This morning's message will come
from Hebrews chapter four, verse nine. Hebrews four, verse nine,
where we read, there remains then a Sabbath rest for the people
of God. Many of you here this morning
were raised in churches which consider Sunday to be the Christian
Sabbath. And therefore, you're pretty
much not supposed to do anything else on Sunday except go to church
and then rest. Now that's not an unusual belief. Many churches hold to that with
various degrees of severity in how they enforce it. But nowhere in all the scriptures
do we find that Christians are commanded to observe any particular
day of the week in any particular way. We meet on Sundays primarily
because it became a tradition. Probably the early Christians
did this in celebration of the fact that Jesus Christ rose from
the dead on what we would call Sunday, the first day of the
week. The seventh day was the Sabbath
day. And that's Saturday, seventh day. And it says that as on the
next day, the first day of the week, the women went to the Lord's
tomb and found it empty. And I suppose that that is the
reason that churches started the practice of meeting on Sunday.
And there's certainly nothing wrong with that. And we meet
on Sunday because, for the most part, our culture allows nearly
everyone to not work on Sunday morning, that they may go to
church or do whatever it is they do. But we don't meet on Sundays
because it's the law. And we don't call Sunday the
Christian Sabbath. But once in a while, It has been
asked, do you believe in a Christian Sabbath? Of course, I know what
they're asking about. What they wanna know is, do you
believe that the Sabbath day has been moved from Saturday
to Sunday and that we are under obligation to observe the Sabbath
because the 10 commandments say, remember the Sabbath day to keep
it holy. But if someone were to ask me,
do you believe in a Christian Sabbath? I would say, oh yes,
I do. I very much agree with the Christian Sabbath. And not
only that, I fully believe that every Christian keeps that Sabbath
holy. That they observe it. that they set it apart from all
other things, which is what it means to be made holy, they distinguish
it from other activities, and they do not violate it. And
you say, why would you speak so strongly about that? Well,
as we shall learn, to violate the Christian Sabbath is to be
lost. The Christian Sabbath is not
a day. The Christian Sabbath is resting in Christ, pure and
simple. And every Christian rests in
Christ. If you're not resting in Christ,
you're not a Christian, whatever else you may be. Now, the world
has its own definition being a Christian, and it's pretty
much whoever says they're a Christian must be, you know. And I understand
that. There is broad Christendom, which
includes a lot of denominations and a wide range of beliefs,
many of which are mutually contradictory, mutually exclusive and contradictory.
But what I'm saying is the Christianity described in the scriptures,
No one has entered into that. No one has become a Christian
unless he is resting, resting in Christ, having ceased from
his own labors to earn or merit the blessings of God. Anyone, no matter how zealous,
devote, moral, and any other virtue you want to put on it.
No one who is not resting in Christ alone is not a Christian. Everyone who is resting in Christ
alone is a Christian despite the many faults you may find
in their conduct, and even their theology. There remains a Sabbath rest. Now to understand the Christian
Sabbath, we need to learn about the Old Testament Sabbath. Because
all the things that were written in the Old Testament were written
for us. You wanna know a secret? almost no one understood the
Old Testament, what it really meant, until Christ came. And He is the light that suddenly
enlightened all those things that had been written in the
Old Testament, gave them their true meaning. And until a person can read the
Old Testament with the gospel in mind, he doesn't understand
what all the laws and the rules and the regulations were about.
