[0:00] What do you think? We're looking at Mark chapter 2, end of chapter 2, beginning of chapter 3.
[0:18] If you're looking in one of the Pew Bibles, it's page 838. So we're looking at Mark chapter 2, verse 23, through chapter 3, verse 6.
[0:32] Now if you haven't been coming to the evening service, just to give you a heads up, after the preaching time, we'll have a song of reflection and then we'll have an open time for question and answer.
[0:43] So if you have questions that come to your mind as we're going through this, keep them in mind or jot them down and then you'll have an opportunity to ask them and we'll have a little time to interact a little bit later on.
[0:56] So we've started that this fall and it's gone really well so far, so I'm looking forward to it tonight. Alright, let's read Mark chapter 2, beginning of verse 23. It says this, One Sabbath, he, Jesus, was going through the grain fields.
[1:11] And as they made their way, his 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?
[1:28] 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.
[1:41] 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. Again, he entered the synagogue.
[1:53] 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.
[2:05] 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.
[2:16] And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, Stretched out your hand. He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.
[2:29] The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him. How to destroy him. Sometimes having a common enemy can bring together unlikely allies.
[2:43] At the end of this passage, it says the Pharisees got together with the Herodians against Jesus. Now normally, the Pharisees and the Herodians would have had very little to do with each other.
[2:53] The Pharisees were a conservative religious movement and cultural movement wanting to preserve Jewish identity against outside influences. And so they were focused on studying and obeying the Old Testament law and practicing traditional values.
[3:10] Now the Herodians, on the other hand, they were connected with Herod. Herod was the Roman Empire's ruler in Galilee. And they were a political movement that was much more, that was pragmatic and not religious.
[3:29] So Herod, for example, Herod had no reservations about disobeying the biblical law. So he was visiting his brother, and he fell in love with his brother's wife, and so he divorced his own wife, and married his brother's ex-wife, and she divorced her husband.
[3:46] So this is the guy that the Herodians were connected with. And, but, but both of these groups, these conservative religious people, and this liberal political movement that didn't really care anything about religion, joined together against Jesus.
[4:05] And you sort of think, what's going on here? I mean, today this would be sort of like the Tea Party leaders joining forces with President Obama, and presenting a united front.
[4:17] And you sort of think, what in the world would make that happen? And then you look at what Jesus did. Right, what did Jesus do in this passage? He defends his disciples for having a snack as they're walking through somebody's field.
[4:32] And then he heals a guy who had a paralyzed or withered hand. And you think, that doesn't, doesn't make sense. What's, what's going on here?
[4:42] What's so controversial? What's making everybody band together against him? Well, the passage says both of these things happen on the Sabbath.
[4:54] And that's why this controversy came up. So we need to ask three questions tonight. First, what was the Sabbath all about? Second, why were Jesus' actions on the Sabbath so controversial?
[5:06] And third, what do we take away from this story? These two stories. So first, what did the Sabbath represent? Well, in Jesus' time, the Sabbath was one of the major distinctive aspects of being Jewish.
[5:24] It still is today. Especially for Orthodox Jews. It was one of the Ten Commandments. The Ten, it's, and it says this, Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.
[5:38] On that day you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner who's within your gates.
[5:48] That's Exodus 20, 8 through 10. So everyone in the whole community, adults and children, male and female, slave and free, native and foreigner, must rest.
[6:01] One day a week on the Sabbath. Now in the larger cultural context, that was a totally unusual practice. No other religion in Jesus' time commanded its followers to take one day every week to rest.
[6:17] Pagan religions in the Roman Empire had holidays and days that you had to offer sacrifices to the gods, but they were inconsistent. They didn't happen every week. And especially if you were a slave or if you were a lower class worker, you didn't necessarily get the day off.
[6:33] Or you had to sort of bargain with your employer and say, well, I'll work double time on Friday if you give me Saturday off. Now many of us today take for granted the idea of having a seven-day work week or seven-day week with one or two days normally set aside for rest.
