Confusion Around The Lord’s Day (3)

THE SABBATH Made For man

Rev. J.W. Deenick. Trowel & Sword. May 1966

Jesus and the Sabbath.
In Mark 2:27 we found this word of the Lord Jesus: “the sabbath was made for man” and I ventured to suggest that when the Lord Jesus said “for man” he meant “for man” and not “for the Israelites from the time of Moses to the day of the death of Christ”.

It has been argued that we should not divorce this statement of the Lord Jesus from the context in which He made it and that in that context He obviously had the people of Israel in mind. He addressed the Pharisees and rebuked them for making God’s people slaves of the Sabbath and He said: “why do you make it look as if the people of God were there for the sabbath; the sabbath is there for them” So runs the argument and it is true to a point.

The Lord Jesus certainly had the Jews of his time in mind primarily; but not exclusively. He had also the human race in mind, just as he always had the human race in mind whenever he spoke of “man” or referred to Himself as the “Son of man”. Moreover, we know that it is nothing unusual for the Lord Jesus to make a statement of a very general nature in circumstances, in a conversation, in a conflict of a very particular nature. I refer to the Lord’s conversation with Nicodemus, or with the woman at the well or with the Syrophoenician woman. I cannot therefore think of one reason why “man” in this context should not have precisely the same meaning as it has in e.g. the song of the angels (Luke 2:14) or in John 2:25. I do not think that anybody would suggest that when John wrote that Jesus knew what was in man, he merely meant to say that the Lord knew what was in the Israelites from Moses to his own days. Yet, that is exactly what we are invited to believe concerning Mark 2:27.

In the April issue I pointed out that we have to be careful not to imply that in fact the Lord Jesus was imprecise in what He said and that He did not say what He meant. As a matter of fact I have not seen one exegesis of Mark 2:27 in which the universal implications of the text were not acknowledged. But how then could we deny that in this text the Lord Jesus declared that His Father instituted the sabbath, i.e. the day of rest for worship, as a blessing meant for all men?

In this connection we may well remember that here too the conflict was not about the sabbath as such but about the sabbath as it was legalistically observed by Phariseism. In that conflict the Lord Jesus said nothing about the abrogation of the sabbath (as he would do about the mosaic divorce regulations – see Matthew 19:8) but rather He pointed to the universal design of the sabbath and He further pointed to Himself as the Lord of the sabbath. By saying this the Lord Jesus meant that He as the Son of man, i.e. as THE man, was placed in charge of that sabbath-for-man to see to it that it be protected and used for the glory of God and the well-being of man. There is no suggestion anywhere in the New Testament, as far as I can see, of the Lord Jesus being in charge of the sabbath for the purpose of abolishing it. During the three years of his public activity the Lord Jesus consistently defended the sabbath against all the innovations and misinterpretations of phariseism. He battled to unmask the falsehoods of legalism in connection with the sabbath. His desire was to give back to the nation the privilege of its sabbath. But then as the sabbath was made for man, His desire was also to extend that privilege to all mankind. I propose that it is a legitimate conclusion from this text to say that still to-day the Lord Jesus is the Lord of the sabbath and that it is His office still, and His desire, to defend the sabbath, and to extend it to all the nations of the world, the people of Ceylon not excluded.

At this point the reader may remind me of the distinction which I made in the April issue, i.e. the distinction between the sabbath as such, or the sabbath of the fourth commandment, and the mosaic sabbath and he may ask whether the Lord Jesus referred to the mosaic sabbath when He said that the sabbath was made for man. This would be a relevant question because the sabbath which applied to Jesus’ days was the mosaic sabbath. Now, this distinction between the mosaic or levitical sabbath and the sabbath of the fourth commandment is not by any means a discovery that I have made. One will find it with Prof. Dr. Willem Geesink and with many others. It is also a quite biblical distinction of which we make use in connection with each of the first nine commandments of the law. In the mosaic or levitic law we find a great many regulations meant to assist Israel in the interpretation and application of the ten commandments. This is true of e.g. the seventh and the fifth commandment. It is also true of the fourth commandment. Many of these regulations were meant to foreshadow the fulness of God’s grace in the Kingdom of heaven. They found their preliminary fulfilment in the work of Christ. The Lord Jesus Himself always observed the mosaic or levitical law in the days before his resurrection. Yet, we notice that He was careful not to render a universal application to it. After his resurrection He did not say to His disciples: “go and teach the nations what Moses commanded you.” He said: “all that I commanded you”. One of these commandments was that the sabbath was made for man.

Now, where are we? Looking back we notice a full agreement between the Lord Jesus and Paul in the matter of the sabbath. While the new approach has considerable difficulty in reconciling their exegesis of Paul’s texts with Mark 2:27, we found no such difficulty at all. Whereas the Lord Jesus declared the sabbath to have been designed as a blessing for all mankind, Paul contended that certain mosaic or levitical manners of observing the sabbath had been abrogated. And both the Lord Jesus and Paul militate against a legalistic observance of the fourth commandment, or for that matter of any other commandment.

