[AI Generated transcript]
Mark chapter 2 beginning in verse 23 and we'll go through chapter 3 verse 6.
I'm going to read the text here as we start.
This is one Sabbath.
He was going through the grain fields and as they made their way, the disciples began to pluck heads of grain.
And the Pharisees were saying to him, look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?
And he said to them, have you never read what David did?
When he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him.
And he said to them, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.
And again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand, and they watched Jesus to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him.
And he said to the man with the withered hand, Come here.
And he said to them, Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?
But they were silent.
And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, Stretch out your hand.
He stretched it out and his hand was restored.
The Pharisees went out and immediately held council with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.
We often think of Jesus as this one who came and he brought peace and love and all these good things to the earth.
That Jesus was a reconciler, that Jesus was coming to bring peace to divisions that existed.
But Jesus, he tells us elsewhere in the Gospels that he actually came to bring a sword.
He came to divide.
And the late John Stott was a British preacher.
He wrote a book one time, the subtitle of which was Christ the Controversialist.
Jesus in the Gospels is very often not only at the center of controversy,
If you read carefully, he is seeking out controversy in order to make a point.
And that's I think what we see here in this text, especially as we get into the second part.
The first part sets up a story where there is a
There's a controversy that takes place and he's at the center of it, but then to make the point, to illustrate the point that he makes in the first part, we get the story of the second.
Christ is seeking out controversy in order to drive his point home.
And Mark chapter 2 verse 1 through chapter 3 verse 6 is a set of five controversies.
We've looked at the first three already, verses 1 through 12 of chapter 2.
He claims to have the authority of God.
He has the authority to forgive sins.
And that's an authority that the Pharisees know belongs only to God.
And so they are outraged that Jesus would put himself on the level of God.
And then in what we looked at last week, verses 13 through 17, Jesus
creates a controversy by spending time with tax collectors and sinners.
And they say, well, that's not the sort of person that a teacher of the law, that a rabbi should spend time with.
And Jesus says, actually, that's exactly who I should be spending time with.
I didn't come to call the righteous to repentance, but sinners.
In verses 18 to 22, they come at him because, well, your disciples don't fast the way that the disciples of John or the disciples of the Pharisees do.
And Jesus says,
Actually, they shouldn't be fasting right now because the bridegroom is here and so the
There's this old form of religion that you've built up around what God actually told you to do.
And you've got basically these old wineskins.
And if we try to pour the new wine of the new covenant with Christ into those old wineskins, it would burst them.
So it's going to look different following Jesus than it looked like following the law of Moses.
So that lack of fasting created the third controversy.
And the final two conflicts both center on the Sabbath day.
So verses 23-28, the controversy centers on a perceived breaking of the Sabbath.
Verse 23, One Sabbath he was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way, the disciples began to pluck heads of grain.
And the Pharisees were saying to him, Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?
Like, Jesus, don't you see what your disciples are doing?
Why don't you stop them?
Now, as I read this text and thought about it and read a bunch of commentaries during the week, the, Andy would, she learned this new word this week, pedant or pedant.
And, uh, it says that describes me.
And so the pedantic point here, the, the minutia that Jesus doesn't seem to even address really.
So I don't think Jesus is breaking the Sabbath.
They're upset that the disciples are breaking the Sabbath, but Jesus...
isn't.
So, I mean, the thing that they're doing was they're walking through the grain fields and taking heads of grain.
They were allowed to do.
They could do that, certainly, the other six days of the week.
It's not like our society where if I walked through and started taking somebody's corn, I'd be in big trouble, right?
I'm stealing from them.
But in Israel's law, in Deuteronomy 23, God had made provision.
You can't go into your neighbor's field with a sickle and start cutting their grain.
But if you're walking through their fields and you're hungry, you can take some of the heads of grain and eat.
But what was not allowed was harvesting on the Sabbath day.
So to cut grain and then to thresh it, that was against the law.
But I don't hardly think walking through the grain field, I grew up in the middle of wheat fields, right?
And so every other year, we had lentils one year and we had, it wasn't soybeans and corn, it was lentils and wheat.
And so around our house, we had just fields like rolling hills of grain, like in America, the beautiful, right?
And we would go out and if you're hungry, you'd walk around and you'd take the, I mean, it's a grass, right?
So that you got the stock and then at the top, there's these
Grains and each of them has a little tiny husk around it.
And so you'd sit there and you'd kind of peel away that husk and you'd eat it.
