Yet wisdom is justified by her children. – Luke 7:35

In Luke chapter 7, Jesus is dealing with questions from and of John the Baptist. John sends disciples to ask if Jesus is the One. Jesus, referring back to Isaiah 61 (which he read in the synagogue at the beginning of his public ministry in 4:16-30 and applied to himself), points to what he has been doing. This is the evidence for John: Jesus is fulfilling the prophecies about him.

After John’s messengers leave, Jesus turns the questions on the crowd. Who was John? He was a prophet, but more than a prophet (Lk 7:26). While Isaiah and the other prophets could only look forward to Jesus’ day (1Pt 1:10-12), John got to herald it. He got to point at Jesus himself and say “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!”

Luke puts in a parenthetical statement about how people reacted to this in verses 29-30. This is the passage that stumped me. The people and the tax collectors “declared God just having been baptized with the baptism of John but the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves having not been baptized by him.” I got hung up asking what God’s purpose for them in John’s baptism was. After all, John’s baptism alone was insufficient and incomplete (Acts 19:1-6). At that point in redemptive history, it was sufficient but there was more to come. So what did it mean?

If you were to get caught in your sin today, would your response be the same as it was when you first became a Christian? Would you flee to Jesus and weep or would you “repent” and beat your breast and then do something good to make up for it?Sometimes to get that answer you need to camp on the part that is bothering you and sometimes you need to just keep reading. I camped for a while and when it didn’t seem to help, I kept reading. What helped me get the answer was looking at the Greek; however, you could get there by comparing English versions too. The same word for “declared God just” is used again in verse 35 about wisdom. Some translations use different English words to translate both and that can be confusing. The NASB says “acknowledged God’s justice” and “wisdom is vindicated by all her children” which is a fair translation but it blurs the connection between these verses. Anyway, once I made the connection between verse 29 and vere 35 I began to look at Luke’s parenthetical statement not through the lens of John’s baptism but through the lens of God’s wisdom.

How is wisdom justified by her children? She is justified by their fruits, by what they do. In 31-35 Jesus is lamenting the current generation. They rejected John for being too radical and they’re rejecting Jesus for being too accommodating. There is just no pleasing these folks it seems! But look at those who are following Jesus and John, they’re showing that God’s wisdom was right. John called them to repentance and some repented. Jesus came to heal and forgive and the sinners are coming to him. The “righteous” are rejecting both of them. This shows that God was right in sending Jesus and John to the poor and the broken and the needy, not to those who believe they have their acts together. This was Isaiah’s prophecy. Freedom would be proclaimed to those in captivity, the good news would go to the poor.

And look at what is happening! God was right. The poor and needy are flocking to Jesus but the “righteous” are clicking their tongues and rolling their eyes. The wisdom of God’s decision to send Jesus for the poor is justified. God’s purpose in sending John to preach a baptism of repentance is justified as those needing it came.

So what about us? Have we come to Jesus as those who were needy? Do we call the other needy people to come and follow Jesus with us? I think the real danger in our discipleship is that we enter knowing we need to repent and follow Jesus but after a while we get comfortable. Soon we change our begger’s and prostitute’s clothing for the rich robes of the Pharisees. Surely we needed Jesus but do we still need him today? If you were to get caught in your sin today, would your response be the same as it was when you first became a Christian? Would you flee to Jesus and weep or would you “repent” and beat your breast and then do something good to make up for it? Wisdom is justified by her children. So is God.

I attended the first public meeting of The Gospel Coalition back in May. I feel like I was a part of something seminal that could have an impact in the future. The meeting was limited to only about 500 people or so, but the caliber of the speakers top notch. Tim Keller and D. A. Carson are the two who spearheaded the Coalition but they soon brought in other “roughly Reformed” (Carson’s term) Christians to participate.

While the conference itself was good, there is more to the Coalition than just conferences. Carson mentioned other groups who are doing similar work and have conferences: Together For The Gospel, Desiring God Ministries, Acts 29 and others. What sets the Coalition apart is that they want to “recover the confessional core of evangelicalism” (Carson again). Not only are they having cool conferences, they have drafted some helpful documents including a confession and a theological vision for ministry. These documents are intended to help the evangelical church recover lost theological ground.

The Gospel Coalition isn’t competing with those other ministries, it is attempting to work beside and supplement them. At any rate, their website has been under construction since the conference ad is now available. Please visit the site and look around. Videos from the conference are being added regularly. The documents the Coalition drafted are available as well as some other helpful materials.