The sabbath in the ten commandments.

From the New Testament we come to what the Old Testament teaches about the sabbath. I do not think we have to be very elaborate about this now. No matter whether we follow Dr. A. van Ruler (who somewhere in his momentous thesis on the fulfilment of the law somewhat strangely contends that the Old Testament is the actual Bible and that the New Testament is something like a list of explanatory notes in the back of the Old Testament) or Dr. Runia (who wrote in the October copy of Trowel and Sword that the correct point of issue for the interpretation of the Old Testament is the New Testament), we had to give precedence to the New Testament in any case. Yet, the Old Testament remains extremely important. In it we find the very heart of the gospel. There is, of course, nothing legalistic about the Old Testament. It gives the message of the grace of God for sinners from Genesis 1 to Malachi 5. As far as I can see nothing legalistic can ever be legitimately derived from the Old Testament. Legalistic attitude has nothing in common with either the Old or the New Testament; it is phariseistic or judaistic but certainly not Old Testamentic. (sic).

What we find then in the Old Testament is that God’s love for His people established a glorious sabbath ruling for their lives in the Kingdom of His grace. This is as true of the mosaic law as it is of the ten commandments themselves. However, we shall leave the mosaic or levitical law out of consideration for now. And even about the ten commandments I would like to be brief. The ten commandments, of course, should never be considered as merely a part of the levitical law. Both the Old and the New Testament forbid this. The ten commandments alone were written by God’s own hand on the tablets of stone. And in the New Testament we find each of the ten commandments repeated as still valid and applying to all the nations.

In the fourth commandment God commanded His people to remember the gift of the sabbath, as a day to be hallowed. From the Hebrew word used for “to hallow” it is obvious that God wanted them to set that day apart for religious feasting and worship, see O.Procksch in Kittel’s Worterbuch. It should also be noted that they are commanded to rest from work for that very purpose, that they may rejoice in the LORD. The resting is subordinate to the worshipping. They were commanded to rest, not for the sake of resting, but for the sake of enjoyment in the LORD. Real sanctification of the seventh day does not consist in abstinence from daily work but in making it a day of religious enjoyment and worship.

It has been proposed that under the New Testament God’s people are no longer commanded to keep this day of rest (for worship), seeing that the “rest aspect” as the “ceremonial aspect” or as the “legal code aspect” no longer applies. The commandment still would bind us to coming together for worship but no longer to observing a day of rest-for-worship. The day of rest-for-worship would still be advisable or agreeable but no longer commanded. In practice it comes down to this – that a few hours of rest ( for congregational worship) would still be commanded but no longer a day.

In this connection I would merely ask why the supposedly ceremonial or legal aspect of the fourth commandment is singled out as no longer applying, whereas similar aspects in e.g. the fifth, the seventh and the eighth commandment are still held to apply. I have a feeling that with these scholastic rather than biblical distinctions we raise more problems than we solve. Moreover if we are still supposed to observe, in obedience to the fourth commandment a certain rest (of a few hours for congregational worship), is then that rest “un-ceremonial”? And what right do we have to limit arbitrarily the privileges of the New Testament church by narrowing down the sanctification of the day to the sanctification of a few hours and by limiting that sanctification to acts of worship only, and then of congregational worship alone? Is really the New Testament church to be made poorer than the Old Testament church? Were they granted a full day of rejoicing in the LORD (of which worship was only one of the elements) and are we sent back to work with a few hours rest for congregational worship? And if one would contend: “yes, but we have seven days of the week to rejoice in the LORD, not merely one day” I would venture to reply: “and so had they!”

The sabbath and the creation 

In the fourth commandment (Exodus 20) the creation is mentioned. It is mentioned in none of the other commandments. Yet, whereas the other nine commandments are held to be “creation ordinances”, this is called into question with regard to the fourth commandment. Has the sabbath been ordained from the beginning as e.g. the marriage relationship for life is taught to have been ordained from the beginning? See Matthew 19:8. That is the point at issue.

