Mark, chapter two, and we're
going to read from verse 13. And of course, we're speaking
about the Lord Jesus Christ, and he is returning again, out of
Capernaum, perhaps, and back to the seaside. So here we find
the Lord in Mark, chapter two, and verse 13. And he went forth again by the
seaside, and all the multitude resorted unto him, and he taught
them. And as he passed by, he saw Levi
the son of Alphaeus sitting at the receipt of custom, and said
unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him.
And it came to pass that as Jesus sat at meat in his house, many
publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples. For there were many, and they
followed him. And when the scribes and Pharisees
saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples,
How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners? When Jesus heard it, he saith
unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician,
but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous,
but sinners to repentance. The disciples of John and of
the Pharisees used to fast, and they come and say unto him, Why
do the disciples of John and the Pharisees fast, but thy disciples
fast not? And Jesus said unto them, Can
the children of the bride chamber fast when the bridegroom is with
them? As long as they have the bridegroom
with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come when the
bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they
fast in those days. No man also soweth a piece of
new cloth on an old garment, else the new piece that filleth
it up taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse. And no man putteth new wine into
old bottles, else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the
wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred. But new wine
must be put into new bottles. And it came to pass that he went
through the cornfields on the Sabbath day, and his disciples
began as they went to pluck the ears of corn. And the Pharisees
said unto him, Behold, why do they on the Sabbath day that
which is not lawful? And he said unto them, Have ye
never read what David did, when he had need, and was unhungered,
he and they that were with him? How he went into the house of
God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the
showbread, which is not lawful to eat, but for the priests,
and gave also to them which were with him? And he said unto them,
The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.
Therefore the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath. Amen. May God bless to us this
reading from his word. We began our study in Mark's
gospel a few weeks ago by noting that really, while we call it
Mark's gospel, it is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And
we read in Mark chapter 1, verse 1, the beginning of the gospel
of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And we have seen how Mark introduced
us to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and how through the baptism
and how through the recognition of John the Baptist, the baptism
of the Saviour, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon him, the
voice from heaven declaring and honouring the Son, and then the
Lord Jesus Christ being taken into the wilderness, that the
Lord was introduced to us by Mark, and his ministry was commenced. And so we see the beginning there
of the gospel of Jesus Christ in the sense that his gospel
ministry was starting, for we know and believe, of course,
that this great gospel is an eternal purpose in the mind of
the Godhead, the triune God. And it did not have its beginning
with the coming forth out of Galilee of the Lord Jesus Christ,
but it had its beginning in the eternal purpose of God to save
a people for himself. And we saw how Jesus' healing
ministry was commenced and how that he was able to heal the
leper and many people who had need, how he healed that man
who was brought by his friends and laid before the Lord Jesus
Christ. And we thought a little bit of
the majesty of the Lord Jesus Christ as he was revealed as
the one that could forgive sins. a task that only God could do,
which was testified by the scribes and Pharisees there, showing,
if they had had wisdom to understand and eyes to see and ears to hear,
that this was indeed truly God that stood before them. And now
we come on in this chapter two to think a little bit about the
call of Matthew, or Levi, as he is here called. It's the same
person with just a different name. And I want to suggest to
you that this call of Matthew is symbolic indeed of the calling
of all sinners to Christ. There is something to be gleaned
here in the way in which we perceive and see and have this account
of Matthew's calling presented to us by Mark. And I dare say that upon an initial
reading of these verses that are before us this evening that
someone might wonder if they are at all connected. Here's half a dozen little verses
or little incidents that are put together by Mark and we might
