New Age Spirituality

Sermon Transcript

I got married in 2012 and I remember that year I bought my first Blu Ray Player. I was so excited to get the full high-def picture and sound experience. I followed up the Blu Ray purchase with a staggering deal in my mind: A 4-pack of movies that came in one purchase, three of which were Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator, and the highlight of them all: Braveheart. What better movies to watch in high def with the sound booming? Well, it’s been 14 years since then, and I don’t think I’ve bought another Blu Ray since that four pack. I don’t think I’ve even watched the Saving Private Ryan and Gladiator Blu Rays. What happened, aside from planting a church and having kids? The technology changed. Now when I do get around to watching a movie, I don’t want to go through the unthinkable hassle of getting out of my chair, finding the blu ray I want to watch, getting the disc out of a case, handling it with care, putting it in the player, trying to remember which HDMI port I plugged it into, trying to find the blu ray player remote, and so on. I just stream it from the comfort of my chair. Times changed; I adapted.

 

This is always the case, especially in a technological age. Some of you older saints could describe to us a radically different city of Philadelphia from the one we know because you lived here 30, 40, or 50 years ago, and you’ve had to adapt. New times call for a new way of living, and as we come to the Gospel of Luke today, we come at a time in the story when Jesus was new on the scene of first century Jewish life. But we’re going to encounter some who thought they could fit him into their old way of life, especially the scribes and pharisees, who we met for the first time in the passage we looked at last week. We also must recognize that if we truly want Jesus, we can’t just fit him into our existing way of life. Jesus has brought a new age with a new way of life. Why does Jesus’ coming mean a new age, and a new way of life not only for the people of his day, but for you and me as well? Three reasons we’ll see in the three stories we’ll cover in this passage: He’s the greatest joy, he’s the highest lord, and he’s the lawful savior.

 

He’s the greatest joy

 

Our passage today begins with an encounter with Jesus at an unspecified location, with an unspecified group of people. They begin with a comment that implies a question, and perhaps even an accusation. “The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink.” Fasting is when you abstain from a meal, and while there were only one or two required fasts under the law before the coming of Jesus, it was normal and expected that God’s people would fast from time to time. Often it accompanied prayer, grief, and repentance, among other things. Fasting doesn’t feel good—you want to eat, on one level you need to eat, but in fasting you deny yourself that desire and need.

 

And for that very reason, it can be helpful if you are trying to cultivate a certain posture before the Lord. For example, fasting often accompanies prayer because in prayer we are assuming the position of a needy, dependent, beggar, and fasting helps that posture because when you are starving, you feel yourself to be a needy, dependent, beggar. Fasting with prayer is a way of saying to God, “God, as much as I feel my need for food right now, I need you that much more.” In the Bible fasting can also accompany a time of grief, as when David fasted a whole day after hearing of the death of Saul and Jonathan (2 Sam 1:12). There would be something inappropriate about throwing a party right after you hear of a loved one’s death, and most of us intuitively sense that. When Buffalo Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin hit the ground with a life-threatening injury and had to be carted off the field at the beginning of a game between the Bills and Bengals, both teams agreed it wouldn’t be right to just go on playing the game. They fasted from football that night, and fasting similarly accompanies grief in the Bible. And for similar reasons, it often accompanies repentance. A truly repentant person isn’t just saying sorry for their sins to get it over with; a truly repentant person is mourning their sin, grieved that they offended such a holy and loving God. It wouldn’t be fitting for them to throw a party in the face of such grief.

 

It was also fitting, then, for the disciples of John to fast and offer prayers. Remember that the focus of John’s ministry was “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 3:3) and that his purpose in such a ministry was to prepare the way for the Lord (Luke 1:16-17, 3:4). John’s posture, then, was one of repentance, and one of begging for the coming of the Lord. We can think back to Anna, not a disciple of John, but an Israelite who was waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem, and Luke told us that “she did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day” (Luke 2:37). That’s what you do when you’re waiting, pleading with the Lord, and grieving the present state of sin and suffering among God’s people. And so the disciples of John fasted.

