Some denominations observe the sabbath as merely a ritual with no real meaning other than to observe a sabbath religiously.
Oh how boring!
There truly is deep meaning in the Sabbath of God for those of us who desire to walk with God.
You are going to understand the Sabbath of God and how it shows us today the wisdom of God through His Words to us.
As a conclusion I have added Chuck Girad's Holy Spirit inspired song "Lay Your Burden Down."
It is my prayerful desire that you would study this lesson and then take some time to sit back and listen to this anointed man of God lead you into the presence chamber of God without your burdens, because you have laid them down; free to worship our Lord in Sabbath observance.
***
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
2 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
Genesis 1:26-2:4
In the book of Genesis, there are basically two accounts of creation.
Throughout the first and second chapters, the word yowm is used for "day."
On the sixth day, God made man and created him in His own image.
That was a very important event.
He said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our Likeness."
Notice that God did not say, "In My image," but He said, "Let Us make man in Our image, " showing that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit were all involved in the creation of man.
There are, of course, many names of God which are plural and therefore use plural pronouns, as in this case.
Elohim is a name which must be used with a plural verb.
How much time was involved in creation, we do not know.
If we trace the word yowm in a concordance, we find that many times it does not refer to a twenty-four-hour period, but to a longer span of time.
In the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and other prophets, the word yown is used for the day of the Lord, referring to a duration of time in which certain things are accomplished.
We know that the day of the Lord is not a twenty-four-hour period.
When the Word says that God made the heavens and the earth in six days, it does not necessarily mean that this was within the span of a week as we know it.
Yown could be an undetermined length of time.
I believe that there were six periods of time in which creation came forth.
Strangely enough, archeology seems to indicate that life developed upon this planet in the same order as that described in the story of creation in the Bible.
You may be wondering if the earth is millions of years old.
Perhaps it is.
The Bible does not say when the world was created, but by certain scientific measurements of the radioactive carbon present, scientists are now able to determine the approximate age of the earth.
This probably has been one of the great breakthroughs of science in recent years- the ability to determine the age of things by the diminishing amount of activity in the element of carbon which is present in almost all things.
We may not be scientist, but very scientifically we do believe in creation.
Although evolution is a theory which eliminates God, it is possible that God could have used evolution as a process in His creation.
At any time that He chose t bring one species out of another, He could have done it.
The only problem with this idea is that God put a limitation upon everything He made.
He established a law that everything would bring forth after its own kind.
This puts a cloud over the possibility that He used some evolutionary process in creation.
It is possible to develop creatures within a certain species and even cross them, but it is very difficult for them to reproduce themselves.
A horse crossed with an ass will produce a mule, but a mule cannot reproduce.
On the seventh day, the seventh period, God rested ( Genesis 2:3 ) .
Creation took place in six ages and then when everything was in motion, God entered into an age of rest.
Laws had already been established and life was proceeding.
The Sabbath in the Old Testament was based upon the fact that God rested on the seventh day after completing the creation.
In the Old Testament, the people looked back to the completion of what God had done in creation.
Today many Christians are keeping the Sabbath on an entirely different basis.
They are keeping the Sabbath in faith of what God is yet to accomplish and complete.
Man was created in the sixth day.
We are now living in the sixth day when the sons of God are being created.
The seventh day of the Kingdom is about to come.
Believers in Christ are not keeping the historical Sabbath; they are keeping the future Sabbath which relates to the things that God is going to bring forth upon the earth.
And God spoke all these words:
Exodus 20:1-4
This is the reason that not many sculptors and painters came from the Hebrew nation.
Other civilizations developed beautiful sculpture, but the Jews did not, because God had warned them from the beginning not to make any likeness whatsoever.
We should not make any likenesses or pictures of Jesus.
In the first place, we do not know what Jesus looked like; second, we are to visualize Him as He is in the spirit, as dwelling in a glory that no man can approach.