wonder what's the thread that connects all these together? Well, I think that as we look
at these verses this evening, we might find upon closer examination
that these half dozen or so little snippets have indeed been woven
together with a purpose and that Mark's intent is to reveal a
clear message as to the fact that the passages build upon
one another to again reveal to us something about the nature
of this one Jesus Christ, whose gospel this is that we are considering
this evening. And I think that Mark has beautifully
brought together these little passages. And I trust that as
we think on them, that we might have a blessing granted from
on high, that God the Holy Spirit might just comfort and encourage
us as we think on the Lord and the way that Mark presents him
to us here. Mark gives an account of the
Lord's actions in the verses before us, and we see that there
are facts given to us, there are events recounted here, and
the words of the Lord Jesus Christ also are recounted here by Mark. And it speaks about the interactions
that occur between a number of different groups that are here
on this particular occasion or on the occasions in which these
things happened. But what I want us, by the end
of this evening, this next little while that we have together,
to have concentrated upon and and touched upon, is to see that
the message here depicts the Lord Jesus Christ's protection
of his disciples. And there is a doctrinal explanation
also of grace, of the free grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and
of God. and also how our justification
is obtained. That is the justification that
comes by the righteousness of God and by the sacrifice of the
Lord Jesus Christ. And again it's it's not my purpose
to spend too much time upon the individual details of the narrative,
as it were, because in truth, these gospel passages are really
very self-explanatory. As we've read down these things,
we can see that they're very commonplace in a sense. We can
well imagine the Lord walking and people following him and
him pausing and stopping and teaching them and drawing upon
perhaps a particular scene or a particular setting to convey
a message and then moving on and the people continuing with
him and there's the seaside and the town, there's the townspeople,
there's his disciples, there's the scribes and the Pharisees,
and others who gather from time to time. But really, the narrative
is very clear and understandable, self-explanatory in many ways. But there are gospel truths and
gospel facts in this story that unfold to us and it's those perhaps
that I want to briefly mention. They merit a mention to us this
evening as we just drop down through the passage. So the first
thing I wanted to draw your attention to was the fact that here we
find Levi. Levi, the son of Alphaeus, or
Matthew. He's seated somewhere which is called the receipt of
custom. And here we find Matthew at the
receipt of custom. That tells us that Matthew was
a tax collector. He was collecting taxes and we're
told that the Lord Jesus was heading to the sea. He went forth again by the seaside
and the multitude resorted unto him. And as he passed by the
receipt of customs, so it's quite likely that Matthew's job was
something to do with the trade that went on at the seaside. So perhaps he was gathering taxis
from the tradesmen and the fishermen who plied their trade on the
water. Perhaps it was something to do
with travellers who came in and out to the town of Capernaum
and maybe they were doing business as well or simply visiting. But
here was a mechanism that the Romans had put in place in order
to tax the people of Galilee. And Matthew's job was to collect
that tax. Now, that didn't make him a very
popular person. And indeed, what we discover
in the reading of the Gospels was that these men who were called
publicans, that was just the name, they had a public capacity.
Of course, nowadays we often think of publicans as the people
that run pubs. But this was not the role of
a publican in the New Testament times. A publican was, as it
were, a government employee. And he worked for the Romans
or on behalf, subcontracted to the Romans as a tax collector. And as a result of that, as one
might imagine, he was basically taxing his own people or enforcing
taxation. in order to give to those who
were their overlords and who were dominating the country at
that time. So these tax collectors were
really hated and detested amongst the general population. And consequently,
they often stuck together because a few of them, or indeed many
of them, as it might be, depending on the size and scale of the
task that they had, would be largely ostracized and marginalized
from the rest of the population. And they epitomized this phrase,
publicans and tax collectors. It epitomized the lowest category
of people. Yes, there were beggars and yes,
there were invalids and yes, there were the sick and even
there were lepers. But you never hear them talked