This might have been a waste of time because I don't know that we ever consumed as many calories as we burnt trying to acquire this food, but it wasn't work.
And I don't, I don't think it falls under the actual Sabbath commands in the Old Testament, but what the Pharisees had done is they had built out this whole system of extra rules that said what you could and could not do on the Sabbath.
So even like how far you were allowed to walk was regulated by, not by the Old Testament law, not by what God had given, but by the Pharisees rules.
You were allowed, I think it's like 1199 steps of
Basically about a half a mile you were allowed to walk on the Sabbath day So I mean don't don't walk to church and back like you'd be in trouble but Be that as it may while while the Pharisees have built up all these rules that weren't actually part of the law and they say Jesus you're breaking the rule you're allowing your Disciples to break the rules therefore you are breaking the rules because you're not controlling them the way you ought to you're responsible for their behavior and
Instead of saying, well, no, actually, and getting into a debate about the finer points of the law, Jesus instead gives an illustration from the Old Testament that subverts all of their assumptions about the law.
He doesn't attack their legalism and their rule adding from the front and say, no, you guys are just way out of line here.
Instead, he subverts their assumptions.
Here in verse 25, he said to them, this is one of my favorite lines that Jesus uses multiple times in the Gospels, he says, have you never read?
He's talking to the experts in the law, the experts in the Old Testament, and he says, haven't you ever read that thing that you're supposed to be an expert in?
It's like he's walking into the Old Testament division at a seminary and saying, haven't you guys ever read in 1 Samuel?
I just imagine, like, as they're hearing him say this, they're just furious.
But he references 1 Samuel chapter 21.
And what he says here is, Have you never read what David did when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him?
How he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat.
and also gave it to those who were with him.
And the story he's referencing here is 1 Samuel 21.
I'm just going to read it here for us.
Then David came to Nob, and the situation is David has been living in Saul's house.
He's been there as a servant of Saul.
He's been anointed by Samuel as the next king, Saul's heir.
And Saul hates David because David is growing in popularity.
He's been one of the chief commanders in Saul's army, and the people are singing about David.
Saul is slain as thousands, David is slain as tens of thousands, and he's becoming overwhelmingly popular, and Saul decides, I have to kill this guy.
And so after the second time that David is having to duck Saul's spear, he leaves.
He decides he has to flee.
And he comes to this place called Nob, which is apparently where the tabernacle was set up at that point.
It's not where the Ark of the Covenant was, but apparently when the Ark of the Covenant came back to Israel, it wasn't with the tabernacle.
So the tabernacle's here and the priests are serving.
David came to Nob to Ahimelech the priest.
And Ahimelech came to meet David, trembling, and said to him, Why are you alone and no one with you?
He's expecting if David shows up, Saul's army should be in tow.
And David said to Ahimelech the priest, the king has charged me with a matter and said to me, let no one know anything of the matter which I send you, about which I send you and with which I have charged you.
And I've made an appointment with the young men for such and such a place.
Now then, what do you have on hand?
Give me five loaves of bread or whatever is there.
And the priest answered David, I have no common bread on hand, but there is holy bread.
If the young men have kept themselves from women?
And David answered the priest, Truly, women have been kept from us.
As always, when I go on an expedition, the vessels of the young men are holy even on an ordinary journey.
How much more will their vessels be holy today?
So the priest gave him the holy bread.
for there was no bread there but the bread of the presence which is removed from the presence of the Lord to be replaced by hot bread on the day that is taken away.
And so in the law God had set up like there's this bread of the presence that's supposed to sit before the presence of the Lord in the tabernacle and then when it's removed the priests get to eat it.
They replace it with fresh bread frequently and those loaves are to be food for the priest and no one else is allowed to touch them.
But
David here comes and he comes to Ahimelech when he's in need and I should note, so Jesus says in the time of Abiathar the high priest and in 1st Samuel 21 we read that it was Ahimelech.
Now Abiathar is Ahimelech's son and so probably, there's all kinds of opinions about this, but probably what Jesus is doing is he's just referring to this whole time period as the time period of Abiathar the high priest.
It's like a way of saying
Here's where in the scroll you would go to look for it.
You would go to look for the place where Abiathar is the high priest, though he doesn't become high priest until after his father Ahimelech is killed, which is almost right after this.
That probably explains the discrepancy there.
But what Ahimelech says to David is that, I don't have anything I can give you except for this.
And David says, well, then give me that.