I’m looking forward to what comes next for The Gospel Coalition and their impact on the church. May God bless this effort with fruit.

By the way, I just browsed the stakeholders and noted 6 Evangelical Free Church of America pastors and three TEDS teachers. It is good to see that my denomination is represented well there. It shows that there are leaders in our denomination who are concerned about the gospel.

This is interesting. Tim Keller’s Redeemer Pres in NYC was rated the number one multiplying church by Outreach Magazine. Number two was Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church in Seattle. The church in third place made me do a double take. It is a church in Keller, TX.

So if you’re a pastor and you want to get your church to reproduce, it appears that your odds are better if you have “Keller” in your name somewhere. :)

Any way, this is encouraging news to me. Having been immersed in church growth literature for the past few weeks I keep hearing about all the techniques to get your church to grow and there is scare mention of solid theology. Programs, greeters, staff, but not a bunch on theology. Redeemer and Mars Hill both have solid, Reformed theology at their core. They’re not planting wishy-washy churches, they’re planting who take a stand on good theology.

So to my good buddies Tim and Mark, congrats bros. Glad to see that all that advice and mentoring I gave you has been taken to heart and is producing fruit. ;)

[HT: Reformissionary]

The Dramatic Chipmunk 5 seconds of intense drama.

Okay, it isn’t a chipmunk but it is funny.

The lads at the League of Tyndale suffered a fire in their printing operation a few months ago but their production has been restored! Let the sarcasm flow. :) Be sure to stop by and check them out. You might also drop a nickel in the milk jug on the counter to help them get back on their feet. I did. Oh, also make sure you take a look at the latest Ad Absurdum. It is a hoot.

The Return of the Sandwich may have inspired me to my next bit of satire. It is an idea I proposed to the Sandwich a while ago but never developed. Let’s see if my sarcasm tank has been sufficiently filled yet.

As I begin to dig in to a Reformed Baptist hermeneutic, I find that I have to deal with some assumptions (not the same as presuppositions) before I begin.

In a more formal work on biblical hermeneutics the first chapter would (should) be on the Bible. I’m just going to go ahead and assume 1) Biblical inerrancy, 2) the Protestant Bible contains all the inspired writings of both the Old and New Testament, and 3) that the consistent message of the Bible is Jesus Christ (cf. Luke 24:25-27 and John 5:39). These “assumptions” are not presuppositions for the sake of this discussion. These are topics that would be developed and defended in a fuller treatment of the subject. I’m taking a shortcut and assuming them to be true already.

On top of that, we would also have a discussion of the Protestant hermeneutic which would include sola scriptura and “the analogy of faith”. That is that scripture alone is authoritative for life and practice and that tradition and man-made rules cannot bind the conscience. The analogy of faith would say that scripture interprets scripture. We need to take the Bible as a whole when wrestling with difficulties. That does not negate the need to take the text in its original setting first, but it requires us to go farther than that as well. Again, these issues are going to be assumed and not defended in this blog series.

One of the first presuppositions we need to deal with is the relationship between the New Testament and the Old Testament. This is a contentious issue but a foundational one. Reformed Baptists are first, Reformed. That means that we would take our cues from the Reformers on this and other issues. Fundamentally, the Reformers recognized continuity between the Testaments. That is why many of them baptized babies for example. Infants were included in the older covenants and there is nothing in New Testament that abrogates that practice so it must continue.

Our presupposition about the relationship between the Testaments is that there is continuity and that the New Testament defines for us what that continuity looks like.But in addition to being Reformed, we’re Baptists, that is we believe in baptism upon credible profession of faith. Does this mean that we disagree with the Reformers we’re supposed to be taking our cues from? Yes and no. Yes, we disagree on the proper subjects of baptism. No, we don’t disagree on the principle of continuity, we just understand it differently. As a matter of fact, I would argue that we are more consistent in consistency. For the Reformed paedobaptist the continuity lies in automatic infant inclusion but the symbol radically changes. What was in the older covenants a bloody removal of a piece of flesh becomes a ceremonial washing. I’ve heard some paedobaptists shrug off this by saying, “Well, there is continuity and discontinuity.”

As Reformed Baptists we don’t want to throw out what our Reformation forefathers have said and our Reformed brothers are saying, but we want to be more consistent Reformers. We’re not content to live with this discontinuity when there is no Biblical warrant for it. Nowhere does the Bible tie together Old Testament circumcision with New Covenant baptism and therefore, applying the analogy of faith (allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture), we’re inclined to reject it. Indeed, when the New Testament refers to baptism in the Old Testament, it always points to water events (1Co 10:1-2, 1Pt 3:20-21) and never to circumcision.