 

So, however, did the disciples of the pharisees. Why did they fast? Well, we know it isn’t because they were grieving their sin, or repenting, because in the passage just before this one they presented themselves as righteous, rather than sinners. Their fasting was not because they sensed their need for God to provide them a righteousness they lacked; their fasting was their way of displaying their own righteousness. So Jesus will tell us later in Luke of a pharisee who Luke says trusted in himself, that he was righteous, and treated others with contempt (Luke 18:9-12). And here’s what that pharisee said in defense of his own righteousness: “I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get” (Luke 18:12). For the disciples of the pharisees, fasting was a spiritual resume-builder. Because here’s the deal about fasting: While on the one hand it’s hard, because it’s painful, on the other hand it’s easy, because it doesn’t require any actual repentance or change of heart. Most of you in the room today probably know someone who wants nothing to do with God but who has intermittent fasting on lock for health reasons. Or you might know a Muslim who engages in all manner of sin that both the Bible and the Quaran recognize as sin, but who is fasting right now during Ramadan. Growing up I was dead in my trespasses and sins, loved my friends and my sin more than I loved the Lord, but would you know that I gave up something for Lent and didn’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent?

 

So there are good, godly reasons to fast, and there are wicked, self-righteous reasons to fast. But what’s interesting about Jesus’ disciples is that they didn’t fast at all! Instead, they were characterized by eating and drinking. In the passage just before this one, Jesus and his disciples went to a party that the tax-collector-turned-disciple Levi threw with a bunch of his tax collector buddies. So now people are like, “Wait you’re supposed to be a teacher of righteousness—why then do your disciples eat and drink while the disciples of John and the pharisees fast and pray?”

 

Here’s Jesus’ answer in verse 34: “Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.” You ever been to a wedding where the reception is a fast? I mean I get that budgets get tight and I’ve enjoyed some excellent cake and punch at a wedding reception before, but I’ve never been to the reception where the plan was for us all to afflict ourselves. So you see, Jesus doesn’t raise any objections to fasting per se; he even says that when he is taken away, his disciples will fast, but his reply is that now’s not the time for that, because when he spoke those words, he was with his disciples! Anna fasted because she was waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem, but now the redeemer is here! So his disciples eat and drink.

 

And it’s not as though Jesus is pulling this bridegroom language out of thin air. When Israel was in exile before the coming of Christ, Isaiah prophesied a day when the LORD himself would take his people as his bride. Listen this beautiful promise from Isaiah 54:4-8 – “Fear not, for you will not be ashamed; be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. 5  For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called. 6  For the Lord has called you like a wife deserted and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off, says your God. 7  For a brief moment I deserted you, but with great compassion I will gather you. 8 In overflowing anger for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,” says the Lord, your Redeemer.” When you’re still ashamed and confounded, when you’re still disgraced, cast off, deserted, when in overflowing anger the Lord has hid his face from you, then you fast, and beg for his mercy. But when his mercy comes, and he calls you like a wife deserted and grieved in spirit, when with great compassion he gathers you, and with everlasting love he has compassion on you, then you feast. And Jesus says with his coming, with his presence, that’s what the Lord is now doing, because he is the Maker who has come as our husband, to love his bride and give himself up for her. He has brought a new age, with a new way of life.

 

Jesus then goes on to illustrate this in two ways: One is tearing a piece from a new garment and trying to sew it on to an old one. If you did that, that would mean tearing up your new garment, and then the piece won’t even match the old one once you sew it on there. If a garment is old and worn out, and you have a new one, the natural thing to do is just to wear the new one. Similarly, he says, no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, it will spill the new wine, and destroy the old wineskin. We don’t use wineskins today, but back then people would actually keep wine in animal skins that were sewn together and treated for that purpose, kind of like a leather pouch specifically designed for storing wine. Jesus’ point in each of these illustrations is that he isn’t just another guy waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem, such that he and his disciples should be fasting and praying for that. He’s the new and better garment, the new a better wine, the redeemer who is his peoples’ husband, and so his coming ushers in a new age with a new way of life. Recall that when Jesus first started preaching, he said that with his coming, the long-awaited year of Jubilee had come (Luke 4:18-19), that year that God said in his law would only come every 50 years, in which slaves would be set free, debts would be forgiven, the people would rest from their labors, and, yes…the people would eat and drink. The year of jubilee wasn’t supposed to feel like every other year. A new age necessitates a new way of living.

