🔋We treat the Sabbath as a rigid restriction on our freedom! Reclaiming Sabbath as a radical declaration of God’s provision and our trust.

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian on Doctor James Spencer and I'm joined by the hosts of the Bible Unbranded podcast, Rebecca Josberger and Renee Duffy, and today we are going to be talking a little bit about the Sabbath commands, probably in Deuteronomy, but also just the law more generally, and how it points us.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: To theology, what it says about who God is, God's.

00:00:54
Speaker 1: Character, and I think a lot of times this is one of those things that I've run into is Eyes taught undergraduate students, particularly because of the way Paul teaches the Law and the New Testament. The law is sort of viewed with a little bit of suspicion. It's viewed with a little bit of like, ah, we don't need the law anymore. Of the law's passe, we've moved beyond that. And what I often find I have to do is sort of rehabilitate students to know the law is actually really crucial and important and it isn't what you quite think it is.

00:01:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's kind of where we'll go today.

00:01:28
Speaker 1: But I'll open the floor and maybe I don't know whether either of you resonate with that as.

00:01:33
Speaker 2: You've taught or talked about.

00:01:36
Speaker 1: The law with other folks, or maybe I'll start with you have you have you had that same experience or what's your experience with people kind of thinking about the law maybe as a set of rules and dues and don'ts or what have you.

00:01:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, I will say that, like, my student experience hasn't been exactly that, But I think that's because the student population I've mostly been fortunate enough to teach are actually students who kind of come in with.

00:02:05
Speaker 4: No preconceived notion, which is kind of a.

00:02:08
Speaker 3: Fun place to start from. But where I where I have experienced that is like in my everyday church experience. I feel like that exact kind of notion is often perpetrated from the pulpit. This just kind of idea that like, it's kind of a it's an easy it's an easy thing to throw under the bus in service of raising high the grace of Jesus, which is deserved to be raised very, very high. However, you're actually kind of doing a disservice then to the grace of Jesus if you don't also have a really useful and at least sort of robust understanding of the theology that does come from the laws. So it is something that I feel rather regularly regularly as someone who studies the Old Testament primarily, and that there's that piece kind of shows up in the more like the culture of Christians who just think kind of flippantly about law and grace.

00:03:17
Speaker 1: Well, it is really interesting because I would say that's been my experience largely as well, except maybe when it comes to the Ten Commandments. Okay, right, because the Ten Commandments are far more.

00:03:29
Speaker 2: Intelligible I think to people.

00:03:32
Speaker 1: In other words, when it says thou shalt not steal, we get that right. It's not like you know, to reference back to our previous episodes. Not very many people have oxen, and so when they're reading don't muscle your ox and while you're trading grain, they're going, how in the world does this relate to me?

00:03:48
Speaker 2: Why is this even here? What does this look like?

00:03:51
Speaker 1: I think you actually have the opposite problem with the Ten Commandments, and Beck, you'll throw this question to you, But to me, it's almost like the familiarity has bred out a lot of the theology from these because it's just intuitive now that we shouldn't steal, it's intuitive now that we shouldn't kill.

00:04:06
Speaker 2: It's into you know, yeah, I am just normal human stuff.

00:04:10
Speaker 4: I agree. It's interesting that we're talking about Sabbath today because that's the one of the Ten Commandments that I get that people seem to trip up on where they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, but what about the Sabbath? And usually the hang up is it's at least the way it's expressed is this idea of there's something I'm going to do wrong and I don't want I don't know what it is, I don't know what we're supposed to do. Do we have to hold, like, you know, all those feelings And you get a little bit of push back on the Sabbath at least I do from from students or at church, which is really really interesting to me because the number one thing I hear from students is how tired they are, And I'm like always telling them, if you could serve a God who doesn't just offer you once a week nap day, which I don't read too much into how I you know what that means or what that's supposed to do, because that's through the lens of what are we or are we not supposed to do? Which is what you're talking about. Is that natural understanding of law? Yeah, wouldn't wouldn't you be really happy to sign up for that one? But serving that God? And yet that's the one I find that people kind of push back on the Ten Commandments because they don't know how they're supposed to fulfill it, and it's scary and they don't know if they have to those kind of ideas. And for me, that's just evidence of kind of a fundamental misunderstanding of both from both Old and New Testament, of what lat is, what it's trying to do.

00:06:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

00:06:02
Speaker 1: We've almost boiled down law into its application. So in other words, you know the ones that are, like I said, the ones that are easy for me to follow, don't kill anyone. I feel like I've gotten that one down pat stealing mostly, you know, right, Like you know, you have some of these that you're just like, yeah, I don't I wouldn't do those anyway. So okay, But then Sabbath, So then then the question becomes, well, how do we do it? And we missed the whole point because we've we've focused on, well, the law is telling us to do things or not to do things, and so if I don't understand how to do this, how do I know I'm going to do it right?

00:06:44
Speaker 4: You know?