[6:50] Now it's, but it wasn't always that way. And actually it's largely due to the influence of this biblical command throughout history that we run on a seven-day week.
[7:02] Almost anywhere in the world that you go, you run on, people run on a seven-day week and there's usually one day or sometimes two days that are mostly set aside for rest.
[7:13] Now, of course, that's becoming less and less the case in our society. But still, there are some modern societies that have tried something totally different. So the French Revolution said, we're going to do a 10-day week.
[7:25] You get nine days of work and one day of rest. It lasted for nine years and then they decided it was a total failure. The Soviet Union tried a five-day week and then they quickly switched to a six-day week and then nine years later they scrapped the experiment and said that was a bad idea too.
[7:44] This week, interestingly, I read an article by a guy named Joel Gascoigne. He's the CEO of an internet company and the article is called My Seven-Day Work Week and Why I Won't Stick With It.
[7:57] So he had a lot of flexibility in determining his work schedule, probably more than most of us, but he experimented with working seven days a week and he said, I wanted every day to be exactly the same.
[8:09] So he said, every day I would do some work, every day I'd go to the gym, every day I'd spend some time reflecting and every day I would spend some time resting. And so he constructed this schedule.
[8:20] He said, I'm not going to actually work more hours, but I'm just going to work more consistently because, you know, after the weekend, I feel on Monday, right, it's always terrible to go back to work on Monday.
[8:31] So why don't I just make this consistent? So he tried it for two weeks and he concluded it was a bad idea. Only took him two weeks to figure it out. So he says this, he said, I worked out for 15 days straight.
[8:44] In the end, I strained a muscle and had to take almost a week off. In terms of my work, I was excited during the first week and even at the weekend, I enjoyed it. But in the end, the seven-day work week fell apart because of the lack of an extended period of renewal and rest.
[9:00] Now, this guy is not a Christian, but at the end of his article, he quotes the biblical Sabbath reference from the book of Genesis. And he recognizes the wisdom of this pattern that it fits with how we work.
[9:17] And he says to work six days and to take one day for rest. So, but you know, the Sabbath wasn't just sort of a practical device so that we'd be more rested and refreshed and ready to go back to work at the beginning of the next week.
[9:32] The Old Testament talks about the Sabbath as a spiritual thing. And it actually gives three spiritual meanings to the Sabbath. So, first of all, if you look in Exodus 20, that's one of the places where the Ten Commandments is, it says the Sabbath is a sign of God's creation.
[9:50] It's a reminder God created the world in six days and he rested on the seventh in the Genesis account. So, if God rested from his work, we should too. Right?
[10:00] It's a reminder that and the Sabbath would be a day for us to enjoy. God's creation. That's sort of the idea of resting. It's not just falling asleep for 24 hours, it's really just sitting back, enjoying the good things that God has created and being reminded that God's our creator and we're his creatures.
[10:21] But the second spiritual meaning of the Sabbath was that it was a sign of God's redemption. In other words, his liberating the people from slavery in Egypt. And Deuteronomy 5 is the reference for this if you want to look that up.
[10:35] Some other time, it says, observe the Sabbath because you were slaves in Egypt and God brought you out from there. So, in other words, you know, if you were one of the Israelites, when you were in Egypt, you worked seven days every week because you had a harsh master who never would let you rest.
[10:54] And you had no hope of gaining your freedom no matter how hard you tried. but now God says, I've set you free from that. I've brought you out of that.
[11:05] I've done what you could never do for yourself. And so, I'm giving you the Sabbath so you can remember that. That every week when you take one day to rest, you can remember I'm not a slave anymore.
[11:19] God, and I'm not a slave because God stepped in and set me free. And so, it's a celebration of freedom. That's what the Sabbath was meant to be.