Nor can he understand why all of those laws, rules and regulations
and ceremonies and whatnot have been set aside. They read the
Old Testament like Jews, most Jews still read it today as a
book of laws to be followed. not as shadowy types and pictures,
illustrations of the gospel, not as prophecies concerning
Messiah who came in the person of the Lord Jesus. And even in
this business of the Sabbath, as it is laid out in the Old
Testament, if we will look at that, With Gospel eyes, we can
learn something of what it means when it says there remains a
Sabbath to the people of God. Now, you don't have to turn with
me to all of these scriptures. I just want to do a little bit
of a cross country in the Old Testament on the subject of the
Sabbath. In the Old Testament, there are
three words which are associated with the word Sabbath. There
is Shabbat with one B in the middle, and that's a verb. And
it really just means rest or cease, quit, stop. That's what the word means. And
then there's Shabbat with two Bs in the middle, and that's
a noun. And that is always a reference
to the day itself, the Sabbath day. And then there is Shabbaton
or Shabbaton, I'm not sure exactly how it's pronounced, but that
means the observance of the Sabbath day, which of course is to rest. But all of these words have connection
to the word stopping, quitting, resting. Now the first mention,
first mention of any of three of these words, and it's the
verb, it's found in Genesis chapter two, verse two, and it says,
by the seventh day, God had finished the work he had been doing, So
on the seventh day, he rested from all his work. He Sabbathed
from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day
and made it holy because on it he rested from all the work of
creating that he had done. Now, let's note some things. about what's said, because there
is in Bible study what they call the law of first mention. If
you want to understand a concept in the Bible, it's best to go
back to the first time it's ever mentioned, and this is it. And
so let's make five or six quick comments about the Lord resting
on this seventh day of Earth's history. First of all, it simply
means that he stopped creating. This word carries the sense of
rest only when it refers to ceasing from labor. Of course, he did
cease from whatever labor might be associated with the creation
of the universe. But the point is, he quit creating. He stopped creating. Secondly, The reason that God
stopped creating was not that he was tired. You know, that God arranged for his national
people, Israel, to have one day of the week when they were obligated
to cease from their normal labors. No servile works, says the scriptures.
That was a blessing. That's why the Lord told the
Pharisee, man wasn't made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was
made for man. It was a law, but it was a law of blessing. Of
course, it is the nature of men to take anything and turn it
into a burden. And so they turned the Sabbath day, which was rest,
turned around and made it into a work. There are a lot of people today
who physically will rest, but spiritually, they're working
very, very hard, proving to God I'm worthy. See, I'm not out
playing ball with the kids. We're gonna go to church today
two, maybe three times. Turning rest into a work. Our Lord rested because he was
done. Creation was finished. Most of
us, when we rest, we rest simply because it's the end of the day.
And we know that tomorrow, we've got to get up and start all over
again. In all reality, until we get
to retirement age, which is a rather modern invention,
actually. Very few people could ever afford
to stop working until at least the 1900s. We reach retirement
age and we quit our jobs, but then there's still daily things
to be done. There's never a time in this
life when we do anything and we say, okay, that's done, I'll
never have to do that again. If you wash your car, you can
say, okay, I'm done washing the car this time. It'll be dirty
again. Or, if you're like me, you never
really get done with the things you get started. Bonnie's waiting
for my very first project that I started at home to actually
be done. That doesn't mean there's only one project. There's probably
a dozen of them, but none of them are done in the
sense that if she were paying me to do it, I could go and say,
okay, here's the bill. We're never done. God was. He had accomplished all that
he intended to do in the creation of this universe, and so he quit
creating. It says that he sanctified or
set apart the seventh day. And he did so precisely because
he was finished. He set it apart, and I realize
God is not a man to think like we do and act like we do, yet
he often presents himself in human-like attributes But having
completed this grand and glorious work of bringing our reality
into existence, he took a day to celebrate. And to celebrate,
I'm sure, simply by resting in the satisfaction of a work done,
and a work done well. It does not say that he sanctified