00:06:44
Speaker 1: Is it really going to work the way that it's supposed to? You know, does this rationale really still hold up in a you know, consumerist, capitalist society where we have to be busy twenty four to seven and you know, get alerts all the time. Like you can see why it's attention point.

00:07:02
Speaker 4: Yeah, agreed. I don't want to get us off track of the Sabbath because I want to talk about that. But another one of the ten commandments that sort of opened my eyes to the fact that I might not be I might be reading them too. I don't know, uh, without the right questions in mind. But I remember translating them not for the very first time, but for the first time as a teacher, so you know, you're more you translate differently. You're like, oh, I have to know how to answer the questions. And I got to that felt not covet, And because we use the word covet, I assumed somehow I didn't even know. I assume that this is a special Christian kind of thing that's like way worse, like up there with murder. And then I translate it and it's just the word for desire or want, and I'm like, I was convinced I could at least avoid coveting because that sounds so bad, But nope, do I want things that my friends have and sit they're all day pinteresting them and wondering why they got them. And I didn't.

00:08:11
Speaker 5: Well, so that was like, whoa, maybe these aren't as like oh yeah, we just put those up on the wall and we all have those and those are just part of natural humanity, right want deeply in bread.

00:08:29
Speaker 4: So anyway, that's my it's my confession.

00:08:33
Speaker 2: No, it's good, I think. Yeah.

00:08:37
Speaker 1: Covening has always been a little strange for me too, because you get you do get in the New Testament, you know, you have certain translations of covening, which is idolatry. Yeah, right, and so it's like, well, desiring something that someone else has is idolatry.

00:08:50
Speaker 2: That's a strange one. But I think those are helpful.

00:08:53
Speaker 1: I really do, because just like Sabbath, it points us away from how am I supposed to avoid doing this? And it like, how do I even differentiate that from stealing? Like I'm just not on desiring it, but I'm not taking it like that.

00:09:09
Speaker 2: What's happening?

00:09:10
Speaker 6: You know?

00:09:11
Speaker 1: Like I think those curious parts where the parts that we don't get, sort of shove us into bigger questions of maybe I'm just reading all of these wrong.

00:09:20
Speaker 2: Right.

00:09:22
Speaker 1: It's it's a really interesting conundrum with those commandments.

00:09:26
Speaker 4: Yeah. One of the cool places that my journey started with this was this thing. I think doctor Block has made it relatively well known. I don't know for sure. I have yet to teach it in a class and have students go, oh, yeah, I read that, unless I heard it from another class. But there's this mindset in the ancient Near East that is made known to us. You guys, have probably heard of it, of course, but it's called a prayer to any God, and it's an ancient prayer. We have a number of different copies of it. It's probably older even than the copies we have, but it's been preserved in a couple different forms, so it was probably I don't want to like compare it, let me compare it to like, you know, now I lay me down to sleep or something. It's probably in the water, in the cultural water, and it's a prayer in a polytheistic culture where there are many gods when something goes wrong in your life, and we can tell this by reading the prayer. When something's gone wrong in your life, obviously that's been controlled by the gods, and the petitioner doesn't seem to know which god, so it's, oh God, I may or may not know, that Goddess I may or may not know. And it goes on like that forever. So it's almost like Doctor Seuss when you read it, because it's just it just keeps going, and it's a sin I may or may not have committed, you know. And he talks about his eyes have looked on something, maybe his hands have touched something, maybe his feet have done. He doesn't know what he did, and he doesn't know what God is mad at him, and he doesn't know what he did, and then he doesn't know what to do to make it right. And it's kind of it seems to, you know, point us to one of the fundamental crises of humanity in the ancient world. And it's really interesting. I'll read that aloud in class. And then you read the Ten Commandments in either Deuteronomy or Exodus, and it starts with I am the Lord your God with his personal name. This is who I So he's identified right off the bat, and then you know, he tells them like, this is the kind of God I am. I'm the one who rescued you. And then he goes on to tell them kind of the ten things they need to do. I can't get all ten fingers in this frame here, right, but it's a pretty simple probably memory device, where like there's ten of them here you go, and we know that there's more than ten things they need to do, but just kind of boiled down. And we, interestingly enough, in our culture as New Testament believers, often look at that and feel relief that we are not bound to those ten things we are saved by Jesus Christ, and I believe the Old Testament characters were too. I mean, this God's plan for the world is universal, but these ten things that are given them are actually quite gracious and very comforting, because how else do you know what you're doing wrong in who you're wronging. And you see that being picked up over and over again when the psalmist will celebrate that. It points out the error of their ways, you know, those kinds of things like it. It gives them pinicition and boundaries in a world where that is absolutely long to four And that was one of those just moments where I thought, I really don't know that I do understand the grace that is given with the laws. And then if you guys want to jump into that, there was a second step, and that is when beginning to understand ancient Mary Stron laws I have read, I think just about all the ones there are. I love reading ancient eery Stern law like over and over and over again, translating pieces of it wherever possible, even if I have to like kind of learn the ins and outs of a new language, not solidly, but you know, love ancient eery Stern law. And one of the things that fascinates me is that whenever we have a preamble to the ancient Eary Stern laws, the page at the front that tell why they're being given. The impetus for ancient Eastern law is that it demonstrates the strength and the character of the king. If law, if kings are you know, we all know this probably, but we don't think about it too often. If kings are strong, they can get larger boundaries, they can their military, can you conquer more. But if they're only strong enough to get bigger boundaries but not strong enough to rule with justice in their land, they're just blopping from war to war. Then they're considered strong outwardly and big, but they don't have the majesty or the strength to also rule. And what a law does in the ancient and Eastern world and even today, it expresses the amount of sovereignty that a king has that they can uphold those laws. And then and then it shows the characters, so so many talk about it will reveal the the justice, which interestingly enough, that Hebrew is the same word for righteousness. I don't know that they're always used the same way. That's a whole nother study. But it shows the righteousness of God. So God's showing his character. And Deuteronomy four you've mentioned pray is the law, as you've vangelistic, it shows the world that His presence with them their wisdom. And that's that's an entire those two steps. I had to do an entire shift of mind of what is this thing? Am I glad that I'm not out from under it? Or am I going to look at it differently as this gift of what He's basic God basically showing who he is. You can't really do law, biblical law without doing theology because if he requires something, he's showing you what he values and who he is. So it's all theological all in my opinion as I study it.

