HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
Matthew 12:2 And the Pharisees seeing said to Him, “Lo, what your disciples are doing is not permitted to do in regard to the Sabbath.”
If only those Pharisees had known who they were speaking to. They should have since they were the leaders of the system built to keep God’s people separate from the surrounding pagan nations. A system built on the commandments that were written by the spirit of God, which included the spirit of Jesus.
Jesus was there when the tablets of the sacred Shall-Nots were written in stone, the rule book to see these people through the centuries and into the future. Maybe Jesus was sent by God to earth like a Geek Squad service call. There was a glitch in the system, and they needed a technician to get on the computer board to make an upgrade. The memory was full. The Ten Commandments no longer served the purpose for which it was created.
When the tablets were first brought to the people by Moses, the Sabbath was a day to be set apart from the other days. But, as time went by and temples were being built, positions of hierarchy infected the system with pride and ego. The Sabbath became a tool to judge people rather than what it was meant for, a ‘holiness’ application.
In God’s perfect timing, Jesus was sent to upgrade that broken system: “We need more megabytes; we need more cowbell; we need more something!” But what? Holy cow, the temple of holiness was no longer a holy production. The temple emissions did not smell like Jesus.
For the general public, the upgrade for the Ten Commandments was going to be manageable: a culture-shock maybe, but manageable, nonetheless. For the commandment-wielding, Moses-protecting leaders of the temple, it was like jumping from a manual typewriter to an I-phone 15… inconceivable.
Upgrading the Ten Commandments for the Pharisees was like adding fifty-six new signatures to the Declaration of Independence: just unthinkable. I can imagine that when Jesus, Moses and Elijah met on that mountain in Israel with Peter, James and John in tow that there would have been some commandment-upgrade fodder conversations.
The life-change was as radical as Newton’s discovery of gravity or Edison’s lightbulb. That upgrade to Ten to Twenty Commands would have a global impact. For instance, rather than keeping one day holy as a judgement tool, Jesus flipped the script: “Do not judge” took care of that problem. Not judging others became the new-normal for holiness rather than a day of the week.
And why was Jesus able to make this upgrade? Because He is the Lord of the Sabbath! He can do anything He wants to do with the Sabbath. He saw the problem and came to fix it. The Sabbath was being used by evil and egotistical men for their own selfish purposes rather than for what it was first created to do; keep people holy.
