Rest and Reflection: Understanding the Sabbath

You're listening to The Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk about the Bible in fun, in practical ways. Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Bible Guys. Today is Friday, and I gotta tell you, I'm gonna miss being with you, Wesley. Yeah, this is the last day we have had a great time. Jeff's been out of pocket. Of course, we miss Jeff when he's gone, and when I'm gone, hopefully you miss me. But we've really had a great time with Wesley and I this week. And we've been covering a lot of the Old Testament stuff and today we're skipping all the way to Leviticus. But before we do that, Wesley, we have our Friday segments. We have the most epic segment of all. This is the segment what made Chris Matt this week. This is probably one of our most loved segments that we have here. Well, just keep in mind, Wesley, I'm not an angry guy, right, So being mad doesn't mean that I walk around angry. Yeah, it means that I get mad for the people of the world. I'm a servant of the people, Wesley. And by the way, I didn't even discover that until we started doing this segment, I realized that the ninety five percent of the things that make me mad, I get mad on behalf of someone else. It's not even from my experience, like if I have a in fact, this just happened, this is not what made me mad. But this is an example of what I mean. Is that we went to a restaurant, my daughter and I and my daughter went to go order the pizza, and this particular waitress said, she said, to be honest with you, the pizza is not that great here. And then she goes, oh, you sold me. I'll have the chicken fingers. And then I was so impressed. I was delighted. I was elated, and I said, you know what, if I was a server here, I said, I honestly would encourage every server to tell everybody that the pizza wasn't good, so that eventually it would make it all the way up to corporate and they say they'd be forced to say, this pizza isn't selling well, so therefore let's go ahead and change the recipe or change the menu item. Because like, that was brilliant to me. That elated to me. That was elating to me, and the reason why is because I really truly do love that idea of benefiting the people in general. Anyway, So here's what made me mad this week. And by the way, uh, it is something personal that happened just to me, but it does have everything to do with customer service. So I have I have this thing in my spine where it's preventing me from not anymore. But it goes, it comes and goes. But I've got some some bulging discs in my spine. So my right hand was too it was it was hurting too much my arm, and so I couldn't cut the grass. So my daughter Tory couldn't cut it. And uh in Steven's allergic, and so's Liz. So I thought to myself, what am I going to do? So for the first time ever, and they listened to me. Wesley thirty three years of marriage for the first time in the history of my life. I call it a long company. Oh wow. In landscaping and cutting the lawn sort of my thing. My lawn looks good, right, It's like it's sort of like I wouldn't say perfect, but like it's pretty dang good, right, And so I chopped all around. I found a company, and it was decently long, but I gave explicit instructions, please take care of my lawn. So anyway, I go to work, I come back home and these guys Wesley tore my lawn up. Oh no, did they cut it super low. Everything that could be bad was bad. And I hate to say this because it's it's like stereotypes. But when they told me that their lawn service was from a different part of town, I thought to myself, huh, like there was only there's there's like sort of two schools of thought, right, Either a like I've seen like people mow down fields in that part of town where the grass clumps on the top, it looks like a piece of garbage, right, because that's good enough for that side of town. But then there's another school of thought that says, well, wait a minute, people from that side of town, if they come to my side of town, it's a little bit nicer than their side of town. Maybe though maybe they work in a pristine manner because they know that, you know, these guys pay well and everything else. So I thought there's two schools of thought. Well guess what it was the first school of thought they came and tore everything up. They cut it too low. They burned the lawn where it was like it was all like where it was like plush green. Now it's like, you know, brown, because they cut it too low. And then they chip spots. They actually like hacked up the edges and then left like layers layers of They didn't clean up the clippings. Oh no, okay, it was just like this massive amount of clippings. They didn't even try to go over twice, like you know, like if there's clippings that you can like mault. Right. So anyway, so I basically come home, I'm horrified what happened. And so my thing that made me mad was that, But it also made me mad for the customer service side of things, right, So it's like, what kind of person sends a company to just destroy a lawn? Because, by the way, even though my lam