about with such anger and detestation as the publicans and the tax
collectors. They gathered the money, they
paid it to the Roman overlords, they, as it were, enforced that
subservience that the Jews were under and they were detested
for that. They were regarded as worthless
and they were regarded as outcasts. And in a sense, that is a powerful
description of us all in our sin. Because we are, by sin,
by nature, cut off and ostracised from God. And there is a hatred
from God upon sin. And we find ourselves in a condition
where we are aware of that sin in our lives, that wickedness,
that evil, and it causes us to be concerned about our soul's
well-being. This picture that we have of
Matthew sitting at the receipt of custom is actually a very
potent phrase because the receipt of custom was basically an enforced
practice. That's what the word custom means. So he was sitting where an enforced
practice was applied. And that speaks to us of the
sin that we have in our lives and the disobedience and rebellion
that is part and parcel of every man and woman and child in this
world. We are subject to an enforced
practice by the ways of our fathers in our sin and opposition to
God. Indeed, Jeremiah speaks of this
very thing and of the impossibility of change. Matthew was sitting
at the receipt of custom and his position was simply that
that was his job and there he would stay. He'd already burned
his bridges, as it were, as far as the rest of the society was
concerned. He was an outcast and he was
hated. And Jeremiah says in chapter
13, verse 23, can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard
his spots? Then may ye also do good that
are accustomed to evil. That's that same word again,
that accustomed to evil. That's our nature, that's our
condition, that's our state. And when the Holy Spirit reveals
that to us, he shows us that there is nothing that we can
do about it. We are accustomed to doing evil. It's our nature, it's our desire,
it's our heart. And there is a force upon us. There is an enforced practice. We sit in the seat of custom. And there's nothing that we can
do about it. It takes a greater force. to
call a sinner away from that seat of custom, then that individual
is able to muster for themselves. Indeed, there is nothing in this
world can change a human heart, nothing can alter the state of
our evil nature, until and except that effectual call of grace
should come upon us. We'll touch more upon that in
a little while. But I want us to realise that
here comes the Lord Jesus Christ. And he is making his way towards
the seaside. And as he does so, he pauses
at the seat of custom. He pauses because here is one
that Jesus knows. Here is one who is perhaps regarded
and detested by his fellow Jews and his fellow Galileans as an
outcast, as a publican and a sinner, but the Lord Jesus Christ has
a love for that individual. The Lord Jesus Christ sees beyond
his sin, sees his sin as not an insurmountable barrier, but
as something that he will undertake to deal with, and in the love
that he has for Matthew. He is pleased to take that individual
to himself, to call Matthew to an honoured position, a position
of disciple, a position of apostle, to take this man from the seat
of custom and to make him one of the Lord's dearly beloved. to make him a member of the body
of Christ, to make him the bride of Christ. And it's lovely just
to remind ourselves as to how the Lord Jesus Christ went by
Matthew, went to Matthew, just in the same way as he went to
another tax collector. Zacchaeus, remember how he went
and he called to Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus' curiosity had been
tweaked and he wanted to see the Lord, but little did he know
that the Lord was coming to see him. And so it is that we see
the beauty of the frequency with which the Lord visits the publicans
and the sinners. How he goes to those who are
the outcasts, those who feel their need and their loss and
he comes to them and he identifies with them. Verse 15, in fact,
in this little passage, it's amazing how frequently it is
repeated in the Gospel that the Lord Jesus Christ is criticised
for the company that he keeps. But what a beautiful picture
that is for us who know our sin. That the Lord Jesus Christ welcomes
publicans and sinners. He welcomes men and women like
us. He welcomes those who need his
help. Those who can do nothing for
themselves. Those who feel the weight of
their sin. and he delights to come to us. He came to where Matthew was,
he came to where Zacchaeus was, and he comes to where his people
are, and he finds them in the gutter, and he finds them downcast,
and he finds them in their need, and he finds them in their sin,
and he lifts them up, and he calls them to himself. These criticisms that we read
about here and the questions, they came from a different, a
number of different groups. They came from the disciples
of John, they came from the scribes, and they came from the Pharisees. And these were all groups who
