The Rhythm of Heaven - Rediscovering the Sabbath | The Principles of the Sabbath and the Presence of God

We're talking today about how to be relieved of stress and anxiety through the practice of the Sabbath. I'm calling this the principle of the Sabbath and the presence of God. I've got my producer with me today, Dustin Roberts. Great to be with you here. Thanks, Rabbi. It's so good to be with you here today, too. I'm really excited about today's message because you told me before we started, this was your first teaching that you began to teach 25 years ago in churches when you would travel into churches. Yes. I was traveling all over the United States teaching this same message everywhere I went. And Gentile pastors, I'm Jewish, and Gentile pastors were being exposed to something that they were not familiar with. They were telling me, Rabbi, that message was a grand slam home run. It resonated with people and it's very practical as well. We all know that the world is moving quicker than ever before, and it's only going to get quicker. The technology will continue to drive us to be operating at a faster and faster pace. And the result is that people are going to become anxious. They're going to be stressed even more so than now. But the Torah, God's Word, has a built-in remedy to help us manage the stress and be healthier for practicing this principle of the Sabbath and the presence of God. So Dustin, I'm encouraged to share this with you. I'm going to give you some practical ways that you can implement the Sabbath in your life. It's important to understand the foundation of Shabbat. We're going to be looking at it historically, theologically, and practically. So we're going to begin today by reading from the Torah, from the book of Exodus, and we're going to go through examples where you're going to see the Shabbat principle being practiced

by Israel, but I'm going to bring it home to you today, whoever you are and wherever you're at. And again, I want to stress that I'm going to give you truth today that you can apply to your life and it will truly make a difference. So we're going to begin by reading from the book of Exodus, chapter 20, verse 8 through 11. We're in the Ten Commandments. Exodus 20, verse 8. It says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. In six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and He made it holy. This is the first time, Dustin, the word holy is used in the Bible. Really? It's in reference to the Shabbat. And we find that in the book of Genesis, chapter 2, verse 1 through 3, where the Lord created the world once again in six days, rested on the seventh and blessed it and called it holy. We all love the word holy, kadosh in Hebrew, and we think of God as holy. But the first time that word is used in the Bible is in reference to Shabbat. That's amazing. Holy means set apart, cut out, unique and different. And the seventh day of the week, Shabbat, we say in Hebrew, or the Sabbath in English, was cut out from the rest of the week. It was different. It's separate. It's separate.

Six days we work, but the seventh day is separate and unique. But here's what's really important for us to understand. Shabbat, the Sabbath, is not just about the law. The Scripture, Dustin, that you just read, that was part of the Ten Commandments. And most people recognize this as the fourth commandment. However, Shabbat is not first given to us in terms of being part of the Mosaic law. It's first given to us, beloved ones, in reference to creation. This is really important that we understand this. A lot of people, they hear about the Sabbath. They think, I'm not under the law, so it's not really important to me because as a Christian, we're not under the law. Let's take a step back for a second and let's re-perspective how we're understanding this. And we're going to do that by reading from the creation story in Genesis chapter 2, verse 1 through 3. Now, keep in mind, as Dustin reads this, the law was not yet given. When we go to Genesis 2, we're at creation. So let's read Genesis 2, 1 through 3. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed and all their hosts. By the seventh day, God completed His work, which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work, which He had done. And then God blessed the seventh day and He sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work, which God had created and made. Get it, it's a creation principle. Shabbat is part of God's divine design that he built into creation for mankind before the law was given. And we need to get that because a lot of people, once again, there's such an anti-law mentality amongst most Christians, but we don't understand that the law

contains God's self-revelation. And there's a difference between being under the law versus taking the spiritual revelation of our creator that he's given us through the law and applying it to our lives as those that are under grace, but realizing that we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater. You see, the law is good, Paul said, for those that use it lawfully. And understanding the principle of the Sabbath as part of the creation helps us as Christians to rethink what application or what pertinence might it have for our life today. Right, and too often these days in the church, we're not even looking at the law and considering what that means for us today. It's like we've lost those principles. We've kind of adapted Christianity to our Gentile ways, our culture of America or wherever we're from, instead of adapting to the roots of our faith. Yeah, Jesus didn't come to abolish the law. He came to fulfill it. He brings it to its true intent. And Jesus said he was Lord of the Sabbath. And I'm gonna get into this a little bit later today about how Jesus related to Shabbat and how he anticipated his followers or disciples would relate to Shabbat. But before we get there,

let's continue to lay the foundation here. We saw it in Genesis 2. We call it Genesis in Hebrew, bershit. That's the Hebrew word for Genesis. It means origin or beginnings. But let's build on that to try to understand once again that Shabbat is not first coming from the law. It's coming from creation, from the creator building himself and his pattern for you and I into creation. Remember the Lord rested on the seventh day. We're created in his image. So let's think this way. The Lord had delivered Israel out of Egypt. And now they've crossed the Red Sea. They're in the wilderness on the way to the promised land. They're not in the promised land yet they had not yet received the law. They're in the wilderness. And what happens? God is putting manna on the ground six days a week. But on the seventh day, again, this is not part of the Mosaic law yet. Wow. What happens on the seventh day? There's no manna on the ground. It's a day of rest. So let's read here how this Shabbat principle was before the law. Okay, this is Exodus 16, verse 20 through 26.