[11:30] Really. And so, the command is there because God was saying to the people, don't act like you're still a slave because you're not slaves anymore.
[11:41] Don't act like you're still in bondage. And don't become a harsh master to other people. If you're a boss or an employer, don't make your employees keep, don't drive them into the ground.
[11:54] Don't just make them work and work and work and never give them a break on a weekly basis. So, the Sabbath was a time to step back and remember. You know, and really, this applies to all of us, not just to the people in the Old Testament.
[12:10] When we rest, we can remember God created, God created each one of us. God created the world all by himself. Right? You had no part, I had no part in my parents choosing to conceive me.
[12:25] I played absolutely no role in that. Right? I had no part in God choosing to create the world and everything that I enjoy from a day-to-day basis.
[12:37] And you know what? In the Bible, it also says that when God sent Jesus, when God sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross for our sins and rise again, you know what?
[12:49] I had no part in that either. God did it all by himself without me doing any work. He did all that was necessary for our salvation.
[13:01] And so the Sabbath is a time to remember God created me all by himself and God saved me all by himself for his own glory. So, and third, it was a sign of God's promise to one day bring his people into an everlasting rest.
[13:17] So when the prophets spoke about the kingdom of God or the Messiah or the age to come, sometimes they would talk about it in terms of an eternal Sabbath. A time of rest and of peace and flourishing and growth.
[13:33] So that was the spiritual significance of the Sabbath in the Bible. But, in Jesus' time, it had become something more. It was a topic of technical debate among the religious leaders.
[13:45] So we have actually a lot of documents from this time that go through what can you do on the Sabbath and what can't you do on the Sabbath. Because the question people were asking was, well, it says don't do any work.
[13:57] So what qualifies as work and what's not? You know, what about taking a run for five miles? What about taking a run for ten miles? Well, most of us aren't quite up to ten miles, but what about taking a run for one mile?
[14:12] What about taking a long walk? You know, does that qualify as work? They had all these kinds of discussions. And they said, what about traveling? So their answer was, you can walk up to 1,999 steps on the Sabbath.
[14:27] But if you walk 2,000, too much walking, that's work. What if a building falls down? Well, the answer is, you can remove enough of the rubble to see if anybody's still alive, but you have to wait to bury the dead bodies until the next day.
[14:44] Seriously. They discussed these things, and even before these situations happened, they had all these discussions. What if somebody is sick?
[14:55] You know, can a doctor work? They said, well, if it's life-threatening, you can take care of them. If you just have a cold, then no, you can't go to the store and get some Tylenol.
[15:06] Doesn't cut it. You've got to wait until Sabbath is over. Now, the Pharisees spent a lot of time discussing these questions, and they were the most powerful group in society at that time, so they actually were able to enforce their standards on pretty much everyone else.
[15:25] And even today, within the Orthodox Jewish community, many of these standards, many of these technical details are still followed through today. And so, back then, the Pharisees sort of decided these are the rules, and pretty much everybody else had to follow that.
[15:46] Now, of course, there are some people who didn't really like that. Right? In any society that's dominated by conservative religious people, there are always some other people who either quietly or publicly distance themselves and say, I don't want that.
[16:02] And those would have been the Herodians. And so, they got into politics and just focused on politics, try to distance themselves from religion. Anyway, so you have these two groups, right?
[16:12] You have the Pharisees who are sort of obsessed with technical details of religion, and then the Herodians who don't really believe in religion at all. And now, enter Jesus.
[16:24] Jesus doesn't fit either of these categories. Okay? Now you think, so what did Jesus do? You might just think, well, Jesus was trying to sort of push the boundaries a little bit.
[16:38] That he was, you know, a progressive and a conservative society. He was sort of more on the Herodian side. Right? Just trying to say, just relax. You know, it's not that important anyway.
[16:49] Just let everybody do what they want to do. But it's actually, but it's interesting that there's, there's actually something more going on than that. Right? And if you look in verse 24, the Pharisees say, look, your people are breaking the law of the Sabbath.
