Light on the Hill

James Kaddis: Today on Light on the Hill, see the big difference between the spirit and the letter of the law as it relates to the Sabbath. If you look at the spirit of the law as regards to the Shabbat, to the Sabbath, it will change your life forever to this current day. If you only follow the letter of the law as it relates to the Shabbat, it will put you in bondage for the rest of your life.

If you understand it the way God intended for you to understand it, you become free. If you understand it the way that the law regulates you to act and closes the box of understanding, you lose. You completely lose. And by the way, God went out of his way to show us this one commandment at its most important place, and that is creation. Creation, he showed us the importance of this. He demonstrated the spirit of this law effectively and powerfully at creation.

Guest (Male): Welcome once again to Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis. We're currently going through Mark's Gospel one verse at a time. As we return to chapters two and three, the Pharisees are claiming Jesus was breaking the Sabbath law. What they failed to realize was the spirit of the law. Let's see what we can glean from this interaction now in part two of "They Didn't See This Coming."

James Kaddis: When our lawmakers got together when they first started this nation, this was one of their greatest problems. This was one of their biggest discussions. You know this, by the way, when you see writings like the Federalist Papers, when you look and you read some of the early documents that our founding fathers wrote. They struggled with this issue because of a person by the name of King George. That's what caused them to struggle with this issue.

And even more so, what made them struggle even deeper was their awareness of the statutes that God's word puts forth and their recognition of mankind's tendencies to separate the statutes from the benefit of those statutes. By the way, I want everybody to understand this. This is really, really clear. This is why in the Bible, God always accompanies the benefits and the curses when it comes to obedience and disobedience.

This is why you can open up a passage like Deuteronomy and you can hear, "If you will obey the Lord your God and follow his statutes, blessed shall you be in the country, blessed shall you be in the city, blessed be the..." Deuteronomy 28. You get to verse 16 and from then for the next almost 60 verses, if you will not hearken to the voice of the Lord your God, if you will not obey his statute, cursed will you be in the country, cursed will you be in the city, cursed will you be here, cursed will you be there.

Do you think that it was God just simply wanting to have fun with cursing you every step of the way just so that you could feel the fear? No. It was God seeking to explain to us what would be the natural result of our decision to not obey him, because our decision to not obey him would create these natural consequences. You will curse yourself while you're in the city. You'll curse yourself while you're in the country. You will curse yourself when you're around people and when you're not around people. You'll curse the family, you'll curse your children, you'll curse yourself. Why? Because when you choose to rebel against God, you become the recipient of all of these devastating consequences.

Now, if I understand that, then I also have to bring myself to understand this very important principle, and we'll get into why this is critical. By the way, you might be thinking in your mind, why am I going over all of this before I go over a Bible passage? Because you won't understand this Bible passage unless you understand this principle. I'm telling you, you won't. You will only understand it from the perspective of a showdown between Jesus and the Pharisees. You will not understand it in any other context, and I need you desperately to understand this context.

If you recognize everything that I'm telling you now, then here's the only other thing that you need to know. The spirit of the law right here is for your benefit. The spirit of the law of God given to you, the spirit of the word of God that was written, the reason why this was written is for your benefit. You look at the Old Testament law. Paul gets into various aspects of this. He digs into this very hard. He says that the spirit of the law that was written to you, the law of Moses, was to show you that you're incapable of bringing salvation.

Why is that spirit very important? Because that spirit was designed, the intent of the writing of that law was designed to show you that you need Jesus. The moment you recognize you need Jesus, your salvation problem is no longer, because he has brought you perfection. The point behind what I'm trying to say is if you take a bird's eye view of this, you'll recognize something really extraordinary. It all comes down to the spirit of the law is your benefit.

The intent for why God gave this to us is that you will be benefited. So obey the law of God and everything that you can in the law of God, you will become the beneficiary of that very thing. I always find it really interesting when I see this. People will spend hundreds and millions of dollars to hire coaches and hire people to teach them a trade or to teach them a tool. This is how you can invest, or this is how you do this or that. And when they pay them that kind of money, they hang on every word.

