Restoration 2013: Jesus.

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Restoration Ministry

Mark Howard

Jesus:  The Lord of the Sabbath

Father in heaven, I thank you and I praise you for your goodness toward us, for your mercy toward us, for your loving kindness and your everlasting love to each 1 here, for the high purpose and the high calling and the confidence you have placed in us, your people, because you see something of value.

And Lord, we ask tonight, as we have gathered here together, that your Holy Spirit would speak to our hearts and minds tonight, Would draw us closer to you and give us a fuller understanding of why we worship you as our God.

And we ask and pray these things as we've gathered here in Jesus' name tonight.

Now I haven't announced the morning, what we're talking about in the morning, but I do want to emphasize that on Thursday morning I'm going to actually be talking about how you can improve, this may not apply across the board, but how you can improve your devotional life.

I've had a number of people ask, so we've talked about it.

What can you do to make your devotional life more interesting and more powerful?

And I'll just share with you, you know, some of where the Lord has led me.

And I hope that that may be a benefit to some of you.

And I'm announcing it now because some of you may have been looking for something like that.

If you're not able to attend then, we will record that.

We're going to start tonight in Matthew chapter 12.

In fact, I want to start in the book of Daniel.

Now, We're not doing a study in prophecy tonight.

I'm making an assumption here and if the assumption doesn't apply to you, there's some study you can do on this and I'm sure that you can ask me afterwards, You can ask people from the restoration team.

But in Daniel 7.25, the Bible foretells a future issue regarding the Sabbath.

If you've not studied it, you may not pick it up right away.

And as I said, I'm not going through the whole prophecy, but Daniel 7.25, I'm going to guess most of you are familiar with this.

Speaking of the Antichrist power, at the end of time it says, "...he shall speak pompous words against the Most High, shall persecute the saints of the Most High, and shall intend to change times and law." The word for times here is interesting because it goes on to say in that verse 25 that The saints will be given into his hand for a time and times and half a time.

But that second word times is a different word.

Daniel 7 is Aramaic in the original language.

And in that last part, time, times and half a time, the word in the Aramaic is Edan.

Now the interesting thing about that is it's times, it's plural.

Zaman refers to a particular point in time, whereas Edan refers to time in general.

Zaman in the plural refers to a repeating point in time.

Let's see, there's gonna be a repeating point in time that the Antichrist power is gonna try to change.

For a lot of the Christian world, you know, they feel like sometimes we go overboard here with the Sabbath, but this is a reason, at least 1 of the reasons, and we'll look at it more.

Why Seventh-day Adventists feel strongly about this, first of all, there's a change predicted.

And the historical change of the Sabbath is 1 of the most well-documented events in history.

Anybody who wants to do their research can see the change that took place, can read all the history on the change of the Sabbath from the alleged change, I should say, from the seventh day of the week to the first day of the week.

Of course, we hear claims that Jesus changed it, but there's no evidence in scripture or history.

We hear claims that the apostles changed it, no evidence in scripture or history.

Historical records lack any substantial evidence indicating the early church worshipped on any other day than the Sabbath day, we don't find historical observance of the first day by Christians until the second century AD when all the apostles had died.

Which makes it kind of strange to substantiate.

If this is what the apostles believed, you'd think you'd find some historical evidence.

I'm saying this to say there are a lot, you know, there, as a pastor who believes in the seventh day Sabbath, I've had to talk to a lot of people who have their questions about it.

I mean, there's a lot of arguments out there that sound very convincing that the Sabbath was changed, only when you try to look it up and find it, It's not there.

There's a transference of the solemnity, so-called, from Saturday to Sunday, but it wasn't by Jesus.

It was by a different power that would think to change times and laws.

The calendars bear witness to which day is the Sabbath day.

You know, Hasn't the calendar changed and didn't that change the Sabbath day?

That's a question that I get asked commonly.

That would be like, I mean, we have a leap year every few years.

Have the days of the week shifted every time we have a leap year?

Calendar changes don't affect the weekly cycle.

Incidentally, the weekly cycle, there's only 1 reason for the weekly cycle.

In fact, if you've done your study on the French Revolution, The French Revolution fought against the established church for various reasons and 1 of the things they did was to try to stamp out religion and they went from a 7 day week and tried to go to a 10 day week.

Because they saw that the 7 day week was directly connected to Christianity.

You can look it up on which day is the Sabbath day.

Languages bear witness in over 104 languages of the world.

The day for the seventh day of the week is Sabbath.

That's their, you know, Spanish is Sabado, Russian is Subota, that kind of thing.

Our day for the seventh day of the week is Saturday, it's after Saturn.

In over 104 languages of the world, The name of their seventh day is not Saturday, it's Sabbath.

Languages are not recent things, they're old things.

So the point is, the history shows it that there would be this change.

Why would this be an issue at the end of time?

Why would the Antichrist's power seek to change this time?

Why is this such an attack point of the enemy?

Well we could say it's part of the 10 Commandments Law of God and that would be accurate, but it goes deeper than that.

1 of the things that we find if you look at the book of Revelation, I'll look at Revelation with you in a minute.

I want to read to you a statement here from the pen of 1 of our founders in the Adventist church.

It's in a book called Early Writings, page 33.

It says, I saw that the Sabbath is and will be the separating wall between the true Israel of God and unbelievers.

And that the Sabbath is the great question to unite the hearts of God's dear waiting saints.

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Jesus: The Lord of the Sabbath

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