MARGIE LITTELL with COLLEEN TINKER |
Honestly, I find it difficult to read some online posts by Seventh-day Adventists with their spirit of superiority and their ridicule of the doctrines of churches other than their own. They react as if church doctrines are the source of our salvation!
Of course, doctrines do reflect beliefs, and they also reveal whether or not a church has its roots in the nourishment of the apostles’ teachings! Yet when Adventists resort to ridicule and arrogant condescension, I can’t help wondering whether the writer/speaker might be revealing that he simply doesn’t know how to answer a new covenant understanding. Ad hominem attacks prove nothing and change no one’s mind; using them is almost always an admission of a person’s being “caught”, unable to defend his case rationally.
After all, if you can’t disprove a person’s argument, the next defensive line is to attack the person himself.
Sadly, in dealing with this sort of defensive, bullying Adventist, I see the same behaviors described in John 5 when the Pharisees decided to kill Jesus because He broke this Sabbath rule in Jeremiah 17:21, 22:
Thus says the Lord: Take care for the sake of your lives, and do not bear a burden on the Sabbath day or bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem,
And do not carry a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath or do any work, but keep the Sabbath day holy, as I commanded your fathers.
The prohibition against carrying Sabbath burdens is also described in Numbers 15:32–36:
Now while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day. And those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron, and to all the congregation. They put him under guard, because it had not been explained what should be done to him.
Then the LORD said to Moses, “The man must surely be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.” So, as the LORD commanded Moses, all the congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him with stones, and he died (Numbers 15:32-36).
You may be saying, “But Jesus kept the law perfectly! He didn’t really ‘break’ the Sabbath!”
Yet John specifically tells us in this account that He did:
After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep [Gate] a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had.
Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been [in that condition] a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?”
The sick man answered Him, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.”
Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your bed and walk.”
And immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked. And that day was the Sabbath. The Jews therefore said to him who was cured, “It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your bed.”
He answered them, “He who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your bed and walk.’ ” …
For this reason the Jews persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill Him, because He had done these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.” Therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill Him, because He not only broke the Sabbath, but also said that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God. (John 5:1-11, 16-18)
Jesus commanded the paralyzed man to carry a heavy load on the Sabbath. The man had been lying on his pallet, his main abode, for 38 years. His pallet was not a modern, feather-weight inflatable hiking mat; it was a heavy pallet where he kept his belongings. It was a far more significant load than were the sticks for which the man in Numbers was stoned to death. Yet Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath, commanded him to get up, walk, and carry that pallet on the Sabbath!
For Jesus to ask this man to carry his load on the Sabbath was to ask him to do a task which was punishable by death according to the law. Furthermore, Jesus Himself performed the “work” of healing on the Sabbath, thus setting into motion all the consequences of that healed man’s moving out of the “sick ward” by the Pool of Bethesda and initiating the disturbing conversations he would have with the Pharisees. All these things were breaking the Sabbath, and the Jews were furious.
Even more, when they confronted Jesus about His healing the man, He defended Himself by identifying with God Himself: “My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.”
Enraged, the Jews began seeking to kill Him. He not only broke the Sabbath but He claimed the identity of God!
Fulfilling the Shadow
It’s important to realize that when Jesus broke the Sabbath along with claiming His rightful identity as God, He was actually fulfilling the Sabbath commandment. Jesus said He did not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it, and in this incident, He demonstrated what He also claimed: that He was God with the power to do what only God could do.
Further, by His healing on the Sabbath and by instructing the healed man to carry a forbidden Sabbath load, He showed Israel that He was fulfilling the prophecies that the Messiah would make the lame walk and set the captives free. He released that man from his suffering and his spiritual misery and revealed Himself as the One who had the authority over nature: He reversed the man’s infirmity and granted Him belief in Himself as the One who came to save the lost.
By Jesus’s breaking the Sabbath laws, He did not sin but rather revealed Himself. He was the Messiah that Israel had been waiting to welcome!
For any other Jew to have attempted to do what Jesus did would have been sin. Only God the Son had the authority over the day that foreshadowed HIM. By Jesus’s breaking the Sabbath laws, He did not sin but rather revealed Himself. He was the Messiah that Israel had been waiting to welcome! The very fact that He could do on the Sabbath what no one else could do was the act of revealing that He was the One to whom that day pointed.
The Jews, therefore, were both right and wrong: Jesus did, in His deeds, break the Sabbath as John declared that He did. In reality, though, He did NOT sin but fulfilled the Sabbath. He, the sinless Son of God was the One who ushered in true rest for those who believed, and He revealed His identity that day.
The Pharisees were not willing to see. By refusing to believe what actually occurred right in front of them, they truly broke the law. Their unbelief caused them not to see the substance of the shadows they protected so carefully.
They had made their Sabbath day more important than Jesus. Even more, they made their feelings of superiority greater than breaking their Ten Commandment Law: Thou shalt not kill.
While denouncing Jesus for breaking the Sabbath (His own “shadow”), they themselves plotted murder.
The healed man, in contrast, received Jesus’ healing and His call to believe and to walk with integrity:
Then they asked him, “Who is the Man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?”
But the one who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, a multitude being in [that] place.
Afterward Jesus found him in the temple, and said to him, “See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.” The man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well (John 5:12-15).
Jesus still calls us today to pick up our burdens and walk. Believe in the One who revealed Himself by His own authority over the Sabbath, over nature, and over sin, and know the freedom that only believing in the finished work of the Lord Jesus can bring. †
- Jesus Broke the Sabbath and Declared Himself God - February 22, 2024
- God Told Daniel the Future - January 18, 2024
- A New Covenant Needs New Words - November 23, 2023
In this account by John, the Jews accused Jesus of breaking the Sabbath. They are either correct or incorrect in their accusation. In a separate account, recorded by Luke, the ruler of a synagogue accused him of breaking the Sabbath when he healed a woman’s infirmity of eighteen years, but Jesus’ answer put him to shame. If it were acceptable to rescue a beast from harm on the Sabbath, then surely it was not unrighteous to heal a person from a lifelong affliction on the Sabbath (Lk 13:10-17). The letter of the law could not be cited against him. But this time, by directing the healed man to carry his bedding, a strong case could be made that Jesus at least indirectly violated the law. As a rabbi himself, he should have known that no burdens should be transported on the Sabbath, let alone advising a fellow Jew to violate the law. When challenged, his response intensified the anger of the Pharisees because he “made himself to be God.” Their logic here is impeccable. The law allowed two exceptions concerning carrying a burden: 1) carrying your newborn male to the priest to be circumcised, and 2) priests carrying the slain animals to the altar. Only God could make an exception to the ritual laws of the covenant. Christ not only asserted his deity, but he also confirmed the symbolical status of the Sabbath commandment. The Jews were correct in concluding that Jesus broke the Sabbath, and if he were a mere man, he should accept the judgment against him. But he is the incarnation of the invisible God and has the authority to invalidate a ceremonial law for the sole purpose of proclaiming his deity. “Only as an extension of the divine will of Christ could the man be justified in carrying a burden on the Sabbath.” Keep the Sabbath or keep Jesus. You cannot keep both. He who hears Christ’s word and believes on the Father who sent him has everlasting life and shall not come into judgment but passes from death to life (Jn 5:24).