00:16:12
Speaker 1: No, I don't disagree, and I would just tag on to what you just said there. You know, am I happy that I'm not underneath the law? I think the answer to that almost has to be no, because when you go through into New Covenant passages, the one I'm the one I love the most is Ezekiel thirty six, twenty six and twenty seven. I will turn your hearts of stone into hearts of flesh and I will put my Holy Spirit within you. And some translations say cause you, but I think it's probably more the sense of make you enable you, remake your heart.

00:16:45
Speaker 2: It's Asah there.

00:16:47
Speaker 1: And I will, I will enable you to keep my laws, my statutes, and my commandments. And so even as they're you know, you're envisioning the spirit coming into our hearts and this complete and total renewal. You're not escaping the law. You're learning and being enabled to live underneath it. And this is the way it's pictured toward in those New Covenant passages. We see it probably something similar in what we know is the Great commission. Jesus is given all authority. We make disciples, and what is part of that making of disciples, it's teaching them to observe all Christ commanded. And so these are not things that we want to escape from. These are things that we get to live underneath. They're appropriate enabling constraints for us that allow us to live into God's order in ways that we couldn't otherwise. Yeah. Yeah, just throw that out there as sort of a ruinder to your statement, and Renee, do you want to jump in You got anything?

00:17:50
Speaker 4: Sure?

00:17:51
Speaker 3: I'll just add what is probably no surprise to either of you that narratively each of these is happening during this like that really key transition moment for the people, and that they're being they're being given freedom. Their freedom from Pharaoh comes with this law that is also their freedom, which is what you're you're describing, is that this freedom being to follow the law, the freedom to fight against it, but to be able to live holistically inside of it. And then now they're going to be leaving the wilderness and leaving that that moment of they're not they're not in bondage to a to a man, to Pharaoh, but they're they're in bondage to this space. This isn't where they're supposed to be. They're heading somewhere else. And so as they head into that freedom that is their land there they reiterate that this is this is how you this is how you achieved freedom versus how you experience freedom is by walking in God's ways.

00:18:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's good. That's a good point.

00:18:53
Speaker 1: It's interesting to think about when the when the law is given, it's given after they've got this sort of quote unquote political freedom. I did a fair amount of study on the use of the Exodus in early American discourse, and one of the things you find is that it looks an awful lot like what you see in liberation theology. The Exodus is leveraged as a political narrative we need freedom, Well, why do you need freedom? So we can live life on our own terms? And you go, well, I think we missed something here. The Exodus is followed by the law, which means you're not living on your own terms, You're living on God's terms.

00:19:30
Speaker 2: That was the whole point.

00:19:32
Speaker 1: But you see that use of the freedom and the liberation of the exodus very seldom paired with the constraints in liberation theologies, and that was very much the same in revolutionary America. Something very similar in the Civil War, the use of the Exodus on the North and the South, both sides claiming to have been on the side of elimination, of tearing me, but really so that they could.

00:20:02
Speaker 2: Continue doing what they wanted to do.

00:20:03
Speaker 1: And so this aspect of law is part of what I think we miss an awful lot when we're looking at the Exodus.

00:20:09
Speaker 2: I mean, I love that point, Renee, It's a fantastic point.

00:20:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I've heard Becky say before, and I really appreciate this, this idea that like we think of the opposite of laws freedom, but actually the opposite of law is lawlessness.

00:20:22
Speaker 4: Does that sound Familia Becky? Am I getting that right? Yeah, that we don't.

00:20:26
Speaker 3: We don't actually crave lawlessness, We prave freedom, which ends with them.

