being put to death. So, this is why he immediately said he was on not going to destroy the law but fulfill the law. Because what sin is a sin, it's still a sin, and it's still a sin, such as lying is a sin, dealing is a sin, homosexuality is a sin, cheating is in space, it's still a sin. But Isaiah just said it in uh the previous verse that we talked about. This is why we must read the Bible in context. This is the rest in which I cause the weary to rest. So here we are. God is telling us that all these precepts, all this foundation, building the laws, the samples of sacrifice was to bring us to this point. And so now it makes sense. It was the point of rest, it was the point of being relieved of this burden of sin that you are carrying, which is why John said in John 1:29, the next day John says Jesus coming up to him and said, Behold the Lamb of God which take away the sin of the world. Now, this is the law that Jesus was fulfilling, he was taking away the sin. And where very little lines that Jesus said as he was hung on the cross, that a lot of people will miss. He said, It is finished. Now, from that moment, the sacrificial law, the law of the sacrifice, was fulfilled. Even in the New Testament, Paul is saying it's no longer because of bulls and goats that our salvation hangs on, it's about because our blood is our salvation, is now in the blood of Jesus Christ. And so from this point on, the Sabbath was no longer a physical day. You never see anyone in the New Testament celebrating the Sabbath ever. Um, it was a spiritual concept, uh, and coming into Jesus Christ is coming into your Sabbath, being born again is being born into your Sabbath, having your sins remitted is the rest. Repentance is the sacrifice that is to be done, that was done on the Sabbath, and this is why Luke chapter 24, verse 1. Now, upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came into the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared and certain others with them. Now, this is actually why we've actually stopped celebrating the physical Sabbath, because we started to move towards celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is why we go to church on Sunday. Now we actually see that Jesus had risen very early this morning, and now I know some somebody paused right here, or somebody looked at their phone, or somebody looked at their radio and said, But JJ, uh the first day of the Jewish week is Monday. Okay, and so what's the point? You want now, you don't want to carry that argument because then that would mean that would, in fact, make the Sabbath day a Sunday. So you I don't think you want to carry that argument, but if you do, that's fine. But one other thing that you're gonna say, and eventually, after about three days of arguing about it, you're gonna realize that we are on a Roman calendar, which we are, absolutely, which is why some of the stuff that we are following, uh for end times may not kind of fit the way we want it to fit because it's the Roman calendar, which is a man-made calendar, which is a little bit off, which is never going to line up with God's calendar. But God's calendar will be remarkably close to this because God inspired the Roman calendar to kind of teach us the time and seasons. So don't think just because it's a guide made up that calendar doesn't mean it's not going to be accurate or completely accurate. So you want to know why we don't celebrate the Sabbath or go to church on Saturday. The thing is, the Bible doesn't tell us not to go to church on Saturday. So I'm not coming out against the Seventh day Adventists. I know if listen, if Seventh day Adventists got baptized. In Jesus' name and got the Holy Ghost, I'm cool. That's what the Bible says. The Bible doesn't tell us what day to celebrate the um to celebrate Jesus. But we do it on Sunday because we are typically celebrating his resurrection, his return from the grave. Now, me personally, me personally, I I I'm starting to be under the circum the kind of the belief that if you go to church only once a week, you're missing out a lot. You're missing a lot. But again, this is me from experience, because I've been that church only on Sunday person, and then I've been that person who's done four or five, eight weeks of revival where you're going to church four days a week. Yeah, I know a lot of people aren't gonna be able to handle that, but I'm I'm saying that I've been on both sides of this, and I can kind of understand that you know you're kind of barely doing it just the bare minimum if you only talk about Jesus on Sunday. The Sabbath is a spiritual concept now. Once you get the Holy Ghost, once Jesus died on the cross and the Holy Ghost was given in Acts chapter 2, the Sabbath was a spiritual concept, and a lot of you are not going to agree with me, and that's fine. But this is what the Bible says no one in the New Testament celebrated the Sabbath, the Jews still did because they were still under the old law, because they were still following the covenant that God gave them, not realizing that when God gave them that old covenant, he was setting the precept for when Jesus to come for them to accept Jesus as the Messiah, which they still have not done for the most part. Now, again, I'm not I'm not against Jews. I love Jews, I love Seventh-day Adventists, I love all, I love everybody. But that doesn't mean what the word of God isn't true. All right, I really hope I answered that question, and I know for a couple times I felt like I had to be going real fast because I had to get this into the time slot, and I did not want to uh carry this over to another slot. I love you if you have any questions, follow up. Uh walk with me Bible study at Gmail, Walk With Me Bible Study at Gmail. Thank you all so much for your support and liking, sharing uh in this podcast. I love each and every one of you. See y'all on the next one. Bye bye.