But they did not listen to Moses and some left part of it, that's the manna until morning and it bred worms and became foul. And Moses was angry with them. They gathered it morning by morning, every man as much as he should eat. But when the sun grew hot, it would melt. Now on the sixth day, they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for each one. When all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, then he said to them, this is what the Lord meant. Tomorrow is a Sabbath observance. A holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil. And all that is left over, put aside to keep it until the morning. So they put it aside until morning as Moses had ordered and it didn't become foul, nor was there any worm in it. Moses said, eat it today, for today is a Sabbath to the Lord and today you will not find it in the field. Six days you shall gather it. But on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none. So think about this. Israel is in the wilderness every day. They're gathering manna six days a week, but the Lord said on the seventh day, there won't be any manna because it's a Shabbat.

There's no working, no gathering, no harvesting. But here was the miracle. Every day during the first six days of the week, if they try to save manna till the next day, the manna would grow foul and infested with worms. They were to eat it and that's it. The next day there'll be new manna. If they tried to hoard it, again, it would go foul on them. But supernaturally on the sixth day, they gathered enough for the seventh day too, so they wouldn't have to work on Shabbat and supernaturally the manna didn't go foul on the seventh day. And what this tells us is a lot of us think, I don't have time to have a Shabbat. I don't have time to take a day a week to rest because if I do, then I'm not gonna be able to get the work done. But what we see is when we honor the Lord by giving Him one day a week to honor Him, He supernaturally puts a blessing on the first six days of the week. He puts a blessing on our lives so that that which would have been impossible the first six days. God somehow makes us still prosper on the seventh day when we're resting. So we've seen that the Sabbath was in the law, right? We read the first scripture today from Exodus in the law, but then we pointed out

that it actually was given to us before the law. It was given to us at creation. Let's press on. Shabbat the Sabbath is multidimensional. Shabbat is not just about resting. It was also a sacred sign that God gave to his first covenant people, Israel. So when the Lord entered into covenant relationship with Israel, he gave them a sign. And the sign of the covenant was Shabbat or the Sabbath. And what's unique and interesting about that is during the time that the scriptures were written, when two nations, for example, formed an alliance with each other or made a covenant with each other, there would be some type of like insignia, something physical that would designate that they had come into a covenant. But when Israel entered into covenant with their maker, with the Lord, there wasn't a physical symbol that recognized the covenant or that expressed the covenant. It was the invisible symbol rather of Shabbat. So every time Israel celebrated Shabbat, it was a celebration of the covenant that they entered into with the creator. But again, it's multidimensional because not only is Shabbat the sign of the covenant

between Yahweh, the God of Israel, and his people, Israel, it's also, Dustin, a gift that Yeshua spoke of to all mankind. So it's the sign of the covenant between God and Israel, but it's a gift to all of us today. Let's look at what Yeshua said in Mark 2, 27 and 28. Sure, Mark 2, 27 and 28 says that Jesus said to them, the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. So the son of man is Lord, even of the Sabbath. The son of man is Lord, even of the Sabbath. But listen to what Jesus said. Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath, get this now, was made for you and me. What does that mean? The Sabbath was made for you and me, it was made for men. It means that God knew that we would need a day to be refreshed. So the Sabbath is actually for us. It's for us as a gift so that we can live in victory over the world. And I'm gonna get into that as we move forward in the broadcast today. So if we're not honoring the Sabbath, we're actually missing out on something. It's like a car. If you have a car, you get a brand new car, and they tell you, okay, here's how to take care of your car.

You bring it in for an oil change after 5,000 miles, and then an X amount of miles, we bring it in for this change of the spark plugs, et cetera. You can keep driving that car without bringing it in for the service, but that car is gonna go bad on you much quicker if you don't do what the owner's manual told you to do and change the oil, change the spark plug. It's the same thing with Shabbat. The Lord made us. He knows what we need as those that are created in His image. He gave us a pattern to follow. He himself rested on Shabbat. He did it for us to show us, if you wanna follow me, this is how to live. Yeah, even God did it, and so if we want to be able to be like God and function like He does, we've got to function like He does. We've gotta do the Sabbath. If we don't take a day a week to rest unto the Lord, to stop being a human doing, because six days a week we're doing, to instead rest, to be refreshed in the Lord, what's gonna happen is our body and mind and our psyche is gonna keep getting worn out, and we're not gonna be able to deal with stress as well. We're not gonna be able to deal with anxiety as well. We're not gonna be able to deal