[17:05] They're doing what's unlawful. But Jesus doesn't say, well, actually, what they're doing doesn't really qualify as harvesting grain, so it really doesn't qualify as work, so you really shouldn't count it as work, because technically, it doesn't count.
[17:21] He doesn't get into a technical debate. What he says is, he gives an unusual answer. So he refers to an incident in King David's life from 1 Samuel 21.
[17:33] David's men were hungry and didn't have anywhere else to get food. So he went to, he did something that was technically illegal against the law in order to provide for his men.
[17:49] Now you think, well, why would Jesus refer back to that? Well, he's basically saying, well, if David can do that, so can I. But then step back, think about it. That's sort of like saying, if President Obama can break the law to, you know, travel to an important meeting, if he can break the speed limit on the highway in the car that he's being driven in, then so can I.
[18:19] Of course not. Or the New Haven police. Sort of like saying, well, if the police can turn on their sirens and go through red lights, I can too.
[18:32] No, you can't. Because you don't have that authority. The only way what Jesus says makes sense is if he's claiming to have more authority than King David. He says King David could do this.
[18:45] David could override the law in this situation. So can I. Because I have even more authority than David. And then in verse 28 he says the Son of Man, referring to himself, is the Lord even of the Sabbath.
[19:01] Now no Jewish teacher back then or today would ever say that. Because God made the Sabbath. In the Old Testament it says God set apart the seventh day.
[19:15] It wasn't a human invention. God says keep my Sabbaths. They're mine. The Lord's.
[19:27] And so when Jesus says I'm the Lord of the Sabbath, what in the world is he saying? He's saying I'm God. You see why people, now do you start to see why people got mad at him?
[19:48] Because he wasn't just saying hey you should just relax a little bit and change the, make the rules a little bit more lenient. He was saying I'm in charge of this thing. I made this thing in the first place.
[20:00] I've come to do and be exactly what it was meant for. And he forces the issue. Right in the next section he calls out this guy and says hey Tommy come on up here.
[20:14] You don't have to come up here. Okay but literally it says stand in the middle. It's translated come here but he means he's saying stand up in the middle of the synagogue. And he challenges everyone.
[20:27] He's like what's right here? And then he goes and heals the man. You know if Jesus just wanted to heal the man he could have done so privately. Or the next day right?
[20:38] The man had the withered hand for a long time. One more day wouldn't have been a big deal. Right? Jesus is provoking the leaders because he claims authority over the Sabbath.
[20:50] We've seen this theme. Right? If you've been coming in the evening we've been looking at Jesus authority. Jesus authority over sickness. Jesus authority over evil spirits.
[21:01] Jesus authority in cleansing the unclean. In forgiving sins. And in interpreting the law. And that's what threatened both the Pharisees and the Herodians. Because the Pharisees said we're in charge of religion.
[21:13] We want to be the religious authorities. And Jesus says I'm an authority there. And the Herodians say well we don't really care about religion. We want to be the political authorities.
[21:24] And Jesus says I'm the authority over everything. Without any exceptions. And so both of them were threatened by that. But do you see Jesus isn't just saying I'm in charge of this.
[21:40] What Jesus does is exactly what the Sabbath was meant to do. The whole point of having a day of rest is to refresh people who are tired and to give restoration to people who are broken.
[21:54] And to care for people. that's what Jesus does here. Right? He heals the man who has the withered hand.
[22:07] Isn't that a picture of what the Sabbath was meant to do? To take all the withered dried up parts of our life and bring them before God and give them life again.
[22:18] And the way he does it he just says a word. He says stretch out your hand. He doesn't touch the guy. He doesn't actually do any work. He just says a word. It's exactly like what God did in creation.
[22:31] God speaks a word and it happens. And something beautiful comes to light. So the question is how do we respond to Jesus?