Genesis 2 teaches that God Himself sanctified His “seventh day”, i.e. He made it a “day” of enjoyment in Himself and in the works of His hand. In Exodus 20 God’s people are called to follow the LORD’s example in this. In Mark 2 the Lord Jesus teaches that God ordained the sabbath for “man”, that is for “adam”, the hebrew word “adam” meaning nothing but “man”. The question then is raised whether (and how God made it known to the first “adam”, known to us as Adam, that this sabbath institution was meant to be observed by him. With the same right I could ask whether (and how) God made it known to Adam that marriage was meant to be a monogamous relationship for life or whether (and how) God made it known to Cain that he had to obey and honour his father and his mother. Yet, we all take it for granted that Adam knew about marriage and Cain about parental authority. I fail to see why we should make an exception here for precisely that commandment in which the creation is mentioned. The fact that we find little or no evidence of sabbath observance in the time of the patriarchs should not disturb us more than the other fact that we find very little evidence of a monogamous marriage in their time. The separation of Israel from the nations and the re-establishment of God’s law was necessary exactly because ALL God’s commandments had been so universally forgotten and contradicted.

The seventh day.

It is argued that if we desire to observe the fourth commandment we should rest on the seventh day of the week. This misunderstanding arises from the fact that the fourth commandment is read as if it said: “the first six days of the week you shall labour, but the seventh day of the week is the sabbath day”. It is obvious however that this “of the week” is nowhere in the text. The text says that they were to rest for enjoyment in the Lord on the seventh day after six days of work. We find this manner of dating everywhere in the Bible. In Numbers 19:11,12, e.g. it says that the man who touched a dead body would be clean again on the seventh day, not on the seventh day of the week but after so many days of uncleanness. In Exodus 16 it says that after six days of gathering in the manna the nation rested on the seventh day. The Lord Jesus rose on the third day, i.e. not of the week but after his death and burial. God’s desire was not that His people rested on one particular day then already known as “the” seventh day; He wanted them to rest after six days of work. It was not until the rule of sabbath observance was well established that people began to call the days with their number in relation to the sabbath as the seventh day. The week was ordered round the sabbath, not the sabbath in the week.

By observing “the day of the Lord(‘s resurrection)” (sic) as the day of rejoicing in His accomplished work the New Testament church observes the fourth commandment. After six days of labour we sanctify the seventh day and we do so after the apostolic example on the first day of the week, the Lord’s day.

Any practical difference?

People have asked what difference it makes in practice whether we follow the one approach to the sabbath or the other. I would say that this depends on the degree in which the new approach inclines to a certain”radicalism”. The new approach may, even quite conservatively so, insist on a rather strict observance of a day of rest for the sake of worship. But the point of difference is that in the “new approach” we observe this day of rest not because God commands us to do so in the fourth commandment, but merely because as (Reformed) christians we have “voluntarily” agreed that it is wise to do so; see the Helvetic Confession. The problem is what would happen if we no longer agree. There is already quite considerable disagreement among (Reformed) christians and some people come to me with the most remarkable opinions about what we should “voluntarily” agree upon. I have the unpleasant feeling that for christian ethics our “voluntary” christian agreement is rather a weak basis to stand on, if it is a basis at all. Thus the question of what difference it makes in the practice of our sabbath observance can only be answered from the case to case, when we know how radically “new” the “new approach” desires to be.

Conclusion

Those who find comfort in the knowledge that they are surrounded by a host of sympathetic christian witnesses in their battle for a christian sabbath I would remind of the many Reformed scholars of the past and the present who stood up for the defence of the Lord’s day, to be observed according to the fourth commandment. I refer to men like Gysbertus Votius, William Amesius, Charles Hodge, James Bannerman, J.C. Ryle, Herman Bavinck, Abraham Kuyper, Benjamin Warfield, Willem Geesink, Klaas Schilder, Kornelis Sietsma, Simon Gerrit de Graaf, Gerrit Brillenburg Wurth, and, to mention one living theologian, John Murray of Westminster seminary, Philadelphia. No one in Australia or New Zealand would have to feel ashamed about being in that company.

And those who are afraid of being looked upon as out of touch with the latest trends or as narrow-mindedly puritan I may refer to the defence of the Lord’s day by a man like the Barthian Dutchman, Dr. K.H. Miskotte, not a puritan by any description, whom Brillenburg Wurth in 1955 quoted as recently having written that the sanctification of the sabbath was in a certain way even a more fundamental principle than the sanctification of the human life or of marriage, and that therefore the desecration of the Sunday was in certain ways a more serious sin than e.g. murder and adultery.

And I would like to finish with a quotation from another scholar, philosopher and novelist, of no mean ability, Prof. Dr. K.J. Popma, who wrote: “With regard to the sabbath it is now very clear that it is an eternal institution; it stretches out over the full sum of the times. Whoever desires to understand the Sunday, must take careful note of what is revealed concerning the sabbath. The sabbath lives on in the Sunday. Whoever in disregard of the Old Testament desires to think away the sabbath entirely, loses also the meaning of the Sunday”

J.W. DEENICK

This concludes Bill Deenick’s contribution to the debate concerning the Sabbath. There is one more contribution to this discussion by Dr. Runia which is not so much a continuation of the the debate but more an explanation of his purpose in instigating this discourse in the first place. This will be published next week.
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