00:20:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I was. That's exactly where I was just going to go with. Like, it's difficult in our culture because we kind of want to throw off all parts of rule that don't conform to what we agree with. But let's be honest, our cries for justice are because hopefully we're crying for justice in a number of settings in our culture. We've watched that for a number of years. But the justice that we're crying for is that the law works consistently for all people groups, not that the law is no longer relevant. Yes, And that's we kind of get that confused. Because we do have the luxury of so much justice in our country. You would not want to live in a in a society where lawlessness rules, and even more so, and I always have to confess this most of my comprehension because I'm such an a privileged Westerner that can kind of count on the law. Like if a policeman comes up behind me, my heart will race a little bit because I don't want a ticket, but that's it. Otherwise I'm like, oh, these are these people are coming to help me. I'm a very privilege protected under the law. So I like it a lot more than I realize.

00:22:03
Speaker 2: I like it.

00:22:04
Speaker 4: But Netflix all these like old you know, vikings and stuff like that shows so my bollership is highly influenced by Netflix, but it helps me understand probably shouldn't admit that. So you guys can distant yourself from that. But that idea of like, oh, this is how protected I am and we are, so that I don't know that we really can understand the value of It's not just that this is what I can't do. I can't steal something, or it's I have recourse if someone else does. And it's not just principle. Someone is going to enforce that principle. And then one of the big things in the Old Testament, especially in Deuteronomy, and this is where I think some people start going off on this humanitarian thing a little bit, but is that within this framework, it's because God doesn't show favoritism. It's not supposed to be a corruptible framework based on the things that the world usually gets corrupted by power, wealth, other things like that. And there's a heavy, heavy focus on that in Deuteronomy, especially watching out for those who don't have the same social advantages or wealth or position and making sure that they get the same kind of justice. And honestly, I think it praised that way. We all realize that's what we're that's what we want to live under. So there's some beautiful, beautiful things about the law that I think have to be re positioned when when students start to understand that the law is literally giving a snapshot of something about the character of God, and if we as Leavers really do want to understand God better and know him better and be more like him, then the question ceases to be do I have to uphold the law and becomes how do I what is it showing me about God? Which is what we started this whole conversation with. And then the safeguard that I always have to remind people, including myself, is that fear that we're going to get it wrong because we don't quite understand it has a solution. It's already been taken care of. There's this thing called grace that was fixed on the cross. So we have this like incredible opportunity to explore what God looks like in his instructions. And if we mess it up, we're already we're being It's okay, it's okay, already covered and yeah, anyway, now.

00:25:02
Speaker 1: I lead a Bible study on Wednesday mornings, and we're going through the Book of Hebrews. So one of the things that the Book of Hebers is really interesting and is the way it frames some of these Old Testament structures, the tabernacle, the temple, the law, the priests, you know, in all the way that this works and sort of pointing to the better that we now have in Christ. And what I've been trying to emphasize with the guys in the study is, look, we're not saying that the better, you know, sort of supersedes what was before. We're not saying that what came before was worthless or trivial or unnecessary. What we're saying is that it served a particular function that, you know, was always pointing us forward to something else. And I think that even as we look at it and we say, well, we have this sort of grace and we can receive redemption and all the cultic mechanisms that were built in that sort of atone for sin and seek forgiveness and to worship. It's like these things are gesturing us towards something better down the road. There's still grace there, and yet even as we're grateful for those things, we can still be yearning for something more. I love and Hebrews this one point where he says, you know, the fact that we still had this outer court, that we can only enter the Holy of Holies once, it should be a reminder and I'm paraphrasing here, but yeah, it should be a reminder that we're not where we want to be yet because we have to stay in this outer court, where where we really want to be is in the Holy of Holies. And It's like, that's just such a beautiful picture. It's like, you don't disdain being in the outer court. You're happy to be there, but you also know all but I'd love to be there, right, Like it is such a beautiful pictures.

00:26:51
Speaker 4: I think, yeah, you know.

00:26:54
Speaker 1: So it's it's I think this being in the law right part of what I think, maybe we don't fully grasp all the time we're talking about the law is yeah, we want to we want to have the law. We want to have an appropriate law. But more than that, we want to be able to live under the law. And this is part of the yearning that we see in the Old Testament, is the inability to live under the law. The inability to keep this law so perfectly. Isn't about oh my gosh, I've disappointed God. Now I'm going to hell. It's it's about I really this was the ideal and I'm missing it. I'm missing something by not being able to keep this and and that's lamentable. I think that's got to be an aspect of how we think about it at least.

00:27:43
Speaker 6: Yeah, including missing something like missing missing an abundance in life, and also missing a closeness with God, right, because that's right.

00:27:54
Speaker 3: Continually, the thing that they're the separation is what is painful for peoples not able to go into approach until they take care of what has happened.