As we critically evaluate how other Reformed traditions handle the relationship between the two Testaments, we find that we agree almost entirely. However, there are some points where the other traditions are not being consistent in the right places. So our presupposition about the relationship between the Testaments is that there is continuity and that the New Testament defines for us what that continuity looks like. This is significant. What we’re doing in this is taking our class on how to read the Bible from the New Testament. We’re allowing Christ and the Apostles to tell us how to read our Bibles.

Others in the Reformed tradition would say that they are doing the same thing, surely. But are they? Returning to the example of baptism (because it is such a big target in this discussion), they are reading the New Testament through the lens of the Old ¹See Greg Welty’s A Critical Evaluation of Paedobaptism, “Paedobaptists simultaneously “Christianize” the Old Testament (read the Old Testament as if it were the New) and “Judaize” the New Testament (read the New Testament as if it were the Old).”, not the other way around. As I’ve pointed out above, the way the New Testament looks at baptism in the Old Testament is as a water event. The way it looks at circumcision is not that it changed to a water rite but that it changed location, from the foreskin to the heart (Rom 2:28-29, Phil 2:2-3, Col 2:13). The Reformed paedobaptist approaches the question from the perspective of the Old Testament first and then imports that meaning there into the New. Since they begin with that presupposition they do not see the New Testament texts cited as regulating infant inclusion. They aren’t purposely being disobedient to the New Testament teaching, they modulate the what the New Testament teaches on this issue with what the Old Testament said. To them, this is simply applying the analogy of faith to the question.

A Reformed Baptist hermeneutic presumes the operation works the other way around. We assume continuity between the covenants and we allow the New Testament and Old Testament prophecies and promises of the New Covenant to us tell what or demonstrate how that continuity works in a New Covenant setting.

I completed two years of Biblical Greek a few years ago and pretty much stopped using it. Now that I’m in my internship I’ve decided to refresh my skills. There were a few blog entires on how to keep your skills fresh and I took them to heart. I’d hate to think that I did all that work for nothing.

Step one was to spend money. Again. I bought the Reader’s Greek New Testament and Kubo’s Reader’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament. I also dusted off the Greek flash cards and started working on my vocabulary. There is a haunting feeling of the pain and suffering I endured gaining my basic skills but it hasn’t been too bad. I started reading Colossians in Greek. Slowly. I’m trying to master that vocab and that’s where the Reader’s NT comes in very handy. For words that are less frequent in the NT there are footnotes with a gloss. That really helps. At the beginning of each book is a vocabulary list of common words in that particular book. It would help to review that list before digging in.

One of the handicaps I had in both Greek and Hebrew was that I got a lousy English education in high school. While I was slugging through mastering new languages, I was also trying to figure out my own. One of the books we were assigned in Hebrew taught Hebrew syntax by introducing the English form first. Wish I’d had that in Greek.

Now that I (loosely) have the framework for English syntax in my brain, I’m going back to my Greek grammar and starting it all over again. Words that seemed foreign (such as ‘the subject of the verb’ and ‘the direct and indirect object’) are now making sense. So when they speak of the nominative case as the subject, I have a category to place that in instead of trying to figure out what ‘the subject of the verb’ means.

So if anyone is interested in going to seminary and is wondering how to prepare, I have two suggestions. First, take a speed reading course. You’ll have so much reading to do you won’t be able to keep up. Speed reading will help. Second, brush up on your English grammar. You can’t believe how helpful that will be when it comes to learning other languages.

Once you start studying Greek and Hebrew, I have a few suggestions on memorizing vocabulary. I discovered these too late to really help. First, write your own vocabulary cards. I found some 3×5 cards at Office Max Depot Shack or something that have holes already punched in the top two corners. Cut the cards in half and they’re a perfect size. By writing your own, you get a head start on memorizing them. Learning is a mental process and the more mental activities you use in the learning process, the better chance you have of getting it. If you can get an audio recording to go with them, even better. But don’t rely on just that. You need the cards. Next, once you have your stack of cards for the week review them in groups of five cards or so. If you have a stack of 20 cards and walk through the entire deck you won’t see the cards you’re having a hard time with as often as you need to. Five is a good number for me. Finally, I found that I could memorize them easier when I was walking. The rhythm seemed to get my brain moving in an orderly fashion and facilitated memorization. A friend who is an aeronautical engineer learned how to juggle in college and that helped him. There is a connection between body and mind, use it.

