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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Dee Casper

The Sabbath:  A Memorial and a Battlefield

Sweet Jesus, thank you for the privilege again to pray.

Thank you that you blessed us this morning, that you ministered to me, certainly, and I know many others have shared the same.

I pray that you do that for us 1 more time, Lord, that you would bless us indeed.

I pray that you would minister to us and you'd help us to better understand, appreciate, and anticipate Sabbath rest, based upon what we learned this afternoon.

So again, we've been covering a series called This Is War, covering different aspects of Adventist doctrine, but in the context of the great controversies.

We talked about the Antichrist last night, we talked about the Gospel this morning, we're going to deal with the topic of the Sabbath this afternoon, And so I'm excited for that.

Again, if you'd like more information about the CORE program, as John mentioned, we have postcards here.

Our website is www.paconference.org forward slash CORE.

And but I'm happy to give you these cards and answer any questions you may have.

So this evening's message is entitled again, The Sabbath, A Memorial and a Battlefield.

1 more time, I wanna read these quotes that have been very helpful for me in kind of setting the course for what we're addressing this evening, or just this whole weekend on topic of the battlefield.

Says, The law that no man liveth to himself, Satan was determined to oppose.

He desired to live for self, and it was this that incited rebellion in heaven, and it was man's acceptance of this principle that brought sin on earth.

Unselfishness, the principle of God's kingdom, is the principle that Satan hates.

It's very existence he seeks to deny, or he denies.

From the beginning of the great controversy, Satan has endeavored to prove God's principles of action to be selfish, and he deals in the same way with all who serve God.

But to disprove Satan's claim is the work of Christ and of all who bear his name." That happens to be all of you.

And it says, "...it was to give in his own life an illustration of unselfishness that Jesus came in the form of humanity.

Jesus, 1 of the objectives he had in coming to earth was to manifest true unselfish love to show what God is actually like.

And all who accept this principle, we're working to get workers together with him in demonstrating it in the practical life.

So, what we're going to do today is cover the why of the Sabbath.

Most of our Sabbath presentations are kind of these polemic exercises.

The Sabbath is actually valid, the 10 Commandments really matter, which is all totally true, and they do.

I'm just going to take a different perspective on the Sabbath this afternoon, just to kind of help buttress and kind of widen our view of what a gift this is meant to be to man.

So we're going to be talking about the why behind the Sabbath.

In Genesis 1, verses 3-5, listen to how God creates.

It says, So, how is it, then, that God creates according to this text?

The struggle is real, but I'm going to be deeply offended if you don't answer my questions.

I will literally sit down and stare at you for the next 40 something minutes.

This is the way that God brings things into creation and into existence in the Genesis creation account beginning in chapter 1.

So, God speaks and it is so, but when we get to Genesis chapter 2 and verse 7, he works differently.

His means of creation is different in chapter 2 and verse 7, this is what it says, "...and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.

The King James reads, man became a living soul.

So We see God speaking and it was so in Genesis chapter 1.

When we get to Genesis chapter 3, God forms man from the dust of the earth.

Notice it does not read, and God spoke and Adam was so.

No, God seems to stop everything that he's doing.

He gets down on the ground and gets dirty as he molds and fashions something.

Then it says he breathes the breath of life into his nostrils.

Now, I'm an introvert and I've got 1 of those like zones, yeah?

I've got my me space and when someone crosses that me space it makes me uncomfortable but I'm too nice to tell you, right?

So someone getting that close to my nose would really creep me out, right?

But God breathed the breath of life into his nostrils.

This implies something to me in the way in which he creates, I'd like to share now.

The way in which God creates, especially in contrast to the way he creates everything else, implies intimacy, care, and value directed towards the 1 that he created.

The way in which God creates man implies intimacy, care, and value, right?

And that doesn't mean that God doesn't care about the Sun or doesn't care about the birds or other things, But there's something about man that is very special and that's evidenced in the way in which God creates him.

So in this context, a context of intimacy and value is when the Sabbath is given.

It's when God changes His creation perspective and implies intimacy that the very next thing He does is create Sabbath for man.

And we'll see this text here now in Mark chapter 2.

Then Jesus said to them, I love this translation of this, it's actually really, really nice.

It says, the Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath.

As Seventh-day Adventists who do not believe that we are legalists for keeping the Sabbath, I really like this translation.

Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, not just, just do it because I said so, right?

Or I better do this to chill God out so He won't bother me, right?

No, we do this because God supplied the Sabbath to meet the needs of man, and Just in how God creates man, we already know that God loves him.

So if he's giving him something for his good, we're more inclined to trust him just based upon the love he's already shown in how he creates us.

So what God had in mind when he created Sabbath was not something to keep man busy or to control him.

It was something designed to meet man's needs.

And I think this is very helpful for us because people who kind of, I didn't grow up in the machine.

I didn't go through the Adventist system, school systems, and everything else.

So, my experience was vastly different in the sense that I didn't go through the whole thing where we just Sabbath, because that's what people do, right?

And I think it's easy, especially if you grow up in the system, to just kind of get used to it and forget why.

And if we ever hear a why, generally people go to Exodus chapter 20, verses 8 to 11, because God said so.

Well, we're going to unpack that more this evening, and hopefully that will make this even more endearing to us regarding the Sabbath.

But a local Loma Lindaite, Sigvey Tonstad, wrote a booming book on the Sabbath called The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day.

If you've not read this book, it's a theological book, it's kind of nerdy, but the language this guy uses is gorgeous.

Some theological books can be kind of like an acquired taste.

He uses very beautiful poetic language in the way he talks about the Sabbath and God's love through the Sabbath.

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The Sabbath: A Memorial and a Battlefield

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