CHRIST’S CUSTOM ON THE SABBATH DAY

Part I

In Psalm 26:8 David, the man after God’s own heart, felt moved to reveal to the Lord what lay concealed in his inmost heart.

He states there: “Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thy house and the place where Thine honor dwelleth.” That which was in David’s heart was not hid from the Omniscient God, for all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do. Moreover, in what David manifested there was the fruit of God’s own work glorified in his heart.

Through the fall of Adam, in which we are all comprehended, because he was our federal head, we have lost the image of God, but also all desire after God and after everything pertaining to God. Never can it be put into words, what terrible destruction sin has brought about; not only the guilt which we have contracted, but also the corruption which has pervaded man completely. We no longer have any desire after the knowledge of the ways of God. Sin has become our delight, and by nature the service and worship of God has become a burden to us. By nature we are of the earth earthly, and are zealous only for ourselves. In fact, in Psalm 49:11 we read: “their inward thought is that their houses shall continue for ever, and their dwelling places to all generations.”

However, God’s eternal purpose in Christ Jesus was not destroyed or made of no effect by the fall; on the contrary, it pleased God to glorify Himself through the depth of the fall by magnifying His perfections. Christ delivers from the wrath to come, from the power of Satan and from sin. He delivers all those whom the Father gave to the Son in the counsel of peace. That blessed Surety paid the debts of His people and reconciled them to God. That Mediator repaired the breach between God and those people, and reinstated them into that most blessed fellowship. But that Second Adam also restored to these chosen people what they lost in the first Adam.

The love of God is shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto them. They love God because He first loved them. It is by this love that they love Him as the greatest good; that they begin to love God’s perfections above their own life; and that they weep and mourn because of sin. Because of this love of God, they hate sin and have a desire to obey all God’s commandments. The ordinances of God become precious to them. They do not swear by wood and stone, but their souls long for God’s house because God delights His people in His house of prayer. God’s house takes first place with the people of God, there, truly, is food for the hungry and drink for the thirsty. They desire that preaching in which the glory of God is most highly extolled, the sinner’s deep debasement proclaimed, and Christ held forth as the only ground of salvation. The saints agree with Hezekiah, where he at one time said: “O Lord, by these things men live, and in all these things is the life of my spirit.”

They would like to be there every day. Their souls live when God receives the honor which is due unto Him. They seek communion with God. It is certainly no fruit of God’s Spirit when people deal with the ordinances of God lightly and as they see fit. God’s people are made to have a deep regard for His institutions and precepts. Christ Himself set the example for His people in this regard in His life as Surety here upon earth.

Come, my friends, let us consider at this time how Christ set this example, the Lord assisting us. Our text for this purpose you will find in Luke 4:16, these words:

“And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day.”

These words tell us of:

Christ’s custom on the Sabbath day.

1. By which He honored the ordinance of His Father;

2. By which He fulfilled the law;

3. By which He is an example for us.

On the very first pages of the Bible we already read that the Sabbath was instituted and sanctified by God Himself. After God had created heaven and earth and all that is in and on it by His almighty power, He rested the seventh day. His resting implied also that He delighted Himself in the work He had done. Now God sanctified that seventh day so that mankind would also share in the rest, and that accordingly this day would be spent in delighting oneself in that great and perfect Creator Who is most blessed for ever.

By our deliberate departure from God, and our violation of the Covenant of Works, we have ruined everything. By our sin we have forfeited not only that rest, but also those delights which God had prepared for us on the seventh day.

By sin we have become guilty to the justice of God, but entirely corrupt as well. In Adam we are all under the condemnation in the sight of God. The earth is cursed because of sin. Rest is no longer to be found on this earth and in our hearts. Man is like the troubled sea, which cannot rest. Everlasting unrest has become our portion; no delighting in God any more, but a share in everlasting suffering and the curse of the Almighty. Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. Because of sin heaven is shut and the earth is cursed, and by sin man has ruined himself. Man has deliberately and voluntarily trodden under foot that most valuable image of God, which consisted in knowledge, righteousness and holiness. We have chosen death rather than life, the curse rather than the blessing, and unrest instead of rest. In God alone the true rest is to be found.