One last tip. My beginning Greek professor had us develop a cheatsheet of all the Greek verbs. She told us to do it however it would work best for us. I’m glad I did. I lost the original file but I use that sheet today as I’m trying to parse the verbs. If you buy one it may not be arranged the best way for you. Also, in building it, you’ll see what you don’t understand so well. I’m going to try to build one for the pronouns and for the forms of the “to be” verbs as well.

If you look to the right you’ll see a list of the books I’m currently reading. Yes, I do keep that current. Yesterday I added “One Size Doesn’t Fit All” by Gary McIntosh. It was recommended to me by a few people and now I get to read it for a class I’m taking. It is a quick read and informative. It is about different church sizes. Small churches are 200 and under, medium churches are 200 to 400 and large churches are 400+. People quibble over those numbers but they seem to work. Not surprisingly, most churches, like 80% are small. That isn’t arrived at by counting the number of congregations of 200 or less but by counting how many people worship in churches of 200 or less. Most people worship in small churches. Interesting isn’t it? Large and mega churches get the press but they are very rare.

So I’ve been thinking about why that is. McIntosh lists some characteristics of smaller churches that seem to help. They are more relational than medium and large churches. Everyone knows everyone. They may not all be bestest buddies but they all know each other. Those kinds of places feel more comfortable.

Then I got to something in McIntosh that I’ve been saying about bigger churches even before I knew much about bigger churches. The groups that make up bigger churches are essentially congregations within congregations. Bigger churches are not larger groups of people as much as they are larger groups of smaller groups. If you have a larger church you have to have small groups for people to plug in to or they get lost and overlooked.

Larger churches around the world have followed this same Less Is More Principle by emulating small churches. As they have grown larger, they have added more small groups within which people may receive the same level of care once thought only possible in the smaller church. – Gary McIntosh, One Size Doesn’t Fit All, 161Something that I wondered about when thinking of church size was growth. You can play games to grow your church and compromise an awful lot of important things. Most TV evangelists have huge churches and they couldn’t compromise more if they had to. But not all big churches have compromised. Some like Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle or John Piper’s Bethlehem Baptist are in the range of about 3,000 and they in no way compromised. They have great preachers who draw the crowds. But what if God doesn’t give your church a great outreach like that and you still grow?

What about Acts 2 when 3,000 were added? Was that, then, just one big church with no small groups? Well, consider this. At that time church leadership was the Apostles. There were 12 Apostles and there were around 3,000 people and 3,000 ÷ 12 = 250. So if the church as it was at that time was divided amongst the Apostles for care, then the group sizes would have been roughly the size of the majority of churches today.

In order to effectively care for people in a church, there has to be a small congregation at some point. Medium and large churches know this and implement them. As I consider church size and what churches need to be like as they move beyond the smaller church size it seems to me that the heart of the small church cannot be abandoned. The church itself may restructure but what the people are cannot. I’m not saying that McIntosh or medium or large churches say otherwise; more than that, I’m reminding myself that what I love about a small church a) is normal, b) doesn’t have to be abandoned in a bigger church and c) can be found in medium and larger churches. It seems to be who we are as people. When Jesus was about to feed the 5,000 he had his disciple have them sit in groups of about 50. People like small groups it seems!

I haven’t commented on politics in a bit and with the primaries looming and debates already starting, I thought I’d pipe in.

None of the candidates are appealing to me so far. Clinton and Obama are too liberal. Edwards is a guy I’d like to like but he needs to drop the timetable for pulling out of Iraq and keep talking about what happens after. None of the Republicans are very promising. McCain is a guy I want to like too. From him I’d like to hear more about what comes next in Iraq and less about troop build up. The rest are meah.

So here’s the issue round up for me:

Iraq: We need a better plan to bring that thing to closure. The best thing President Bush can do for it for the next President would to graciously be the fall guy. Let the next President say publicly that Bush messed it up and he wants to fix it. By Bush being the fall guy, other countries could step in to help and still save face. In politics, that’s more important than it sounds. Simply pulling our troops out is no answer. It plays well at home but I doubt that anyone who is elected will actually be able to do that once in office. Drop the pretense. Let’s get some real answers on this.