leaned heavily on the Old Testament law principles of their Judaism
and their religion. And what they said when they
looked on and saw Jesus with Matthew in what appears to be
Matthew's house and surrounded by all these tax collectors and
publicans and sinners, they said, he's eating and drinking with
the wrong sort of people. He's not enforcing the rules
and the practices and the mores of the age and the time. He's
bringing the faith into disrepute. He's not imposing the obligation
to fast. And when his disciples picked
the ears of corn in the field and rubbed them in their hands
together in order to eat those grains, so these scribes and
Pharisees found the actions of the disciples offensive. These
individuals, these groups, to a greater or lesser extent, were
precise. They were pernickety in the details
of their legal observance. But really, their question, their
criticism, their allegations against the disciples and against
the Lord, for whom he, for who he mixed with, It displayed,
or perhaps the better word is betrayed, the attitude of heart
that they had and the mind and the thinking of self-righteousness
that was in their heart and in their mind. And we can see that
the Lord, he saw right into their hearts and he knew the attitude
that they were harbouring and the motivation which inspired
their approach and their censoriousness against the disciples and against
himself. These people basically were saying, when we consider the questions
that they asked, they were saying, I'm better than these people
that the Lord is mixing with. They were saying, these people
are not as good as I am, and yet these are the people that
the Lord is identifying with. They were saying, I'm striving
for holiness, And as far as I can see by my works, by my labours,
by my attitude, by my dedication, I'm pretty much getting there.
They were saying I'm so far ahead in my personal holiness that
I can find opportunity and occasion to examine these finer points. and decide whether or not they're
acceptable or unacceptable in order to establish holiness and
righteousness and perfection before God. And so these men
were mulling over and agonising upon and questioning and arguing
within themselves as to whether rubbing husks of corn on the
Sabbath day was tantamount to working on the Sabbath. And what
we discover, of course, is that self-comparison is the burden
of legalism. They compared themselves with
others in order to bring themselves out above others, in order to
justify themselves in their own eyes at the expense of others. Self-righteousness has no need
for grace. and it ultimately has no need
for the Lord Jesus Christ. But what I want us to notice
here, in the midst of these allegations and accusations that were being
made against the Lord and his people, that the Lord makes a
stark distinction when he comes to discuss these matters with
these people. You see, self-righteousness sees
religion in terms of grades to be achieved on a scale. They see themselves as being
above or below someone else. And this is how religion manifests
itself in the world. People may not voice it. Of course,
they wouldn't voice it. That's not plight or proper to
voice it. but in their minds, they're thinking
to themselves, I'm better than him. Or, all I need to do is
make a few changes, a few tweaks here and there, a few little
alterations, and I can lift myself above the position that I am
on the scale, and I can be better. And we might wonder, why is it
that people don't make themselves better? But of course, it's all
down to that attitude of seeing themselves simply on a linear
scale, simply grading themselves against someone else. And the
reality and the fact of the matter is you will always find someone
else to place beneath you on the scale, and someone else to
whom you can aspire to. And the Lord Jesus Christ immediately
pulls the ground, pulls the rug from under such an attitude. Because at once the Lord distinguishes
between men according not to their works, but to grace. And that's what Paul calls the
purpose of God according to election. It is God that must make the
difference in the life of an individual. There is no mixing
between that righteousness which God gives and which alone is
acceptable before him, and the righteousness so called that
men are able to manufacture for themselves. This was the old
righteousness of works obedience, drawn from the law of Moses,
which these men imagined they could employ and use in order
to impress God and recommend themselves to God. and the new
revelation which was to be discovered in the gospel of Jesus Christ,
that there was a righteousness which was apart from the law,
a righteousness that was distinct from works. And the Lord Jesus
Christ immediately applies this distinguishing aspect to the
arguments of these scribes and Pharisees. He says, look, there's
no way that you can patch up the old with the new. There's
no way that you can incorporate grace and works together. They
will tear at one another. They will grieve one another.