 

But the pharisees’ problem is that they like the old way too much. So he says in verse 39 that no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, “The old is good.” When you’re fasting because you’re waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem, then when the redeemer comes, you’re happy to give up the fasting and get in on the feasting. But when you’re fasting to build your spiritual resume, like the pharisees were, then you don’t want to give it up when the redeemer comes. For what do you need a redeemer, anyway? You’ve got your own resume. And in fact, for the redeemer to suggest that it’s possible for people to rejoice and to give up fasting simply because they have him, even when they have no resume of their own, is kind of a threat to your whole system. You don’t want to see people happy in him; you want to see people fasting like you! If you’re here today and you aren’t yet a believer in Jesus Christ, might a sense of your ability to build your own resume be standing in the way of you receiving Jesus and rejoicing in him? To the pharisees it did—they thought the old, their way, was good.

 

But the same would soon be true of Jesus’ disciples in a good way. Jesus is the new wine in this parable, but recall that he said though his disciples eat and drink now while the bridegroom is with them, the day is coming when he will be taken from them, and then they will fast. Why would they fast then? Because they’ll want him to come back, and they won’t be able to really just let loose with feasting until he comes back! He’ll be the old wine to them, and nothing after him could possibly taste better. Once you’ve received Jesus, once you’ve tasted of his goodness, you won’t keep desiring something new. You’ll say, “The old is good.” Apart from Jesus, we’re always looking for the next new thing: The next hobby, the next relationship, the next job, the next city. But when you find him, you can finally rest, and everything else gets put back into its proper place. What’s the hymn say? “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace.”

 

I remember late in high school into my freshman year of college I was the Penn State football guy. I knew the whole roster, I knew all the stats—guys on my floor freshman year called me “Stat Mike.” But sometime over the next couple years, the Lord saved me, and I remember a time being out to dinner with a friend and realizing I didn’t know many of the stats anymore. I still watched the games and cheered for them, but it didn’t have the same appeal to me anymore. I never made a conscious choice to follow the team less, but it grew strangely dim to me in the light of Jesus’ glory and grace. Don’t you know that feeling too, brothers and sisters? This is why Jesus’ disciples fast when he is taken away from them—nothing else really can take his place, and we don’t want to so fill up on the things of this world that we start to think they can. While we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord (2 Cor 5:6), and it is our desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better (Phil 1:23). So it is right and good that in some way, we would limit our pleasures in this life, to cultivate our hunger for the day when we will be forever with the Lord (1 Thess 4:17).

 

Don’t get me wrong—that doesn’t mean we always walk around grieving. Though we do not now see him, we believe in him and rejoice with a joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory (1 Peter 1:8), but as great as that rejoicing is, a regular practice of fasting serves to remind us of the words of another hymn: purer, and higher, and greater will be, our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see. Since he’s the greatest joy we could have, we rejoice now, but since our eyes don’t yet see him, we also fast now. His coming brings a new way of life, and the next reason we’ll see for that is that he’s the highest Lord.

 

He’s the highest Lord

 

So the next story, beginning in chapter 6, takes place on a Sabbath. We’ve seen Jesus teaching on the Sabbath already in Luke and even casting out a demon, and we’ll see the Sabbath come up throughout the book. The Sabbath is a big deal in Luke because it was a big deal to the Jewish people of Jesus’ day. The Sabbath was the seventh day of the week, what we’d call Saturday, or technically Friday sundown until Saturday sundown, and on the Sabbath, right there in the ten commandments, God prohibited ordinary labors. It was a day of rest on which activity was to be “holy to the LORD,” that is, uniquely devoted to him, in such activity as public, private, and family worship, and as we’ll see today, works of mercy and necessity. But you know how the pharisees used fasting to build their spiritual resume? Well, Sabbath observance was another way they did that.

 

They didn’t just rest from ordinary labors like God said on the Sabbath. They got hyper-specific about what activities could or could not be done on the Sabbath, something God never did in the Bible. 200 years after Jesus when the teaching of the Jewish rabbis was written down in the Mishnah, there were 39 activities they said were prohibited on the Sabbath. Jesus’ disciples violated at least four of them by plucking heads of grain, rubbing the grain together in their hands, and eating the edible part: reaping, threshing, winnowing, and preparing food. You were allowed to eat on the Sabbath, but you were supposed to prepare the food ahead of time so you wouldn’t have to do that “work” on the actual Sabbath day. It’s not hard to reconstruct the argument: Hey, God told us not to work on the Sabbath, and you knew the Sabbath was coming; it’s not like the date changes each week and you just forget. So if God is really the central priority of your life, shouldn’t you have prepared your food ahead of time so you could obey his commandment and not work on the Sabbath?

