Monday

The Lord Of The Law

Mark 2:27 And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath:
28 Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.

This is one of Jesus' most amazing statements. In this passage Jesus openly defended His followers who were charged with breaking the Sabbath laws. Breaking the Sabbath, one of the ten commandments, was a death penalty offense.

What's so astonishing is they did break the Sabbath laws as interpreted and applied by the Jews, and they did it with Jesus' permission. This was not just another Rabbinical conflict over an interpretation of the law, it was about the authority of the Lawgiver to interpret and apply His law.

These Jews missed a truth about Jesus: He is the lawgiver. The Author of the law knows the purpose and intent of every statute and text, so the application and interpretation are as much His as the words of the statute. The practical power of law doesn't rest in the statute, it rests in the interpretation and application of the statute.

The Jewish elders had become the interpreters of His law and the judges of His intent. So the application of the law had become the exclusive domain of these religious power-brokers. It would be similar to James Madison, called the father of the U.S. Constitution by some historians, coming back from the dead, and finding himself accused by some influential group of modern lawyers of breaking constitutional law.

Here Jesus set them straight: this is His law, and He will interpret and apply it. The application of God's law and Word is as much a part of His domain as the written statute or text. For some reason, some modern Christians have a habit of separating the authority of the Bible text from the authority of the application. They see the text as His, and the application as theirs. This was the same problem the Pharisees had. We should be as cautious with the application of Scripture as we are the text itself, since both belong to the Author.

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