And we cannot place a patch of Christian belief and faith on
top of the old works efforts of the natural man. The gospel
message is radical. The gospel message is fundamental. and it is transformational. It
doesn't build upon the old in order to improve or enhance or
remedy the faults that it finds. It demolishes our efforts. It clears the ground. It begins
again. It recreates. And it does that
sovereignly, according not to the will of man, but according
to the choice of God, according to the elective purpose of God,
or again, the purpose of God, according to election. God gives
righteousness freely, not upon any condition of the individual's
will, or works, or faith, or desire, but according to his
free, sovereign choice. He has a people whom he has loved
from all eternity, a people that he desires to save for himself,
and God gives justifying righteousness. to all those that he has chosen
and all that he will, through the gospel, call in mercy to
himself. And so, men and women, in their
deadness, in their sin, as they sit, as it were, at the receipt
of custom, fulfilling the desires of their heart as their fathers
did before them for a hundred generations, They have no desire
or ability to come to Christ. But as Christ came to Matthew,
so he comes to each sinner that God is pleased to call to himself. Those individuals are made to
see a need in their heart. They are made to feel their lack
of righteousness and acceptance with God. They are caused to
lament the sickness that is in their souls and ultimately to
confess their sins. to cast away the rags of the
old ways of their self-righteous works, and to receive the indwelling
power of God the Holy Spirit. These, says Christ, are those
that are called to repentance. And that's a lovely phrase, the
fact that sinners are called to repentance. They are sinners
when they are called to repentance. They don't repent and then receive
a call to faith. It is the call, the call of the
Lord Jesus Christ, the call of God the Holy Spirit that is the
bringer of change, that is the potent force, that is the energy
that transforms, that is the power to effect that conversion. It is the work of God in the
heart of an individual changing and bringing about that alteration. And it's a call that is vested
in the sovereign choice of God. And this one who calls, this
call to repentance, is the same one who once called light to
shine in darkness, the same one who once called worlds into being
by the word of his power. And it is the same power at work
in the call of grace as it enters into the heart and soul of a
sinner. enters into those who are content
to sit at the receipt of custom. and then are miraculously, powerfully
called from that state of carelessness and heedlessness to feel a need
for Christ and to desire after him that salvation and that forgiveness
that he alone can give. This is the call to repentance. There's no offer in this call. There's no
commonality of grace that is extended to everyone that they
are able to take it or leave it. This is the call that brings
grace to sinners. and sinners to grace and it works
according to that direct one for one coming of grace to an individual. It doesn't get cast around unilaterally,
with no particularity in its heart, but rather it comes to
those who are the Lord's chosen people. It is sovereign, it is
electing, it is regenerating, it is quickening, it is the power
to transform and to convert those that the Lord sends it to. And
I wanted to point out another little incident here, which I
think is worth our attention. It's a very little thing, but
it's an aspect of this engagement that the Lord has with these
scribes and Pharisees that I think speaks volumes. And I personally
found it encouraging, and I hope you do too. It is the gospel
care that the Lord exhibits here for his disciples. These scribes
and Pharisees, they approached his disciples in the first instance
with their questions and with their requests, their allegations. And as these scribes and Pharisees
came to the disciples, it was a little bit like pros and amateurs. It was a little bit like heavyweights
coming against lightweights as far as religion was concerned. But notice what the Lord does
in this situation. He sets himself between the accusers
and his disciples. He sets himself in the middle. Here comes the Pharisees and
the scribes with their allegations and their condemnation, and they
come to the disciples, but the Lord steps in, and I find that
very comforting. Because when our enemies attack
us, when the world weighs us down, when the flesh plays up,
when the devil circles around about us, who will come to our