And the one thing that they want to do when they listen to these people is they don't waste a lot of time trying to write down what the exact rules are. They want to know why those rules came out. They want to know what their heart is. They want to know the mindset. Give me the mindset. Let me dig deeper. Let me understand. If they did that with the word of God, it would be game over. Everything would be completely different.

Now, this section of Mark chapter two, starting in verse 23 and we take ourselves all the way to chapter three verse 12, this is really important. This was designed by God to teach you to understand the difference between the spirit and the letter of God's law as it relates to one very important subject, and that is the Sabbath. If you look at the spirit of the law as regards to the Shabbat, to the Sabbath, it will change your life forever to this current day.

If you only follow the letter of the law as it relates to the Shabbat, it will put you in bondage for the rest of your life. If you understand it the way God intended for you to understand it, you become free. If you understand it the way that the law regulates you to act and closes the box of understanding, you lose. You completely lose. And by the way, God went out of his way to show us this one commandment at its most important place, and that is creation. He demonstrated the spirit of this law effectively and powerfully at creation.

So look what this says. We'll jump right in and we're starting in verse 23. "And it came to pass that he went through the cornfields on the Sabbath day, and his disciples began as they went to pluck the ears of corn. And the Pharisees said unto him, 'Behold, why do they on the Sabbath day that which is not lawful?'" Okay, so we just do the picture of what's going on. Most people will read this and go that the Pharisees are claiming that Jesus broke the law by going through the fields and stealing all the wheat from those fields.

That would mean that the person who gives you that sermon don't know what they're talking about. They haven't read the Bible, they don't understand what the Pharisees mean when they talk about the law, and they certainly don't understand what they mean when they're talking about this. First of all, understand this: what they were doing was perfectly legal according to the law. What they were actually doing was what was called gleaning in the fields.

What would happen was the farmers were told—this is in the law, you can establish this in the Old Testament—the farmers were told that when they planted their farms, they were supposed to leave the outer edges of their farms alone. They were not to reap any of the outer edges of the farms. And the reason why that was the case was because of those who were poor that did not own a farm, or maybe they had a smaller farm that wasn't outputting what they needed to output.

Those outer edges allowed any person who needed it to go and to reap for themselves, to harvest for themselves, whatever they needed out of those fields. Now, that did several things. The first thing is it taught the person who owned the big farm to show their gratitude by allowing other people to be the beneficiaries of their work. They taught them charity. That was one very important thing. The second thing that it did was it taught people to receive welfare without standing and waiting for it in doing nothing. They were taught that if they wanted to eat, they had to work.

Now, there were some exceptions that were made for that rule. People with disabilities couldn't do that, but there weren't a lot of those. But the reality of it was if you want to eat, you have to work. So there was never a condition where somebody was without work. In other words, if somebody wanted to eat in Jewish society, they always had work to do to be able to eat, and they were always guaranteed food by working. Because the work that they had to do was rigorous. It was not easy. They had to go and pull the wheat out of the ground and then they had the food that they needed.

They were not people who just stood there and said, "I'm going to open my mouth like a bird and go, 'Ah, feed me.'" So it did two things. It taught the landowners how to be generous, and in their generosity, they were thankful to the Lord for what they did. It taught the people who had nothing that they had to work, even if they were going to get anything. And you know the third thing that it did that was pretty remarkable? The third thing that it did is it prevented property disputes.

It prevented property line disputes. Because even if you had a disagreement with your neighbor about where your property line was, it never mattered to you anyway. Why? Because you weren't allowed to fence up those property lines. What you were to do, at least on the field side of it, was to keep those edges available for people on your farm to be able to take. Now, the reason why they had property disputes back then was because the more land I have, the more crop I have, and the more crop I have, the more money I have.

And so one little tiny strip of land going down a few acres could make a big difference in terms of their bottom line, which is why you would have property disputes of such. They didn't have those because they knew that strip they would have debated was supposed to be for the poor anyway, and they couldn't do anything with it. The law forbade them from doing it. So Jesus and his disciples are walking through the fields because they're hungry. They're gleaning. That's what they're doing. They're taking advantage of the law that was made available to them.

