Mark 2:23-3:6. "What Does God Want Us To Do on the Sabbath?

Lets explore the concept of Sabbath and what God desires from us on this holy day. It begins by recounting the Old Testament story from Numbers 15, where a man was executed for gathering wood on the Sabbath, highlighting the serious nature of breaking this commandment. This punishment, however, seems harsh and raises questions about God's intentions.

The sermon explains that the Sabbath commandment was given to remind the Israelites of their freedom from slavery in Egypt and to ensure rest for everyone, including servants and animals. It was about trusting God's provision rather than self-reliance.

Tim then compares this with the New Testament account where Jesus and his disciples picked grain on the Sabbath, and Jesus defended their actions, emphasizing mercy and the intent behind the Sabbath.

The true issue, as the sermon outlines, is the hardness of heart. Both the disobedient man in Numbers and the Pharisees in the Gospels displayed stubborn hearts—one through disregard for the law and the others through rigid enforcement without compassion.

Ultimately, Tim concludes that the Sabbath is not about strict adherence to rules but about trusting God and finding rest in gis provision. This rest is not limited to one day but is a continuous, spiritual rest in Christ. The apostle Paul's teachings in Colossians are referenced to illustrate that all laws, including the Sabbath, are fulfilled in Christ. Therefore, God desires us to rest in Him daily, trusting in His care and provision.

 This Sunday sermon, based on Mark 2 verses 23 - 3:6, was preached at Grace of God Lutheran Church on June 2, 2024.  This sermon is preached by Pastor Timothy J. Walsh, a member of WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod). Scripture selections come from the New International Version.

Our services are at 9:30am every Sunday morning, at our campus in Dix Hills on Long Island. Visit our website for more information, at www.graceofgod.church 

Intro Music "On the Way" by Vlad Gluschenko https://soundcloud.com/vgl9
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Outro Music "Divenire" by Ludovico Einaudi
copyright (℗) by: Ludovico Einaudi (in 2006)           

Transcript

What Does God Want Us To Do on the Sabbath? (Mark 2:23-3:6.)

Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus the Messiah, Son of Man and Lord of the Sabbath. Amen.

About a year after God gave the Israelite people the Law of Moses at Sinai, including the Ten Commandments, they were camped in the wilderness on a Sabbath day, a Saturday. We heard in today’s Old Testament reading what God wanted, or rather, didn’t want his people doing on the Sabbath. He told them, “Six days you shall do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work.” 

But on this particular Sabbath, recounted for us in Numbers fifteen, one man decided to go out and gather wood. He was doing work. He was seen. Those who saw him brought him to Moses and Aaron to be judged. Moses and Aaron were at a loss. What should they do? The man had been willfully breaking one of God’s commands. But this was the first time someone had broken this command. There was no established judicial precedent. So God spoke directly to Moses and told him simply, “The man must die.” And the man who had been gathering wood was stoned to death outside the camp.

No other execution for Sabbath breaking is ever recorded for us in the Bible. This is the only one we can be sure occurred. But is one still one too many? Why would God have a man executed for doing some household chores?

In our Old Testament reading, to return to those verses again, God gives his general “why” behind the Sabbath. In verse fifteen, he says, “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.” Remember that once upon a time, you had no control over when you worked. You did not receive the profits of your labor. So, God says, “On the Sabbath you shall not do any work. Neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do.”

God’s Sabbath command, he says in Deuteronomy five, was meant to give workers something like what we would today call labor rights. God says, “Don’t you, my people, work. Don’t make your kids work either. Don’t make your employees work. Don’t make foreigners work. Don’t even make animals work! Everyone will be given a day to rest.” For a whole year, God’s people happily observed this command. But then this one man, this one particular Sabbath day, went out gathering wood. 

God says that the reason the Israelites should observe the Sabbath was to remember that they had been slaves in Egypt. The Sabbath reminded them that they were free. But doesn’t this punishment undermine that? If they can’t choose to do what they want, are they really free? Or have they simply exchanged one slavemaster for another? Is God any different than Pharaoh?

Before we even try to answer that question, though, we can muddy the waters even further and look at the incident with Jesus in our Gospel reading today. Here is Jesus, God walking around on earth, the same God who gave the Sinai law, the same God who told Moses and Aaron that the Sabbath breaker needed to die. But when he and his disciples are walking around one Sabbath, before church starts, and the disciples start picking grain in the fields, does God once again say, “He must die”? He does not! Instead, he says that it’s totally okay.

There’s a problem here. But it’s not the problem that we would think it is. We would think that the problem is that God is capricious and erratic. We would think that the problem is that the Bible is an inconsistent jumble, and that God keeps changing the rules as he sees fit, so it doesn’t really matter what he says in Deuteronomy five, or Numbers fifteen, or Mark two, or anywhere else. 

That isn’t the problem. The problem is something we see in the actions of both the Pharisees and the man out gathering wood. How? One of them didn’t care about the Law, one did. But “caring about the Law” or “not caring about the Law” wasn’t their problem. The problem both the Pharisees and Mr. Wood-collecting-guy had was hard, stubborn hearts. 

God called on his people to rest on the Sabbath in recognition of the fact that he would provide for them. It was his “mighty hand and outstretched arm” which had rescued them from Egypt. Did they think he wouldn’t be strong enough to provide for them? They had no reason not to! The God who could turn rivers to blood and cover over the noonday sun in pitch darkness, as he did in Egypt, that God could make sure that his people had what they needed for daily life while they took one day off a week. This man believed otherwise. He believed that without his efforts, when and where he chose, his needs would not be met.

It’s a good thing we never think that way. We’re never so caught up by chores and tasks that we forget about God and his Word, about taking time to rest. Well - maybe you never are. Sure happens to me. This is the natural hardness of our hearts playing out in our actions. We don’t trust that God will take care of us. We don’t believe his promise to provide. 