aid? It is the saviour who interposes
himself. It is the saviour who intercedes
on our behalf. It is the saviour who represents
us. So it always has been and so
it always will be. He is the substitute set up before
time as the bearer of his people's need. He is the carrier of our
burden. He spoke up for us in the eternal
council as the everlasting Word of God. He bore up for us on
the cross as our substitute and sin-bearer. And he stands up
for us in heaven today as our great high priest and our intercessor. And this perhaps is the greatest
and the best blessing that we have upon earth, short of our
promised salvation. It is the presence of the Lord
Jesus Christ with us. You know, the Lord just doesn't
save us and leave us or give us a promise that it's all going
to be alright in the end and then leave us to our own affairs
or our own ends. He lives with us. He indwells
us. He comes to us. He supports us. He comes to his people to help
us, to comfort us and defend us, to encourage us and to bless
us. The Pharisees said, why don't
your disciples fast? Why don't your disciples mourn? Why don't your disciples lament
and look downcast? because they have Christ with
them, because they have a joy that transcends their troubles. They have a peace that passes
understanding. They have a rest upon whom to
lay their weariness and their challenges and their disappointments
and their trials. This is Christ, our Bridegroom. Our Bridegroom is here with us. Our Husband is standing with
us. It is our Husband who steps in
before us, who protects us as our shield and our defender,
who when our accusers come, When the allegations are made, it
is He who steps in before us and protects us. Mark this lovely
picture of the Saviour interceding for His disciples in strength,
for His dearly beloved spouse in her weakness. This is our
God. This is our Deliverer. This is
our Saviour. This is our Jesus. And finally,
just a closing thought. Just towards the end of this
little passage, Mark gives us a beautiful little gem of gospel
doctrine. And the Lord Jesus Christ supplies
a spiritual explanation of it with respect to his superiority
over the law. The law is for the service of
man. And what the Lord teaches here
is that his people have freedom from it in him. And that's a
beautiful little piece of gospel truth. And once again, here we
are with Mark carefully and simply presenting that gospel to us
as he reveals to us the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, the
Son of God. How precise these precisions
were in their reading of the Sabbath law. Their great error,
and the great error of all natural flesh, is to imagine that what
was given to constrain wickedness was in
some way intended to confer righteousness. The natural flesh wants to take
that which was designed to inhibit evil and say that by following
and fulfilling it, we can make ourselves deserving before God. And that's just wrong. There
is no righteousness of the law which will ever recommend an
individual to God. And men and women are building
their hope upon their good works. And I know that we emphasise
constantly that it is salvation by faith and not of works, that
great pillar of the Reformation. But the reality is that the natural
man and natural flesh fails to grasp that that's not simply
the point of a conversion question. It has to do with the whole of
a believer's life, how we walk, how we serve, how we see our
comfort and our help coming to us from God. These Sabbath regulations that
had been given by God to Moses, and revealed from those earliest
days, they distinguished the Jews from their neighbours, from
the nations around about them. They never were universal. And a right and proper understanding
of the Sabbath, the Sabbath rest, doesn't distinguish the Jews
from their neighbours, but rather distinguishes the elect from
their neighbours, and from the religious self-righteousness
that exists in the heart of every man and woman in every age. whether that's the Old Testament
days of Moses, whether that was the New Testament days of Christ
and the disciples and the Apostle Paul and the leading forth of
that gospel to the nations and its extensive preaching amongst
the Gentiles. Right up to the present time,
a proper understanding of our Sabbath rest distinguishes the
elect from the non-elect. The Lord reminds these Pharisees
of an incident in the Old Testament, you can read about it, I think
it's in 2 Samuel, where David enters the temple with some of
his men and he is hungry and he eats the showbread and the
Men there were obviously feeling weak, obviously hungry, and there
was nothing else for them to eat. There was no bread there.