00:28:04
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the number one thing. Yeah, I was absolutely I was gonna back up on the point you made just a minute ago about Hebrews, which I'm always insanely impressed with someone who can master both Testaments just seriously, so I don't. I read the New Testament as a layperson and I love it, and I but you're gonna have a lot to add on that. But one of the things I consistently like to remind my students that they it seems to make sense to them is that if we if if Christ is better than it doesn't mean a whole lot. If we say Christ is better than a bad thing. It's like, right, I like spin it better than liver, Like, okay, I actually love spinach and hate liver. But you wouldn't know that. You don't know what I'm saying. But if if like Psalm nineteen suggests that Tora is like this, it's compared to like that, or it's set by the heavens as this thing that declares the glory of God, I would argue Torah is the second best picture of God we have in the entire history of the world, with Christ being the first. And so it's better than the sun and the moon, the star, everything, And it's better because what it reveals about God is who he is, and we want to know who he is. It's then his character is then lived out through human behavior, and humans are broken. They're living it out in a broken setting, and they make mistakes with it. They're not It's just it's not going to be this utopic thing you think it's going to be, because the character of God on an imperfect person. Where Christ comes and he's the character of God in the person of God. Good doll done. And then you talk about I've never quite made this leap, and I don't even know if I want to make it right now because I don't want to just take my theological paradigms and plug him in somewhere instead of like looking at the text. That's really uncomfortable for me. But as New Testament believers, when you keep talking about the incorporating of the Holy Spirit and stuff, which is so profound, but we get to be imperfect, but we have the spirit of God in us as we're trying to walk out this law, and I don't know if perfect completion of the law. And this is where I just haven't asked myself this question. Inside the Old Testament text, enough was ever what was expected or were acquired. You look at all the characters that are called perfect or complete David, et cetera, and they aren't. They don't keep all of the law, but they're keeping the not the spirit of the law. That's not where I'm trying to go with this. They're walking with God and knowing him. Yeah, and you mentioned even well, I'll leave it there. My brain's firing, I know.

00:31:31
Speaker 2: I mean, I'll say this.

00:31:32
Speaker 1: I think one of the points that I tend to make when I'm dealing with these kind of issues, because We've had such a tradition of you, the Jews needed to keep off perfectly in order to be saved. Nobody can do that. You all fall short of glory of God. YadA, YadA, YadA, Like everybody knows that's narrative. But then you go to first John one nine. Right, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and justin forgive us our sins and cleanse us of all and righteousness.

00:32:00
Speaker 2: Don't take that as.

00:32:02
Speaker 1: A straight condition, right, So that if we don't confess our sins, he's not faithful and just forgive us. Right, if we take it as evidence and inference, right, that part of the evidence that God is faithful and justine forgiving our sins is that we do confess our sins.

00:32:20
Speaker 2: There's this recognition that we are part of.

00:32:24
Speaker 1: We could probably frame it like this, all those a little dangerous, but obeying the law, part of being obedient, part of being a righteous person is agreeing with God that some of the things we've done are wrong in turning from those It's a built in mechanism similar to what you see in the sacrificial system. Right, there's an assumption that the Israelites are not going to keep the law. Like that's a big portion of the entire penitution. It takes up a whole bunch of space to make it right. Yeah, right, you have to have a way of a way of sort of reorienting this. So you say, yeah, I have done all these bad things, and here is what I'm offering as atonement for these, is forgiveness for these I'm worshiping you like it's a true act of contrition. And I think that some of the people that are called that, you know, Abraham always obviously comes to it through Isaac David, you know, expresses contrition, real contrition in a variety of ways. You know, you see these things happen across time and you go, okay, yeah, it isn't just about doing this perfectly it's also about aligning oneself so closely with God's order that you refuse to live for long misaligned with it. Something around that is kind of what I'd want to say.

00:33:51
Speaker 4: Yeah, one of my questions, and maybe I can ask you this right now, And I don't have an answer to this one. I have what I assume is an answer, but I have found that other people think differently, and I'm not sure how. So that's what I'm asking, This assumption that you identify really well, that we often push back on that the law was somehow made a given so that people could live a good enough life so that God could be with them. When I say that out loud, it sounds totally contrary to the character of God has explained everywhere else in scripture and the capability of man, the idea that we could save ourselves even if we got everything right, And I don't understand how this sounds awful. There's a better way to say this, but I don't understand how Christians can assume that. I'm sure there's a way, because lots of Christians do. But even where it's you know, the people break the very first commandment, have no other gods before me? They make or don't make another likeness that represents me, and they make this golden calf, and God says, Okay, I'm gonna wipe you all out and I'm gonna start over with Moses. And Moses like, no, please, don't leave us and we won't go anywhere without you, and God's like okay, and this whole thing, this reconciliation happens, and when that reconciliation happens, we don't see really any evidence of We see the punishment, but it's not like and then Israel walked rightly and so God was able to come down and live with them. Instead, there's reconciliation and the next thing they do is build the people, and then he shows up. So I have had to jettison a long time ago, just on theological grounds, the idea that like there was one way of salvation and then God changed his mind like I can't fathom my world. Oh no, I'm able to say, And I know you weren't referring to that either, you were you were building as a yeah, are there actually? Like? Is are there? Actually? People believe that?

00:36:16
Speaker 1: So I think there's a common misconception around it.

00:36:20
Speaker 2: So this was probably.