I need the bread.
I need the food.
And I think the point here is that God prioritizes life over meticulous rule-following.
In that situation, like, Ahimelech could have said to David, I have nothing that by the law I am allowed to give you.
Sorry, go find somebody else to get food from.
But instead, what Ahimelech says to him is,
Here's the bread that I'm not allowed to give you, but it's all I have.
Here you can have it, as long as your young men have kept themselves holy.
They're not ceremonially unclean.
And Jesus is saying essentially the same thing here in
in Mark 2, that meticulous rule following on the Sabbath is not the point.
If they're walking through the grain fields and they are hungry, which it's not specifically said here in Mark, but in the parallel accounts in Matthew and in Luke, it tells us that they're walking through the grain fields and they're hungry.
That's why they're taking grain to eat.
And while that may break the Pharisees' rules around what does it mean to be a good Sabbath keeper,
Christ is not interested in all the extra rules.
He's interested in life.
He's making a point here about what the Sabbath is meant to be.
And that idea that Christ, that God himself prioritizes life over meticulous rule following does not in any way downgrade our view of the law.
So, in Matthew 5, Jesus says, you know, don't think that I've come to abolish the law and the prophets.
Not one jot, not one tittle, not one iota, not the smallest stroke of a pen is going to pass away from the law until it's all been fulfilled.
But what it does do is acknowledge that in a fallen world,
in a world where we need a lot of laws.
Sometimes you are put in a bad position where you have to choose between one law or another and you have to make a decision what is the weightier matter of the law.
And so you think about an example like in Exodus chapter 1 where Pharaoh tells the Hebrew midwives, you are supposed to kill all of the male children.
You can let the girls live.
but you have to kill all the male children.
And the midwives lie to Pharaoh.
They say, well, we just, you know, they just keep popping those babies out so fast we can't even get there in time.
They lie to Pharaoh and it says God blessed them.
Now, I'm not going to read that and say, well, lying is a good thing.
No, God hates lying.
I mean, we're told that throughout the Proverbs.
You're not bearing false witness against your neighbor is one of the Ten Commandments.
Like, lying is bad, but it's not as bad as murder.
And Jesus speaks in places about weightier matters of the law.
In Matthew 23, he talks about how the Pharisees would... I'll just read it real quick.
Matthew 23, verses 23 and 24.
Woe to you, scribes!
and Pharisees, Hypocrites, you tithe mint and dill and cumin and neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness.
These you want to have done.
So like they should be tithing.
That's not a bad thing to do, but they should be doing that without neglecting the others.
You blind guide, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.
And so that's the same people that he's in conflict with here as the scribes and the Pharisees and their whole extra set of laws that they have built up around
around the Sabbath day is an exercise in straining out gnats so that they can eat camels.
They're intentionally setting up a system where they can ignore the most important parts of the law so that they can keep these other things over here that they've added onto it.
But Jesus is making a point about what the Sabbath is.
Verse 27, he says to them,
The Sabaath was made for man and not man, for the Sabaath.
Where does the Sabaath come from?
The Sabaath isn't something that comes initially in Exodus 20 when God gives the Torah, when God gives the Ten Commandments.
The Sabaath is established
in Creation.
No, God is setting the pattern for all of humanity to live in.
And it's interesting, the first six days we have it was morning and it was evening.
The first day is morning and it was evening.
The second day on through the day six, you don't have that pattern.
with the Sabbath.
It's as if the Sabbath is what we are supposed to live out of and live into as human beings, as God has set this pattern for us of six days and then one to rest, followed ultimately by an eternal Sabbath, which Hebrews 4 talks about.
But God gave man this gift at creation, gave all of creation this gift really, in Exodus chapter 20,
It says that your livestock shouldn't be worked on the Sabbath, your servants shouldn't be worked on the Sabbath, you shouldn't be working on the Sabbath.
So it's all of creation is supposed to get this gift of Sabbath.
They were supposed to give their land a Sabbath once every seven years.
They were supposed to let the land rest.
The Sabbath is a gift from God and in making it about rules to follow rather than rest to enjoy,
Lord of the Sabbath
Instituted initially at creation who made the world God made the world and so to be Lord over something that God Made is he's claiming the rights of God because God doesn't delegate that authority to anybody else in scripture And so Jesus is saying I am God who gave the Sabbath law in Exodus God gave the law and Jesus says I am in the position of being the law giver he claims to be God himself Which is right in parallel
with chapter 2 verse 10 where he says that he has authority to forgive sins just like God has authority to forgive sins.