[22:44] It's not a question isn't how do you interpret the technical details of the Sabbath or other religious observances. The question is how do we respond to Jesus who claims to be the end all be all of them all.
[22:56] So let me challenge you. You can't stay merely neutral about Jesus. Now maybe you're here for the first time.
[23:07] Maybe you're just starting to explore Christianity. I encourage you to come back and keep learning. Ask questions. But you know eventually you must decide one way or the other about Jesus.
[23:20] He's either the Lord of everything as he claims to be. Otherwise he's lying or crazy and not trustworthy. If Jesus was just simply a wise man and nothing else he would never have said I'm the Lord of the Sabbath.
[23:42] Now finally for those of us who do follow Jesus let me conclude with two applications. Two things we can take away and we can talk more about these in the Q&A. So first Jesus says in verse 27 the Sabbath was made for man.
[23:58] In other words made for people. And you know the Sabbath is in the law but was also in instituted in creation. It's a good gift from God to all people.
[24:10] Now today we sort of live in the opposite kind of culture that they lived in back then. Back then the culture was dominated by the Pharisees. These conservative religious people who enforced lots and lots of rules on everybody else.
[24:22] Today we've sort of swung the other way. Right? Our culture is very much more secular. Much more pragmatic. And we have fewer and fewer boundaries in place in our culture that would promote any kind of Sabbath keeping.
[24:38] Right? Stores are open today every day of the week. You can go online anytime you want. Et cetera. So the question is are we pursuing and receiving God's gift of the Sabbath?
[24:54] You know do you think do you think this? Do you think you know maybe I don't really understand what that would be like to actually try to somehow take a day or some regular time every week for rest?
[25:08] But you know I really want to practice the Sabbath somehow because God's given it to me for my good. I really want to take one day in seven if possible to do no work.
[25:23] And to remember God created me all by himself. and God sent Jesus and Jesus saved me all by himself and one day he's going to come back and he's going to finish the work he's done.
[25:36] I don't have to add anything to it. Or do you just think oh no I'm serving the Sabbath. That sounds burdensome and restrictive and isn't there some reason why since we're Christians we don't have to obey that rule?
[25:51] But see if you're thinking that way then you've missed the point. The Sabbath is meant to be a good gift for us. Now I know it's complicated. I know that some of you are in situations where you're required or expected to work seven days a week and you have no say in the matter.
[26:08] I understand that. We can talk about that. In biblical terms that would be called oppression actually. And you know most people in the world are oppressed in one way or other but you shouldn't choose to be oppressed when you don't have to be.
[26:23] So let me challenge you with that. I'll leave it there. We can talk more about that. Second, so receive the Sabbath as a gift. But second, receive the spiritual meaning of the Sabbath that Jesus has come to fulfill.
[26:39] And Jesus made it and he embodies it. He came to bring everything that the Sabbath was meant as a symbol to point forward to. He came to bring us rest from our strivings to prove ourselves before God and before other people.
[26:57] When he died on the cross he said, it's done. It's finished. It's complete. You know, maybe you feel like the man in the synagogue with a withered hand.
[27:11] That there's some part of your life, whether it's physically or emotionally or spiritually, that's just been withered and dried up. And no matter how hard you try, you can't bring it to life again.
[27:26] And Jesus invites you to stretch out your hand to him. And ask him to come and restore and bring life to that part of you.
[27:40] He's come to refresh and restore and heal. That's why Jesus has come. That's why he did these things on the Sabbath. To show us that he's all that the Sabbath was ever meant to be.
[27:53] So let's pray. Lord Jesus, we pray that you would help us to come to you and rest tonight.
[28:10] And we pray that you would be here by your Holy Spirit, that as that man in the synagogue, experienced your restoring power, simply as you spoke a word to him.
[28:24] Lord, that your word would speak to us. Lord, that we might be restored and refreshed and encouraged and prepared for the work that you do call us to do.
