If ppl believe the Sabbath day is our rest, rather than Jesus is our rest, can they truly enter into the rest of God?
One problem that arises in these discussions is that words and phrases have different meanings to different people but, in the end, they are all we really have to communicate with each other. Many people try to be honest and understand each other. They make the sharing of ideas profitable and enjoyable. I've had enough interaction with you, for example, to know that you want to understand and to be understood.
So, for instance, if we say:
"______ is our rest"
On the surface (apart from your intentions which I have no reason to believe are any less than friendly), this part of the question could be seen to imply that there is only one kind of rest that pertains to the Christian, i.e., "our rest."
But we do have to rest every night. It could be said that just as Jesus provides deliverance from sin and its condemnation, He also provides the shade from the sun that the earth gives producing the darkness that quickens the secretion of melatonin in the brain every night so that we can get much-needed restorative sleep and so, in an indirect or metaphorical sense, Jesus could be considered our nightly rest.
In the same way as with regular, biorhythmic rest, Jesus provides (in more ways than there is space to enumerate here) everything we need to survive including food, water, exercise, fresh air, etc. In Him, we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). To the degree that we have the proper amount of these things, we are better able to love and serve Him. So He could be seen, figuratively,
to be all of these necessary things.
In, again, the same way science is becoming more and more aware that there is a weekly cycle of activity and rest that humans just can't shake off, no matter how hard Madison Avenue marketing tries to exploit their vanity and greed.
Just as God regulates the healthy lower passions that cause man to seek to be fruitful and multiply by the imposition of 7th commandment, He regulates the healthy initiative to work and prosper that, if left unchecked, would result in the aforementioned vanity and greed, by the 4th commandment.
As soon as God expanded the codification of His law in Exodus 20, He created another law (which was an expansion of Genesis 3:21) pointing to the disposition of sin and guilt—the ceremonial law, especially contained in the ancient Hebrew Sanctuary service—which typifies the entire atonement process at which Christ is the center.
From one Jesus to another?
In Isaiah 66, the poetic exhortation of the previous several chapters for Israel to be patient and cultivate hope in the promise of His coming to deliver them culminates in verses 22 & 23. In the new heavens and the new earth He will then have made, He declared that from one Sabbath to another, all would gather before Him to worship.
If Christ is the Christian's only pertinent or necessary rest, are we really to assume that this verse means that "all flesh shall come to worship before the LORD from one new moon to another and from one Jesus to another?"
Jesus said the Sabbath was made
for man. He ought to know—He made it and is LORD of it. He never broke it (John 5:18 is written from the point of view of
the Jews' claims about Him, as a careful study of the entire verse reveals). He said plainly that He kept His Father's law (John 15:10), and Sabbath-keeping is recorded as being His custom (Luke 4:16). And mankind has never stopped needing weekly rejuvenation and especially focused worship.
Those who break
the least of His commandments and teach others to do so shall be called
least in the kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 5:19). This is no declaration of condemnation by one human being to even a hypothetical other one.
It is simply what the Word says. And "being called least" is a Hebrew expression that does not mean a demotion to a lower rank—it is a dishonorable discharge.
If,
in addition to the rest we need most of all from the guilt and condemnation of sin, the weekly rest and concentrated worship is something we all need even to this day, wouldn't the 4th commandment even qualify as "
the least of commandments?"
And if there is more than one Great commandment (Matthew 22:36-40),
couldn't there be more than one kind of rest that pertains to Christians?
And finally, if we try to fashion Jesus as a mere object of one of our felt needs (rest from labor, material needs for temporal survival, or even a means of salvation), we deny Him His right to be loved and worshipped as a Person Who has not only provided everything (John 10:10) above that we could ask or think (Ephesians 3:20), but as an amazing Friend Who desperately desires to commune with us.
Zec 13:6
And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.
(This has long been my favorite verse in the entire Bible.)
