{"id":7143,"date":"2015-11-24T00:05:46","date_gmt":"2015-11-24T08:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=7143"},"modified":"2015-11-23T23:55:20","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T07:55:20","slug":"you-need-to-eat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2015\/11\/24\/you-need-to-eat\/","title":{"rendered":"You Need to Eat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesus passed through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick and eat some heads of grain. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, \u201cLook, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath!\u201d <\/p>\n

\tHe said to them, \u201cHaven\u2019t you read what David did when he and those who were with him were hungry\u2014how he entered the house of God, and they ate the sacred bread, which is not lawful for him or for those with him to eat, but only for the priests? Or haven\u2019t you read in the Law that on Sabbath days the priests in the temple violate the Sabbath and are innocent? But I tell you that something greater than the temple is here! If you had known what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.\u201d (Matthew 12:1-8)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\tGod doesn\u2019t love rules. He loves people. And some rules really are made to be broken. God told his people to keep the Sabbath. And he told his priests what all their duties were. So sometimes the priests violated God\u2019s Sabbath and never felt guilty about it. They sometimes had to offer sacrifices on the Sabbath. And sometimes they had to perform circumcisions on the eighth day after a birth, even if that eighth day was the Sabbath. <\/p>\n

\tSo Jesus told his critics that they had forgotten the whole purpose of the Sabbath, which was simply that people needed time off. The need to satisfy hunger took precedence over the minutia of the law. Just as David and his men, fleeing from Saul for their lives, needed food for their journey and took what they could find, so the disciples were doing nothing wrong by eating a few grains of wheat from a field as they walked along. The prohibition of \u201cworking on the Sabbath\u201d could not be allowed to prevent people from doing what needed to be done.<\/p>\n

\tJesus claimed to be the Lord of the Sabbath. What does that mean? His use of the term \u201cLord\u201d didn\u2019t just mean that he was the boss. When Jews said the word \u201cLord\u201d they meant \u201cGod.\u201d Jesus told his critics that he was God and since he approved of what the disciples were doing, the discussion was over.<\/p>\n

\tThe rules aren\u2019t supposed to get in the way of us doing what\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

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Jesus passed through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick and eat some heads of grain. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, \u201cLook, Your disciples are doing what is not … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[18,17,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7143"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7143"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7145,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7143\/revisions\/7145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}