The thread that holds it all together!

We had Vision Sunday at my church today (Hillsong) and one of the things they did was play a video about who we are in general as the church of God and what that means for us as a church and as individuals. The theme in this presentation was the scarlet thread of redemption woven throughout history and it really got me thinking about how the Bible all fits together as one story, the story of God with mankind. There have been many things I have been reading in the Bible lately that I am seeing as though for the first time and I am realising that in general churches seems to suggest that the New Testament cancels out all of the Old, but have we disregarded and done away with things that we weren't meant to?

These are some words from the epilogue in the booklets we were handed at church today:

"A rich and crimson cord stretches wide from eternity to eternity... its loving journey winds through the pages of the Bible where it has marked the elected, graced the broken, and cleansed the outcast. Its scarlet yarn twists through the vestments of the priesthood and the textile of the sanctuary. It emboldened warriors, clothed kings and its covenant message was the song of prophets. It wove its way to the seamless Son, whose rent frame, observed by an unseeing crowd, was undressed in order to clothe the soiled and threadbare world for which He came.

This living line now passes into our times... and is unbreakably tied to the soul who believes."

Thinking of this thread has helped me to see the perspective of the Bible more clearly today as I sort through my thoughts. That the New Testament is a continuing journey of the Old, where God opens up this thread to people outside Israel, the thread isn't cut, the story just continues!!

So one of the things I have been seeing fresh in the Bible lately is the keeping of the Sabbath. I first wondered about it when I read Hebrews 4:9, "there remains then a sabbath rest for the people of God, for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from His. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no-one will fall by following their example of disobedience." Now there is a lot of stuff in Hebrews about Jesus as our high priest now and the new covenant, setting aside the former regulations etc, so to find this verse in this book really threw me. Wasn't the sabbath just part of the law and no longer required???? So I looked up sabbath in a concordance and started searching the Bible.

What did I find? That God set aside a day of rest back in Genesis 2:3 after He created the world which is what is referred to in Hebrews, and this was done before there was any law, or any sin to make a need for the law! That in Exodus 16 when the Israelites were in the desert and God sent manna they didn't collect it on the seventh day because it was a day of rest, and that was before the law was given! Keeping the sabbath is part of the 10 commandments in Exodus 20 and most Christians today would say the 10 commandments still stand as God's moral law!

I then found an amazing passage in Isa 58 and when I turned to it I found that I had actually put a box around it and a question mark next to it last time I read it, so I had obviously wondered about it before but hadn't remembered to go back and check it out. Isa 58:13-14 "If you keep your feet from breaking the sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight and the Lord's holy day honourable, and if you honour it by not going your own way and not doing as you please or speaking idle words, then you will find your joy in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheriatnce of your father Jacob. The mouth of the Lord has spoken." Wow so the Sabbath sounds like it's pretty important to God and meant to be a wonderful thing not some burden we have to keep. The interesting thing to me is that the verses before this passage are all about feeding the hungry, helping the oppressed, loosing the chains of injustice etc, things that I care deeply about and would say still stand as important to God today, so why would I then discount the last 2 verses in the passage?

In Ezekiel Chapter 20 I found many verses about the Israelites breaking God's laws and Sabbaths, and it is always listed separately. Verse 13 "they did not follow my decrees but rejected my laws.. and they utterly desecrated my sabbaths." It is said again in verses 16 and 24, breaking the law and not keeping sabbath were seen as 2 different sins. In verse 20 the sabbath is listed as a special sign of belonging to God, "keep my sabbaths holy, that they may be a sign between us. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God."

So then I turned back to the New Testament to see what else I could find there. In Mark 2:27 Jesus says "the sabbath was made for man" after being questioned by the pharisees about what was lawful on the sabbath. God made the sabbath FOR us, He made us, He knows us, He knows we need rest!! In Acts Chapter 13 I found that Paul went to the synagogue each sabbath, so he was still keeping sabbath.

Do you see a theme here? Keeping the sabbath is important to God, it was given before the law, it was kept by the early believers, it was given by God as a delight for man... how could I have not seen that before?

So what does keeping the sabbath mean? It means a day of rest, a day set apart as holy. So my next question was is keeping the sabbath just going to church? Does it matter what day you keep the sabbath? The answers to these questions I am still mulling over. I do know that church and rest are often very far from each other. At the moment I am not involved in anything at church so I go and get fed and that has been very refreshing after many years of ministry at my old church, but getting up and rushing around to get everyone ready and off to church by 9am is not my idea of a day of rest. I've also been thinking that if God set apart the 7th day as holy then that is saturday and who am I to decide to tell God that I find His choice inconvenient, but how that would work practically in the 21st century when so much of life happens on a saturday is something I am still pondering over.

I do know that a day for rest, for focusing on God, for spending time as a family, sounds beautifully refreshing to the body, mind, soul and spirit and my God loves me enough to know how much I need that, to take a day to recharge with Him, before going back out and sharing Him with others, oh how good that sounds, and here I have been missing out on that sinply because I thought the Old Testament wasn't relevant to us anymore. So I am doing lots more Bible reading with my eyes wide open this time, and not losing sight of that thread that holds the whole story together, I encouarge you to start your own Bible adventure and do the same. :-)