Health Care: Ugh. The pharmaceutical companies  pretty much own the politicians on this it seems. Clinton and Obama promise health care for all but we know what that will mean: higher prices for all. And the prices for heath care are already too high. Part of the problem is the way new drugs are introduced. Not so much based on need but based on economics. A new treatment for high blood pressure (do we need another?) is introduced to be competitive and to generate a profit. If it actually does something for the patient, that’s great too. We need to get a handle on prescription meds. It is a business more than anything else. There are good, honest chemists and doctors working on them but in the end the drug has to be profitable or it doesn’t get introduced. The other part of the problem is that care providers get sued too easily. Look, they’re human and they make mistakes. They’re so afraid of getting sued now that they have to order tests that are probably not warranted but they have to cover themselves. Let’s take the pressure off these folks and get some sanity in the medical malpractice laws. Finally, not every problem detected needs to be treated necessarily. There are tales of men dying of old age who, upon autopsy, are discovered to have had colon cancer for a while. Screening makes sense but if it is found during screening does it need an operation or does it just need to be watched? Again, more sanity please.

 The Economy, Stupid: Or the stupid economy. The housing market is slumping and I’m convinced that it isn’t done yet. The full effects of the sub prime lending and McMansions have not fully come home to roost yet. No politician can admit that or it may trigger a bigger slump, but I’d like to see a President who is ready for an economic slump and can address it. If they ignore it and wait till it happens it will be too late. No one is mentioning the economy yet and I’m sure they are not considering it. Wake up gang!

Trade Deficit: We are buying too much from China and they’re buying too little from us. The trade deficit is bigger than it should be. Also, China’s economy is shakier than they admit and if it collapses that deficit will get even bigger. I would like to see some thought go in to how we trade with them.

Immigration Reform: We need it. A functional guest worker program is necessary for Texas and California. If we will allow and favor people who come and work and go home legally we’ll be in better shape. Also, the mass of people here illegally needs to be addressed beyond “send them all home.” I think Bush is right, we need to create a path to citizenship for these folks. They need to become a legal, tax paying part of our economy rather than the current illegal, under-the-table part they are. It won’t make all the illegal immigrants go away but it will begin to bring the problem under control.

Jobs: We send too many low skilled jobs away.  Take a look a many of our urban centers. There is joblessness and no hope. If we could move some of the low skilled jobs into these depressed areas it won’t solve all the problems but it will provide many people a path out of the poverty. Yes, the work will face the resistance of the gangs and skepticism of the people. Yes, there will be people who won’t work if you lay a great job in their lap. But those problems a) aren’t as big as they seem and b) are not insurmountable. Let’s do something that stems the flow of jobs overseas and to illegal immigrants and start funneling jobs to our poor. That requires risky investments in depressed sections of major cities. That isn’t going to happen by business alone. Government, government with guts, needs to help make that happen. It takes leadership and that is something I’ve not seen in the White House since Reagan.

Gay Rights: Wow, here’s a powder keg. Homosexuals cannot marry. That defies the very meaning of the word. At the same time, they should not be discriminated against simply because of their behavior. I oppose the marriage amendment to the Constitution for two reasons. First, that is not a defining principle of our Union and therefore doesn’t belong in the Constitution. Second, I am surprised that conservatives are pressing for it. It clearly oversteps the distinction between the Federal government and the States. That is an issue for the States to decide, not the Federal government. A Presidential candidate I could vote for would articulate that. He or she would be opposed to gay marriage and at the same time would oppose a Constitutional amendment banning it. He or she should instead encourage the States to develop better domestic partner laws and benefits. He or she should also strongly dissuade any State from legalizing gay marriage as it puts the rest of the Union in a bid as far as how to handle ‘marriages’ from that State.

Global Warming: I know many Conservatives want to say that it isn’t happening or that it isn’t our fault, but we have to face the music. It is happening and many, many scientists say that we’re at least contributing to it. We can’t put our fingers in our ears and act like it isn’t real. We need to take some real steps to deal with it. We need a moon-shot like program to promote alternative energies. The oil companies should be brought in and given an opportunity to help in this effort since they are the ones who will be most directly impacted by it. Government needs to push to get us to reduce our reliance on oil and coal. We have to cut down how much we burn, by a lot. This requires visionary leadership and there seems to be a dearth of that going around these days.

Well, those are the big ones anyway. My problem is that no one is talking the way I want to hear them talk about these issues.

On a Sabbath,while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?” And Jesus answered them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?” And he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.” – Luke 6:1-5

This passage puzzled me for a long time. Questions arose every time I read it. Wasn’t David wrong for eating that bread? Is Jesus condoning David’s blantant violation of tabernacle law? Why would Jesus appeal to David eating the bread of the Presence when defending himself against accusations of Sabbath breaking?

