Observing The Sabbath - According to Jesus

The Day of Rest
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Biblical Teaching About Time

—An online book about rest and worship—
By Dr. Al Franzmeier

Chapter 6

The Sabbath And The New Testament
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“Had any good Sabbath rests lately?” I asked a young visitor, as she settled into the easy chair in my office.

“Matter of fact,” she replied, “last Saturday was very, very busy. My Aunt Grace is coming to visit with us for a few days next week and Mom gets all worked up about having the house clean. She was ordering us around all day.”

I smiled knowingly. “Happens at our house too. My wife worries about the relatives finding some dust.”

“Mom too and she has to plan meals for every day and buy groceries. She’s taking a couple days vacation while Aunt Grace is here so the two of them can go antiquing.”

“Should be fun. I gather that your weekend was pretty busy.”

“Right. The only rest we had was the couple hours we spent at church last Sunday.”

That piece of a conversation leads into this chapter’s discussion about the meaning of the Sabbath for the believers in New Testament times. In an earlier chapter I pointed out that the rules and regulations about the Old Covenant Sabbath, as well as the other feasts and festivals, no longer apply since they all pointed to Jesus. He is the long awaited Messiah, come as foretold by the prophets. The feasts of the Old Covenant are now fulfilled. What they pointed to is present in Jesus, the Messiah and Son of God. To continue to observe them would signify a falling back into the Old Covenant, as if the Messiah (Christ) had never come.

“Wait a minute,” you may be saying. “It almost sounds like Christians only need nine commandments. The one about remembering the Sabbath no longer applies.”

I am not saying that, although that’s exactly how many Christians act when they claim their freedom in Christ and ignore what the Third Commandment is all about. As we open this up a bit more you’ll be able to get a better grasp on the New Testament teaching.

Jesus observed and fulfilled the Sabbath 

Until His resurrection, the Lord Jesus faithfully observed the Jewish festivals and days of worship. Look at a few examples. During the final days of his life Jesus went with his disciples to Jerusalem to observe the Passover. While there, he gave specific instructions on how and where to prepare for the great Passover festival. During that particular festive gathering he initiated the Lord’s Supper (Matthew 26:17-30).


Luke tells us that it was Jesus’ custom to observe the Sabbath by teaching in the synagogue. Once when teaching in the synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth on a particular Sabbath, he was nearly killed by the residents of the town. Many of the folks gathered that day were even related to him. After reading a lesson from the prophet Isaiah about the Jubilee Year he said he was the one sent to usher Jubilee in. That really got them angry, because they couldn’t think of him as anything but the son of a carpenter by the name of Joseph. They chased him out of the synagogue and out of town, even threatening to throw him off a cliff. That’s probably why he moved his headquarters to Capernaum, Peter’s hometown (Luke 4:14-30).

Early in his public ministry, in the fall, Jesus went up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles. You may recall that this was the time when everyone camped out for a week, eating, celebrating and remembering how the Lord brought their forefathers through the wilderness to the land in which they now lived. During that week Jesus got into a big argument with the Pharisees and temple priests who condemned him for healing a a paralyzed man by the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath. In their eyes, he had broken the commandment by working—by healing.

In response, Jesus pointed out that the Jews circumcised on the Sabbath in accordance with the strict Law of Moses. The Torah specifically said that a boy baby must be circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. If that day landed on the Sabbath, the Rabbis taught that the baby must be circumcised. In other words, the circumcision law preceded and overruled the Sabbath command to rest (John 7:1-24).

They had a point, however. Jesus could have waited until the day after the Sabbath to heal the blind man, but he wanted to make a point of his own. Again and again he chose the Sabbath as the day for his healing miracles in order to direct the people toward the full meaning of Sabbath. He was Immanuel, God with us (Isaiah 7:13-17), sent by his Father, even though his own hometown people had rejected the idea. By returning to his Father after suffering on the cross, he would be ushering in the eternal Sabbath, the eternal day of rest to which the Seventh Day had always pointed. They who put their faith and trust in the mercy and forgiving love of the Lord would finally enter the eternal Sabbath-rest longed for in the weekly Sabbaths. Jesus, by his healing miracles, was giving them signs of what that rest would mean.

The Chief Priests and their crowd didn’t get it. As a result of this very hot argument, they tried to arrest Jesus, but were afraid to see it through. John writes that at the time Jesus was very popular with the people and his time had not yet come.

On the eighth day, the last and greatest of the Feast of Tabernacles, the priests led a procession from the Pool of Siloam to the Jewish temple. In the temple they poured out water on the main altar to represent the water that the Lord had provided their forefathers in the Exodus wilderness journey. At that very moment Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” John wrote that by this Jesus meant the Holy Spirit whom believers were later to receive (John 7:37-39).

Jesus came to fulfill all the feasts and festivals of the Old Covenant. His healing miracles on the Sabbath served to emphasize that. The Greek verb ‘to fulfill’ (plerein) means to bring to pass (the prophecies of old). Examples of fulfilled prophecies abound, For instance, when Mary gave birth to Jesus she fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy: "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel ”(Matthew 1:22-23).

Again, when Mary and Joseph went to Egypt they fulfilled what the prophet Hosea had said about God calling His Son out of Egypt. Hosea’s prophecy was initially about the infant nation of Israel being led out of bondage in Egypt. Now Jesus, standing in for all the children of God, was leading them out of the bondage of sin by way of the cross (Matthew 2:13-15).