Jesus is claiming to be God.
These two places, chapter 2 verse 10 and chapter 2 verse 28 are the only two places in the first half of Mark's gospel where he uses this title Son of Man.
He's going to use it all the time towards the end.
But in the early stages of Mark's gospel, the only two places where it occurs are places where he is specifically clearly claiming to have the authority of God himself.
How do you look at your relationship with God?
Do you look at it as a set of religious duties to be completed or as
the rest of a restored relationship with the Father out of which you can pursue your obedience to Him in your labor.
The Sabbath is not about you.
The Sabbath is not about your rule keeping.
It's not about your diligence.
Sabbath is about God.
It's about honoring Him, trusting Him to provide for your needs, even if you do rest and finding your rest in Him.
Well, while it's not about you, it is for you.
It's a gift, not a burden to rest from your labors and acknowledge that Christ is the Lord.
You are not.
What's the danger of missing that point?
What's the danger of misunderstanding the Sabbath or any of God's laws?
That's what we are going to see in chapter three, verses one through six.
I think in this short story here,
We're going to see three dangers of worshipping your rules instead of worshipping God.
Mark 3 verses 1-6, Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand.
And they watched Jesus to see whether he would heal him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him.
And he said to the man with the withered hand, Come here.
And he said to them, Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?
But they were silent.
And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, Stretch out your hand.
He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.
The Pharisees went out and immediately held council with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.
What are the dangers we see in this passage of worshiping your rules?
The first is that when you worship your rules, you lump everybody into two categories, good or bad.
But those categories of good and bad aren't defined by what God says in scripture, they're defined by the rules that you have made.
That's exactly what the people are doing here, and it dehumanizes the people around you that you're judging.
These guys, they don't look at this man in the audience, this man with the withered hand, as a human being who has a
some kind of terrible problem where he can't even use his hand.
Instead, they just look at him as an opportunity for Christ to follow their rules or to break their rules.
Which category is Jesus going to be in?
Is he going to be in the good category or the bad category?
Well, they already know where they think Jesus is.
Is this man going to participate in that or not?
And that kind of thinking leads to, second problem, a life of suspicion.
Verse 2, you see that
They watched Jesus, and they didn't watch to hear what he was going to say.
They didn't watch to see what he was going to teach them.
They didn't watch to see what good he was going to do.
No, they watched to see whether he would heal this man on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him.
And instead of focusing on what good God was doing in the world around them, what good God was doing in their midst there in the synagogue on the Sabbath,
They're looking for the demon under every bush.
And I think that's a pattern of mind that's easy for us to fall into if we're so focused on the rules that we have made.
We start looking for who's breaking those rules and how are they breaking those rules.
And we should be suspicious of them.
And the third thing, the thing that that leads to is missing the Messiah even though he's right under their nose.
Even when he's right in front of them.
And they don't only miss him, they hate him.
They love the darkness rather than the light because their deeds are evil, as John would say in John chapter 3 verses 5 and 6.
When the man is told to stretch out his hand, he stretches it out.
Jesus heals him.
His hand is restored.
verse 6, the Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him how to destroy him.
These are two groups of people that hate each other.
The Pharisees who are so focused on the law and focused on religious observance and carefully doing what they thought God wanted them to do and the Herodians
They're total sellouts.
Like their only interest in keeping Israel together is so that they keep power.
They're in league with, they're called the Herodians, the party of Herod.
Herod isn't even a Jewish king, but he's placed over this region by the Romans.
And so by being in league with Herod, they are essentially participating in the Roman oppression of the Jews.
And so these two groups are diametrically opposed, but they've got one thing in common.
We hate Jesus.
So let's start planning.
And this is early in Jesus' ministry.
They're already planning, how do we get rid of this guy?
But what led the Pharisees there was their obsession with their rules over actually looking for what God was doing.
So I think when we read this text, we've got to ask, like, what religious rules are you clinging to?
What standards are you using that aren't scripture in how you evaluate other people?
It could be all kinds of things.
People do this with rules around alcohol.
So like scripture says, don't get drunk, full stop.
That's debauchery.
That's evil.
And some people will then take that and say, well, then Christians should never touch it.
And that might be well,
Mark 223-36, Lord of the Sabaath
There's all kinds of reasons to make the different decisions people do.
We had, I mean, we homeschool our kids and we've got pretty strong convictions around that.
