What’s with the Sabbath?

For the week of February 15, 2025 / 17 Shevat 5785

Message information over a poster on an easel with the words, Ask Me a Bible Question

Yitro
Torah: Shemot/Exodus 18:1 – 20:23
Haftarah: Isaiah 6:1 – 7:6; 9:5-6 (English Isaiah 6:1 – 7:6; 9:6-7)
Originally posted the week of February 18, 2017 / 22 Shevat 5777 (updated)

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Shemot/Exodus 20:8-11)

I was in Vancouver, Canada, some years ago to participate in an event. Over three days, thousands of people gathered at one of the city’s largest venues to hear speakers on a variety of biblical topics. My ministry was one of over two hundred with displays, small and large. Weeks before the event, I was discussing with one of my daughters what I might do to encourage people to interact with my display. She suggested I make a simple sign with the words, “Ask me a Bible question!” This indeed led to some very interesting discussions.

One interaction didn’t go so well, however. In the name of asking me a question, the person chose to harshly lecture me on the Sabbath. In the end, they questioned my eternal future with God because I wouldn’t fully subscribe to their perspective, which is too bad since this is a critical and often neglected issue.

So, as briefly as I can, I will share what I believe to be a sound biblical perspective on the Sabbath. First, in whatever way we may derive universal moral principles from the Ten Commandments (of which the Sabbath command is a part), it is primarily a cornerstone of the covenant given by God to the people of Israel through Moses at Mt. Sinai. As the special ten, they represented the whole of the covenant, which includes many other directives covering every aspect of Israelite society. This is why the tablets of the Ten Commandments were to be included in the Ark of the Covenant, stored in the Most Holy Place within the Tabernacle and later the Temple.

Unlike the earlier covenant God made with Israel through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which was unconditional and eternal, the Sinai Covenant through Moses was conditional and temporary. As a covenant, it was broken by the people of Israel by their repeatedly turning to other gods. God’s response to the breaking of the Sinai Covenant was the New Covenant promised through the prophet Jeremiah (see Jeremiah 31:31-33) and instituted by the Messiah (see Luke 22:20).

The New Covenant internalizes much of the Sinai Covenant’s essence and permanently establishes a right relationship with God. As a system of law, therefore, the Sinai Covenant is no longer in effect. Therefore, the Ten Commandments as representative of the Sinai Covenant aren’t binding. This doesn’t mean that the principles they represent are to be neglected necessarily, since biblically speaking, they are clearly eternal, universal principles, like so many of the other directives contained in the Sinai Covenant. However, applying the Sabbath beyond the confines of ancient Israel isn’t straightforward. As the early followers of Yeshua began to teach God’s Truth to non-Jews, while they taught principles based on Old Covenant Scripture, including the Ten Commandments, they warned against the imposition of Sabbath law (e.g., Galatians 2:16; Colossians 4:10). Why is that?

Unlike the other nine and many other directives revealed by God through Moses, Sabbath keeping includes more than the moral and spiritual components of other commands. By regulating the workweek, Sabbath also addresses society in general. Not only would it be impossible for people outside the Jewish world to effectively observe Sabbath by demanding the cessation of work, it would also cause an unnecessary clash with the pagan world of that day.

Does that mean, therefore, that Sabbath has no place whatsoever among Yeshua’s followers? For much of history, Sabbath has been central to the lives of believers. It is thought that the Sabbath was changed from the seventh day (Saturday) to the first (Sunday) due to Yeshua’s resurrection and the early believers meeting on that day. Actually, there is very little evidence of what occurred and why. Nevertheless, for most of the past two thousand years, believing communities have almost always determined that some sort of Sabbath-keeping was to be implemented. In my opinion, they were right to do so because even though Sabbath keeping was not to be imposed upon believers from among the nations, it is clearly an important principle of Scripture stemming back to the giving of the Sinai Covenant. While the Sabbath, as expressed in the Ten Commandments, is specific to Israel under the Sinai Covenant, it is rooted in creation (Bereshit/Genesis 2:1-3) and also reveals God’s perspective on the need for rest. The need for rest is not just about self, but also for those under our care, even including animals. Therefore, why would we not seek to implement such a principle that obviously expresses God’s understanding of life, work, and rest?