And the Lord reminds these Pharisees of that incident. And he shows
them thereby that dead men men who are still in religion, men
who are still spiritually incapable of understanding. They venerate
symbols, while living men and women, they feed on Christ. And that's the point that the
Lord reveals to us here. This showbread in the tabernacle
and later in the temple, it begins, it's shown to Moses in Leviticus
when the tabernacle was in the wilderness and then later it
was incorporated into the temple worship. That showbread spoke
of the Lord Jesus Christ. The symbolism was to speak of
Christ and his elect people. There were 12 loaves of bread,
especially made with the finest ingredients, the finest flour,
and laid out in two lines of six at the beginning of every
Sabbath. And there it stayed on a table
covered with gold. There it stayed in the presence
of God's holiness. And it was to be replaced weekly
and the replaced bread was to be eaten only by priests. But David and his young men consumed
that bread and they consumed it on a Sabbath day. Now, if ever there was anything
that ought to have affronted the legalist, it was that incident
from the life of David. But what is the Lord telling
these men here? He is telling them that grace
speaks something different. Grace says, look beyond the symbols
and see the reality of which those symbols spoke. The Lord's
people are eligible because they have been purified, sanctified,
and consecrated to partake of that showbread, to eat that showbread. Revelation 1, verse 6, John writes
to us there that the Lord Jesus Christ hath made us kings and
priests unto God and his Father. And so by being made kings and
priests, the Lord Jesus Christ has made us eligible to partake
of that showbread. And such as are so made kings
and priests with Christ are at liberty to feed upon that bread
of life, that showbread that spoke of the Lord Jesus Christ
and the coming of Christ. These are they that as David
hungered in the temple, so we hunger after righteousness. As David went to the temple,
so we go to worship in Christ. We worship in spirit and in truth. We find nourishment. We find
provision, we find comfort, we find sustenance in the Lord Jesus
Christ. As David dined upon the showbread,
so we eat Christ. We eat Christ. And the great
picture of the communion, this is my body that is broken for
you, leads us into the understanding and experience of what it is
to dwell upon the bread of life for our sustenance and for our
Comfort. What did he say about the Sabbath?
Because the whole point about this was that the disciples had
taken and rolled these grains of wheat and consumed them on
the Sabbath day. What does he say about the Sabbath?
He says the Sabbath was made for men. Not all men. We've spoken about that. It distinguished
the Jews from the nations all around about. But it was made
for men. It was made for chosen men. It
was made for the elect of God. It was made for those people
for whom the Lord Jesus Christ came into this world, died on
the cross, rose again, and ascended into glory on their behalf. These are the people who have
a proper understanding and grasp of what it is to rest in the
Lord Jesus Christ, to rest from their own labours and their works,
to rest from their own righteousness, to rest from their legal obedience
in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ. They and they alone
discern in the Lord Jesus Christ that rest of which the Sabbath
day was merely a type and a picture. Doing or not doing certain things
on a Sunday has nothing at all to do with this Sabbath rest. Furthermore, pretending that
it has is disrespecting the reality and returning to the symbol. If we do and don't do things
on a Sunday because we believe that in some way that is remembering
the Sabbath day to keep it holy, then what we are doing is disrespecting
the Lord Jesus Christ and his finished work by leaving off
that finished work and returning to the empty symbol. that was
emptied of its meaning by the fulfilment of the reality. The
type has given way and we insult the Lord by construing it as
a measure of holiness by the things that we do, by the way
that we live, by the way that we dress on a particular day
of the week. The Lord Jesus Christ is the
Lord of the Sabbath. It was made to typify him. It was given to point to him. And when he died, he rested in
his tomb on the Sabbath day. He brought that to an end. That
was the end of the week. He brought that old dispensation
to an end. He brought the old pictures to
an end. And he rose again on the first
day of a new week, having fulfilled all his labours, having satisfied
all the types, all the pictures, having suffered on our behalf
as the Lamb of God to take away our sins. And now we rest in
Him. We are not any longer subject
to Sabbath day rules, any more than Christ, who is Lord of the
Sabbath, was subject to them. We are free in Him. and we shall
stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. May the Lord bless these thoughts
to us and teach us from the lovely verses and passages and incidents
that Mark sets before us here, to see the Lord Jesus Christ
wholly and exclusively, to trust in him, to place our faith upon
him, looking unto him, the author and finisher of our faith. May it be so for his name's sake.
Amen.