Confusion and Sabbath

For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. (John 5:18)

I keep coming back to this verse seeking to get deeper into the real issues that are found here. There are so many of them that it is difficult for me to move on past this without spending much more time here excavating and learning the many things about the real truth of God and of reality that can be discovered in this passage. I also see exposed some of the deep areas of deception that have become embedded in religion and that still remain firmly entrenched even in my own thinking that really need to be seen, challenged and expelled from my heart.

In these verses it becomes very clear that these Jews were deeply offended by Jesus and what He stood for as far as their beliefs about God were concerned. They were so offended that John states unequivocally that they wanted to kill Him. That is a pretty deep offense. They also quite clearly believed some things about Jesus' motives that were not true but that they were basing their opinions on, things that they refused to check out or ask Him about His side of the story before they jumped to such violent-prone conclusions.

It says here that they believed that Jesus was breaking the Sabbath and that Jesus was making Himself equal with God because He called God His Father or Daddy. Both of these things evidently were clearly wrong according to their version of religion and were so terribly that they felt anyone who clung to such 'heresies' deserved nothing less than death.

But as I have been noticing over the past few weeks, the real problems lay in their own version of what the Sabbath really means and their picture of God and how He wants His children to relate to Him. The more I think about these things the more I realize that they are actually much more intertwined that we might suppose at first.

When properly understood and appreciated the Sabbath and our relationship with God are really very close to one and the same thing. The Sabbath was given as one of the key elements of protecting and maintaining an intimacy with God that is vital to delivering us from the power of sin in our lives. When we fail to grasp the reality of what sin really is – a breakdown in our vital connection with the only Source of life in the whole universe, then we are set up to miserably mess up our conceptions of what the Sabbath is all about. We can easily slip into very defensive arguments about which day is the right one for the Sabbath or which church is the right one to attend on the Sabbath or what activities are allowed or disallowed on the Sabbath or any number of other fights we might like to engage in to defend our opnions about the Sabbath.

But all of these fall far short of the real purpose and meaning of the Sabbath day as designed by God from the very Creation of this world. As important and vital as it is to align ourselves properly on the right day that God wants to spend His most intimate time with us called the Sabbath, an obsession with arguing about the proper day that eclipses the relationship and intimacy that must take place during that day can actually cause more harm than good. Getting the timing right but missing the experience will do nothing to improve or strengthen a relationship that is nearly non-existent to start with.

These Jews found themselves in just that very trap. They had come to see the Sabbath as an external regulation that had to be 'kept' in very meticulous ways to appease the demands of a God who was ready to punish anyone who failed to live up to all of His demands for perfect outward performance. But as any person could tell you who has found themselves trapped in a marriage with someone more intent on using fear and force to get their spouse to satisfy their every whim but with little interest in sharing love and life together in humility and thriving in each other's love, relationship without intimate love and selfless expressions and actions is hardly worth the term if that relationship is only for external appearances.

People may be able to force themselves to put on appearances of a good marriage so that others will believe everything is wonderful in their home, but if the reality is not deep inside and their hearts are not experiencing genuine love and nurture and care for each other, the whole charade is worse than a sham, it can be outright hell on earth. Whether or not there is open violence in the home or whether the abuse is simply neglect of the needs and heart longings of the spouse, a supposed relationship without the intimacy of caring, compassion, humility and tender regard for the needs of the other above one's own needs is just a living arrangement hardly worth the name.

The very same applies to our attempts to 'keep' the Sabbath day holy when we resist the love and compassion and desire for intimacy that God longs for us to share with His heart as our loving Father. When our picture of God is skewed (and everyone of us has this problem), then our perception of what the Sabbath is all about is going to reflect those distortions to the same extent. Our ideas about Sabbath-keeping are going to reflect our concepts of God and how He feels about us and how He wants us to relate to Him.

This is the core reason why we are so similar to those Jews so long ago. We not only fail to grasp the true meaning and significance of the Sabbath as God gave it in Eden and again on Mt. Sinai but we all have been seriously tainted with the many lies about our loving Father that sin has infected all of humanity with over the centuries. Our lies about God infect our concepts of the Sabbath and all of it becomes intermingled. The Jews were deeply mired in confused thinking about God and the Sabbath and as a result when they encountered the very Author of the Sabbath day they could not recognize in Him anything familiar to what they believed about God in their version of Sabbath observance.

They, just like all of us tend to do, were judging Jesus and His radical ideas about God by their own entrenched beliefs about what God had to be like or how He treated sinners and 'good' people. They refused to let go of their firmly cherished beliefs that God was looking for good performance instead of a deep relationship. They could not tolerate any notion that God was desirous of an intimate, interactive, caring relationship of love and respect and creative interaction between Himself and His children designed in His own image. Instead they insisted that God was more interested in control like they wanted for themselves than in joyful interactions of love in perfect freedom.

Because their ideas about what the Sabbath was all about were so deeply distorted, it lead to the exposure of the related problems of their terribly distorted views of God that were directly linked to those beliefs. Since their version of God was all about control, fear, demands and performance, they felt it an insult to see anyone insinuating that God might want to share intimacy and openness with humans much like a genuinely happy and healthy marriage relationship would involve. Such ideas were totally scandalous to their way of thinking – and nothing has changed in the years since that time. Jesus' inferences that He treated God like His close friend and Daddy challenged their opinions – and ours – about how we are supposed to feel toward God and they could not stand such threats to their thirst for power and control over those under their religious dominance.