Hi Tim, Lets go to those scriptures . The Pharisees’ rules and traditions made the application of the Law burdensome for the common people. The Mosaic Law furnished the overall structure for Israel’s worship of Jehovah. However, minute details were not provided. For instance, the Law forbade work on the Sabbath, but it did not explicitly define what constituted work and what did not. (Ex. 20:10) The Pharisees sought to fill in such supposed gaps by means of their laws, definitions, and traditions. While Jesus ignored the arbitrary rules of the Pharisees, he did observe the Mosaic Law. (Matt. 5:17, 18; 23:23) He saw beyond the letter of the Law. Jesus discerned the spirit behind the Law and the need for mercy and compassion. He was reasonable, even when his followers failed him. For example, although he urged three of his apostles to stay awake and keep on the watch on the night of his arrest, they fell asleep repeatedly. Nevertheless, he sympathetically remarked: “The spirit, of course, is eager, but the flesh is weak.”—Mark 14:34-42. Lets see what Jesus said “ Doing good on the Sabbath “? 1John 5:1-9 ,16“Get up, pick up your cot and walk.” Jesus spoke these words to a man who had been sick for 38 years. The Gospel account continues: “With that the man immediately became sound in health, and he picked up his cot and began to walk.” Surprisingly, not all were pleased by this turn of events. Says the account: “The Jews went persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things during Sabbath.” . The Sabbath was intended to be a day of rest and rejoicing for all. (Exodus 20:8-11) By Jesus’ day, though, it had become a maze of oppressive, man-made rules. Scholar Alfred Edersheim wrote that in the lengthy Sabbath-law sections of the Talmud, “matters are seriously discussed as of vital religious importance, which one could scarcely imagine a sane intellect would seriously entertain.” (The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah) The rabbis attached life-and-death importance to frivolous, arbitrary rules that regulated virtually every aspect of a Jew’s life—often with cold-blooded disregard for human feeling. One Sabbath rule decreed: “If a building fell down upon a man and there is doubt whether he is there or not, or whether he is alive or dead, or whether he is a gentile or an Israelite, they may clear away the ruin from above him. If they find him alive they may clear it away still more from above him; but if [he is] dead, they leave him.”—Tractate Yoma 8:7, The Mishnah, translated by Herbert Danby. How did Jesus view such legalistic hairsplitting? When criticized for healing on the Sabbath, he said: “My Father has kept working until now, and I keep working.” (John 5:17) Jesus was not performing secular work in order to enrich himself. Rather, he was doing the will of God. Just as the Levites were allowed to continue their sacred service on the Sabbath, Jesus could rightfully carry out his God-assigned duties as the Messiah without violating God’s Law.—Matthew 12:5. Jesus’ Sabbath-day cures also exposed the Jewish scribes and Pharisees as being “righteous overmuch”—rigid and unbalanced in their thinking. (Ecclesiastes 7:16) Certainly, it was not God’s will that good works be restricted to certain days of the week; nor did God intend the Sabbath to be an empty exercise in rule following. Jesus said at Mark 2:27: “The sabbath came into existence for the sake of man, and not man for the sake of the sabbath.” Jesus loved people, not arbitrary rules. Christians today thus do well not to be overly rigid or rule oriented in their thinking. Those in authority in the congregation refrain from burdening others with excessive man-made rules and policies. Jesus’ example also encourages us to look for opportunities to do good. The Christian, says the apostle Peter, should be “always ready to make a defense before everyone that demands of you a reason for the hope in you.” (1 Peter 3:15) The doing of good has no time restriction.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:19:00 +0000
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