Studying the Sabbath in as much detail as possible brought me eventually to the stories related by the apostle John.
First, the healing at the pool of Bethesda: John 5:8-18 [portions].
"Jesus said to [the man], Rise, take up your bed and walk.
And immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked.
And that day was the Sabbath.
The Jews therefore said to him who was cured, It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your bed...
the man [departed and] told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.
For this reason the Jews persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill Him, because He had done these things on the Sabbath.
But Jesus answered them, My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.
Therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill Him, because He not only broke the Sabbath, but also said that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.
" Here is a reason for exceptions to the Sabbath rule: The eternal work of God never stops.
The creation was an isolated six-day event after which came the lasting Sabbath picture.
His work of creation is over, the material world was completed in a mere six days.
The worlds are held together by the word He spoke.
But His work of sustaining and caring for what He made never stops.
So it is always proper to do on the Sabbath those things that are reflections of the eternal sustaining mercy of God.
In John 7 is another Sabbath principle espoused.
John 7:22-23.
"...
you circumcise a man on the Sabbath.
If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath, so that the law of Moses should not be broken, are you angry with Me because I made a man completely well on the Sabbath? Do not judge according to the appearance but judge with righteous judgment.
" So here is Moses vs.
Moses.
Circumcision is an actual deed to be performed, a work.
Yet in the hypocritical eyes of the Pharisees, its performance was Sabbath-friendly .
There is no way to get around the fact that some children's births are exactly eight days before the Sabbath.
And eight days was the required time to wait to circumcise a new-born.
They do not want to break one of Moses' laws, so in their thinking, Moses must have approved the bending of one of Moses' laws.
To yield to Moses was an okay thing, but to yield to the pain and suffering of a fellow human could wait until the next day.
This was garbage thinking to Jesus and He told them so without doing damage to the law which He came not to destroy.
John's final Sabbath entry concerns the healing of the man born blind.
John 9:14-16.
"Now it was a Sabbath when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes.
Then the Pharisees also asked him again how he had received his sight.
He said to them, He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and I see.
Therefore some of the Pharisees said, This Man is not from God, because He does not keep the Sabbath.
Others said, How can a man who is a sinner do such signs? And there was a division among them.
" You say, For a man who believed in Sabbath, Jesus certainly was active on that day! Oh, He believed in it, all right.
He is the Creator Who spent the very first Sabbath rejoicing over the work he had made, and in the plan for the man who would rule that creation.
But His plan from the beginning was simply that there be a weekly remembrance of Who God is, and what God did.
The entrance of sin clouded that purpose.
Busy men forgot the Day altogether.
Religious men later remembered the day but still obscured the meaning.
Jesus brought by example the teaching of the Sabbath back to where it began, just as He did withmarriage, adultery, murder.
He cut the tree of false teaching to its roots.
He weeded the garden.
It is for us to keep the garden clean of these wicked plants, the thorns that choke the life from God's People.