“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
I’ve always tended to take these words and apply them in a narrow sense. As Christians we worship on the first day of the week because that is when our Lord was raised from the dead. We no longer are subject to the Sabbath restrictions because we have entered into Christ and He is our rest. OK, but I’ve recently come to believe that Jesus is clearly talking about something bigger here.
The principle is simply this: God did not create us because He needed someone to keep His rules. He created the rules for our benefit. He gave them to us to protect us. “Thou shall not kill,” so we wouldn’t go around killing each other. “Honor your father and mother,” so once we realized that we knew it all and that our parents weren’t very smart we would hopefully still pay enough attention to what they told us to not completely ruin our lives. “Have no other gods before Me,” so that we wouldn’t be led into death by false gods.
The spirit of religion places rules ahead of people. God places people ahead of rules.
No comments:
Post a Comment