Exodus 20:8-11 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.… I. The first word of the Fourth Commandment reminds us that THE SABBATH DAY WAS ALREADY ESTABLISHED among the Israelites when the law was delivered on Sinai. That law created nothing. It preserved and enforced what God had already taught His people to observe by another method than that of formal decrees. II. IN THIS COMMANDMENT WORK IS ENJOINED, JUST AS MUCH AS REST IS ENJOINED. Man's sin has turned work into a curse. God has redeemed and restored work into a blessing by uniting it again to the rest with which, in His Divine original order, it was associated. III. GOD RESTS; THEREFORE HE WOULD HAVE MAN REST. God works; therefore He would have man work. Man cannot rest truly unless he remembers his relation to God, who rests. IV. It is not wonderful that the Jews after the Captivity, as they had been schooled by a long DISCIPLINE INTO AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE MEANING OF THE SECOND COMMANDMENT, SO HAD LEARNT ALSO TO APPRECIATE IN SOME DEGREE THE WORTH OF THE FOURTH. Nehemiah speaks frequently and with great emphasis of the Sabbath as a gift of God which their fathers had lightly esteemed, and which the new generation was bound most fondly to cherish. His words and acts were abused by the Jews who lived between his age and that of our Lord's nativity, and when Christ came, the Sabbath itself, all its human graciousness, all its Divine reasonableness, were becoming each day more obscured. V. JESUS, AS THE MEDIATOR, DECLARED HIMSELF TO BE THE LORD OF THE SABBATH, AND PROVED HIMSELF TO BE SO BY TURNING WHAT THE JEWS MADE A CURSE INTO A BLESSING. He asserted the true glory of the Sabbath Day in asserting the mystery of His own relation to God and to His creatures. (F. D. Maurice, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. |
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