Though we have known Him after the flesh, yet know we Him so no longer ( II Corinthians 5:16 ) .
We are to know Him after the Spirit.
We are to remember Him as He was in His days of humanity, for He now dwells in glory at the right hand of the Father and He should be visualized like that.
"You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the forth generations of those who hate Me, but showing loving-kindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy."
Now note:
"Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you.
For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy."
Exodus 20:5-11
The fact that God made the sabbath holy gives the commandment of the sabbath a moral basis.
The legalistic way of keeping the Sabbath disappeared when Christ abrogated the Law.
Sacrifices and other rituals came to an end with Christ, for He was the fulfillment of all of them.
He fulfilled all the law.
Every moral obligation of it was fulfilled, and He extends that righteousness to us.
A person who really loves Christ should be open for Him to be his Sabbath rest.
We should enter into the Kingdom Sabbath which Christ opened p for us.
Keeping the Sabbath day is just as binding to believers now, in this day when the Kingdom is coming forth, as it was in the Old Testament.
Some of the most creative, blessed times many believers know are in Saturday morning services.
The flow of revelation teaching on the Sabbath often exceeds that which comes on Sunday.
This does not mean that we should downgrade Sunday.
We should continue to worship on Sunday, keeping it not as the first day of the week, but as an eight day, the day of life and creation that comes forth even as Christ came forth after the Sabbath in resurrection life.
"You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
Exodus 20:13-17.
The Sabbath has a special spiritual significance.
The Sabbath that was kept in the Old Testament had a historical significance of the great Sabbath rest that followed the completion of all creation.
From the chronologies after the fall of man we find that mankind was thrown into labor.
There were approximately four thousand years in the Old Testament history, and another two thousand years have passed since the birth of Christ, so that we are now close to the end of six thousand years.
We are in the sixth great period of change, often identified as dispensations.
Many of the early Church fathers believed this very implicitly.
In the writings of the Ante-Nicene fathers, Barnabas related that six thousand years were to pass and then the Kingdom of God would come forth upon the earth.
We are looking forward to the coming of the seventh thousand year period since the fall of man - a time in which God will accomplish the various stages of redemption and open up different realms just as He did in the creation of the physical world in ages past.
The sixteen chapter of Exodus contains the story of the manna.
It may seem unrelated to the Sabbath, but if we read carefully, we will find that it is not, for it reveals a great symbolic truth.
Like many other happenings in the book of Moses, the manna has deep, prophetic significance.
When the layer of dew evaporated, behold, on the surface of the wilderness there was a fine flake-like thing, fine as hoarfrost on the ground.
When the sons of Israel saw it, they said to one another, "What is it?"
The margin gives the Hebrew word: man hu.
They did not know what it was, so they called it man hu, or manna.
For they did not know what it was.
And Moses said to them, "It is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.
This is what the Lord commanded 'Gather of it every man as much as he should eat; you shall take an omer apiece' (an omer is approximately one~tenth of a bushel ) 'according to the number of persons each of you has in his tent.'
"And the sons of Israel did so, and some gathered much and some little.
When they measured it with an omer, he who had gathered much had no excess, and he who had gathered little had no lack; every man gathered as much as he could eat.
And Moses said to them, " Let no man leave any of it until the morning."
But they did not listen to Moses, and some left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and became foul; and Moses was angry with them.
And they gathered it morning by morning, every man as he should eat; but when the sun grew hot, it would melt.
Now it came about on the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for each one.
When all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, then he said to them, "This is what the Lord meant: Tomorrow is a sabbath observance, a holy sabbath to the Lord.
Bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over put aside to be kept until morning."
So they put it aside till morning, as Moses had ordered, and it did not become foul, nor was there any worm in it.
And Moses said, "Eat it today, for today is a sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field.
Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, the sabbath, there will be none."
And it came about on the seventh day that some of the people went out to gather, but they found none.