with the responsibilities of life as well. We're not gonna be able to raise our family as well. All these things will suffer if we don't receive the anointing and the gift that God has made available to us at Shabbat, during Shabbat, by participating in it. Now, if someone thinks they're smarter than God, you know, God rested on the seventh day. Jesus said it was a gift, it was made for us. If someone thinks they're smarter than God and wants to say, I'm not under the law, well, you have that choice, you can do that, but you're gonna lose out on an opportunity for spiritual blessing. It's not about being under the law, Dustin. It's about receiving the opportunity to be blessed from the Lord. Because every time we stop on Shabbat, that's what Shabbat means, to stop and rest. Every time we stop to just present ourself to the Lord and rest, He re-presents Himself to us. There's a blessing, we're gonna get into it, for honoring the Lord on this special day. You know, Yeshua expected his followers. as Jewish followers to keep Shabbat. Let's look at a few scriptures here that illustrates that Jesus didn't say, oh, the law's done, the law's gone. No, he actually anticipated that his Jewish followers would continue to celebrate Shabbat. Let's take a look at the book of Luke.

Yes, Luke 23, verse 54 through 56 says, "'It was the preparation day, "'and the Sabbath was about to begin. "'And now the women who had come with him "'out of the Galilee,' that's with Jesus, "'and saw the tomb and how his body was laid, "'they returned and prepared spices and perfumes, "'and on the Sabbath they rested "'according to the commandment.'" Very good, so let's clarify something. Yeshua fully expected his Jewish followers to celebrate Shabbat. I mean, there was nothing like, oh, this is done, this is gone, hey, listen, I was crucified, I shed my blood for you guys, so let's put all that stuff aside. It was never anything like that that he hinted at. You see, what Yeshua was speaking against was not the law, not Shabbat, but legalism. The Pharisees, the religious leaders of Yeshua's day, they built what we call in Judaism a fence around the Torah. Most of you know that the Torah is the first five books of our Bible. So what the Pharisees did is they said, we need to make sure that no one breaks God's commandment. And their intention was good, but they got sidetracked and they got led away in deception. So by building a fence around the Torah, what the Pharisees did was they added

all types of other man-made laws. Yeshua, Jesus spoke about this in Mark chapter seven when he said to the Pharisees, you teach your own traditions as if they're doctrines of God and they're actually leading people astray. So as it relates to Shabbat, as it relates to the Sabbath, what the Pharisees did is they added all these extra laws. And they said, these are the things you can't do on the Sabbath. And the way that they came up with these additional laws, again, that God did not give, but man created originally to build a fence around Shabbat and protect it. But at the end of the day, it became a heavy yoke. What they did was the Pharisees, they said, okay, how do we know what we can and can't do on Shabbat? The Lord told us not to work. We know that, but they asked themselves, what's work? And so they said, you know, we have a clue here because the Lord told us to stop building the tabernacle on Shabbat. So what did we do when we were building the tabernacle? So they came up with 39 different categories of work that were involved in the building of the tabernacle. We call it in Hebrew, the Mishkan. And one of the categories of work that was involved when they built the tabernacle was ripping and tearing. So they had a rip and tear. And so they said, okay,

there's no ripping and tearing on Shabbat. So today Orthodox Jews will pre-cut their toilet paper so that they don't break Shabbat by ripping and tearing. And so when Yeshua was speaking against the Pharisees as it related to Shabbat, it wasn't because he was speaking against Shabbat. He was speaking about the legalistic man-made rules that they had built around it. For example- Oral law. Yeah, exactly. It's called the oral law. So we see an example of that, for example, when Yeshua was walking through a field with his disciples and they went down to take a cup of some grain and they were accused of harvesting on the Sabbath. And that's Matthew 12, verses one through two. And that says, at that time, Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath and his disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, look, your disciples do what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath. The Pharisees, they see this, they're like, look, your disciples, they're not doing what's lawful. They're picking grain. What does that mean for us? Well, what it means for us is that

as we seek to participate in the Sabbath blessing, to receive the Sabbath anointing, we do it in a way that's led by the Spirit and by the written word of God as those that are being led by the Spirit, not as people that are doing it legalistically. We don't want to do it legalistically ourself and we don't want to put legalism on other people. I'm not under the law. I'm a Jewish believer in Messiah. I am freed from the law. But again, I don't want to forsake the wisdom and the divine intent of the law so that I can be blessed from its true intent. Again, Paul said the law is good when it's used lawfully. And Paul also said that the law was holy, righteous, spiritual, and good. and that the problem isn't the law, the problem is mankind. In the book of Numbers, chapter six, the Lord gave instructions to Moses and Aaron to speak this blessing over his people. And the Lord said, when you speak these words over my people, I will place my name on them and bless them. Receive the impartation of the Lord's blessings. Yeh Vah Recheche Yahweh Vah Yishma Recha Ya'er Yahweh Hnave Lecha Vihunecha Yissa Yahweh Hnave Lecha Ve'asem Lecha Shalom The Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift you up by His countenance and the Lord give you, beloved one, His peace. God bless you and shalom.