was lawn, they looked at it and thought themselves, holy crud, this guy keeps a good lawn, so let's go ahead and try to cut it. Well. They thought we're going to make this better. They don't give it. They don't give a one ounce of care. They literally thought to themselves, I do not care whether this customer cancels or complains because because it's a it's you know. Anyway, the bottom line is, good customer care is hard to find, right, and people who disregard good customer care they don't care about anything else other than getting to the end of that day getting their own paycheck. Yeah, they can care less about the customer. That's what made me mad. Yeah. So if you would like to cut Chris's grass now one five five five, you know. Yeah, Well after that speech, people are fearful in my grass. Right, I'm moved too afraid to live up to his expectations. Yeah. We've had some bad and we've got a good guy now, but we've had some bad ones in the past. Oh I'm telling you what, man, I can't even think of a thing that made me more angry. And I'm not even kidding when I say this, in the past six months. Yeah, like that that made me more angry than anything has in the past six months. Yeah, because depending on what they did, now you have to go back and either plant grass seed, fertile lot, like, do something I don't know, right, Yeah, well, let's just say Chris was not happy. Yeah. So anyway, good customer service people. Yes, let's care about the customer, all right, let's move on us. So we're jumping from Exodus all the way to Leviticus sixteen. There's a lot of levitical law, right, So God gave you know, you know, a lot of different instructions, and we're skipping over a lot of that. Instructions for priestly conduct or conduct, instructions for you know, beginning works, and instructions for the people, instructions for purification after childbirth, serious skin disease, instructions, all these different levitical law, instructions, treatment for contaminated clothing, all these different things. And so we're going to skip to Leviticus sixteen, verses twenty nine through thirty four. Yes, so it says, on the tenth day of the appointed month in early autumn, you must deny yourselves. Neither native born Israelites nor foreigners living among you may do any kind of work. This is a permanent law for you. On that day, offerings of purification will be made for you, and you will be pure in the Lord's presence from all your sins. Verse thirty one. It will be a sabbath day of complete rest for you, and you must deny yourselves. This is a permanent law for you in future generations. The purification ceremony will be performed by the priest who has been anointed own ordained to serve as high priest in place of his ancestor Aaron. He will put on the holy linen garments and purify the most holy place, the tabernacle, the altar, the priests, and the entire congregation. This is a permanent law for you to purify the people of Israel from their sins, making them right with the Lord wants. Each year. Yep, there it is. Yeah. So it's a Sabbath day scripture, right, and so this is a more specific instructions and by the way, we skipped over even before last podcast, very detailed instructions on what to do or not to do on the Sabbath. Now, there's a lot of controversial topic even with major religions in the world about Sabbath. Right, so we all know that uh uh you know, I remember my aunt got uh sort of locked into uh you know this, this idea of the Sabbath has to be Saturday, right, and there there are entire you know, religions out there that say, uh, you know that that the Uh, yeah, I've I've I've I've even seen a billboard that says that Sunday is the mark of the beast. Wow, have you ever seen that? No, I've never seen that one. Yeah, yeah, put out by a certain group, right, and and they say that, you know, it's the mark of the beast. And so not only do they say that, hey, we don't believe that Sunday can can be a Sabbath, but what they what they're saying is you're you're going to hell. It will lead you straight to hell because you've disobeyed and not honored this calendar day of Sabbath being Saturday. So do you have any initial thoughts on that. Well, the thing that pops to mind pops in mind is verse thirty one. It says it will be a Sabbath day of complete rest for you. So God created this Sabbath day for us, but I think in modern day times we view it as the other way around, which there's a scripture that actually talks about that. But you know, the Sabbath day was created for us so that we could reflect on the good things that God did. When you go back to Genesis one and one, it talks about how in the beginning God made the heavens in the earth. Then it goes all the way down when we get to the last day. It was when we say use the word rest there in Genesis. It's more of the fact, not that God was tired and you know, he was exhausted and had to lay on the sofa, and who I created the heavens and the earth and the planet and animals, and I am utterly exhausted. It was more so that God was reflecting on the good that he made. So that's kind of what