the seventh day of every week, any more than it says that on
the first day of every week thereafter, he said, let there be light. Now on the first day of creation
week, he said, let there be light. But he didn't say that on the
first day of every week that followed. And the seventh day, he sanctified
that day. It does not say that he sanctified
every seventh day afterward. He sanctified the seventh day,
not the seventh day of the week, the seventh day of human history. Not human history, earth's history,
the universe's history. It was only the second day of
human history. Adam having been created on the
sixth day. human, Earth's history. Just that day, he sanctified
it. And think about this. We have
no scriptural record that he ever told anyone else that he
had sanctified that seventh day in honor of his completion of
creation. It's never mentioned again for another 2,500 years at least. Now, I don't know how old the
earth really is. I don't know that all the genealogies
and the scriptures are complete. That is that they contain every
generation. But if you figure that the genealogies and dates
and stuff given are complete, then the universe is roughly
6,000 years old, regardless of what scientists may say about
it. But I want you to think of it. If indeed the universe is
6,000 years old, why it was almost half that time
before God ever mentioned this seventh day to anybody else so
far as we know. The next time we find this word
is in Genesis 8, verse 22. And this is when Moses, and this
is 2,500 years later, roughly. And Moses is talking to Pharaoh,
telling him to let, you know, these are the Lord's people,
let them go, let them go out. And at this point, they're just
saying, let us go out into the desert, into the wilderness,
three days journey, and to worship the Lord, and then we'll come
back. And here's Pharaoh's answer. He says, You know what? I can tell you
what he said. There you go. Exodus five, excuse
me, it appears in Exodus five, chapter four. I got some things
out of order here. Imagine me doing something like
that, huh? Exodus chapter five, verse four,
the king of Egypt said, Moses and Aaron, why are you taking
the people away from their labor? Get back to your work. Then Pharaoh
said, look, the people of the land are now numerous and you
are resting them, stopping them from their labor. Now that's the next time that
you see that word in the scriptures. And then we read The first time it appears
in regard to observing a day of rest unto the Lord is in Exodus
16. I'm gonna stop right there. I
just realized I didn't jumble things up. I read my notes wrong.
There is one other mention of the word before Exodus. And that's
where God made promise to Noah after he came out of the ark,
he said, as long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest,
cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, we'll never Sabbath,
we'll never rest, we'll never cease. And then Pharaoh makes
his remark, you're getting the people to rest from their work.
But the first time that any of these words appear in relationship
to observing a day unto the Lord is in Exodus chapter 16, and
it concerns the gathering of manna. And it says, on the sixth
day, they gathered twice as much, two omers for each person. And
the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses.
He said to them, this is what the Lord commended. Tomorrow
is to be a day of Sabbath rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. So
bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save
whatever is left and keep it until morning. And then of course, in Exodus
chapter 20, verse eight, we find it chiseled into the tablets
of stone as what I believe is the fourth of the 10 commandments.
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Now, some have said
when God said, remember the Sabbath day, that that's proof that the
Sabbath day had been Something that always went on, because
you can't remember something that hasn't already happened.
That's not true. When the Lord said, remember
the Sabbath day to keep it holy, if we were saying it, we would
say it this way, remember to keep the Sabbath day holy. Just
like you might say to your child, the first day they go to school,
remember to pay real close attention to your teacher. yet that's something
he's never done before. So the Lord was not telling them
to recall a weekly practice that had been set aside at somewhere
along the line. He just saying, I have recently
set this up. When he was talking about, told
them in the gathering the manna, you're supposed to gather twice
as much on the sixth day so that you don't have to gather any
on the seventh. But he said, now we got that set up, remember
to do it, keep it in mind. Kind of like saying, remember
to brush your teeth. A lot more serious than that, but still,
the same kind of structure. After that, we find well over 100, in fact, nearly
200 occurrences of one of those three words I mentioned to you.