I haven’t looked in any commentaries on this yet, my collection of the three volume Word commentary on Luke only includes the last two volumes so far. Besides, I like to work on it myself for a while before going to the commentaries. So here’s what I’ve wrestled with so far.

Jesus refers to the episode in 1Sa 21:1-6 where David has fled empty-handed from Saul and is now looking for food and weapons. He goes to the tabernacle which was at Nob and speaks to Ahimelech the priest, begging for food. Ahimelech says that they only food available is the show bread, the bread that is baked and placed on the tables in the holy place of the tabernacle. That bread is only supposed to be eaten by the priests when it is replaced weekly (Lev 24:5-9). He appears to indicate that it is only available to them if they’re clean; in this case if they’ve abstained from sex. Where did that come from?

In the end, David claims that they have and gets the bread as well as Goliath’s sword and he leaves. ¹There is no mentioned in this story that David was traveling with companions, it appears that he was traveling alone. But Jesus indicates that he had young men with him. There is nothing in 1Sa 20 and 21 to indicate that he was entirely alone. The author only speaks of David but he could have had men with him who do not get mentioned because the author doesn’t want to divert our attention from David at this point. That is to say, the author never explicitly says that David traveled alone. Jesus wasn’t wrong. But what just happened? Did David and Ahimelech do something wrong here? By a strict interpretation of the Law, yes they did. What should give us pause on that is that this is never pointed to as one of David’s sins. There is no divine condemnation on the act and therefore we should be careful not to judge it ourselves. Of course that doesn’t mean that every action that is wrong in the Bible must have divine judgment to tell us it is wrong, but when it applies to one of whom it is said “he is a man after my own hear” and then Jesus holds up the episode as an example, well I think it should slow us down in rushing to judgment.

Alright Tim, then what did happen? ²I’m tempted to steal from Luther At The Movies and yell “SILENCE, IMAGINARY INTERLOCUTOR!” but that’s Martin Luther’s gig so I’ll let him have it. We have to include Jesus’ understanding of the text to get to the meaning. And in this case, we need to specifically include Jesus’ teaching on the Law to get to the point. According to Jesus, the entire Law hangs on two commandments, love God and love man (Matt 22:40). Obedience to the Law ³Notice that I capitalized ‘Law’. I did that to show that it has a specific reference to the Mosaic Law and not God’s moral law that is written on humanity’s heart. It is never okay to commit adultery or to murder or to worship a false god. was never intended to be a ridged thing like the Pharisees tried to make it. In the next story in Luke (6:6-11), the Pharisees attack Jesus for healing on the Sabbath and he asks “is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” The Law said that no work was to be done on the Sabbath but it did allow for certain things. Rituals were performed on the Sabbath so the priests worked. If your ox fell in a hole on the Sabbath you could pull it out. Theologians call these acts of necessity and acts of mercy that are permissible on the Sabbath. So it would be a mistake to take as absolute the statement that no work shall be done on the Sabbath and make it absolute. The example of the Law should lead us to that conclusion.

The way we make the decision on whether a thing is permitted or not when it appears to violate the Law requires wisdom and that is the case with the David story that Jesus points to.  To get to the heart of the issue, we need to first understand what it means to be holy. The bread that David and his men ate was holy. By ‘holy’ it meant that it was set aside for God’s purposes. It wasn’t to be treated like other things, God had a purpose in it. Similarly, God had a purpose in David, David was holy. Since these things were holy God gets to decide how they were used. Both David and the show bread were used according to God’s purposes. David was God’s man and would ascend to the throne of Israel. God could have provided food for David in any number of ways as he traveled to Nob but he didn’t. He didn’t provide for David till David arrived at the tabernacle and asked for whatever they had on hand. Even here God could have provided for David in a way that would involve the tabernacle. Ahimelech could have had a bountiful harvest. But God used the show bread to keep his king alive. God showed that he was Lord of the Tabernacle and Lord of the Kingdom in doing this.

So when we consider how Jesus pointed to this episode and then announced that he was Lord of the Sabbath, he is doing much more than an “in your face” with David’s supposed violation. He is telling the Pharisees that since the Sabbath is holy and these men are holy, He can decide how they are used for his purposes. He is the Lord of the Sabbath after all. The Sabbath and his disciples were holy unto him. Jesus told the Pharisees that he was God.