00:36:24
Speaker 1: Ninety seven ninety eight where I started doing research on the new perspective on Paul. And this gets into E. P. Sanders and cupn Ol, noomism, and a lot of words that people are listening to this may not even understand, but essentially there is a movement within Paul and scholarship to say that we got the Second Temple background and understanding of the way that Jews thought wrong. And I think so much of this is driven and sort of anachronistically read back onto the Old Testament from this notion that Second Temple Jews somehow thought that keeping will law was saving them or justifying them using that very Christian language that we have, and it's probably in my mind as I've read through all of that different scholarship and looked at different things.

00:37:14
Speaker 2: What I would say is, I think the Jews.

00:37:17
Speaker 1: Were struggling to understand, how do we align ourselves with God's order in this setting without the Temple? How do we do it without remaining clean because we're being defiled every day by gentiles, and so they start being more stringent on what they can control, which is keeping various aspects of the law, and they're hoping, I think, is keeping them as aligned with God's order as they possibly can be given the situation that they're in. But I think overall there's just sort of a misunderstanding, probably partially due to what law actually does some of the stuff we talked about earlier. I think there's just a misunderstanding what the law actually was meant to do and how it was supposed to be enacted. And and you get hints of this in the prophetic literature. You know, mercy not sacrifice, right, Well, what do you mean you told us to sacrifice.

00:38:18
Speaker 4: Or temple the temple?

00:38:20
Speaker 2: We like, what are we talking about here? God?

00:38:23
Speaker 1: You told us to offer sacrifices what we're doing? And He's like, no, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. And so you get this sense that the law is not a set of rules that if you miss one you have to you know, you know, whip yourself, you know, or something like that.

00:38:41
Speaker 2: Right.

00:38:42
Speaker 1: What you get the sense of is that there is a thrust of the law that involves some of the things we've been talking about, knowing and understanding what it means to live with God, and that when that law is applied in a in a more stringent recipe like fashion, right to bake a cake, you always have to put the mix in the bowl first, and then you have to add the A and then you have to like when it gets to that point, then you kind of know you've gotten a lot wrong. So I think that's how it comes in. Becky, that's a real like, Okay, thank you. That'd be my guess on it, say, my relatively informed guess.

00:39:21
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's it, yep, and that makes sense. I yeah, yeah, I just ye.

00:39:29
Speaker 1: Well, let's uh, so we don't let the episode get away with us and get away from us without ever addressing the Ten Commandments. Let's jump back into those real quick.

00:39:41
Speaker 4: Or Sabbath.

00:39:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think it's so here's a question for both of you. So here's the way I sort of have thought through the Ten Commandments over the years. And this is informed by the way I studied Sabbath. So it may not it may not quite square, but when I try to help people understand how I read the law, this is how I do. So I don't know that it's as interpretive as it is heuristic, right, but I think two things have informed me. Number one is the Sabbath. Number two is the sabbatical laws, right, And so I tend to start by reading the law and saying, these are divinely empowered practices.

00:40:20
Speaker 2: They work and function because.

00:40:23
Speaker 1: Reality is the way it is, and particularly because God is the way he is. And so when I read something like thou shalt not steal, my tendency is to say, well, what would it say if I did steal? If I'm in Israel and I'm an Israelite and I'm supposed to be sort of displaying the wisdom of God to the rest of the world, and I'm out there stealing and killing and committing adultery and coveting what other people have, I'm suggesting that God can't provide for me sufficient. I'm suggesting that they are are These are not humans, They're obstacles to my own agendas. I'm suggesting that, you know, the covenant that I made with God in marriage doesn't mean anything, and I'm suggesting that God gave my stuff to someone else, and it's my job to rectify his mistake.

00:41:18
Speaker 4: Right.

00:41:18
Speaker 1: There's always a theological sort of implication to doing the opposite of what the tank commandments are asking you to do, and so what you end up with is sort of a back end way of helping people understand how this relates theologically?

00:41:33
Speaker 2: How does that?

00:41:34
Speaker 1: How does that strike you? Maybe I'll go to Renee first, How does that strike you?

00:41:37
Speaker 2: Renee? Does that?

00:41:40
Speaker 4: I mean?

00:41:42
Speaker 3: I'm I'm processing, I'm trying to process through each one of those things, and like all of the like the outcomes from it, like it.

00:41:49
Speaker 4: Definitely, Uh, it's making sense.

00:41:54
Speaker 3: It is helping people go from well, it's it's always strike right that the Ten Commandments are given to us in the negative, right right, like that that they're restrictive in that particular way, and so thinking about the positive helps Overwatching all of those things then can always bring us to this place of who is in control?

00:42:22
Speaker 4: Is it me? Or is it God?

00:42:24
Speaker 3: So I think that even even being able to see that and being.

00:42:29
Speaker 4: Able to acknowledge.

00:42:33
Speaker 3: My rightful place below, God shows up in each one of those in a really helpful way.

00:42:41
Speaker 4: What are you thinking, Becky? No, M Yeah, I'm curious.