It nevertheless pleased God, according to His incomprehensible counsel and will in Christ, to perpetuate the Sabbath. When God proclaimed the law on Mount Sinai, He spoke of a rest following the completion of six days of labor. But this is of grace only. Paul declares in Hebrews 4 that all rest proceeds from God. Israel entered into rest in Canaan, and, what is more, there remains a rest to the people of God. One day it will be eternal in heaven, but they already enjoy it by faith here below. Christ has procured this rest of His people. He was the true Shiloh, the One Who gives rest.

Though Israel’s backslidings were great, and they departed far from the Lord, yet God Himself saw to it throughout all the days of the Old Testament that His ordinances were maintained. It is just as impossible for man to do away with what God commanded as it is for him to change the ordinances of heaven. It is true, hostile man, filled with eternal enmity against God, can tread them under foot, but he cannot take them away. God keeps a close watch over them, and poor, blinded man will wage war against God in vain. All who join battle against God will be crushed and destroyed by Him.

The Sabbath day is God’s day. Regarding this day, God had given all sorts of law and ordinances to His covenant people. Everything pointed to this one fact, that this day was not their own, but God’s. This day was to be set aside and hallowed for the service of the Lord.

For the true Israel the Sabbath was a feast day. David speaks of the multitude that went to the house of God to keep holy day. It was the day of which the Lord had said that He would cause His people to rejoice in His house of prayer; the day that they would delight themselves in the Lord. “On that day”, the Lord declares in Isaiah 58:14, “I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and will feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father.” The saints of old have always experienced, too, that God blesses His ordinances, and that in the keeping of God’s commandments there is great reward.

The Son of God, Who was ordained and appointed by the Father from eternity to be a Surety and Mediator of the Covenant, willingly and joyfully took upon Himself in the eternal Council of Peace to satisfy the Father’s demands. The will of the Father was also the will of the Son, and the zeal of God’s house consumed Him.

He bore God’s law within His heart. I hope to say more later about the fact that a part of His work as Surety was to honor and reverence the ordinances of His Father, even in early childhood. When He was twelve years old He traveled with His parents to Jerusalem, and went into the temple to be about His Father’s business. And in our text it is stated that in the days of Christ’s public ministry among the Jewish nation He went, as His custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day. Christ did not visit the temple or the synagogue only when it was convenient, but it was His custom to do so. God may at times awaken a more than ordinary desire in the hearts of His people for the instituted ordinances, but He does not issue special directions regarding that which He has prescribed in His law. We must not lose sight of this fact.

At the time Christ was born, as well as during the time He appeared publicly, conditions in the church were deplorable. Things were so bad that the Jews had made the house of the Lord a house of merchandise. Those who were the leaders in the Church in those days were Christ’s bitterest enemies. Thieves and murderers, blind leaders of the blind, had the most to say in the temple in those days. They refused to acknowledge Jesus to be the Son of God and the Messiah Who God had promised. And still, notwithstanding that great decay in the Church, Christ did not withdraw from it, but He went, as His custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day. He attended the reading and preaching of the Scribes and Pharisees, even though they had lost the key of knowledge, and even though ignorance was so great that Nicodemus did not know what regeneration meant.

That great Preacher of righteousness, Who is the supreme Wisdom itself,—He Who possessed the Spirit of Wisdom, did not consider it beneath His dignity to go to the synagogue. As the Son of God He adored His Father; He loved His Father most perfectly, and accordingly also loved the ordinances of His Father. In His sojourn on this earth Christ never acted indifferently toward those Divine institutions. Whatever self-denial was necessary, He never sought His own honor, but the honor of the One Who sent Him. In the reading of the law and the prophets, Christ heard the voice of His Father; then He could forget all else and occupy Himself solely with the will of His Father. Seeing He was the Son of God and had neither original nor actual sin, and seeing He was not kept under the power and dominion of sin, nothing and no one could divert His attention. As such He was not susceptible to that. In the fullest sense of the word He was “The Holy One of God.” His entire life’s conduct and demeanor was to the honor of God, and His delight was entirely in God. The warning Solomon gave, “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God”, was not needed for Christ. He never committed sin, nor was guile ever found in His mouth.