Then the Lord said to Moses, "How long do you refuse to keep My commandments and My instructions?
See, the Lord has given you the sabbath, therefore He gives you bread foe two days on the sixth day.
Remain every man in his place; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day."
So the people rested on the seventh day.
Exodus 16:14-30
We must understand the significance of this.
We are in the sixth day, the day of the double portion.
The double portion will bring an adequate supply for the whole seventh Sabbath that is approaching.
The Kingdom will be rich in what God is giving.
In God's remnant of this day, there is a flow of revelation right now which exceeds anything that has ever come in the entire history of God's dealings with man.
It is important that you store up as much of this teaching as you can absorb, for there will be days when you will not have an opportunity to receive such teaching.
Some people love the good old days, but if they are trying to live on yesterday's manna, they will have worms n their manna; it will become foul.
In each dispensation there has been a progressive unfolding of truth and life.
Everything that has come was alive only for the day in which it came.
But men could not rest on that day; they had to keep seeking the word that was to come in the next period and the next.
If you read some of the writings of the early fathers, you will realize that they had a portion, but we could not survive on what they had.
It was real for their day because it was manna for that day.
If we tried to quote and preach the truths of the reformers or the early Church fathers, we would find ourselves on a very unhealthy diet, and we would become spiritually sick.
The seventh day is different.
The manna that was gathered on the sixth day did not spoil on the seventh.
And the bowl of manna that was placed in the ark of the covenant, where the presence of the Lord was manifested, was kept there for generations.
Manna that normally would have spoiled within a day became imperishable.
The Israelites carried it through the wilderness and took it wherever they went.
That bowlful of manna was alive!
In Revelation 2:17, God said, "To him that overcometh ( in the Church age ) I will give to eat of the hidden manna"- manna that was hidden away in the very presence of the Lord.
The great Sabbath rest is coming.
The day of the double portion is upon us.
The word that you hear today will not be filled with worms tomorrow.
It will not be foul and out-of-date.
Every word that has come since the end-time move of God began is just as alive to us now as the day in which it came, if not more so.
The Bible is coming alive, more now than in the past.
read the Old Bible commentaries on some chapter and than compare them with the recent expositions of the same chapter.
You will wonder where the life came from.
We have not seen it before.
It is today's manna- the manna that is coming in the sixth day.
It is preparing us to walk with God in all of the days of the Kingdom ahead of us.
Do not draw back.
Open your heart to keep the Sabbath, not as they did in the Old Testament when they were commemorating creation.
We will keep it by commemorating the new creation, the sons of God who will loose all creation from futility and bring forth the will of God as His Kingdom is being established.
We will enter His courts with praise and thanksgiving ( Psalm 100:4 ) .
We will come to the house of God to worship Him because that which He has begun, He will perform to a point of completion ( Philippians 1:6 ) .
He said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our Likeness."
Notice that God did not say, "In My image," but He said, "Let Us make man in Our image, " showing that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit were all involved in the creation of man.
There are, of course, many names of God which are plural and therefore use plural pronouns, as in this case.
Elohim is a name which must be used with a plural verb.
How much time was involved in creation, we do not know.
If we trace the word yowm in a concordance, we find that many times it does not refer to a twenty-four-hour period, but to a longer span of time.
In the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and other prophets, the word yown is used for the day of the Lord, referring to a duration of time in which certain things are accomplished.
We know that the day of the Lord is not a twenty-four-hour period.
When the Word says that God made the heavens and the earth in six days, it does not necessarily mean that this was within the span of a week as we know it.
Yown could be an undetermined length of time.
I believe that there were six periods of time in which creation came forth.
Strangely enough, archeology seems to indicate that life developed upon this planet in the same order as that described in the story of creation in the Bible.
You may be wondering if the earth is millions of years old.
Perhaps it is.
The Bible does not say when the world was created, but by certain scientific measurements of the radioactive carbon present, scientists are now able to determine the approximate age of the earth.