00:42:49
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:42:50
Speaker 4: I want to hear you talk about the Sabbath. He's gonna keep bringing it up until he does. I just keep going. Sorry, I mean, if you were going to.

00:43:01
Speaker 1: Rest find No, I think it's good. I think the Sabbath was always interesting me. Not because I felt like I needed a break, but because you could do comparative work between Exodus twenty and Diuuronyomy five, and comparative work that you really can't do with any of the other commandments. It's not like there's no other differences. I wouldn't say that, but the Sabbath command really does have a.

00:43:23
Speaker 2: Lot of differences.

00:43:24
Speaker 1: And so if you read, for instance, in Exodus, the sabbath command is rooted in creation, and so what we see really in Exodus is that there's the Sabbath is a reflection of the created order. It's ordering time, right, and so this time is to be sacred. If God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, then you keep your seventh day sacred as well. It's a way of ordering time. But you get a completely different vibe when you jump over to Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy roots the sabbath practice back into the Exodus, so you're to remember the Exodus as you sabbath. The Sabbath is a mechanism for remembering. It's a way of demonstrating that you understand that you're no longer under the thumb of Pharaoh and that you live in a different domain and kingdom now, and that conditions some of the other differences that you see between these two commands, for instance, like in Deuteronomy, and an ad just popped up on my Internet Bible, so now I can't see it. Such poor timing. But there's a little phrase that comes in here in verse fourteen. The end of verse fourteen, so you know you're supposed to sabbath. You know everybody's supposed to sabbath.

00:44:42
Speaker 2: On it. You shall not do any work.

00:44:44
Speaker 1: You, your son, your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, you or your ox, your donkey, or any of your livestock are a sonjourner who's within your gates. That your male servant and your female servant may rest.

00:44:55
Speaker 2: As as you.

00:44:57
Speaker 1: That little as you isn't actually available in Exodus. Now, there's some other differences, but that as you is not there in Exodus. And so that's brought up this question. You mentioned the humanitarian impulse in Deuteronomy, right, A lot of commentators say, well, this is the humanitarian impulse. Look, the God is commanding this so that the male and female servants can rest as well. I tend to take it a little differently. I mean, yes, their rest is sort of a consequence of this. But the reality is, if we look at Sabbath across the scriptures, part of what you see is that it's not really a You're not really taking a sabbath if you've got your slaves out in the field, like taking care of things, right, Like, how is this trusting God if I've just got my workers out there doing it and I'm sipping back a lemonade and just chilling right. And so what we see in the in the Sabbath command here in Deuteronomy is a move toward the theological that the practices that are put in place, the way that the Sabbath is to be exercised, is aligned with who God is, the way that God is structuring the society. And I think the difference the contrast between Pharaoh and God. Pharaoh requires ceaseless work. God of everyone, like of all the slaves. God is saying, that's not how my world works. Everybody gets this break. Everybody treats this time as sacred. This time was made sacred, if we read from Exodus to Douronymy, it was made sacred by me at creation. And you're for jarn sure, not going to screw it up by having your slaves work on the Sabbath. Yeah, that's kind of how I see that, the two sort of that whole narrative connecting and so yeah, so the Sabbath in Deuteronomy, to me, gives us real handles for understanding how to read all of these commands in more of that theological register.

00:47:02
Speaker 4: This is so exciting for me because my work for so long has been so teaching focused that I haven't always gotten to dialogue with other people who have worked on the same things that I've been working on. And so in my independent, little, I don't know, conclave of my office, you know, I have spent years with this Sabbath command and doing very similar things, and hearing you talk about this, I'm so lit up I have I would say, I do almost the same thing with it, which which is so exciting to me. When people are approaching the text with a similar mindset in methodologies but not talking to one another, and finding similar things, it can be very affirming that I'm not just out there, you know, like making up my own theology, which is always so scary. The one piece that I brought to the question before I even started when I noticed, like, ooh, there's a piece of the Ten Commandments that I can study, that there's actually a comparative analysis that can go on. And that was the Sabbath, soa same kind of thing. All my study with law had already driven me to believe and to test repeatedly every time I go to anything like the Sabbath laws, that the reason something is being given to us is because it shows us something about the character of God. I mentioned this last time we talked but Teronomy ten when he says, you know the Lord your God at seventeen the lords r God is God of God and lords of lords, the Great God, a mighty and awesome who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you're to love, and you know you almost want to. Therefore, you are to love those who are aliens, for you, yourselfs are alien working in Egypt. And so it's like, I do all this, so you have to right because you're emulating me. So with that idea, which I didn't find in Deuteronomy ten, it's so little that I didn't see it until after studying a lot of these laws. I went to the Sabbath laws, and that's the one little piece that I I'm kind of asking you, James, to test off camera and see, like does this fit. So instead of seeing a difference, there is one between what's going on in Exodus and what's going on in Deuteronomy. If they're both reflecting the character of God, and they're both the same commandment, so it seems like maybe they'd be reflecting something similar about the character of God because he's asking them to do this. You talk about Sabbath ordering time and structure, which one hundred percent, but it's not just ordering things. It's ordering things to teach a lesson, like to give the people a reminder every week. I did all of this, and I made it perfect, and it's it's finished, and I did it, so you don't have to like you're not going to make it perfect. You're not gonna It's that thing Renee was talking about about the sovereignty of God and where are places under him, and it has kind of this complex layer. I talk to my students about this. I'm like, kind of it's kind of like heaven in Genesis one, like it's all done, it's all taken care of, and so you get to kind of rest in that closest thing I think we come to in the Old Testament as an idea of a utopia, that God did it and it's complete. And I think what he's doing in the Deuteronomy passage is the exact same thing, but he's referring to something that is much closer in the minds of the Israelites as an example in their immediate context of his redemptive, redeeming, finishing, freeing kind of power, in that they are no longer slaves. He did the thing, he redeemed them, and they they get to remember that once a week. And I can't. I can't quite make the firm connection without forcing it. That's kind of the weakness of where I'm going firm connection between that redemptive finishing power of Genesis one and that redemptive, literally redeeming, freeing kind of experience that the Hebrews, that the Israelites experienced in the in the Exodus. But they seem to be pointing to the same characteristics of God worked out in two different spots in history. Yes, is my pointing to something about the character of God that, rather than being different, seems to be the same in two different expressions. And I don't know, if I haven't had other people test.