Oh, what majesty and glory emanates from this Blessed Person, He Who is God blessed for ever, but also the fairest of the children of men! Grace is poured into His lips. His whole life was an eminent manifestation of holiness.

Moreover, Christ’s whole life on this earth, and this part of it as well, was of great significance. In fact, it was of very special significance, because, when He went, as His custom was, to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, He thereby fulfilled the law. Let us consider this in the second place.

In the sermon on the mount, well-known to each of us, Christ Himself declared in Matt. 5, that He was not come to destroy the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them.

As we know, God Himself gave the Sabbath as a day of rest in Paradise. When God made the covenant with Israel at Sinai, amid the thunder and lightning of His Divine majesty, He declared, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” Now then, Christ in His capacity as Surety kept the Sabbath perfectly. On the Sabbath days in particular, Christ taught in the temple and in the synagogues; He proclaimed the full counsel of God and declared God’s eternal thoughts of peace. But over and above this He performed many acts of mercy on the Sabbath days. He healed many on the Sabbath days, according to both soul and body, and it was a stumblingblock

to the hostile Jews. Many a son and daughter of Abraham, bound by Satan, Jesus loosed and set free on the Sabbath. And still, Jesus was condemned to death, we read, because He did not keep the Sabbath!

In the fall of Adam we desecrated and broke the Sabbath; and if God sends us our bill of accounts, and if during this life the spirituality of the law is discovered to us, then we shall realize and acknowledge with sorrow that we have grievously transgressed all God’s commandments and kept none of them.

If we had no other sins except Sabbath sins, we would have enough to cause us to perish for ever. The least transgression makes us guilty before God, and makes us liable to eternal condemnation. All these insults to the Most High Majesty of God; all that trampling upon His judgments and statutes, oh, how it casts down the soul! Indeed, as David declares in Psalm 6, it causes his bones to be shaken, and his spirit is greatly shaken thereby.

To keep the Sabbath really means, to rest in Christ. Now if we compare our life with this, in the glass of God’s Word and law, then nothing remains except sin and guilt. There are so many who openly break God’s day; they despise the ordinance of God, and make the Sabbath a day of sin. For many it is a tedious, tiresome day, and for others a day of relaxation; a day used to satisfy the lusts of the flesh; the Sabbath is not a day to go on hikes, to go visiting, to eat and drink excessively, to sleep or to travel.

Now let us consider all these things. We attend the services at the Lord’s house on the Lord’s day, and we outwardly observe the Sabbath; but even then nothing but guilt remains. God’s justice is not satisfied with an outward observance of the law, for God looks for truth in the inward parts. The Lord assuredly declares in His Word: “This people with their Ups do honor Me, but have removed their heart far from Me.” No dead animals might be sacrificed on the altar in Old Testament times. They always had to be alive. And this also holds true with the worship of God.

Accordingly, the children of God have come to delight in the law of God after the inward man. At regeneration, when God called them from death to life, they began to love God and His ordinances. David declares:

“My one request has been
And still this prayer I raise
That I may dwell within
God’s house through all my days,
Jehovah’s beauty to admire
And in His temple to inquire.”

And the saints whole-heartily agree. It is the desire of the new life within to delight itself in the ordinances of God. It is not a burden but a pleasure to them. And still, even here God’s people incur nothing but guilt. It is not in “many” things that they fall short, but in “all” things. Oh, how dull and insensible they often go their way! So often taken up with outward things, and even satisfied with them; and then again so listless, so heartless, without longings or desires, nothing making any impression on them, everything within as cold as ice!

In such times the honor of God does not concern them, and they have no need for Christ. Sin is not mortified, but the Spirit of God is grieved and quenched. Then we do not come to Christ by faith, empty and destitute, but we rest in our own righteousness which is of the law. And so I could go on, but alas! there is no end to it. “I have seen an end of all perfection”, declares David, “but Thy commandment is exceeding broad.’’

