What Is Work? (2)

But He answered them, "My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working." (John 5:17)

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 of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. (Exodus 20:8-10)

I have been brought up from my earliest years to respect the words of God as set out in the Ten Commandments including the fourth commandment. I have understood that this day of rest is sacred, set apart by God to be special, holy and that because it was God who made it holy no one else has the power or authority to change that in the slightest. That is still my belief to this day and I am glad that I have that biblical background as my heritage.

However, what I have been discovering for many years now is that the assumed meaning of most of the words we use in religion have been distorted and obscured in many cases by the religious cultures that we grow up within. Because the truth about God and the good news about how He views us and desires to save us from our sins has been so perverted and confused in most minds, we have taken all of the words and phrases of the Bible and have morphed them into other ideas that conveniently fit our traditions more than the real truth about God's plan of salvation.

The two texts above tend to highlight this problem. The Jews, just like many of us today, had taken the words of God and the commandments that He gave to them to reveal universal principles of reality to humanity and had externalized them so much that they could not see the deeper importance and significance of how they were originally intended to apply to our lives. Included in this mass of distortions was the real meaning of what kind of work God was talking about in the fourth commandment.

Many have concluded that because Jesus openly stated that both He and His Father worked on the Sabbath day that He was somehow implying that the Sabbath was no longer applicable. But that is a very mistaken application of this passage and can lead one into very deep deception. Jesus in no way was trying to somehow introduce a new Sabbath day or do away with the commandment that lies in the very heart of the law that describes the essence of the character of God Himself. Contrarily, Jesus was actually challenging religious people's assumptions about the true meaning of the words God used when He spoke those commandments in the first place.

Part of the way we can properly understand what Jesus was trying to say here is to look at just what the Jews in this story were thinking about when they accused Jesus of working on the Sabbath. What had Jesus just done that they believed was a violation of the Sabbath commandment?

Jesus had healed a man from 38 years of sickness on the Sabbath day.

Jesus had instructed this same man to pick up the pallet that he had been lying on much of that time and carry it away instead of leaving it lay there on the ground in the way of everyone else.

These two things are the only things that I can see in this story that could have been involved in the accusations of the religious leaders. These evidently were the activities that they classified as being work that was unacceptable to God for people to do on the Sabbath day. They had not accused Him of conducting some sort of business to profit Himself or to support Himself financially. He was not doing carpentry work or fishing or working in the fields. He had simply carried out an act of compassion and had invited a dying man to exercise his own faith in the goodness and power of God and the results were obvious to everyone, especially since the man was carrying his pallet away because he no longer needed to lay on it helplessly anymore.

Can anyone of us honestly believe that these kinds of activities were what Jesus Himself had in mind when He spoke the commandments on Mt. Sinai around 2,000 years before? Or had the beliefs of the Jews been transformed into something very different than what God had in mind when He instructed humanity as to what their original blueprint was supposed to look like?

Humans are designed to be very similar to God Himself. God created the first humans in His own image, to reflect God in many ways, to be so similar to God that they could be considered His own children. That was not just in the physical realm but in nearly every respect. Humans had become so confused as to what healthy humanity was supposed to look like by the time of Moses that God stepped in to reintroduce Himself more clearly to humanity and to expose the foundational principles of what both He and His children would look like if they were restored to the relationship they were designed to enjoy together in the first place.

But because the Jews had lost sight of these truths in their vain attempts to reproduce the outward symptoms of godliness without the heart transformation, they had done the very same thing that nearly all religious people tend to do – they had morphed the meaning of nearly all the words of Scripture to take on quite different meanings than what God intended them to convey. As a result they could not comprehend that what Jesus did on the Sabbath day was anything other than work since it violated their artificial restrictions put in place through long years of tradition and human religious interpretations.

Because Jesus chose not to engage in an argument about what the real meaning of work was, He chose instead to simply use their terminology and disrupt their own thinking by stating that both He and God the Father would do things on the Sabbath that they classified as work. That does not mean in any way that the original commandment had changed, it simply meant that the meaning of the word 'work' had been lost and replaced with false assumptions by religious people bent on control over others instead of humble dependence on God.

These Jews were so opposed by this time to the very idea that true religion was supposed to be an intimate relationship with God instead of a system of ethics and morality and outward performance that the very suggestion of viewing God as a Father rankled them to their deepest core. They became so irritated by this reference by Jesus to His Father that they started to lose sight of the original cause of their frustration with Him and resented this reference so strongly that they cherished a spirit of hostility and murder in their hearts. They failed to notice that their inward desires to hurt and destroy Jesus were far clearer violations of the commandments than might be the activities of compassion that Jesus had performed that they found so offensive.

So, was Jesus really working on the Sabbath? Or was He simply borrowing their confused terminology and using it to expose their faulty thinking? I have to believe that the later is the case.

Jesus Himself gave the Ten Commandments centuries before and nothing had changed in the meantime. He knew better than anyone what He meant when He spoke those words to the Children of Israel and He had come to earth again to reveal the true meaning of what those commandments would look like when lived out as a human being in right relationship with Father God. For mere mortals who claimed to know more about the commandments than the original Author of the commandments is absurd to the max when one realizes what was going on there. But unfortunately we too often do the very same thing when we fail to search for the real meaning of religious words that we likewise misuse and misunderstand.