There are 111 references in the Old Testament to the Sabbath
day. There are 71 references to resting,
the verb form, and there are 11 references to the observance
of the Sabbath by resting. And one thing that it might be
good to notice, the primary reason that God sent
the land of Judah into captivity for 70 years was because For
490 years, they had failed to observe the seven-year Sabbath
and given the land its rest. For the Sabbath was not only
a day, not only on the seventh day, on the seventh year, they
were to give the land rest. And they didn't do that. So there
were 70 years, the land was never given rest. So the Lord said,
the only way the land's ever gonna get any rest is if I take
you all off of it. And that's what he did. He took
them off the land and for 70 years, the land rested. And then lastly, as a comment,
Exodus 12 verse 16. Now this is just like gathering
bricks to put together a wall. It wouldn't be of much value
if you just stacked these bricks up and looked at them, you'd
just have a stack of bricks. We hope to build them into a
wall here shortly, make something out of these facts. Exodus chapter
12 verse 16 makes it rather clear for whom the Sabbath law was. Well, I've written down the wrong
one. Probably in a different chapter,
I got the right verse. But here's what it says, the
verse I intended to take you to. The Israelites are to observe
the Sabbath, celebrating it for generations to come as a lasting
covenant. It's the next verse. Well, I'm looking at 1216. Okay, well anyway the point is it's
for the Israelites, for the Israelites. The Sabbath day law was never
given to the Gentiles and it never was given to the Church
of the Lord Jesus Christ, never. That's a point of religious contention,
and it's not nearly important as some make it out to be. Paul
said, if a man wants to honor one day above another, let him,
if he does so unto the Lord. If that's what his conscience
tells him he should do, then he should do that, and let no
one look down on him for it. There are people who were raised
in that, that's the way their conscience has been formed. And
I would never tell someone who thought they should observe a
particular day of the week as a Sabbath day or somehow special
to the Lord, I would never say to them, no, you need to quit
doing that. Because Paul says in that very
context, Whatever is not of faith is sin. And what he means by
that, whatever freedom you express, whatever conduct you express
with regard to these disputable matters, if it is not being expressed
as a result of your understanding of the gospel, then it is sin.
Now, by the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, I understand there
is no Sabbath day. for Christians. There's a Sabbath
rest, but there is no Sabbath day. Not every Christian understands
that, and we would never tell someone who believed otherwise
that they should cease and desist from what they consider to be
Sabbath keeping. But Paul did say this about those
who dispute over the matter. Let not the man who elevates
the day Look down on a man who does not. And do not let the
man who does not look down on the man who does. For each does
so unto the Lord. And that goes with all kinds
of things that believers have different opinions about. But
we can say rather plainly from there, it says the Israelites
are to keep the Sabbath. Now let's go back to Hebrews
chapter four, and we'll see if there isn't something we can
build out of those bricks that we have gathered. Verse nine, there remains then
a Sabbath rest. for the people of God. Why does
he say there remains? Is he talking about something
yet to be achieved in time? You know, something still to
come? No, he's talking about in the
process of an argument he's making. And that argument starts back
at the beginning actually back in chapter three, but we'll start
in the first verse here in chapter four. Therefore, since the promise
of entering God's rest still stands, let us be careful that
none of you be found to have fallen short of it. So here we
have this matter of God's rest. It says his rest, but the his
is God. God's rest. Now he says, for
we have had the gospel preached to us just as they did, but the
message they heard was of no value to them because those who
heard it did not combine it with faith. Now I don't know that
the apostle or whoever it was wrote the book of Hebrews, I
don't know that they meant that or that he meant that the gospel,
such as we understand it, the message of Jesus Christ, was
preached to them. The word gospel simply means
good news, and good news was preached to the Jews, and the
good news was, I will give you this land, just go in. I will
go before you, I will destroy your enemies, I'll clear them
out ahead of you, and you will live in a land flowing with milk
and honey. It was a very this-worldly type
message, but it was a good message. But when they got to the edge
of the promised land, they sent in spies. Spies came back with
a report. Boy, there's a lot of really,
really big people in there. Yes, it's a land flowing with
milk and honey. It'd be a wonderful place to
live, but we're like grasshoppers in the sight of those people.
