HOW MANY BRICKS 

“The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, ‘It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.’

“But he replied, ‘The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ‘So they asked him, ‘Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?’ “John 5:9-11 (NIV)

The Sabbath — a hot issue for the Pharisees, but why? Anyone who violated the Sabbath got them going. Was it because it was the one thing they could control? Breaking the Sabbath was an outward violation of the law and they could come down hard on the culprit to show him who was boss.

However, to them Sabbath-breaking wasn’t about “breaking” the fourth commandment as much as it was about contravening their petty laws which were added to the fourth commandment as their interpretation of God’s law. The fourth commandment was about keeping the Sabbath, not breaking it, and it all depended on what was meant by “keeping” the Sabbath!

In order to understand the Sabbath, we have to go back to when and where this commandment originated. It was part of God’s marriage covenant with them at Sinai when they came out of Egypt. Why was it necessary for God to give His people an instruction like this? Was it to put restrictions on them? No, it was to set them free.

The only life the Hebrews knew in Egypt was a life of slavery. Seven days a week they made bricks. Their value for their masters lay in what they could produce. God sent Moses to deliver them from Egypt and everything Egypt stood for. Without an instruction like that, they would have gone on thinking that their only worth to God lay in what they could achieve or produce and not in who they were.

They had to be reprogrammed to realize that their work did not make them who they were. They were of worth to God because He had created them in His image to be a reflection of Himself, not only for His own sake but also to train them to treat one another with dignity and respect.

When God’s work of creation was complete, He rested but He did not sit back, fold His arms and do nothing. He supervised what He had created to ensure that everything functioned together in perfect harmony. He wanted these newly-freed slaves to remember that it was He who set up the Sabbath as a legitimate day of rest and it was the Egyptians who had contradicted His instruction.

For the Jews the Sabbath was intended to be a gift from God to set them free from viewing themselves in terms of what they could produce, and to give them time and opportunity to catch their breath, recover their strength and get ready for another six days of labour. They were to remember that God set it up for them because He had rested on the seventh day after His work was complete. It was a “sign” of His covenant with them set up at Mount Sinai.

“Say to the Israelites, ‘You must observe my Sabbaths. This will be a sign between me and you for the generations to come, so you may know that I am the Lord, who makes you holy.'” Exodus 31:13 (NIV).

The religious leaders had turned the Sabbath into a day of restrictions and religious rules so that they could monitor what the people were doing and jump on them when they stepped out of line. They prescribed what “work” was in such petty detail that the people were hardly able to move.

Jesus refused to be dictated to by these religious slave-drivers. He was not intimidated by their accusations and threats. Carrying a mat was not work; it was part of legitimate daily activity. He insisted that the Sabbath was a gift of God’s love, not prison bars to dehumanize them, and that He was the author of the Sabbath, not some human rule-makers who failed to understand why it was needed in the first place.

The Sabbath was a visual aid of a rest that went much deeper that just one day of not working. It was prophetic of a day which God called “today” in which we would rest form every effort to please God by our own “work”. When we enter into Jesus, we enter into His rest, because He satisfied God’s requirement for a perfect life and then died to pay the debt of our imperfection. He calls us to enter that rest by trusting in His finished work.

Have you entered His rest?