 

So when the pharisees either see or learn of Jesus’ disciples doing this, they say, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?” Notice that it was Jesus’ disciples taking the heads of grain and eating them, but when they’re questioned, Jesus doesn’t leave them to stand up for themselves. He advocates on their behalf. Before we get into Jesus’ response, though, let it be said that they weren’t doing anything genuinely unlawful. They were violating the tradition of the pharisees, but not the word of God. But Jesus doesn’t go that route in his response, because to do that would have put him on the same plane as the pharisees, like they’re the prosecuting attorney and he’s the defense attorney in a courtroom, or even like they’re the judge, which is how they view themselves, and he’s the defense attorney who has to show that his disciples measure up to their standards.

 

Instead, Jesus appeals to a story from the scriptures. He begins with the words, “Have you not read?” The implication there is that since they definitely have read that story, they ought to have understood it. Jesus doesn’t say, “Ah your question is very understandable. The scriptures were written a long time ago in a different culture using different language than we speak today.” Instead, he looks at the pharisees, and appeals to words that were written at least 700 years before this conversation, originally in a different language from the language they were then speaking, and says, “Have you not read?” We call this idea the doctrine of the clarity of scripture, or in fancier terms, the perspicuity of scripture. The idea is that because God has made us in his image with the ability to understand human language, if we are willing to use the ordinary means of things like translation, grammar, pastoral teaching, and especially prayer, we can actually understand what God intended to say when he inspired the human authors to write the words of the Bible.

 

Jesus clearly assumed that, and so he asked the Pharisees, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?” Here Jesus appeals to a story we find in our Bibles in 1 Samuel 21, and the events are basically as he narrates them. The “big deal” of the story is that the bread David ate was the bread that was stored in the tabernacle, the tent in which God made his presence especially known to his people. Each week the priest was to prepare twelve loaves of bread and put them on a table inside the tent. On the Sabbath he’d replace the bread with a fresh twelve loaves, and the old loaves were then designated for the priests, and only for the priests. But in 1 Samuel 21, David is on a journey, he and his men are starving, and he asks the priest to give him five loaves of bread for him and his men to eat. What Jesus’ disciples were doing plucking heads of grain and eating them wasn’t actually unlawful, but what David did appeared to be! Yet he still did it, and wasn’t judged by God for it.

 

How could that be? Well, Jesus gives us his interpretation and application of it in verse 5: The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath. The son of man is a reference to another earlier part of the Bible, Daniel 7, in which the son of man is this prophesied figure who Daniel sees appearing before the LORD, the ancient of days, and receiving authority. So what was David doing in 1 Samuel 21? He was exercising authority as God’s anointed king at the time, not to neglect the law—that would have been wicked in God’s sight. Instead, David exercised his authority as God’s anointed king at the time to fulfill the law—that is, to decide what the right application of the law in his situation was. He did something technically unlawful, or we could say ceremonially unlawful, but he didn’t do something sinful, because he did it in service of what Jesus elsewhere calls a “weightier matter of the law” (Matt 23:23)—loving his neighbor as himself by feeding the hungry, something God’s law also required (Lev 19:18, Isa 58:7).

 

So also, Jesus didn’t abolish the Sabbath, but he asserted his lordship over the Sabbath as the son of man, who had been given that authority by the ancient of days, the Lord himself. And in asserting his lordship over the Sabbath, he also asserted his Lordship over the pharisees. He’s not just another Israelite trying to measure up to their standards of Sabbath observance. He’s the new David, the son of Man, the lord of the Sabbath, who has the right and responsibility to decide how to fulfill the Sabbath. The Sabbath, after all, was not meant to be a day for fasting, or afflicting oneself. The Sabbath was a day for feasting, a day of rest, a day to enjoy the LORD and his goodness to his people. Isaiah 58:13 describes it as a “delight.” God gave it to his people as a sign of the covenant he made with them when he brought them out of slavery in Egypt (Deut 5:15). As he released them from their slave labor in Egypt, so they were to rest from their labors once a week to remember and celebrate that. And how much would it really have helped them to remember and delight in God’s goodness to them if they weren’t even allowed to pick a head of grain and eat it on that day? Jesus as the lord of the Sabbath fulfilled the true meaning of the Sabbath when he freed his disciples from the harsh spiritual-resume-building way the pharisees were using it, and restored it to the delight for which God intended it.

