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(13)
"Speak also to the children of Israel, saying: "Surely My Sabbaths
you shall keep, for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your
generations, that you may know that I am the LORD who sanctifies
you. (14) You shall keep the Sabbath, therefore, for it is holy to you.
Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for whoever does any
work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people. (15) Work shall
be done for six days, but the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to
the LORD. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day, he shall surely be
put to death. (16) Therefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, to
observe the Sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual
covenant. (17) It is a sign between Me and the children of Israel
forever; for in six days the LORD made the
heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested and was
refreshed.""
To learn more, see:
Consider where this covenant
appears. It is in the book of Exodus, but after chapter 20, where God gives the commandments. From this we see that God proposes
a special covenant, which He places in the midst of all of the instructions for
building the Tabernacle. It means that, even though these people were employed
to construct such an important edifice for the worship of God, they were not to
desecrate the Sabbath by working on it. Even the construction of the Tabernacle
had to take second place to the keeping of the Sabbath.
The Sabbath is a sign.
It is not a mark. Bible usage shows that a sign is voluntarily accepted,
whereas a mark is put on against a person's will. The Sabbath is a special
sign. It is a special covenant between God and His people. Who are His people?
A sign can identify an occupation.
One might read, "Joe Smith, Dentist"—or plumber or
electrician. A sign can also give purpose for a thing; it tells us why
something is being used or done in the way that it is. A sign can give
directions: "This way to River City."
A sign can also bring people
together with shared interests and common purposes. Some fraternal
organizations have special signs that they pass to one another to identify what
lodge, or organization, it is that they belong to. A sign can unify; it can
bring people together. A sign can be a pledge of mutual fidelity and
commitment. Signs are used by organizations to designate membership. People wear
a little badge on their lapel that says that they belong to such-and-such
organization, and by it members recognize one another.
This is part of the way that the
Sabbath is also used. The Sabbath serves as an external and visible bond that unites
and sanctifies us [sets us apart] from everyone else. Here in the United States
and Canada, almost everybody else who is religious keeps Sunday or nothing. If a person keeps the Sabbath, he is being cut
away from, separated from, sanctified by the very fact that he is keeping it.
Though these people do not realize it yet, it becomes a sign to them that he is
in the process of being sanctified. We ought to be very much aware of this sign
because we are keeping it.
Everybody who has ever kept both
Sunday and Saturday knows this: Sunday sets almost no one apart because
everybody who is "religious" is already doing it. Big deal! What is
so different about that? They are only sanctified from the people who keep no
day at all. For those who are "religious," it does not sanctify them
because the Baptists are keeping the day, and the Catholics are keeping the
day, as well as the Mormons, the Pentecostals, the Church of Christ, the
Disciples of Christ, and the Congregationalists. All those people are keeping
Sunday, and it is not separating, or sanctifying, anybody.
But once a person begins to keep the
Sabbath, it immediately begins to sanctify him, to separate him from everyone
else. God has a purpose that He is working out. He has made a tremendous
investment in the Creation and in the death of His Son. The Sabbath is a means
by which He protects His investment.
If the only reason He created the
Sabbath was because we need rest, then any old time would do. Ultimately, how
and why one keeps the Sabbath are the real sign. Other religious groups
"keep" the Sabbath, but are they keeping it as God desires? It is how
and why we keep it that makes us different—they do the sanctifying. "Sanctify
them through Your truth," Jesus says in John 17:17. God's Word is truth. If people accept
it and use it, they will be using the Sabbath for different purposes than
others are.
God created the Sabbath to educate
His people in His way. It prepares them for their witness. Suppose that a
basketball coach says to his players, "Come to the gym and meet with me at
such-and-such a time." But some of the players decide that they will go to
a different gym, at a different time, and with a different coach. Players on a
team begin to take on the qualities and the philosophy of their coach. Anybody
who is familiar with athletics understands this. Those who are intimately
involved in athletics say that they can always tell whether a certain player
has been coached by a certain coach, say John Wooden or John Thompson. What has
happened is the player has taken on the sign of the coach, and it has
sanctified him from other players who are not coached by that particular coach.
The same principle is at work with
God and us. He is our Coach. He has made an appointment with us to meet at a
certain place, at a certain time. And if we choose not to go to where He is
going to be, then we are not going to begin to take on the image of our Coach.
The Sabbath was created because it both enhances and protects our relationship with God. And it provides the witness—to God, to the individual, and
to the world—of who is keeping it. This is how it becomes the sign. It
provides a witness.
The Sabbath exists to keep us in a
proper frame of mind and to provide us with the right material to negotiate the
way to God's Kingdom. We live in a grubby, grasping material world. Every day
has a built-in bias towards material things, and it is very difficult to keep
our minds focused on things that are spiritual. But the Sabbath, if a person is
keeping it as God desires, will almost put a person into a spiritual mode,
point him toward God, and force him to acknowledge Him as Creator.
The Sabbath presents us with the
opportunity to consider the whys of life, to get our head on straight with the
right orientation so that we can properly use the other six days. The Sabbath
is the kernel, the nucleus, from which the proper worship—our response to
God—grows.
Existentialist philosophers tell us
that life is absurd, that all of life is nothing but a prelude to death. But
keeping the Sabbath is a celebration of life! It tells us that God's creative
process is continuing, that He is creating us in His spiritual image so that we
might live with Him forever. For the great God, the Sabbath is a day of
creation. The Sabbath ensures us that life is not absurd, but rather, it is a
prelude to life on an infinitely higher and greater level. The more we become
like Him, the more sanctified we are from the world. It is in experiencing the refreshing elevation of the mind
that we get a tiny foretaste of what is to come.
— John
W. Ritenbaugh
To learn more, see:
Commentary
copyright © 1992-2016 Church of the Great God
FROM: THE BEREAN - CHURCH OF THE GREAT GOD.
New King James Version copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.
FROM: THE BEREAN - CHURCH OF THE GREAT GOD.
