Part 12 – The Sabbath Forever?
The beautiful thing is at the end of time God’s people will
not only be alive during the great work of creation, they will get to see if
for themselves. Can you even imagine what that’s going to be like?? To see God
remake the earth again and to watch as He organizes it like He did in the
beginning, puts it in order and fills it with His glory? On the First day God
will say, “Let there be light”, and light will appear. On the Second day God
will say, “Let there be the firmamanet”, and so it will be. On the Third day
God will say, “Let there be productive land, trees, plants, flowers”. On the Fourth
day God will say, “Let the sun, moon, and stars occupy their places again.” God
will set the heavens in order and organize the cosmos, and place the sun, the
moon, and the starts where they were before they were thrown out of their
orbits during the second coming of Jesus. On the Fifth day God will say, “Let
the sky be filled with birds and the waters with fish.” All of these creatures
will have died because of the plagues, but God will repopulate the earth with
them once more. Then on the Sixth day God will say, “Let the earth produce
living creatures”. God is going to create all the millions of wonderful animals
that we have come to know and love as well as animals we never seen before I’m
sure. The world is going to be one gigantic zoo and everything will be
perfect…..man I can’t wait for this day!! Then Jesus is going to say something
like this…..”I have made this whole world in six days, now come I am going to
give you the scenic tour”. Then He will show us everything He has made when He
suspended His rest and started working again. Just as He did after the first
creation, at the beginning of this world, God will step back. He will take a
deep breath and rest. And God will enjoy the experience of rest and joy and
gladness. The whole heaven and earth will be filled with singing as He enjoys
the work of His hands. Then at the end of the first Sabbath day after the
creation of the new world, God will say to His people, “Now this day is holy. I
rested on it. Therefore, from now on, you will come into my presence from
Sabbath to Sabbath to commemorate the glorious work of re-creation.” Meaning
that the Sabbath has a prophetic dimension, a future dimension. It points
forward to the time when God will create a new heaven and a new earth, and His
people will be eyewitnesses to that. Once again He will establish the Sabbath
after creation, as a sign that He’s the wonderful, generous and loving Creator.
Some people think that there will not be monthly or weekly cycles of worship in
the new earth. People bring up Revelation 21:23. Well in this verse God is
telling us that the city had no need of a sun or the moon to shine on them, for
the glory of God illuminates them, and the Lamb is the light. Notice that it
says “the city”. Also notice that it doesn’t say that the sun or the moon will
be taken away. Think about when you shine a flashlight on the ground outside on
a bright sunny day. The flashlight is still shining, but the sun is so bright
and so brilliant, that it’s like you don’t even have a flashlight. This is what
is going to happen in heaven. There will still be a sun and a moon, but God’s
glory is so bright that the sun and moon will have to step aside and allow God
to shine in the Holy City. Isaiah 24:23 tells us more about this. This verse
tells us that the moon and sun will be disgraced and ashamed. It doesn’t say
they will disappear, just that they will be disgraced and ashamed. Key to
notice here.
So here is a question…..Do you think the devil loves the
Sabbath? No, the devil hates the Sabbath. In fact it is the devil that has led
many many Christians to hate the Sabbath and call it a Jewish institution or a
yoke of bondage. The fact that we can clearly see from this Sabbath study is
that it’s not a yoke of bondage, and it is not a Jewish institution. Jesus did
not create the world for the Jews only, He created it for the whole human race.
He did not come to redeem the Jews only, He came to redeem the whole human
race, and the new heavens and earth which He will create, which will soon be
commemorated by the Sabbath, will be for the saved regardless of country or
culture.
The devil hates the Sabbath because the Sabbath exalts Jesus
as Creator and Redeemer of this world. He also hates the Sabbath because it
points forward to the new earth, where we will go to worship Jesus from one
Sabbath to the next, and from one new moon to another. It should be no surprise
that the devil hates the Sabbath that points forward to Jesus, because the
devil hates Jesus.
To me if you want to know how much the devil hates the
Sabbath, all you have to do is look at the history of the Sabbath. From the
moment God gave the Sabbath in the fourth commandment, the devil tempted Israel
to trample on that Sabbath. They worshiped the sun, they worshiped other Gods,
and in the words of the Bible, “did their own pleasure” on God’s holy day. So
God sent them into Babylonian captivity because they trampled the Sabbath,
desecrated and disobeyed it. The devil is very sly, however, and managed to use
even this to his advantage. The devil said, “So God wants them to learn to keep
the Sabbath, I’m going to tell them that they need to establish a whole bunch
of laws that will make it virtually impossible to break the Sabbath”. So the
Jews enacted a long list of burdensome laws, supposedly to protect the Sabbath
from being desecrated, and also so they would not be taken captive again.
One of these laws said that if you had false teeth, you had
to take them out of your mouth on the Sabbath because carrying them would be a
burden. If you had a prosthetic leg, you had to take that off, because it was a
burden on Sabbath. You couldn't look in a mirror and pull out a hair on
Sabbath, because that, too, would be committing a sin. You couldn't jump over a
river because you might fall in and get wet. Getting wet in and of itself would
not be breaking the Sabbath, but wringing out your robe or garment would be.
It’s crazy all the rules they made up. Nowhere in the Bible do you find these
rules and regulations. In other words, the devil led Israel from trampling on
the Sabbath to idolizing the Sabbath and making the Sabbath a means of
salvation. The devil was also busily preparing a way for Christians of the
early church to look at the seventh day and say, “That Sabbath…it’s a yoke of
bondage, a burdensome bunch of Jewish rules and regulations. Let’s not keep the
Sabbath because of that. Lets keep Sunday because it’s a happy day, a day that
honors the resurrection of Jesus, instead of that old Sabbath yoke of rules and
regulations. They were only seeing the Sabbath through the eyes of the
religious leaders of the time of Christ.
Do you understand what the devil has done and is still doing
today? He wanted Israel to establish a whole bunch of laws under the guise of
wanting to protect the Sabbath….laws that would actually turn it into a yoke of
bondage. The devil wants to lead Christians to reject the Sabbath, to think
that the Sabbath of the Pharisees is the same as the Sabbath of the Lord. It is
up to us to see that that the Sabbath of the Pharisees during the days of
Christ is not really the Sabbath, but a distortion of the Sabbath. Jesus didn't
come to break the Sabbath, He came to deliver the Sabbath from the truckload of
rules that made it a yoke of bondage.
Jesus would never have given this rule-ridden Sabbath as a
blessing!! He would not have made a day holy, and blessed it, that was
virtually impossible to keep. The fact is Jesus came to delivery the Sabbath
from the bondage that had been created by the devil.
I have a separate study series that I made and also posted up on
my blog here dealing with the end times and Bible prophecy. I encourage you check it out, but this Bible
prophecy tells us that there was a “little horn” in the period of the Middle
Ages that actually thought it could change God’s law. Today there is a church
in the world that says, “We are the ones who changed the day of worship from
Sabbath to Sunday.” Let me ask you…..who do you think would like to see a
change of Sabbath from the seventh day to Sunday? Do you think God would want
such a change? The answer to that question is no!! Satan is the one who would
want such a change, because the original Sabbath pointed to the God who established
it, but the change in the Sabbath points to the person who changed it.
The final question becomes, then, whose authority are you
going to accept? Will you accept the authority of God, who established the
seventh day as the Sabbath, or will you accept the authority of the power
(Man/Satan) that established Sunday as the day of rest? The issue is not one
day versus another; the issue is, whose authority do you accept……God’s
authority or Man’s/Satan’s?
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