[28:40] But Lord, that we might remember tonight. Lord, that we are saved by grace and not because of anything that we've done.
[28:52] Lord, that you've made us and you've redeemed us and you're completely sufficient to make us whole. So Lord, help us to rest in you tonight and every week.
[29:04] In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. A couple guidelines. Raise your hand if you have a question. State your question briefly and clearly. I'll try to repeat it so everybody can hear.
[29:15] If your question is maybe on a different topic, I might say that it would be better to talk about it afterwards. I'd be happy to do that. But we'll try to keep to questions that are mostly focused on the passage here.
[29:30] So yeah, we've got about eight or ten minutes and then we'll end. So any questions? Elizabeth?
[29:46] Okay, Sabbath, yes. So literally it just means the seventh day or the day of rest. Which day is it?
[29:59] So in the Old Testament, it was from Friday night to Saturday night. That's the Jewish Sabbath. In the New Testament, so in the New Testament doesn't talk about a one particular day as the Sabbath.
[30:15] So it talks about Sunday as the Lord's Day when Christians meet together because we celebrate Jesus' resurrection. And for much of Christian history, many Christians have tried to observe something like a day of rest, rest on Sundays because that's when Jesus rose from the dead and so that's why we do that.
[30:37] But it's not in some cultures, so Christians who live in the Middle East or in Muslim countries often have Fridays off and they often meet for church on Fridays, which is when the Muslims meet for their prayer service.
[30:52] But that's the time when they can most conveniently meet together because most of them are required to work on Sunday and wouldn't be able to get around that. So I don't think it's a command in the New Testament that we must meet on Sunday and not on any other day of the week.
[31:07] But I think it is appropriate when we can, when it's possible to meet on Sundays because Jesus rose from the dead on that day and because that's such a defining event for Christians.
[31:21] it's a v gruddle.
[31:46] Yes. It's a particular day when God gives you us. You choose your Wednesdays and your other day. Yeah. So for me as a pastor, I have to work every Sunday.
[31:58] And so I take Mondays as my Sabbath. I'm able to do that. I try to take that as my day of rest. Again, you know, this, it's not always easy to do.
[32:13] So in college, sometimes I would try to take from Saturday night to Sunday evening and then sort of do the sunset to sunset idea.
[32:24] Again, I don't think we have to focus on the technical details. I think part of what Jesus is saying is not so much about the technical details. It's about the meaning.
[32:37] The spiritual meaning is more important. But I think taking some time, you know, if you have to work on Sunday, I'd encourage you, you know, is there another day of the week that you can take?
[32:47] Or can you take, you know, part of Sunday and part of the next day, part of Saturday and Sunday morning or whatever? Again, I think the day that you take is much less important.
[32:59] I think setting apart some time every week for that rest and to worship God is the most crucial thing. And I think that might look different at different stages of life.
[33:09] So my wife and I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old. Okay, so tomorrow is a holiday. So our three-year-old does not have his preschool. So I'm supposed to be taking a day of rest.
[33:21] But my wife hasn't been feeling well. I don't know how restful tomorrow will feel. Like, that's just life. You know, life intervenes. But I'm going to, you know, trust the Lord and receive what he gives me.
[33:34] And so I think that's, it'll look different at different times of life. Yes?
[33:45] Does it mean that God rested? Does it mean that God rested? Yes. Yes. So I think it's the idea of God enjoying his creation, taking delight in what he had made.
[33:58] Right? In the days of the creation story, right? He's creating things during this six-day pattern. And then the seventh day he rested.
[34:10] And I think, actually, that seventh day, it wasn't just that God rested on the seventh day and then started creating all over again the next day. That seventh day actually seems to be a much longer day.
[34:26] It's not a 24-hour day. I'm not sure the other days are either. But the seventh, when it says God rested on the seventh day, it means he had completed his work of creation.
