Rather than have an overburden of information in the last P.T. I have sensed the necessity of presenting some factual material here in an Appendix, which can be passed over by those who don’t wish to delve any deeper into these matters of present concern. First of all I should like to refer to the Hebrew text of Exodus 20:8-11, which is the FOURTH COMMANDMENT, concerning the Sabbath Day. In P.T.83 I said that there were no less than TWENTY occurrences of the little letter YOD in the text. I was correct – there are certainly NOT less than twenty – in fact on testing it again I found that I had missed THREE of them! How easy it is to miss this tiny letter. When the Lord said that “not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law until all are fulfilled” He had 23 cogent reasons for not disturbing the Sabbath Law! Looking at it from this point of view, should we not shudder at the thought of transferring the Sabbath to another day? [Read more…]
Archives for March 1996
83. The “Jewish Sabbath”
AN EXAMINATION OF OUR LORD’S ATTITIDE
In this second paper on the Sabbath we shall investigate those passages which reveal our Lord’s attitude towards the Sabbath Day. It is well known that the Jews had compassed the Sabbath about with numerous ADDITIONAL laws. So complex had the issue become that instead of the Sabbath being a day of delight and relaxation, of family enjoyment, and worship in the Synagogue, it had degenerated into a strait-jacket of negativism, a 24-hour minefield of prohibitions, each of which could cause a Jewish man-in-the-street to become a “sinner” or even “cast out” from among the people, “excommunicated” by the Sanhedrin. [Read more…]