067. "The Sabbath Was Made for Man"
"The Sabbath Was Made for Man"
(Mark 2:27) Christ said, "The sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath." The weekly day of rest was one of God’s beautiful plans for man’s mental and physical rest from labor, and a day to especially cultivate his spiritual nature, a day for fellowship with God. It began at sunset on Friday and ended at sunset on Saturday. When Christ was on earth, man had a tendency to observe the sabbath in letter rather than in spirit. However, even then it had its noble side. The Jew dressed himself in his festal garments: he lighted his sabbath lamp; the table was spread with special food and the men all went to the synagogue. The work was done the day before so that no work that could be avoided was done on the sabbath. It was a beautiful day of worship and rest. Then the rabbis feared that the day would not be properly observed, so they made laws which in course of time so completely destroyed the purpose of the day, that to keep all these laws that the rabbis had made, became very much harder and more exacting than the labor of the working day. Thus was God’s beautiful day for meditation, worship and rest brought to nought.
One can scarcely believe that leaders could make such absurd regulations, a few of which are: The greatest burden a person might carry on the sabbath day must be less than the weight of a dried fig. They must not begin anything new just before the sabbath, lest the sabbath should find one in the midst of the task. A scribe must not carry his pen, or a tailor a needle on the sabbath. A woman was not allowed to have a pin in her clothing, she was not allowed to look in a mirror, because she might see a white hair and be tempted to remove it, which would be labor. The rabbis forbade them to cut their nails, and many, many other absurd regulations could be mentioned which made the sabbath a very hard and unhappy day.
It had become a day of form and so lacked spiritual significance. Back of all these absurd rules there was a genuine piety and a real desire to observe the sabbath day as God had planned it. This attitude toward the sabbath was very distasteful to the Son of God, because for Him all of God’s laws were necessary for man’s highest good, and were made to meet a real need. The sabbath was made for man, not only for the physical man, but for the most important part of him, the spiritual.