 

A new lord was now here, who brought a new age, and a new way of life. In him his disciples could rest from all their spiritual resume building because he came to accumulate the perfect resume on their behalf. Jesus lived a life of perfect obedience to God, Jesus offered to God a perfect sacrifice for all the sins of his disciples, and Jesus now offers that resume to any who will give up their resume building, and rest upon him alone for salvation. When you do that, you’re free from the doctrines and traditions of men like the pharisees, you’re free, not to disregard God’s law, but to fulfill God’s law, the law of love, that consists in good works like feeding the hungry (cf. Rom 8:1-4).

 

Now don’t get that twisted: That doesn’t mean now God’s various commandments are somehow redundant, because, in the words of John Lennon, “All you need is love.” It’s essentially true as far as it goes that if you love your neighbor as yourself, you’ll never be sinning (Rom 13:8-10), but we still need God to tell us what true love looks like. Sometimes people try to justify their sin by an appeal to love—they might say they love their boyfriend or girlfriend so much that they violated God’s commandment to not commit adultery, or they might say they love their kids so much they lied on their behalf and thus violated God’s commandment not to bear false witness. That’s not fulfilling the law; that’s rationalizing sin. You and I aren’t the son of man; you and I aren’t lord of the Sabbath; Jesus is. So we don’t exercise our authority to determine what fulfills the law—we submit to Jesus’ authority to tell us what fulfills the law.

 

Let’s trust Jesus’ authority, brothers and sisters. Let’s not receive it begrudgingly. Let’s happily submit to Jesus’ authority, and let’s encourage one another and all to do likewise. We live in a new age under the greatest possible Lord, and that calls for a new way of life—a life in which we submit to Jesus’ interpretation of the law, a life marked by love rather than by spiritual resume-building, a life made possible because of the perfect resume Jesus has given us as a gift. And, finally, we see in our next story that Jesus has brought a new age with a new way of life because he’s the lawful savior.

 

He’s the lawful savior

 

Starting in verse 6 we come to another Sabbath story. On this one Jesus does the usual and enters a synagogue to teach, and a man was there whose right hand was withered. It’s not entirely clear what that means—it probably indicates at least paralysis. The word translated “withered” also could be translated “dry,” meaning the fluids of life (in this case, blood) aren’t flowing through it. We saw last week how leprosy, a skin disease, was akin to death, as the skin decayed. This withered or dry hand is something like a dead hand.

 

Then we read in verse 7 that the scribes and pharisees watched him, to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, so that they might find a reason to accuse him. So in case it wasn’t already clear to you, Luke makes sure we all know that the scribes and pharisees weren’t innocent bystanders. So far they’ve been asking questions; now Luke explicitly says they were looking for reasons to accuse Jesus. But verse 8 tells us Jesus knew their thoughts. Once again, Luke’s dropping bread crumbs to show us that he’s not just another player in the religious scene of Israel in that day. He has knowledge beyond any mere human.

 

Now what’s interesting is what he does with that knowledge. He knows the scribes and pharisees are looking for a reason to accuse him. And instead of avoiding giving them such a reason, he confronts it head on. Remember that he’s been teaching in the synagogue, so all eyes are on him, and now he calls the man with the withered hand forward. So the man comes, and Jesus asks his audience, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to harm, to save life or to destroy it?” And now you can see that even though the scribes and pharisees were originally the ones scheming, finding a way to accuse Jesus, Jesus’ superior wisdom has them in a kind of checkmate. There is no good answer from their vantage point. If they say it’s lawful to do good, he’s going to heal the man, but then they can’t accuse him of doing something unlawful. But they also can’t say it’s lawful to do harm on the Sabbath, because it’s never lawful to do harm, let alone on the Sabbath.

 

What they would probably have wanted to say is that it’s lawful to do good, but it should wait until Sunday, because healing is a kind of work, and it was the Sabbath. So Jesus shouldn’t work that day by healing this man, the thinking goes. But Jesus suggests that to have the man in front of him, to have the power to heal him, and not to do so, wouldn’t just be morally neutral—it would be harm, even a destruction of life. It would not be a sin of commission, but a sin of omission, as scripture says elsewhere, “whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin” (James 4:17). We often use the prayer of confession from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, in which we pray in the words of Thomas Cranmer, for forgiveness not only for what we have done, but what we have left undone. For Jesus, to leave a good he ought to do undone was to do harm. To leave a hand dead that he could have saved was to destroy it.