This probably has been one of the great breakthroughs of science in recent years- the ability to determine the age of things by the diminishing amount of activity in the element of carbon which is present in almost all things.
We may not be scientist, but very scientifically we do believe in creation.
Although evolution is a theory which eliminates God, it is possible that God could have used evolution as a process in His creation.
At any time that He chose t bring one species out of another, He could have done it.
The only problem with this idea is that God put a limitation upon everything He made.
He established a law that everything would bring forth after its own kind.
This puts a cloud over the possibility that He used some evolutionary process in creation.
It is possible to develop creatures within a certain species and even cross them, but it is very difficult for them to reproduce themselves.
A horse crossed with an ass will produce a mule, but a mule cannot reproduce.
On the seventh day, the seventh period, God rested ( Genesis 2:3 ) .
Creation took place in six ages and then when everything was in motion, God entered into an age of rest.
Laws had already been established and life was proceeding.
The Sabbath in the Old Testament was based upon the fact that God rested on the seventh day after completing the creation.
In the Old Testament, the people looked back to the completion of what God had done in creation.
Today many Christians are keeping the Sabbath on an entirely different basis.
They are keeping the Sabbath in faith of what God is yet to accomplish and complete.
Man was created in the sixth day.
We are now living in the sixth day when the sons of God are being created.
The seventh day of the Kingdom is about to come.
Believers in Christ are not keeping the historical Sabbath; they are keeping the future Sabbath which relates to the things that God is going to bring forth upon the earth.
And God spoke all these words:
2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
3 “You shall have no other gods before[a] me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.
This is the reason that not many sculptors and painters came from the Hebrew nation.
Other civilizations developed beautiful sculpture, but the Jews did not, because God had warned them from the beginning not to make any likeness whatsoever.
We should not make any likenesses or pictures of Jesus.
In the first place, we do not know what Jesus looked like; second, we are to visualize Him as He is in the spirit, as dwelling in a glory that no man can approach.
Though we have known Him after the flesh, yet know we Him so no longer ( II Corinthians 5:16 ) .
We are to know Him after the Spirit.
We are to remember Him as He was in His days of humanity, for He now dwells in glory at the right hand of the Father and He should be visualized like that.
"You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the forth generations of those who hate Me, but showing loving-kindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy."
Now note:
"Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you.
For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy."
Exodus 20:5-11
The fact that God made the sabbath holy gives the commandment of the sabbath a moral basis.
The legalistic way of keeping the Sabbath disappeared when Christ abrogated the Law.
Sacrifices and other rituals came to an end with Christ, for He was the fulfillment of all of them.
He fulfilled all the law.
Every moral obligation of it was fulfilled, and He extends that righteousness to us.
A person who really loves Christ should be open for Him to be his Sabbath rest.
We should enter into the Kingdom Sabbath which Christ opened p for us.
Keeping the Sabbath day is just as binding to believers now, in this day when the Kingdom is coming forth, as it was in the Old Testament.
Some of the most creative, blessed times many believers know are in Saturday morning services.
The flow of revelation teaching on the Sabbath often exceeds that which comes on Sunday.
This does not mean that we should downgrade Sunday.
We should continue to worship on Sunday, keeping it not as the first day of the week, but as an eight day, the day of life and creation that comes forth even as Christ came forth after the Sabbath in resurrection life.
"You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
Exodus 20:13-17.
The Sabbath has a special spiritual significance.
The Sabbath that was kept in the Old Testament had a historical significance of the great Sabbath rest that followed the completion of all creation.
From the chronologies after the fall of man we find that mankind was thrown into labor.
There were approximately four thousand years in the Old Testament history, and another two thousand years have passed since the birth of Christ, so that we are now close to the end of six thousand years.
We are in the sixth great period of change, often identified as dispensations.
Many of the early Church fathers believed this very implicitly.
