Unusual Rest

Immediately the man became well, and picked up his pallet and began to walk. Now it was the Sabbath on that day. (John 5:9)

I have been sensing the call of God to my own soul in this story for several weeks now. I have been hearing Jesus whispering to me that it is time for me too to pick up things I have been lying on for so long, to put aside my excuses and doubts and to begin to walk. I have been seeing developments taking place in my life in which I am challenged to get outside of my comfort zone, to deliberately make choices that are uncomfortable and potentially frightening to me that require faith in the power of God to enable me to do things that I have in the past failed to do very well if at all.

Just like this sick man I was raised in a culture that put great emphasis on the lists of things a person was not supposed to do on the Sabbath day. Very much like the Jews we had created many restrictions and regulations and detailed instructions about what was allowable and what was sinful concerning activities during the hours of the Sabbath. Like the Jews we were taught to be very careful to guard the edges of the Sabbath and we knew to the very minute when it began and when it ended so as to avoid offending God by doing or saying something that might get Him upset.

I am not trying to diminish the importance of true Sabbath observance or of guarding the edges of the Sabbath from profaning it. But what I am seeing so clearly now is that if a person's heart is not truly engaged and growing in a love affair with the Creator of the Sabbath, then all attempts to keep the Sabbath holy are nothing but smokescreens and charades that only serve to deceive our own hearts into thinking that we are obeying the will of God for our lives.

Jesus was the very author of the whole idea of the Sabbath to start with. It was Jesus who created the world in the beginning and it was Jesus who rested on that first Sabbath. After creating a most amazing masterpiece of beauty and perfection and synchronized love, the whole universe burst out into spontaneous celebration at this fresh revelation of the glory and magnificence of God. It was this very same Jesus who's words had literally brought into existence everything that existed on this planet and who was standing before this pitiful victim of the effects of sin. Jesus had a deep longing to restore into the lives of His precious children a sense of what the Sabbath was originally intended to be – a guarded, sacred time of intimacy with the greatest Lover of the universe, free of all distracting influences that would detract from their paying attention to each other.

The Sabbath was made for man, not the other way around as Jesus stated quite clearly. Yet religious people prompted by the deceptive spirit of Satan have worked incessantly for centuries to distort, defame and invert everything about the true Sabbath that God had originally designed to draw people back into intimate fellowship with Himself. The whole purpose for God's rules about avoiding work on the Sabbath had everything to do with removing distractions from experiencing intimacy with Him, but humans had turned it into a concept of appeasement for a demanding, selfish, threatening Dictator in heaven.

Not a great deal has changed even in our own day quite sadly. There are still very many of us who cling to the dark pictures of God similar to what the Jews espoused in the way we view how God intends for us to 'keep' the Sabbath. Because we have never accepted the truth about God's desire for intimacy with Him we have fallen into the trap of obsessing over external forms and regulations while completely ignoring and even discounting the most important purpose for the Sabbath – a time when God wants to come and have a date with His chosen bride each week.

Given this sad state of affairs, Jesus found Himself in the midst of a whole nation filled with prejudice and false ideas about God and that enforced hundreds of petty rules with great rigidity about how to supposedly keep the Sabbath from being profaned, while in their hearts where the Sabbath was intended to take place they harbored selfishness, pride and self-righteousness. This atmosphere of misapprehension about God and His true desires for His people was so suffocating that Jesus had to be careful to not stir up their anger and prejudice too much lest He cut short His time on earth.

Yet the compassion of God's heart could not be suppressed completely even in this oppressive atmosphere of unbelief and His heart longed to heal every person around that pool. Seeing this most wretched victim of sin that was so bad he was approaching the end of his hope and even his life, Jesus could refrain no longer from expressing His compassion and He came to offer this man the greatest gift He could give.

