Shabbat! The Holy Sabbath. If you read Genesis Ch. 1, you will notice that the way God views it, a new day begins with the darkness and ends with the light. The evening that comes after sunset is the beginning of that next day which will also end in light. I love these tiny pictures of Jesus throughout scripture. First there is darkness, and then comes His light.
The Jews maintain God’s way of viewing our days and nights. There are many other things like this that the gentile church perverted in order to appease pagans’ ideas of worship. Of course, you only need to read the Old Testament once to get a very clear picture that this is the human practice that God hates more than any other – but we do such things in many ways. One of the 10 Commandments is to honor the Sabbath which God created, but most of us have decided to change this day of worship from Saturday to Sunday.
Of course, within our Messiah’s covenant, we are free from the Law. (I attend church on Sundays) But why are there so many things where we have willfully gone away from God’s prescribed ways? Jesus followed all of these ways. When you look back at history and you see that the Church went away from its Jewish roots so that it could adopt traditions from other cults/religions and would force the Jews to totally give up their Jewishness in order to accept their Jewish Messiah, you begin to see that we have not done a very good job of following our Lord. We (Gentiles) forgot that we were the ones grafted in.
So we celebrated the Sabbath. We celebrated Shabbat dinner (on what I would think of as Friday night) with all those staying at the hostel. It was a beautiful occasion. It’s amazing how the weekly Shabbat dinner and every other feast points towards Yeshua hom Meshiah (Jesus the Messiah).(John 13:1; Matt. 26:17-19)
On Saturday morning, we went to a small house congregation. Our team was about the same size as those who gathered there. Rabbi David taught on Holiness. A few of the things I took away were:
The opposite of Holy is not sinful. It is ordinary. Holy means “set apart”. To treat something as holy is to honor it as special. On the other hand, Righteousness is being clean from sin. Some things which are Holy:
1) The Word
2) Tithing
3) Other Believers
4) Apostles
5) Prophets
6) Spiritual leaders
7) Marriage
8) Places of worship
9) Our bodies
10) Shabbat
11) Israel
We’ll continue this discussion tomorrow. Why not share this post with a friend!
Photo credit: Thing Family