By not imposing their particular implementation of Sabbath, the early Jewish believers gave non-Jewish communities the opportunity to develop culturally appropriate expressions of Sabbath over time, which is precisely what they did. They did, that is, until more recently when it has just about been forgotten altogether.

While we are not mandated to impose Sabbath keeping upon one another, we would be well advised to seek God and the Scriptures to appropriately apply the Sabbath within our communities today. This includes speaking into the society at large, encouraging civil governments to return to the godly rhythm of rest exemplified by the Creator himself.

Scriptures taken from the English Standard Version

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Whatness

For the week of February 8, 2025 / 10 Shevat 5785

Message info over an image of the Israelites gathering manna from a neo-gothic fresco, Trnava, Slovakia

B’shallach
Torah: Shemot/Exodus 13:17 – 17:16
Haftarah: Shoftim/Judges 4:4 – 5:31

When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the LORD has given you to eat. (Shemot/ Exodus 16:15)

As I was looking over this week’s parsha (weekly Torah reading portion), the story of the manna caught my eye, which led me to check out its Hebrew background. The very popular Strong’s concordance of the Bible[1], includes a suggested definition for the supposed root of the word “manna” as: “literally, a whatness (so to speak).”[2]

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “whatness” is “the quality of something that makes it what it is and different from other things.[3] Take trees, for example. A tree’s whatness is its unique combination of attributes that makes it distinct from other things, such as a root system, trunk, branches, leaves or needles, and perhaps especially its woodiness. Strong’s use of “whatness” for the manna is especially interesting because it’s in a category all its own. It cannot be grouped together with anything else in existence. Therefore, its “whatness” is found solely in its relation to itself. In other words, it is what it is.

When the people of Israel first encountered the manna, they were dumbfounded. They had never seen anything like it. That’s because there wasn’t anything like it. Eventually, they would discover it didn’t behave like anything else in all creation. If they took too much for their family between the first and fifth days of the week, it would go bad. And yet, on the sixth day, they were to take double the daily amount since none would appear on Shabbat, the seventh day. This would continue for forty years until they entered the Promised Land when it abruptly stopped. As far as we know, manna is the only food substance to have ever existed that provided everything needed, in addition to water, for a human’s daily nourishment. None of this would have been known to the Israelites on the first day they encountered it. But they knew it was something most special. They looked at it. They touched it. They tasted it. And all they could say was something like, “What?”

Many theologically minded people like the concept of “mystery” to describe the unknowns of God and life. Regarding the manna, its whatness, that which makes it what it is, might be described as a mystery. Indeed, much of what makes manna manna is beyond our understanding, but that should not be a barrier to truly experiencing it to its fullest extent. And that goes for both those who literally partook of it and the rest of us who encounter it in Scripture.

The manna didn’t only sustain the people of Israel for forty years in a most inhospitable environment; it demonstrated God’s provision and was designed to teach the people to rely on God’s Word. As we read:

And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD (D’varim/Deuteronomy 8:3).

To understand the essence of the manna was not to be found in its unknowns but in its knowns, its profound and complex whatness. I wonder how often we miss God’s own whatness because we can’t figure him out or understand what’s happening. But should we allow our inability to understand God and life to get in the way of our fully experiencing him? Perhaps you are in a situation right now that makes you want to say, “What?” If so, may God help you see it for what it is so that it can accomplish what God wants in and through you.

Scriptures taken from the English Standard Version


[1] “A concordance is a comprehensive index of the words used in a text or a body of texts. Ordinarily it will not only index but also cite all passages in which a given word occurs” (https://guides.library.queensu.ca/english/concordances-quotations).
[2] https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h4478/nasb20/wlc/0-1/
[3] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/whatness

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