Today’s reading: 2 Kings 6; John 5
If Jesus was sinless, how can John tell us that the Jews were seeking to kill Him because He was breaking the Sabbath? Wouldn’t breaking the sabbath have been considered sinful since observing it was a direct command of God?
This would have been a problem, yes, but the fact of the matter is that Jesus was not breaking the Sabbath here, nor was He getting someone else to break the Sabbath, from God’s perspective, but from the Jews’ perspective, He was. So when John says the Jews were seeking to kill Him for violating the Sabbath, he is not saying that Jesus was objectively breaking the Sabbath, but that the Jews thought He was and were against Him for it.
Mostly I wanted to bring this up this morning because I think this is an easy trap for Christians to fall into today as well, and we have to be aware of where we might be doing it.
What’s really interesting about the Sabbath regulations in the Old Testament is that there is very little said about it compared to how important it is. The Sabbath is undeniably important to the Lord throughout the Old Testament as a significant test of faith for the Israelites. Would they trust God enough to listen and rest from their work, letting it be a day dedicated to the Lord? Especially in an agrarian society, this would have been a huge step of faith for the Israelites, and it comes up over and over and over. But for all that, relatively little is actually instructed about it other than that they aren’t to work on the Sabbath or to light a fire in any of their houses on the Sabbath, and that’s about it…
So when Jesus tells the man He heals to pick up his bed and walk, how is that a violation of the Sabbath? Is the man seeking to make a living off carrying his bed? Is he completing a daily chore that could wait until tomorrow? In no way should this be considered the man working on the Sabbath, but to the Jews, it was. “Working” was too nebulous and subjective, and they needed to know where to draw the line as to what constituted a violation of the Sabbath and what didn’t, so they had added their own rules on top of the Lord’s instruction to clarify what did/didn’t constitute work. They had decided that carrying a burden was a violation of the Sabbath, and since this man was carrying his bed (a burden) at Jesus’ command, he and Jesus were breaking the Sabbath. On top of that, while it doesn’t come up here, we see elsewhere that they also considered healing to be work, meaning that Jesus was doubly violating the Sabbath, first by healing the man, and then by telling the man to carry his bed.
This should have been a cause for incredible excitement and praise of Yahweh. This man had been an invalid for thirty eight years, and on this day he was completely healed! They should all be jumping up and down in excitement, marveling at the power and goodness of God to forever transform the life of this man and his family. This should be a cause for worship and praise, and should validate Jesus’ message and ministry in a big way! But instead, because they had decided for God how His own instructions should be administered, they ignore His miraculous intervention into human history and malign the One sent to save them from their sins.
The fact of the matter is that God is a highly relational God, and He is okay with the subjective in a way we struggle with. God knows the heart and intentions of a person, and so can look at the man carrying his bed after being healed and know that he is not working on the Sabbath, while another person, carrying his bed simply because he wants to rearrange his house, is very much violating the Sabbath. But how can the same action be okay in one instance and not in the other?? We all fully understand how the two are different, but since we cannot know the heart like God can, we look for the lines we can draw and the boundaries we can set to take the subjectivity out of faithfulness to the Lord.
This happens in a lot of areas, but one that immediately comes to mind for me is salvation. Salvation, according to the Bible, is by faith alone in the work of Christ, but how can you know whether a person has faith? You can tell they have faith by whether or not they have prayed a sinner’s prayer, obviously! If you have prayed a specific prayer for salvation, then clearly you have the faith to be saved, and if you haven’t, clearly you don’t!
I was sitting around once with a group of Christians I was serving in a particular ministry with and we were talking about how we all came to faith in Christ. One of the men among us was describing his journey in coming to understand the gospel, but at no point did he ever pray a “sinner’s prayer.” One of the other men in the group kept coming back to that, asking him when he made a particular decision and when he had prayed for it, etc., clearly uncomfortable with not having a hard and fast answer. The thing is, the man who was talking knows the gospel deeply, loves the Lord deeply, has led many people to faith in Christ, and clearly evidences his faith by how he lives his life day in and day out. If there was any among us whose faith I doubted least, it was probably his, and yet, he didn’t have a moment of prayer to point back to, leaving our other friend struggling to accept his faith as genuine. But there is no “sinner’s prayer” in the Bible, and no prayer is prayed generally in the situations described in the Bible where people come to faith, but we aren’t comfortable with the subjective, so rather than rejoicing in the grace and mercy of God at work in someone’s life, if we do not have our particular rules met, we have to question whether the Lord has even been at work at all!
The thing is, I don’t think the one man actually questioned the other’s faith, but he struggled to fit what he saw into the artificial framework he had built up, and this is exactly what was happening with the Jews in Jesus’ day. It wasn’t so much that they questioned what they saw, but they were holding so tightly to their artificial frameworks that they were willing to reject what they clearly saw in order to preserve their frameworks.
We need to hold tightly to the Word of God, and be willing to stand unashamedly on His truth, but where we have added our own frameworks and systems where His Word has left us the room to do so, we need to hold to such things with a loose grip lest we, like the Jews in Jesus’ day, reject the clear work of the Lord for not matching our expectations.
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