19 August 2023
Basic principle: Depend on Jehovah. There is no other.
God does not grant rights; that's a pagan concept. God grants privileges. Those privileges require that you stay on good terms with Him. The task is never finished in this life.
However, those divine privileges are beyond superlatives. The problem is that our rebellious human nature views privilege as restriction. It's trying to redefine the concept of "privilege" to make it sound like autonomy. Your flesh wants to be its own god.
It's the nature of reality itself: You will serve someone. If you think you are serving yourself, you are a fool serving a fraud. If you refuse to make a conscious choice, you will be under the rule of false deities who will toss you back and forth between them for sport. They have that power, but none of them are gods. They simply claim to be. Still, they have way more power than you and I.
It's not enough to call them "demons" because the English word includes a lot of false baggage. There is a huge mass of false mythology about what demons are. In the Bible, it's a word that refers to spiritual creatures who may or may not be evil. It's a class of being, not a specific type.
Even our word "evil" carries connotations that aren't biblical. The Bible seldom addresses the ontology of anything. Seeking to know the nature of something is not a biblical approach to anything. Rather, the Bible teaches us to discern the role a person or thing plays in any current context. The person or thing is good today and "evil" tomorrow. The word "evil" refers to the net effects on you and yours. It's not inherently bad, but sorrowful to you in your context. Our faith in God teaches us that what may be hard on us might still be good for His agenda in the long run. Faith teaches us that there are contexts other than our own, and that our own context does not define the rest.
Again, it's not a question of ontology. The word "sin" in the Bible refers to arguing with the Creator. A particular act is not inherently bad; it's becomes bad when it sprouts from resistance to God's will. It is tainted by the particular motive or its effects. Motives may not change the outcomes in this world, but they do change how we should regard the outcomes. It's not about product, but process.
This was the big deal with Jesus in His argument with Pharisees over His disciples snacking on ripe grain on the Sabbath (Matthew 12). In their perverted minds, the act of plucking, husking and eating the grain was a sin in itself because it was the Sabbath. Jesus reminded them that the revelation through Moses was a matter of teaching us Jehovah's priorities, not nailing down legalistic details. They had lost the Hebraic personal connection to Jehovah, and substituted a Hellenistic rationalism as their "law". His disciples were with Him on an important mission, and they would not be home to eat a family meal, which would have been cooked the day before.
They needed food for the mission. They didn't break the Sabbath provisions of Moses, but they did defy the Talmudic perversion of Moses. Notice the rather clear Hebrew choice of words in Moses: "So you must keep the Sabbath, for it is holy for you. Everyone who defiles it must surely be put to death; indeed, if anyone does any work on it, then that person will be cut off from among his people" (Exodus 31:14 NET Bible). The word for "work" (mla'kah) refers specifically to the servile nature of the activity, working for someone else. The emphasis for this command was on staying the master's hand from compelling his employees/servants/family to serve his demands.
Such are the priorities of Jehovah. By His divine power, manna prepared on Friday for Sabbath observance stayed edible, but on any other day of the week, it spoiled. The Creator works through Creation to uphold His own demands by making things work when you obey. If it doesn't work out, then you are missing something.
Priests could still kindle a fire on the Altar, of course. If you are going to get picky, it would appear kindling a fire out in the open was okay, since the restriction (Exodus 35:3) was "in your dwellings", but then you couldn't gather firewood on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36). It would have to be laid ready to burn the day before. And nothing kept you from keeping a fire burning from the previous day, as long as the wood was there on hand. But that's missing the point. Jesus said (Matthew 12:9-14) that the Sabbath Law was not meant to restrict one from helping people or even animals. It was meant to guide us into understanding the heart of our Lord.
Pharisaism makes the law code into a god, and very simple one at that. It operates not from a personal interaction, as Jehovah demands from His people, but a very pitiful god that is subject to human logic and reason (thus, making reason a god, too). The Devil encouraged this as a way to drive a wedge between Jehovah and His people, to prevent Him having a personal relationship with them.
Back to the main point of Sabbath Law: Does shopping, eating out, or even turning on an electric appliance make other people have to work on the Sabbath? Only if your covenant community is big enough to have a noticeable economic impact. The whole point of most covenant law was not some imaginary depersonalized "lawfulness", but the stability and peace of the community. No community? Then the law code shrinks down to a tiny few observances. In Ancient Israel, the covenant community was the whole nation. In the US, the covenant community is virtually nonexistent. It's not even a blip on the spreadsheet at the specific place of business itself. You cannot make an impact that way without having a large number of members who operate as a community.
And besides, is not our "Sabbath" now on Sunday? You decide. I cannot sit here and proclaim how ritual laws apply under the Covenant of Christ. You'll have to follow your own convictions. All I can do is ask questions to provoke your contemplation of the Scriptures.
As long as your mind operates along the lines of rights, you'll never understand His Word. When you pile up rights as demands on any human system, you create a dependency on that system that takes you out from under God's covering. It makes the government your god. That's exactly what the Devil wants to see.
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