The more the light of God’s Spirit shines into our hearts, the more abominations are discovered to us, the guiltier we become in our own sight. Then there remains no sacrifice for sin, but a fearful waiting for the righteous judgment of God. The law pronounces its curse upon us, and the justice of God must condemn us, because the holy and righteous God revengeth and is furious (Nahum 1:2) and can have no fellowship with the least sin.

What an infinite wonder of God’s sovereign love and grace! God gave His only begotten Son! We read in I John 4:9: “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.” Oh, who will ever fathom the love of the Father! And that love of the Son in already giving of Himself voluntarily in eternity for sinners worthy of death and perdition—this cannot be put into words; it can only be admired.

Christ came in the fulness of time, made of a woman, made under the law. Christ came into the world as a ransom, to atone for sin, to merit grace, to satisfy the demands of Divine justice, and to glorify the Father. Christ came to remove the curse of the law, but also to fulfill the law, and in this way merit life eternal. Now then, seeing Christ assumed our nature, in order to suffer and die in the room of His people, the avenging sword of Divine justice, unsheathed also because of Sabbath-breaking, awakens against Him as the Surety. That sword smote the Surety so that He was brought into the dust of death. And thus “the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5.

What a blessing it is if God will discover our Sabbath breaking to us, so we may be constrained to flee out of self, to find refuge by faith in the everlasting, priestly righteousness of Christ. Then the Spirit of God convinces us, discovers to us our lost condition, and causes us to mourn because of sin and guilt. That Spirit also constrains us to flee to Christ, that fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, Zechariah 13:1.

Christ, that only High Priest after the order of Melchisedek, by one offering hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. He did not pay only for this sin or for that sin, but for all the debts of His people. He became a curse in order to deliver His people who lay under the curse and the judgment. None of Adam’s sons and daughters were able to do this, but the Second Adam, the Surety of the Covenant, He Who was both God and man, possessed the power to do it. In one day He removed the iniquity of the land, and silenced the wrath of God. But by His active obedience, too, He fulfilled the law for His saints. In all He did He satisfied Divine justice.

Christ’s whose life here on earth was in the capacity of a Surety and a substitute from day to day and from moment to moment. This is hidden from the natural man who is estranged from God. Nor does he feel any desire to know Him or to learn something about this. But God’s poor people do not remain strangers to the nature of Christ’s work. The fact that all He did, He did as Surety is hidden from the wise and prudent, but it is revealed unto babes. Oh, what a blessing it is to attain to the knowledge of that Surety in His substitutionary suffering and death! But it is also a blessing to view Him in His life, for then He satisfied the demands of the law in order to merit eternal life for His people and also restore this eternal life to them.

For this reason this blessed and precious Surety went as was His custom, into the synagogue on the Sabbath Day. His sojourn in the temple and His presence in the synagogue was of the deepest significance for God’s Church on earth. Christ’s love for His Father’s glory and for the redemption of His people moved Him to live in that capacity here on earth, and induced Him to give satisfaction to God in all things.

Christ removed the curse of the law so that God’s children are freed from that curse. Christ fulfilled the precepts of the law so that they now receive eternal life. But Christ also glorified the law, so that God’s children are freed from that curse. Christ fulfilled the precepts of the law so that they now receive eternal life. But Christ also glorified the law, so that God’s children also receive that law as a law of love in their hearts, as a rule of life. Thus they delight in God alone, and while in this life, they commence the eternal Sabbath. The blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, cleanses from all sin, and expiates all our trespasses; and Christ restores to us that which we lost.

Oh, how all of this teaches us the necessity of learning to know Christ as the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believes! We must be reckoned in Him and united to Him; we must be clothed with His righteousness and holiness. Only as viewed in Him can we appear before God, and only by Him can we walk and act acceptably to God. Accordingly He declared to His disciples in John 13:15, “for I have given you an example; that ye should do as I have done to you.” And that also applies to His going into the synagogue, which we shall consider in the third place.

(To be continued)

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