that sabbath means, to kind of reflect on what God has done in your life. Remember the good things that he's done, Remember the blessings, Remember to spend time with him. That's why we go to church and things like that. So that's kind of the point of the Sabbath. It was given for our benefit, not the other way around, right, And Jesus, Jesus himself said that because, yeah, Jesus, you know, in the New Testament, he was healing somebody, right, and they were really upset because he was healing somebody on the Sabbath, the Sabbath. Yeah, And then Jesus asked them a question and said, well, wait a minute. You know, you say not to work on a sabbath, but if a sheep falls into a pit, which one of you would leave it in that pit, which one of you would not lean over and pull it out of the pit. Right? He says that the Sabbath was created for man. The man wasn't created for the Sabbath. The Sabbath isn't all, you know, all binding. Because we have to remember this too, that they created rules around the rules, right. So what they would say is they would say, well, what are the semantics of work? Right? And they actually had a number of steps that they had determined was too many steps, and so they would not only honor the Sabbath, and they were doing it out of good intentions, I think, but they were actually so particular about the Sabbath. That hang on a second. So they were so particular about the Sabbath that they implemented their own rules on top of the rules as law. And so Jesus was saying, no, no, no, no, listen, it's lawful for me to heal in the Sabbath. You're considering it work. But God didn't say that, right. And so the bottom line is is, well, let's go back to the idea, have Saturday versus Sunday, so we get our Sunday because Jesus was raised on a Sunday, right, So he dies just a few hours before Friday ends. And people think sometimes he was in the grave for seventy two hours, but actually the scripture is very clear that he at the ninth hour he cried with a loud voice and gave up the ghost right at three pm. So six pm started a new day, right, And so so what he does is he he he goes ahead and dies and then he's only in the grave for three hours on Friday. He's he's in the grave for all of Saturday. And then it says very early in the day on Sunday, which means what was still dark out, you know, so there's only it's only six hours into you know, the new day. Probably he raises from the grave. And that's why we honor our Sabbath on Sundays. Yeah, the principle, you know, Paul says, it's the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. You know, we are to honor a sabbath. So it's one in seven, right, So God rests on the Sabbath day. I don't think there's anything wrong with making Saturday your Sabbath. I don't think there's anything wrong with making Sunday your Sabbath. Yeah right, But I do think it's wrong to say that if it's anything besides Saturday, it's the mark of the beast. Yeah, that's taken it a bit far. Yeah, when you're as you're talking about this, I think of another scripture, completely unrelated, but that talks about prayer and going into your prayer closet. Yes, kind of the same concept in that God can hear your prayers even if you don't literally go into a closet and shut the door. God can still hear your prayers. It was more so like symbolism or a metaphor not that, oh I can't be heard by God unless I'm sitting literally in a closet. We used to have a family member like that who it was more so a family member. My mother knew of that, literally believed that that, you know, you, if you prayed, you had to go into the closet or like God wasn't going to hear you, you know, because of what the reference used in the Bible in going into your per closet. So yeah, yeah, it's kind of the same concept a little bit here, right, Yeah, with the Sabbath. Yeah, so so to think to think that we have to think about this. So, so there's levitical law. We skipped over. You know, fifteen chapters. Moses had come down from the you know, the mountain of Sinai with ten commandments, and then when there was a golden calf, he threw the commandments of the tablets on the calf, right, and we're actually, I'm sorry that was the movie. It's so funny. Yeah, the scripture actually says he threw them at the foot of the mountain, yeah, and broke them. Okay, so God actually gave him a replacement of the Covenant. Now we skipped over that, but basically he went back up the mountain and got replacement tablets and then set them in the ark of the Covenant. So we know that for sure. But part of the scripture that we skipped over is that God eventually gave Moses six hundred and thirteen commandments. So there's six hundred and thirteen precepts. So there's two hundred and forty eight thou shots, there's three hundred and sixty five Thou shot knots, making up six hundred and thirteen precepts. So there's a bunch of laws. And God is very detailed. God is very specific. So when they talk about the Law of Moses, we're not talking about ten commandments. We're talking about six hundred and thirteen of them. Right now. What's interesting is is that