What was the spirit of the law? The spirit of the law, prevent property line disputes—maybe that was the secondary spirit of the law. The other spirit of the law was designed to create a charity system that everybody had to work, but it was also to feed the people that didn't have the money. Or the other thing that it did is if you were for whatever reason traveling and you did not have enough supplies, you still had the ability to eat because those farms were in front of you and they were there for your taking.

So it wasn't just poor people that gleaned. Sometimes it was people that had wealth but just didn't plan correctly. There's a lot of different reasons why it worked, but that's the way it was. So when these men are saying that Jesus and his disciples are breaking the law, they're talking about what they refer to as the violation of the Shabbat law. They're not saying that Jesus is breaking the law because he's stealing wheat from the wheat fields. They're saying that he's breaking the law because he's doing it on the Sabbath.

Now, why is that? Because the Lord told his people that they were not to work on the Sabbath day. But here's the problem with that. The problem was the intent of that statement was multifaceted. The intent of that statement, the spirit of that statement, was to give the worker bees time to rest and relax so that they could reflect upon the blessings that had been given to them and thus become closer to the Lord. The second thing that it was intended to do was to give them an opportunity to be able to rest, to reset.

Do you think God needed to rest on the seventh day after he created the world in six days? He didn't. But when you read the Hebrew Bible, it gives you every single bit of understanding, intent, awareness, thoughtfulness in looking and recognizing that God declared all of his creation good. And on the seventh day, he used that time to reflect upon the goodness of his creation.

I think that that's pretty spectacular because if we honor the Sabbath the way God intended for us to honor the Sabbath day, then that means we work our tails off for six days. We work hard. And on the seventh day, we take the time to recognize that the work that we did was good. We rest in knowing that we were fruitful, and then we thank God for the provision that he provides for us as a result of the work. That's the goal of the Shabbat.

What did the Pharisees do? They made 600 laws out of it. Because they believed in the letter of the law. "Well, you can't walk five steps. If you walk five steps, that constitutes work." That's ridiculous. The point behind what I'm trying to say here was the Shabbat was designed by God. The spirit of that law was designed by God to do all of the things that I just described. But it was also another thing. It was designed to be a symbol of a covenant.

A symbol of a covenant. And that symbol was a symbol of the covenant of salvation, the promise of salvation that God gave to the Jews. The promise of all that they had. The Shabbat was a symbol of that. It was the first symbol of one of the most powerful covenants ever made between God and man. So the whole goal behind this time was for them to not only reflect upon the wonder of what God has done in the time of labor in the six days prior, but to also thank God for what he's provided, to reflect upon the goodness of all that they had and at the same time to be reminded of the great covenant that was made between God and his people Israel.

And that responsibility was heavy because that day became a day of realignment with the heart of God. You see, when you got finished with that day, you walked away from that day feeling encouraged. You walked away from that day feeling empowered. You walked away from that day feeling strengthened. You walked away from that day more eager than ever to put your hands to the plow and work as hard as you possibly can because you know the purpose by which God gave you all of these things.

What these Pharisees did was they took these laws, this one law, and they made hundreds of laws, and those hundreds of laws were designed to hold to the letter. But holding to the letter destroyed their minds and their hearts. Holding to the letter kept them from understanding basic, simple principles. So they're talking about how what Jesus did was unlawful. But look at what Jesus says here. This is heavy.

"And he said unto them, 'Have you ever read what David did when he had need and was hungered, he and they that were with him? How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest and did eat the showbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him?' And he said unto them, 'The Shabbat was made for man and not man for the Shabbat. Therefore, the son of man is Lord also of the Shabbat.'"

What does Jesus do when he starts talking about them being unlawful? This related to them eating. The reason why they were going through the fields wasn't to make an extra dollar so they could move on with ministry, grow the ministry funds. The reason why they were going through the field was so they could eat. They didn't have McDonald's back then. They didn't have fast-food restaurants. If you wanted to eat, you had to get your food.