 

Now, to my sensitive conscience brothers and sisters in the room, don’t let that place on you a burden the Lord doesn’t want you to bear. There’s a sense in which we all leave some good undone every day, not because we’re sinners, but because we’re finite. So the Westminster Larger Catechism question and answer 99 states, “That what God forbids, is at no time to be done; what he commands, is always our duty; and yet every particular duty is not to be done at all times.” You can’t do every particular duty at all times; Jesus didn’t heal every person in Galilee at the same time he healed this man with a withered hand. In fact, we saw in chapter 4 a story of Jesus leaving a town even when there were more people to heal so he could go on to other towns to preach the gospel (Luke 4:43). But in this story he’s got a man right in front of him with a withered hand, the power of God was with him to heal, and far from the Sabbath being a reason not to do it, to Jesus, the lord of the Sabbath, the Sabbath was precisely the reason to do it, because the sabbath was about rest, delight, feasting, and what better way to make it so for this man than to give him rest from his disease, to release his hand from its bondage to death, and to restore life?

 

Jesus didn’t initiate this healing in violation of the law; he initiated it in fulfillment of the law. Look at the question he asks in verse 9: Is it lawful? Jesus loves God’s law. It is, in the final estimation, Jesus’ law, after all. So after looking around in verse 10 to see if there were any takers on his question, and apparently finding none, he says to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He did so, and his hand was restored. We see again here the power of the word of Christ. He doesn’t command the hand to be healed; he simply tells the man to stretch it out, and with the command, new power, new life, comes into his hand, and it is restored. We talked last week about this idea of effectual calling, that with the call to come to Christ, Jesus also gives the power to come, and that’s what we’re seeing here again. When Jesus calls the man to stretch out his hand, his hand is restored, and when Jesus calls people to follow him, dead sinners are made alive by the power of his Holy Spirit, and enabled to believe.

 

But the pharisees weren’t coming to him. Jesus had just asked whether it was lawful on the Sabbath to save life or to destroy it, and though they didn’t answer his question, look what happens next: Jesus saves life, and in verse 11, they start a plot that will eventually lead to the destruction of Jesus’ life. How were they able to successfully destroy Jesus’ life? I mean, Jesus has shown us that he’s the highest Lord, not them. He’s shown his ability to read their thoughts, and he’s shown his superior wisdom to refute their accusations. Yet when they come to arrest him, he lets them. When they put him on trial, he says nothing in his own defense. When they nail him to a cross, he doesn’t come down from it. Why?

 

Because Jesus came to fulfill the law. He didn’t just heal this man’s hand; he was careful to say that he did so because it was lawful. And so also if Jesus was going to save us, he had to do so in a way that was lawful. He’s the lawful savior. So he first became man, to put himself under the law. Then he fulfilled it by his perfect obedience to it. And, finally, he suffered the penalty the law required for our sins—death under the judgment of God. For him to save us without living a righteous life for us and paying the penalty for our sins would have been unlawful. But for him to save us by his righteous life for us and by paying the penalty for our sins was the ultimate fulfilling of the law of love, for greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13). And so another Sabbath did come in which Jesus rested in a tomb, a tomb in which he remained until that Sabbath ended, and a new age dawned, a new age that began on the first day of the week, or what early Christians called the eighth day, and what the Bible calls the Lord’s Day (Rev 1:10), the day he rose from the dead, and ushered in a new age with a new way of living.

 

We live in that age today, brothers and sisters, the age of the resurrection, in which our Lord is alive, in which he is able to save to the uttermost whoever draws near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them (Heb 7:25). That new age is already here, so we don’t observe the Sabbath as they did before the coming of Christ. And yet, that new age is still in the process of breaking in, so we do fast. We cannot rest from all our labors and go all-in on feasting yet. Rather, we strive to enter our final rest when we will be forever with the Lord, striving not to build a spiritual resume, but striving to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and striving to love our neighbor as ourselves, with the strength the Spirit of Jesus supplies. That is the new way of life Jesus has brought. Let us stir up one another to it, and all the more as we see the day of his coming draw near.