The word hermeneutic may be a frightening one for many people who are not students of theology, yet it means a rule of interpretation. When we examine the attitude of Jesus Christ and the early Church of God towards the Sabbath, we must have the same rules of interpreting scripture as they did, or our conclusions will be faulty as they will not match up. What are needed in order to know these rules of interpretations are statements that are made that would confirm the attitudes of Jesus Christ and the early Church of God towards the law that specifically relate to the Sabbath. Where can we find such statements?

Fortunately, we know of a statement in Matthew 5:17-20, so powerful that it allowed one writer, Greg Bahnsen by name, to write a book expounding on this passage for more than 700 pages. While I do not intend to write anything remotely approaching that length here, it is worth drawing attention to this passage for what it says, before we uncover what it means. Matthew 5:17-20 reads as follows: “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.”

It is hard to read this passage without a heavy and pervasive sense of irony. After all, most Christians believe that Jesus Christ came to destroy the law. A clue to understanding this passage, and to taking Jesus Christ at His words, is understanding what He means. For example, the book of Hebrews speaks eloquently about how Jesus Christ serves as our sacrifice, showing how it is that He fulfilled that law without abolishing it. Fulfilling is a more complicated matter because the law is not done away with, but rather the price of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ in order to fulfill that law simply keeps rising, as does the worth of that sacrifice. Besides this explanation, though, do we have any evidence that Jesus Christ viewed the scribes and Pharisees as being defective when it came to the obedience of His law? After all, that would be the clearest sign that having a righteousness that exceeded that of the scribes and Pharisees was not a monumental task.

As it happens, we do have that evidence. Matthew 23:23-24 reads: ““Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone. Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!” Here we have an example of one of the main ways that the scribes and Pharisees failed to obey the law, because they did not have an understanding and practice of justice, mercy, and faith. It is not that their tithing was wrong–they should not have left such matters undone, but rather their focus on the small stuff led them to think, falsely, that they had taken care of the big stuff when it was clear that they missed some major and fundamental principles, aspects of the Sabbath, as we have seen. In Mark 7:9-13 we see another example of this that ought to be a memory verse for every contemporary Christian: ” He said to them, “All too well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition. For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘He who curses father or mother, let him be put to death.’ But you say, ‘If a man says to his father or mother, “Whatever profit you might have received from me is Corban”—’ (that is, a gift to God), then you no longer let him do anything for his father or his mother, making the word of God of no effect through your tradition which you have handed down. And many such things you do.”” Here we see Jesus Christ defending the law of Moses, specifically the fifth commandment and its elaborations within the Law, against the traditions of the Pharisees that had contradicted that commandment.

The implications of this for contemporary Christianity when it comes to the Sabbath is pointed. As we have seen [1], Jesus Christ was the Lord of the Sabbath. The Sabbath of the fourth commandment, falsely considered to be the Jews’ Sabbath, was His day. Yet few Christians take Jesus Christ at His word and worship on His day. They have, like the Pharisees, violated the fourth commandment so that they could keep their own human traditions, and have sought to nullify the Law of God through those traditions. Given the fact that Jesus Christ viewed the Ten Commandments as a fundamental expansion of the two greatest commandments to love God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our being and to love our neighbor as ourselves, and given the fierce condemnation that He gave to the Pharisees for valuing their own human traditions over His laws, we can draw the inference that Jesus Christ would view those who disregarded His Sabbath, which He claimed as His domain, in like fashion. Let us consider this.

What are we to do about this? The most obvious and straightforward solution would be to, as best as we are able, to act as Christ acted and to think as He thought. Part of that is to develop a hermeneutic of continuity. That is to say, we see the fulfillment of the law in a way that does not lead us to abolish it, but rather to honor it. Let us keep in mind, for example, one aspect of this to look at shortly, and that is the matter of circumcision as it was discussed in Acts 15 at the Jerusalem conference and in some of the writings of Paul, most notably Acts. As we will see, this is the apparent exception that proves the rule as to the unchangeable nature of God’s law in a way that points to fulfillment and not abolishing. It also speaks directly to the matter of the Sabbath in a way that is not often well understood. Once we understand that the New Covenant was not a decisive break with the old ways, but rather an organic broadening and deepening, and a wiping away of the water hyacinths that had blocked up those existing channels with the accretions of human tradition and misinterpretation, we can come away with a better appreciation of God’s work, and what is necessary to clear away in our own times, so that we may be among that company of believers that is able to arise at the last trumpet, and to hear our Lord’s praise ringing in our ears.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/matthew-12-1-8-mark-2-23-28-luke-6-1-5-the-lord-of-the-sabbath-and-the-lord-of-sabaoth/