Only two of them believed, Joshua and Caleb. They said, let's go
in. The other 10 said no. The whole
congregation took a vote. voted it down and they didn't
go in and you know what God did? He says, so I swore an oath,
in my anger I swore an oath, they will never enter my rest. That land was supposed to be
the land of their rest and through unbelief, they never entered
it. That generation died in the wilderness
because they didn't believe God. And so, he describes, or the writer here
applies that to us. Now we who have believed enter
that rest, just as God has said, so I declare to my anger, they
shall never enter my rest. That is, the unbelievers won't
enter. But we have believed, so we do enter that rest. Now
isn't it interesting? We enter God's rest, But I don't
think many of us, if any of us, have ever been to the land of
Israel. God's rest is not a patch of real estate. Never was. You know, the Jews finally did
enter that land, and there was no real rest there either. When
they went in, there was a series of wars trying to conquer the
land. Once they conquered it and settled it and thought they
might have peace, it was not long before those who still lived
there who were not Jews rose up and troubled them again. And
it was almost unceasing wars. There wasn't any rest in that
land. And then there was this rest.
We go on in verse three, the last part. And yet
his work has been finished since the creation of the world. That is God's work has been finished
since the creation of the world. For somewhere he has spoken about
the seventh day in these words and on the seventh day God rested
from all his work. And again in the passage above
he says they shall never enter my rest. Now The scriptures tell
us, the law says, when giving the rule of the Sabbath day,
he says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, and Moses
went on to comment on that and said, for in six days, God created
the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he rested,
therefore, you shall rest on every seventh day. And then later
on, it ties the observance of the Sabbath to this, And you
shall remember that the Lord brought you out of the house
of bondage. Remember how Pharaoh said to Moses, you're trying
to make the people rest. Well, Moses couldn't do it. He
couldn't get Pharaoh to give up. God could. God got Pharaoh to release them. God gave them rest, at least
from that enslaved labor. And that's what the Sabbath day
was about. It spoke of a finished work, a work which was done. And yet he says, they, the unbelievers
will never enter his rest. Now verse six, it still remains
that some will enter that rest. And those who formerly had the
gospel preached to them did not go in because of their disobedience.
Another word for unbelief. Therefore God said a certain
day, calling it today, When a long time later, he spoke through
David, as was said before, today, if you hear his voice, do not
harden your hearts. That means don't harden your hearts like
they did right there on the border of the land of promise, the land
of rest, and decided not to go. See, that was an act of rebellion
on our part, when through unbelief, they refused to go into the land
that God had promised them. And you know, when a man does
not enter God's rest in Christ Jesus, it is not simply some
free will choice about which God has no opinion. To refuse to rest in Christ is
to call God a liar, to call his son unworthy, It is to reject
the testimony of the Holy Spirit. It is a high insult to God. Unbelief is the worst sin there
ever was. Now we are probably all guilty
of things that make us feel a whole lot worse than our years of unbelief
make us feel. But the fact of the matter is,
the greatest sin ever committed by men is unbelief. And everybody here is guilty
of it. Everybody. That's why we do not
despair of the salvation of any. Well, in verse eight, it says,
for if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken
later about another day. If Joshua, leading them into
the land, had given them rest, there would not have been another
day spoken of as a day of rest. If the Sabbath day keeping was
God's rest, there would have never been mention of another
day. There remains, in his argument,
he said, there must remain something else that is the Sabbath of the
people of God. For anyone who enters God's rest
also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. Now, first thing to note here then,
and I'll try to wrap this up as quick as I can, we don't enter our rest, we enter
his rest. And what is his rest? His rest
is the rest of a work that is finished. God rested on the seventh
day. He did not start creating again
the next day. God entered his rest from his
creative labors on the seventh day of the history of this universe. And he's never gone back to his
labors. Why? They're done. And in like fashion,
