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John 7:21-24
Jesus' command or instruction is that they quit judging superficially. His statement is interesting because the Pharisaical sect had for centuries been pouring over the Scriptures, and all of that time had been wasted. Jesus said that all of their thinking about the Sabbath was superficial, and they were not judging righteously. To judge means "to consider"; "to evaluate"; "to size up, to appraise, to discern"; or "to come to an understanding of" to form an opinion. What this means practically is that we will have to gather information, in some cases, from several sources, to compare and to balance them against each other to determine the right way. Notice that Jesus did not find fault with circumcising on the Sabbath—in fact, He used it as His illustration of a correct judgment. Why? The Jews looked into God's Word and saw that God commanded circumcision. They righteously concluded that it was God's pleasure, will, and desire that the circumcision be performed on the eighth day—or we might say, regardless of the day. They understood circumcision, the seal of the Old Covenant, to be of such overriding importance that its practice superseded any given Sabbath. In that sense, circumcision was greater than the Sabbath. A Sabbath circumcision did not happen very often in anybody's lifetime. A family might have ten boys, and maybe none of them would be born on a Friday. Perhaps it was a once-in-a-lifetime event for a large family. But when it did occur that the eighth day fell on a Sabbath, they rightly judged that because of what circumcision represented, it should supersede that Sabbath and be performed. It took only a few minutes, and it was over. THe parents took their squalling baby home, and that was that. The covenant was more important than the Sabbath in this regard. Today baptism—which has some parallels with circumcision—is done on the Sabbath by the true church without one whit of a guilty conscience. Why? For the same reason. Baptism has such overriding importance to a person's making of the New Covenant with God, that it supersedes the Sabbath. Jesus drew on this because it is an easily seen principle. He reckoned that the Jews judged righteously, and of course, He went on to His conclusion that it was therefore not wrong to make a person whole on the Sabbath day for the same reason.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Sabbathkeeping (Part 4)
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