00:52:37
Speaker 2: That idea, I don't disagree.

00:52:39
Speaker 1: They would point to a very similar character of God, I think, if not the exact same. I think, you know, the connections between creation and Exodus are such that it almost needs to read that way. I would also say that, while I haven't done the study, my haunches that when we look at the bringing out of the people from Egypt, which is the way the language just used here, Yeah, you know, my wish would be that it's redeemed, I know, right, because redemption then speaks to ownership, which speaks to sovereignty, which you know all these things.

00:53:17
Speaker 4: Well, and even if it isn't here he's talked about the God the redeeming one of Israel at it.

00:53:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, But my hunch is that what we're looking at in all of this is a set of concepts that are consistently overlapping and found in connection with one another. So I mean, even as you were talking about the ancient Near Eastern lack coats and what these do within the context of a King, shows his character, shows his sovereignty. It's hard not to conjure up the image of God in Genesis one and recognize that, you know, we're this reflection that the humanity is supposed to do is intended to both demonstrate God's authority and mark humans off as having a unique dignity and character, you know, And then you know, you get into Sabbath. Obviously we have Sabbath again here, we have, you know, the creation of an order coming out of chaos. Within Genesis one one through two through t through two three, you have a very similar thing happening in Egypt, at least on a conceptual level. That they are in chaos, that they're in oppression, that there is no room for worship exactly. All of these different aspects sort of start to pile up conceptually at the very least. And then I think we are intended to read a lot of that not into the text, but we're supposed to read this text in that context. And so I yeah, I agree. I think there's a real richness here, and it's all you know, sort of shoving us back to God is sovereign, God is wise, God is benevolent.

00:54:58
Speaker 2: Now you're free to worship. Yeah, and this.

00:55:03
Speaker 1: Is what that looks like. It looks like Sabbath. Well, it looks like a bringing back that ordering of time.

00:55:08
Speaker 4: And it would make sense too. We talked last time about you know, where you go to the bathroom in your war camp, these very crystal clear, kind of human samples of how you would remember that God is there and how it would be driven home that to serve a God who is sovereign, ordered, sufficient, and redemptive means that we have the privilege to remember that through rest. That's right, and that kind of you know, and of course you went to the New Testament. Jesus is like and Sabbath was made for man, and you're.

00:55:52
Speaker 7: Like, no, oh oh oh, but what kind of in my mind frees me up from question of but how what will God count as Sabbath?

00:56:05
Speaker 4: Nience?

00:56:07
Speaker 2: That's right?

00:56:09
Speaker 4: But anyway, well, I think there's just so much beauty there, and I map every Saturday or Sunday.

00:56:18
Speaker 1: I agree, And maybe what we do, maybe maybe next time we keep this going and we'll stick with Sabbath for one more episode and can maybe expand it out a little bit, because I think there are some interesting structural questions to talk about with regard to the modern day church. There's some interesting things we could discuss just on our own personal rhythms of rest and those kind of things. To display the character of God that is gestured to in Sabbath or pointed back reflected in these laws, what does it look like for us to do that in our daily lives and how much improvisation can we actually use in doing so. Yeah, so maybe we'll maybe we'll pivot to that next time and just stick with Sabbath for a little bit.

00:57:00
Speaker 2: Seems good to sit with.

00:57:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love it. Thank you.

00:57:04
Speaker 2: Very cool.

00:57:05
Speaker 1: Well, we're gonna have to call this episode done for the moment, but we'll be back next time. We'll be talking a little bit more about Sabbath. So, Becky, Rene, thank you very much for being here. Everybody, thanks for listening, and we'll catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian Take Care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.