our Lord Jesus Christ came into this world with a work to do,
something to accomplish. He said, it is my meat to do
the will of him who sent me. And from the moment he was conceived
in the womb of Mary until he said, it is finished, he was
engaged in a hard, hard labor, a labor that you and I really
can't understand. Because we've never been the
kind of person he is. Therefore, there's a lot of things
he had to deal with that we don't understand. The nearest that
I could illustrate it to you is we're probably, as Americans,
you know, well, civilization-wise, we're pretty close to the top
of the heap. And we live our lives clean and hygienic and
we've got good medicine and we live in nice homes and everything
else. What would it be like if suddenly you had to live in some
filthy slum in a third world country? Live among those who
are ignorant and superstitious and filthy. That's what our Lord did. He
is God. And he came here to live in this
cesspool called the earth. It was work for him just to live
here. But all of that pales in comparison
to that work, that labor he did in bearing our sins in his body
on the tree. And that's another thing that
we cannot know and thank God because he does know it, We who
believe in him will never know it. I don't want to learn that
lesson. I don't want to learn the lesson
of what it is to be forsaken by God. I don't want to learn
the lesson, by experience anyway, of what it is to fall under the
wrath of a justly outraged God. The Lord Jesus Christ knows it,
not as a theological concept, but by his own personal experience,
because that's exactly what he bore. You know, people tell you,
certainly with regard to certain trials and troubles, there's
no way for you to understand what it's like unless you've
been there. I've heard that's true about combat. If you've never
been in combat, there's no way you're gonna be able to relate
to the difficulties faced by those who have been in combat. Well, there's no one on earth
who has ever experienced what Christ did. He poured out his soul unto death. And when he was done, what did
he say? It is finished. What? The work that his father
gave him to do. That was not a shout of defeat. It was a shout of victory. I'm
done. I have finished it. And when
he said that, he gave up his spirit and entered his rest. What kind of rest was it? A rest
that just to regather strength and come back and start again?
No. A rest from which he has never returned to take up the
labor again because it's done and done perfectly. And through
faith, we enter his rest. He says, come unto me, all you
who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. What
rest is he gonna give us? Does that simply mean that the
Lord Jesus Christ was gonna give them a lighter law to carry? No. A lighter burden may not be as
tiresome, but it's not rest. He says, I will give you rest,
and the rest that I give you will be the rest of my work finished. And he says, take my yoke upon
you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and
you will find rest for your soul. There is a law in the old covenant
that says that you cannot yoke together two kinds of animals. For instance, you cannot yoke
together an ox and a donkey. Yet our Lord says, take my yoke
upon you. What is he saying? Take my yoke
upon you. and you will be regarded to be
like me. We will be of the same kind. Now you ponder on that a minute. That being yoked to Christ, it's
not going to change Christ. It changes us. certainly changes
our position in the sight of God. God no longer sees an ox
and a donkey, and you can imagine which one of those two we are.
He sees two oxen. He sees two righteous people.
He said of his son, this is my beloved son in whom I am well
pleased. And when we are yoked to him,
he looks at us yoked together and he says, these are my beloved
sons in whom I am well pleased. You say, aren't you over speaking
yourself? I feel like it, but that's what the scriptures teach. John says, as he is, so are we
in this world. And you know something? If you
can lay hold of that truth, I mean really get a grip on the fact
that, and this is for believers, if
you can get a grip of that fact that God views you with the same
level of love, affection, approval, and acceptance as he does his
only begotten son, the Lord Jesus, you'll find rest. You say, oh, but my sins trouble
me. How do they trouble you? Do they make you think you've
been cut off from God? Remember, you're yoked to Christ. You're of the same kind as him. Don't ever despair of the grace
of God. Don't ever try to work yourself
into his favor or work yourself back into his favor. At every
point where there seems to be a conflict between you and God
or something that argues against your full possession of all the
blessings which are in Christ, Here's what you need to do. Stop. Quit. Rest. Why? The work's done. It's finished. And that is the Christian Sabbath.