Jesus chose to heal on the Sabbath 

Jesus chose to heal on the Sabbath to emphasize that he was the promised Messiah. There are numerous examples. He healed a man’s deformed hand on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:9-14). He cast out a demon from a man in the synagogue of Capernaum on the Sabbath (Mark 1:21-28).

In Galilee on the Sabbath he healed a woman crippled for eighteen years. For this he was strongly criticized. They used the same old argument about working on the Sabbath. The synagogue ruler, cold as nails, said, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.” This stirred up Jesus. He answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it to water?”

They did, of course. Then Jesus went on to drive his point home. “Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”

His opponents were humiliated and the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing (Luke 13:9-11).

Another time, while eating in the home of a prominent Pharisee on the Sabbath, he healed a man suffering from dropsy. Dropsy refers to various fluids collected in the cavities of the body or limbs, because of a malfunctioning heart, liver, kidneys and so forth. The Greeks called it the water disease. Nobody had a cure.

Jesus healed him and got into big trouble again. In response Jesus again pointed to their family and their animals. “If one of you has a son or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull him out?”

The answer was obvious. They had no response (Luke 14:1-6).

But let’s go back to the case of that paralyzed man by the Pool of Bethesda whom Jesus healed on the Sabbath (John 5:1-14). Jesus initially responded to his critics that his Father never stops working, so why should he? By this the Jews understood him to say he was equal to God, as indeed he was. After all, Jesus said, “He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him."

They were correct. He was indeed claiming to be the Lord, come to bring that rest foreshadowed by the Sabbath.

The Sabbath always foreshadowed the Rest of God, the return to paradise (the experience of Adam and Eve in the original Garden of Eden). When that blessed Rest comes, all the children of God will dwell with Jesus in God’s eternal Seventh Day. Jesus made this promise to the believing thief who died beside him on the cross just prior to the Passover Sabbath. “I tell you the truth,” Jesus said, “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:39-43). The same promise holds true for all believers.

The Sabbath was always the ultimate sign, pointing to Jesus as the promised Messiah and Lord of the Sabbath. He came to bring all men that mercy of God foreshadowed by the Sabbath. Mercy is what God is all about. That was why Jesus permitted his disciples to pluck heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath. That was why, a thousand years before Jesus, David and his men, fleeing for their lives, ate the showbread from the Tabernacle. That was why priests serving in the temple on the Sabbath were guiltless. Jesus emphasized again and again out that the Jews rescued their sheep that had fallen into a pit and watered their cattle on the Sabbath. Surely then men were of greater value than sheep or cattle.

Following up on this insight, the Apostles emphasized that all those laws, regulations and rituals of the Old Covenant are no longer binding for New Testament believers.

But wait! This is getting confusing.  We learned that the Sabbath commandment still stands, but now we’re hearing that the laws and rituals of the Old Covenant are not binding. What is going on?
It’s all explained in the New Testament Book of Hebrews. Briefly, the writer says the sacrifices of cattle and birds, the ritual washings, the festivals, the weekly Sabbaths, circumcision—all of the rituals and festivals—were but shadows. They were prophecies, pointing believers toward what was to come. The shadow is not the same as the body. It has no real substance. The real thing is the body that blocks out the light and so casts the shadow. That body, writes the Apostle Paul, is Christ. Now that the body is present, we turn from the shadows to embrace him. He is both the body and the head of the body of which we are all members (Hebrews 10:1-10).

Conclusion: it is not circumcision—or any other ritual—that saves, but Christ. Through the Spirit, believers eagerly await the hope of righteousness in Christ. They don’t boast of being circumcised or of having kept any other commandment. God forbid! Their boasting rests in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him all believers await a new creation. The true children of God are those who believe in Jesus and put their trust in him, regardless of race or nationality, Jews, Germans, Americans, blacks, whites or whatever. All are members of his household, built upon the foundation laid down by the prophets and extended by the apostles as they taught believers the meaning of the rituals and festivals, the shadows of what is to come. Jesus is the great cornerstone holding together the new, living temple of God. This living, growing temple is the place in which the Spirit of God dwells. This beautiful, living temple is made up of people everywhere, people who believe and trust in Jesus, not stones and mortar (1 Corinthians 3:10-23).

But I still have not answered the question about the Third Commandment. Does it or does it not apply to New Testament believers?

It does, but now, instead of observing the Sabbath in order to reflect upon God’s promise to restore his Day of Rest through the promised Messiah, we gather to celebrate Messiah’s coming. His name is Jesus, Fulfiller of all God’s promises. He has completed everything needed for our salvation. He is our guarantee of rest. We do not observe the Sabbath to gain the goodwill of God or earn something. Instead we remember the Sabbath out of gratitude and joy. To remember is to experience anew the past. This we do in our baptism as daily we remember we have died and risen again with Christ. To remember is to do what is now necessary, namely to move forward in His name today. To remember is to emphasize what is vital and important to all of us, namely that we are the Lord’s and in him we have eternal life.

So we remember the Sabbath by gathering weekly to be with him who alone gives rest, to be nurtured and nourished by him, to be fed at his Table, to rejoice in his mercy, to be with his people and to look forward eagerly to his return. In doing so, we are motivated by his mercy and grace. In faith and love, we seek to obey him, follow his leading and thus receive his eternal blessings (1 Corinthians 11:23-25).

We will continue our discussion next as we look at  the early church’s response to Christ and the Sabbath.