But I can't look at another parent and say, well, because you made a different decision than me, you must not actually be trying to follow Christ.
No, the scriptures give principles.
Raise your children up in the fear and admonition of the Lord.
You should be trying to shape their minds towards godliness.
There's different ways to approach that.
God gives freedom.
There's all kinds of ways we can take good things, things that we should have convictions about.
Like it wasn't wrong for the Pharisees to want to honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
God commanded them to.
But then when they added these layers of rules and judged everybody based on their own made-up rules, they missed the mark.
That's the problem with our legalisms is
is that we end up so wrapped up in those things that we miss the core that we thought we were protecting to start with.
I saw this a lot, like I said, we homeschool our kids.
I'm a big fan of homeschooling.
I grew up in a homeschooling community and like going to conventions and stuff.
And boy, in that world, there were a lot of people who they cared a lot about homeschooling supposedly for Christian reasons.
But their lives didn't really reflect the love of Christ for anyone that didn't dress like them and act like them and do things their way.
Like when we showed up to a homeschool convention and didn't have like the starched white shirt and the pleated khaki pants, like, uh, we got kind of looked askance at like, they don't really fit here.
They don't belong here.
That's a dangerous place to be.
And we can do it.
We do it with all kinds of things.
We make ourselves the standard of what's right and wrong, what's good and evil, rather than Christ.
We make these rules oftentimes, like I said, out of good motivations.
But we looked at a couple years ago in Colossians.
In Colossians chapter 2, Paul is really clear that those kind of extra rules don't actually help you follow God.
verse 16 of Colossians chapter 2.
Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath.
These are a shadow of the things to come but the substance belongs to Christ.
Let no one disqualify you insisting on asceticism, worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by a sensuous mind, not holding fast to the head
from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.
If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of this world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations, do not handle, do not taste, do not touch, referring to things that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings?
These indeed, this is the key verse, these indeed have an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body.
I mean, he's just describing the Pharisees to a T right there, right?
But they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
Maybe the way to put it is like we think rules will save us because rules protect us from the evil out there.
But the evil that gets us is the evil that's already inside.
It's the flesh.
And so rules can't actually save you from yourself.
Only Jesus can save you from yourself.
Jesus, he healed this man and it's one of those miracles where the man is almost just incidental to the story.
He's the center of the controversy, but we don't even hear from him.
But in doing this, Jesus demonstrates that his lordship, his lordship over the Sabbath, is something that he exercises for our healing and joy.
His lordship is not like the lordship of evil kings who want to press their authority down and oppress the people underneath of them.
Jesus' authority is meant to bring rest and healing and shalom, peace that's beyond just...
The whole idea of Sabbath is not just that you stop working, but it's meant to bring restoration and fullness.
And Jesus demonstrates that in healing this man.
The question he asks, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to harm, to save life or to kill?
We might think is a little bit kind of over the top, Jesus, like it's his hand.
You could have just healed him tomorrow.
That's what the Pharisees might say.
You don't need to heal him right now.
But Jesus is hearkening to the language of Deuteronomy.
where Moses, after repeating the law to the people, Deuteronomy is Deutero-nomos, the second giving of the law.
And after Moses has recounted the whole law again to the people, he says, now you've got two choices.
You can keep the law, you can follow God and have life, or you can cling to your own way of doing things and have death.
And that's what Jesus is saying to the Pharisees.
You hold on to your way of doing things, you have death.
But if you receive the life that comes from me, the fullness that comes from me, the forgiveness and the healing that come from me, you have life.
We can cling to our own sin.
We can cling to even the sin of prideful religion and miss Jesus.
Or we can humbly repent of our sins and receive his healing, receive his forgiveness and have true life.
So brothers and sisters, friends, quit trusting yourself.
Do not trust yourself.
Do not trust your own rules.
Do not trust your own judgment.
Instead, trust in the Lord with all your hearts.
Repent of your sin and turn to Jesus and receive the rest that He gives.
I just want to finish by reading Matthew 11, verses 28 to 30.
Jesus says, Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden.
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Would you pray with me?
Father God, we need your help in this.
We want to build our own yoke and make our own rules that we think we can accomplish because it feels really good to be independent and to do things on our own.
But doing things on our own will only take us to hell.
So give us the humility to repent of that and to receive the free gift of forgiveness and to live lives that do honor you and labor for you from the rest of forgiveness that you give.
We pray in Jesus name.
Amen.