somehow people believe it has to be Saturday, and it has to be this exact time frame is the Jewish custom, and yet we don't follow any other Jewish custom in the political law, not even one, not even a single one. And there are six hundred and thirteen rus was the follow right, you know? Even right here it says there would be a purification ceremony performed by the priests who anointed to anoint his service high priest, you know. And that's that's directly connected to the Sabbath passage, right. And yet those who insist that it has to be on a certain day, they don't do that ceremony, right, And so all these other things that are under the levitical law, Jesus says, we're not under the law. Paul says we're not under the law. Jesus said he's not abolishing the law. He came to fulfill the law. So therefore we still honor our father and our mother. We still have no graven image, right, But it translates into our modern day. Remember the Sabbath day keeping it holy. We are given the instruction to work six days and rest for one right, so we are not to work. And so I would say, of all the ten commandments, wouldn't you agree that the Sabbath, honoring the Sabbath is probably the one that we violate the most. Yeah. Yeah, I think people don't think much of it from a society perspective. It's just another day off from work, right, you know, that's how society views that. You have Saturday and Sunday. You know, maybe Saturday you'd clean the house and Sunday you go on your boat or to the beach or something. Right, So that's kind of how society views it. But as mentioned, God gives guidance. Now, what would you say to the person who's trying to figure out the Sabbath thing and they're thinking, like, well, what is acceptable or not acceptable on a Sabbath? Because there's that's like a hot button topic in the Christian world of you know what you should do or shouldn't do on the Sabbath. What would you say to that brand new Christian just accepted Christ yesterday. Yeah, I would say, the principle is that you are to pick one in seven days to rest, and so therefore you whatever your schedule allows. In this modern society, if you work on Sundays, then make Monday your sabbath. Right. So for thirty years I worked at churches where Monday was the day off, and so Monday was my sabbath because Sundays, you know, really hectic time. And I think most people don't understand that. For pastors, Sunday is a work day for us. Oh yeah, you know, so it's a worship day for you, but it's a work day for us, yes, And it's mentally exhausting and emotionally exhausting and in many other ways physically exhausting. So therefore I used to make Mondays my sabbath. But then Heritage works on Mondays, right, So so so i'm I'm you know, And some people would say, oh, it's Sunday afternoon to Monday, Monday afternoon, that's fine, But I don't normally, you know, so I try to to the rhythm that you have. My Sabbath varies because my job varies, but I will make sure I have a time of rest. So I would I would give that advice. I would say, make sure that you're not working and that you're relaxing and detaching, because I heard a sermon one time that said this, and this was one of the coolest things I've heard, and that is man is not made to rest from work. Man was created in the book of Genesis to work from rest, right, So think about that. So it's like, so it's like God rested, right. So God created Adam on the sixth day, and then what do you do on the seventh day? Rested? Right? So man is created, and what is the first thing that man does? Rests and then he goes to work. So man wasn't created to rest from work. He was created to work from a state of rest. And so it's like, so we need to make rest a priority so that from that overflow of rest we have enough energy to work. We don't just work to ourselves to the bone to the point where we're like, man, we got to take a break. And it's never a sufi should break. And that rest and reflection allows you to operate at your best. That's the thing. It's kind of like, that's how you're recharged. That's how you feel spiritually as you're maybe taking that Sabbath in praying and reading God's word or going to church. So it's really rejuvenating you. But that's the part that we typically X out of our lives because we're on to the next thing. Right, Yeah, that's exactly right. So hey listen, that looks like it's about our time. And do you have any other last thoughts? Yeah? No, I think this was great. Yeah. I would just say I would just say, if you don't rest one and seven, if you don't detach and do whatever it is that you could do to make sure that you're emotionally and physically resting and not to mention, consecrate that time for the Lord. Yeah, and your relationship with the Lord, because that's the purpose of the Sabbath. I would say, if you're not doing that, then then find some time in your schedule because you will not regret it. It is unplug it's a biblical principle and you you are made to operate that way, so all right we hey listen, that is our time, and so hopefully we will see you next time on the Bible guys. H m hmmmmmm