[34:38] And it says that he invites us to enter into his rest. So actually in Hebrews, which we'll be looking at in a couple weeks in the morning service, it talks about entering into the Sabbath rest that God has prepared for us as his people to share with him.
[34:57] So, and one other interesting comparison. So there were some other stories about the gods creating the world back in the day when Moses lived. And some of them said the gods created people so that people could be slave labor for them while they got to rest.
[35:17] So basically, in these other pagan religions, the idea was that the gods make us to do their work for them so they can rest. And the idea in the Bible is that God has everything he needs all by himself.
[35:31] So he doesn't need us to do his work for him. He can finish his work all by himself. And he does. And then he invites us actually to share in that rest with him. So he's perfectly sufficient in himself.
[35:43] And he generously offers us to receive from his sufficiency. So I think that's an amazing thing.
[35:55] It's a beautiful thing. So it sounds like what you're saying is it's been the Sabbath day ever since creation? The Sabbath you mean?
[36:08] Well, in a second you said, so on the seventh day God rested. And that rest has never ended.
[36:19] So would you say it's still? Yeah, is it still the seventh day? So I think it's maybe symbolically used in the Bible. So in some sense, in one sense I would say yes.
[36:31] It's been the seventh day ever since creation. The only thing I would say there is that on the first day of the week, Jesus rose from the dead. And it talks about Jesus' resurrection as his work of new creation.
[36:45] So in one sense, yeah, God finished creating the world a long time ago. And it's continued to, you know, he continues to sustain it and develop it.
[36:58] And so he finished it back then. But then the world, right, what happened? Well, we turned away from God and fell into sin. And the world became a mess. And so Jesus came to do a work of new creation.
[37:11] And in his resurrection, it was the first day of God's new creation. And so, but it also talks about us still entering into God's rest.
[37:22] So it's a little bit of a mixed metaphor, I think. We're both part of God's new creation work and we're invited to enter into his Sabbath rest. I think we got both of those at once.
[37:35] All right, last question. Chris. Does the phrase son of man connect the two stories? Does the phrase son of man connect the two stories? Yeah, so Jesus refers to himself as the son of man in verse 28.
[37:50] And let's see, I don't think he refers to himself in the chapter 3 part. But I think that's the central claim that Jesus is making here, that he's the Lord of the Sabbath.
[38:01] And that both of these stories and what Jesus does reflects that. In healing the man and restoring him. And also defending his disciples, caring for his disciples when they were hungry and in need.
[38:14] You know, that's what Jesus does for us. Let me just end with this thought. Because it really struck me this week.
[38:25] You know, Jesus' disciples were the ones who were picking some grain and snacking on it. But Jesus stands up for them. He defends them. And he defends us when we're wrongly accused by others.
[38:36] And so if other people have accused you and you were not at all at fault, Jesus is your defender. If you trust in him.
[38:48] And he hears every word that they have said. And he sees everything that you did and that they did. And he knows the truth. And one day, the truth will come to light. And so don't be afraid.
[39:00] And don't get really mad and try to throw it back in their face when they do that to you. But trust that you have a defender. Who's going to stick up for you. And he has stuck up for you and he will in the future.
[39:14] All right. Let me end with a few announcements. Look at your bulletin. There's a lot of... You got an extra large bulletin this week. Because there's lots of exciting stuff coming up.
[39:25] I'm just going to run through stuff real quick. If you're a woman, there is a fall dessert. Elizabeth is hosting it. Elizabeth is right back there. If you can raise your hand. If you have questions or want to meet her or need a ride, you can talk to her or contact Emily.
[39:41] Who's also one of the other contacts for that. It's next Tuesday. Not this week, but following Tuesday. If you... From here today. We're going to hear you from the other family.
[39:51] You can do any further along. If you're going to have a room with the USA, I need a few questions for those. We've got some new ideas. We go to theão Bus. We're almost eating a bit later. We're going to be on the other side.