So all Jesus's men were doing, him and his men, was they were eating. And Jesus appropriately brings out what may be one of the biggest sore spots in the minds of these men. Because they know that what David and his men did was not only technically unlawful according to their law and according to what even the law of God said, but what it did was it completely blew out of the water every single rule that those men had wanted to make.

Why? Because think about it. If you were to go and to eat the showbread that was only made for the priests to be able to eat, do you know that God would just strike you down? You would die. Literally, you could walk into that area of the tabernacle and you could eat that showbread and you wouldn't live. God would kill you. You walked into the tabernacle in an unworthy way and God would kill you. But did you ever notice that David took showbread from the high priest at that point?

He ate it and God sustained him and protected him. He ate it and God blessed him. God kept him and his men. Why? Because when push came to shove, those men were going to die if they didn't eat the bread and they needed to eat the bread. And the spirit of all of the laws, even as they sit for the tabernacle, was to sustain the very soul of man. Was to sustain the mind and heart of man. Was to sustain them. Jesus is saying, "Hey, you had a bunch of soldiers that walk into the tabernacle and eat bread that only the priests are supposed to eat. And look at what happened to them."

And then Jesus says something extraordinary. Jesus reveals the spirit of the law of the Sabbath. Jesus says to them, "The Shabbat was made for man, not man for the Shabbat." Remember all the conversation that we just had, all the foundation. Remember this. The letter of the law took the Sabbath and turned the Sabbath into another work obligation. The letter of the law took the Sabbath and made something that was very special turn into something that was burdensome and overbearing.

The spirit of the law took something that could have been burdensome and overbearing and made it special, miraculous, and even exciting. When the Sabbath was used in the way that it was intended by God to be used, it became all of those things. And when it was used outside of the context that God chose to use it in, then it became something completely different. I need you guys to understand this.

I need you to see this because there's a much bigger principle at hand. This isn't something that just relates to the Sabbath. This is something that relates to everything that you do in your life. This is something that drives how you should be thinking as a whole. It should be the very thing that drives how you even approach what you approach. Because if you begin to understand the spirit of the law and how the spirit governs how the letter is written, then absolutely everything changes about how you live your life and how people's lives continue to change.

Guest (Male): Remember, you are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.

Thank you for joining us today for Light on the Hill. What you just heard is one part of a study in Mark's Gospel from Pastor James Kaddis. You can hear it again at lightonthehillradio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Not long ago, Pastor James released his new book on the first half of Revelation. It's entitled "The Last Book." He points out that Revelation isn't a book of fear, but rather a book of hope.

Pastor James will help you understand the world we live in and current events through a biblical lens, preparing your heart for what lies ahead. Get a copy by going to lightonthehillradio.com or through Amazon. We're so grateful for your support. Each donation that's sent in is an investment in what God is doing over the radio and internet. Lives are being impacted daily for the glory of God as a result.

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James Kaddis: By the way, did you know this? Anybody who has a background in law enforcement would agree with this. You should all know that although most academy instructors do a terrible job of doing this, they still do it. It's normal. Even at the federal level, they do a terrible job of doing this. They spend a whole section of your law enforcement training teaching you the difference between the spirit and the letter of the law.

They do it all the time. Before they go over the penal code—or if you're a federal agent before they go over the United States Code—as a matter of fact, the last federal class that I went to, they spent a lot of time talking about 42 USC, which is 42 USC 1983, which is what they call the Civil Rights Act. You go over that code and they try to help you understand the spirit of the law that was written there versus the letter.

And it's funny, if you teach it right, then you begin to realize there's some serious problems with the Civil Rights Act, like mega huge big problems that created bigger problems than you would even think. But it is interesting. In law enforcement, they teach this to their law enforcement officers. Why do they teach it to them? Because they don't want law enforcement officers running around giving a ticket to anybody who breathes.

That's not what they want to produce. They want to produce law men and women who will recognize that the law that's been given to them has become a tool for them to accomplish something that is for the general benefit of the population. Beyond that, it goes beyond even the picture of discrimination. It's a bigger picture.