But lest we think that hardness of heart takes only one form, let’s see those Pharisees again. Aren’t they trusting God by doing what he wants done on the Sabbath (or more correctly, not doing what he doesn’t want done)? It sure looks like it. 

But Jesus - who, again, is the God who gave the law about the Sabbath - Jesus thinks otherwise. He sees their hearts; he knows what’s in them. So he asks some pointed questions. “Which is lawful on the Sabbath? To do good, or to do evil? To save life, or to kill?”

God gave another command from Sinai, which we call the Fifth Commandment. It’s a simple command: “You shall not murder.” Jesus is referencing that command with his challenge to the Pharisees: “Should one save life, or kill, on the Sabbath?” The Fifth Commandment doesn’t describe simply a prohibition. It describes a duty toward our neighbors, Jesus is telling us here. Martin Luther explained Jesus’ explanation this way in his Small Catechism: “‘You shall not murder’ means that we should fear and love God by neither hurting nor harming our neighbor in his body, but by helping and befriending our neighbor in every bodily need.” The Pharisees had also lost God’s intent for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for people’s benefit! God wanted people to benefit on the Sabbath from him. And here God, Jesus, finds a man who could benefit from God’s love on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees don’t care.

The Third Commandment - “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy” - does not override the Fifth. No word from God ever overrides another. We don’t play the Bible against itself, the Bible against God, in that way. The Pharisees did. This is why they asked Jesus such questions as, “Which is the greatest of the laws?” 

A heart which asks questions such as that is a hard heart. And for the hard-hearted person, what God actually wants is never the most important thing. The hard heart may make a big show of obeying God’s Law; the hard heart may scoff at God’s Law! The heart is hard regardless. Our hearts, by nature, are hard. We judge others according to a Law which we do not perfectly keep. 

So what does God want us to do on the Sabbath? What does God want us to do, at all?

The apostle Paul’s words in Colossians, our second reading, are foundational to understanding the Sabbath properly. Paul says, “Do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day.” These are all references to the Law given at Sinai. The Israelites could only eat and drink certain things. They had specific religious festivals they celebrated. They could not work on the Sabbath.

Paul says, all of those laws have been accomplished on our behalf. Earlier in that reading, he references the foremost of the Laws given through Moses, the law of circumcision. Every Jewish male was to be circumcised. But Paul says that every Christian, male or female, Jew or Gentile, has been “circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands.” What does that mean? The action of circumcision symbolized that we are by nature sinful, hard-hearted, and that we pass our sinfulness down to the children we bear. The state of being circumcised was a symbolic acknowledgement of that truth, and it was how God marked his people. 

In the New Testament, Paul goes on, we acknowledge our natural sinfulness, and are marked by God, not in circumcision, but in baptism. Paul says, “You were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism.” This specific parallel of circumcision and baptism leads the church to baptize babies. Babies got circumcised; babies get baptized.

“I thought this was about Sabbath, Pastor Tim?” Okay, let me bring those together. All of the law’s requirements and ceremonies - to not kill, to save life, to observe the Sabbath, to be circumcised, anything else God ever has or ever will require - he sees as entirely complete in your life, totally fulfilled, because, as Paul says, “in Christ you have been brought to fullness.” “He forgave all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.”

How did God do that? He killed us, by bringing us into Jesus. Baptism is us, with our naturally hard hearts, being drowned by God. Paul calls our baptisms “being buried with Christ.” You don’t bury living people! You bury dead people. God kills us and then raises us to new life in Christ when he creates faith in our hearts. 

That’s what God wants from us. He wants us to trust him. He wants us to know that we can rest in his love, in his promise to provide. And sometimes God needs to kill us so that we will rest. He needs to lay us flat, knock us down, because we are stubborn! Because we so easily become slaves. If we aren’t enslaved by someone else, we’ll enslave ourselves. 

What God wants from us on the Sabbath isn’t really anything, anymore. Saturdays are no more special than any other day. And Sunday is also not really any more special than other days; it’s not the “replacement Sabbath.” It’s just the day that we, historically, as Christians, have chosen to use to find rest in God and his Word. Why? Because this is the day on which our Lord stopped resting in his tomb and took up again his life to work on our behalf. What better day could we choose to rest in God’s Word? Sunday, the first day of the week, is the day we know Christ took up his life again to be our perfect Advocate before the Father.

God wants us to remember that we have rest in Jesus. Not just rest on the Sabbath, but rest every single day. As the writer to the Hebrews says, chapter four, “We who have believed have entered rest,” have entered and live every day in Sabbath. The writer to the Hebrews also warns, right before that verse, that the true obstacle to Sabbath-rest is not working on the Sabbath, but hard-heartedness. God said to the hard-hearted Israelites who rebelled against him in the desert, “They shall never enter my rest.”

That brings us back to our Sabbath-breaker in Numbers fifteen. To be blunt, does he go to hell? We don’t have to say “Yes.” The Bible doesn’t say it. He may have. He may have faced that death sentence with defiance. 

Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he acknowledged his sin. His refusal to trust in God. His cavalier attitude toward something which God intended to benefit not just him, but his nation! If everyone took his view of the Sabbath, there would be no rest for anyone; in particular, servants and employees. God is concerned for such people. God is concerned for those whose time is not their own. So he took this man’s time. But there’s no reason we can’t conclude that he wasn’t - in exchange - given rest everlasting.

God wants you to rest in him. Not just on the Sabbath; everyday. And you can. He will provide for you. His Word will comfort and guide you. One day, he will welcome you into his Son’s wedding feast. Rest in those promises, friends. Amen.