But we in our own prejudice and confused ideas about God still might miss the main point of what Jesus was about in this story, for it is no accident that this mention of the Sabbath is so closely linked to the event of this man's healing. As important and wonderful as the healing of this man's body was, that was not the greatest gift that Jesus had to offer him. Rather it was the gift of true soul rest that is only found in a real appreciation for what the Sabbath is all about. And this gift was not only being extended to this one man only but was actually being offered to everyone who would be willing to open their eyes a little and begin to perceive what God was really wanting for them.

Jesus came to reveal the heart of the Father more than anything else. Every act, every word, every gesture and look that came out from the life of Jesus was meant to unravel and destroy the massive web of lies from the enemy about how God feels about lost sinners. Since the Sabbath is at the very core of the intimate relationship that God wants to have with His children it has become the object of special attention by the enemy in His attacks to defame the reputation of God on earth. Likewise, the Sabbath also became the focal point of Jesus' ministry in His work to unmask Satan's lies while Jesus time and again tried to get through to His people the true purpose and role of celebrating the Sabbath the way heaven designed for it to happen.

The Jews had improperly assumed that because the laws about the Sabbath included prohibitions against common work, that making even more meticulous laws along this line would make God even more satisfied. But because their hearts were far from God while their professions claimed to be obeying Him, they were unable to see that they were only destroying the real rest of the Sabbath instead of enhancing it. Instead of seeking to come closer to God during these sacred hours of intimacy, their pictures of God caused them to impose ridiculous and burdensome regulations and punishments that caused others to resent God instead of wanting to know Him better. This is the problem that Jesus came to redress and that still needs to be dealt with yet today.

According to the Jew's idea about Sabbath-keeping – and no different than what many yet believe today – they felt that what God wanted were tight restrictions on the physical activities that a person was allowed to perform to keep an arbitrary God from getting upset. But what they seemed to completely fail to comprehend was that the restrictions about working on the Sabbath were meant by God to sweep away all the competing priorities of His people for 24 hours each seventh day so that nothing would interfere with their heart communion with their Creator. As a result the Jews and most of us yet today, failed to realize God's intention for us to experience the real rest of the Sabbath day.

The very word 'Sabbath' quite literally means 'rest'. But while it is true that billions of people over the ages have 'observed' the correct day of the week as the holy Sabbath day, according to the author of the book of Hebrews we have still failed to really appreciate and truly enter into the kind of rest that God created the Sabbath for us to experience.

So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. (Hebrews 4:9)

This whole passage in Hebrews is a clear indictment both of the Jew's understanding of the Sabbath and the very similar way that many of us still view it today. We think that we are obeying God by refraining from our checklists of forbidden activities during a 24 hour period of time each week while living in total ignorance as to the true nature of the kind of rest that we need the most, a complete relaxing and refraining from our attempts to be righteous or to provide for ourselves and a corresponding reliance on the goodness and righteousness and provision of our Saviour.

When Jesus had this healed man pick up his pallet and walk around on the Sabbath day, He was not unaware that this was going to create a confrontation about proper Sabbath observance. Far from making a technical mistake, Jesus actually intended for this to be a lesson for all who would be willing to rethink their assumptions about the kind of rest that Jesus has to offer. This experience is often very different than the sort of rest we usually impose on our families when we think we are keeping the Sabbath. What appeared in human opinions to be a clear violation of the Sabbath commandment was in the eyes of heaven a wonderful celebration of the original purpose of the Sabbath – for broken, perverted, sickened humanity to be restored to wholeness and joy and fellowship with the heart of God once again.

In obeying the words of Jesus this man not only received physical healing of his body but he also began to experience the kind of soul rest that empowered him to respond with confidence and assurance when confronted by the technical enforcers of religion's petty rules. This man had entered into a relationship with His Creator who had just restored his body and he now was living under the authority of a different government internally. As such he found his actions and attitudes in sharp contrast with that of the religious 'right' and he was not afraid to say that it was more important for him to obey the words of the One who healed him than the mass of strict regulations imposed on people by the religious authorities of his church.

I know there is much more in this passage waiting to come into the open and I look forward to spending more time listening to what the Spirit has to say to the churches – His people.