1. 6/21/09 PM Work and Worship Ten Commandments 08Exodus 20:8-11 The 4th Commandment stands out from the other nine because it is the longest of the ten. God spends all these words giving some explanation about what rest means as well as a significant explanation about WHY this is a command at all. And as long as we are talking about length it is worth mentioning that if we divide the commandments into the first 4 which have to do with our relationship with God and the remaining 6 being about our relationship with men that the God part of the Decalogue contains 42 lines in my Bible and the man part has 15. This tallys out to 4X more words for the commands that relate to our responsibilities toward God than man. Let’s read the 4th commandment. …. This last sentence catches me a little by surprise. What is this blessing all about? Let’s read Gen 2:1-3. It appears that the first time God blessed anything (Gen 2:3) He blessed the day in which He rested. (He blessed Adam and Eve later). It is clear that this command is rooted in the events of Genesis 1-2 so let’s spend a little more time there. The 4th commandment is unique because it actually contains two commands. There is a command for us to work and then there is a command for us to rest on the 7th day. The rest that God took was from His work of creation. In Genesis 1 & 2 both God and Adam do work. It is the nature of their work that has caught my attention. In both cases the work involves stepping into chaos and creating order design and meaning. In 1:2 everything was shapeless and empty. In the next clause we learn that darkness shrouded everything. But then, God began His work and out of the chaos and meaninglessness He brought light and order and life and purpose. In the same vein, Adam was put into a paradise that needed organization. Most of the work we do can be put in the category of putting order and purpose into a situation that otherwise would be chaotic and useless. Think, for example of the work of a farmer. What would happen if a farmer quit doing his work? Almost no food would be grown. What would happen if a mom took a month off and no one took her place? Chaos!!!! So, now we come to the place when God ‘rests’ from His work. I’ve always had a bit of trouble here trying to figure out why an all-powerful God would need a rest! The Hebrew word is ‘shabbat’. It actually means to cease. It is not a word that would be used of someone who stops to rebuild his strength after a long, exhausting day of work. There is an element of celebration in the word. It has more the flavor of the enjoyment of an accomplishment… a time to celebrate the completion of a task. We also read that God blessed the day and “made it holy.” We usually think of holiness as something that is without sin. Actually the word means set apart especially for God’s use. This means that God intended for the 7th day to belong to Him in the sense that our attention be completely turned toward God. So, here’s the picture so far. The ‘Shabbat’ was God’s gift to the Jews giving them the chance to stop and rest after six days of work. But the Shabbat was about more than rest. IT was an opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of the previous six days. Most importantly it was an occasion for people to turn their undistracted attention toward the LORD. Sabbath observance was such an important part of being the people of God that being a Sabbath keeper was one of the things that signified that a person WAS a follower of God. (see Exodus 31:13)! The book of Nehemiah contains some helpful sections on the Jewish Shabbat and I noticed this verse in my study… (Neh 9:28) “But as soon as they were at rest, they again did what was evil in Your sight.” Our 7th day rest was not meant to be a day where we slack off and forget about God; though this is what men tend to do. Nehemiah tried to stop this drift away from God when he was governor of Jerusalem. (read Nehemiah 13:15-22.) The Pharisees of Jesus’ day had the same concerns that Nehemiah did and over time turned “Shabbat” into an incredibly burdensome day. There wasn’t very much joy & celebration left after they were through with it. this brings us to Mark 2:23…. *”unlawful” The Pharisees divided all work into 8 categories and then included 100’s of specific prohibitions about what people were not allowed to do on Shabbat. One of the eight categories was harvesting. The disciples were harvesting grain. *Jesus’ example of David …. Principle—God cares about human needs, meeting the legitimate needs of people is the best course. *The purpose of Shabbat! (vs 27) Shabbat was made FOR man. Shabbat was never intended to be a time when another obligation for service to God is laid on our backs. It is not a time to make our life harder. It is, as we learn in Gen 2—a blessing, a time to bring happiness to man. Before we complete our teaching on the 4th commandment we must deal with the question of which day of the week the Shabbat should land upon. The 7th day of the week is Saturday, yet we are here on Sunday. There is no question that Jesus attended the synagogue on the Jewish Shabbat (read Luke 4:14-17a). It is worth mentioning that attendance at a synagogue service was not originally part of the Shabbat. I say this because synagogues didn’t even exist until 900 years after Moses. In our day there is a group who goes by the name “Seventh Day Adventists” plus a few Seventh Day Baptists who say that Saturday is the Shabbat and Christians should worship on Saturday. According to their prophet, Ellen G. White, a great apostasy set into the church by AD 300 and that when Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion he took the pagan festival of Sunday and substituted it for Shabbat. I have read in some Adventist literature that Sunday worship is actually the mark of the beast spoken of in Revelation 13. -- If this is true then it is impossible for anyone to be saved who worships on Sunday instead of Saturday. Figuring out this issue will help us to take our next step of figuring out just how we should spend our day of worship. We have all heard before that the resurrection occurred on the first day of the week, Sunday. Jesus revealed Himself to the disciples on that day, and again a week later. It was also on a Sunday when Jesus ascended into Heaven. There is no command that actually changes the day. Look at Acts 20:5-7… Paul was a in a huge hurry to get to Jerusalem but Paul stayed in Troas for 7 days so that he would have the opportunity to speak in a church service that was held on the first day of the week. In First Corinthians 16 Paul gives the Corinthian church some advice about taking up a benevolent offering. He tells the church to do it on the first day of the week. This day came to be known as the LORD’S day. In Revelation 1:10 John introduces the book by saying that he was ‘in the Spirit on the LORD’S DAY. There is little doubt that the first Christians, who were Jewish all the way continued to go to the temple for worship and keep the Shabbat. Acts 2:46 says, “every day they continued to meet in the temple courts.” The question really came up when large numbers of Gentiles started to be saved and come into the church. The Jew s were still all keeping the Shabbat regulations on Saturday but what about these Gentiles? Should they be forced to do it? In the first general council of the church (Acts 15) the answer seems to have been, “NO”. We can read the letter sent out by the council in Acts 15:24-29. (read) Because this is such an important question there was much written about it in the first 250 years of the church. Listen to these ancient words…. (quote from Zond. Bible Dict. “The Lord’s Day” Vol 3. I absolutely reject the teaching that the Christian day of worship was changed in the 4th century by Constantine to accommodate pagan beliefs. The very early church changed the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday as a response to the leading of the Holy Spirit. All the church fathers in the next 3 centuries who say anything about it unanimously support the practice of Christian worship on Sunday. * “The change of day in the Christian dispensation from the 7th to the 1st is of great symbolic value, and although no Divine word was written commanding the change, the spiritual facts of Christianity altered it surely, yet without proclamation or noise. Until Christ has come, man worked TOWARD his Sabbath. Since Christ, he works FROM his Sabbath. In the old economy, in the last analysis, the Sabbath depended upon the work; in the new, the work grows out of the Sabbath. This changes a good deal of our thinking about the Shabbat. Strictly speaking I do not believe that God calls us to “keep the Shabbat”. Shabbat is anchored in the law, it causes us to look back, the issue of work is in the center of things. Think about it With the Shabbat you only deserve the rest after you have worked hard all week. With the Lord’s Day we don’t have to earn anything, and all of our work days that follow flow out of our time with God. Next week we will work hard at figuring out what Sunday should look like for us.