In the writings of the Ante-Nicene fathers, Barnabas related that six thousand years were to pass and then the Kingdom of God would come forth upon the earth.
We are looking forward to the coming of the seventh thousand year period since the fall of man - a time in which God will accomplish the various stages of redemption and open up different realms just as He did in the creation of the physical world in ages past.
The sixteen chapter of Exodus contains the story of the manna.
It may seem unrelated to the Sabbath, but if we read carefully, we will find that it is not, for it reveals a great symbolic truth.
Like many other happenings in the book of Moses, the manna has deep, prophetic significance.
When the layer of dew evaporated, behold, on the surface of the wilderness there was a fine flake-like thing, fine as hoarfrost on the ground.
When the sons of Israel saw it, they said to one another, "What is it?"
The margin gives the Hebrew word: man hu.
They did not know what it was, so they called it man hu, or manna.
For they did not know what it was.
And Moses said to them, "It is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.
This is what the Lord commanded 'Gather of it every man as much as he should eat; you shall take an omer apiece' (an omer is approximately one~tenth of a bushel ) 'according to the number of persons each of you has in his tent.'
"And the sons of Israel did so, and some gathered much and some little.
When they measured it with an omer, he who had gathered much had no excess, and he who had gathered little had no lack; every man gathered as much as he could eat.
And Moses said to them, " Let no man leave any of it until the morning."
But they did not listen to Moses, and some left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and became foul; and Moses was angry with them.
And they gathered it morning by morning, every man as he should eat; but when the sun grew hot, it would melt.
Now it came about on the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for each one.
When all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, then he said to them, "This is what the Lord meant: Tomorrow is a sabbath observance, a holy sabbath to the Lord.
Bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over put aside to be kept until morning."
So they put it aside till morning, as Moses had ordered, and it did not become foul, nor was there any worm in it.
And Moses said, "Eat it today, for today is a sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field.
Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, the sabbath, there will be none."
And it came about on the seventh day that some of the people went out to gather, but they found none.
Then the Lord said to Moses, "How long do you refuse to keep My commandments and My instructions?
See, the Lord has given you the sabbath, therefore He gives you bread foe two days on the sixth day.
Remain every man in his place; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day."
So the people rested on the seventh day.
Exodus 16:14-30
We must understand the significance of this.
We are in the sixth day, the day of the double portion.
The double portion will bring an adequate supply for the whole seventh Sabbath that is approaching.
The Kingdom will be rich in what God is giving.
In God's remnant of this day, there is a flow of revelation right now which exceeds anything that has ever come in the entire history of God's dealings with man.
It is important that you store up as much of this teaching as you can absorb, for there will be days when you will not have an opportunity to receive such teaching.
Some people love the good old days, but if they are trying to live on yesterday's manna, they will have worms n their manna; it will become foul.
In each dispensation there has been a progressive unfolding of truth and life.
Everything that has come was alive only for the day in which it came.
But men could not rest on that day; they had to keep seeking the word that was to come in the next period and the next.
If you read some of the writings of the early fathers, you will realize that they had a portion, but we could not survive on what they had.
It was real for their day because it was manna for that day.
If we tried to quote and preach the truths of the reformers or the early Church fathers, we would find ourselves on a very unhealthy diet, and we would become spiritually sick.
The seventh day is different.
The manna that was gathered on the sixth day did not spoil on the seventh.
And the bowl of manna that was placed in the ark of the covenant, where the presence of the Lord was manifested, was kept there for generations.
Manna that normally would have spoiled within a day became imperishable.
The Israelites carried it through the wilderness and took it wherever they went.
That bowlful of manna was alive!
In Revelation 2:17, God said, "To him that overcometh ( in the Church age ) I will give to eat of the hidden manna"- manna that was hidden away in the very presence of the Lord.
The great Sabbath rest is coming.
The day of the double portion is upon us.
The word that you hear today will not be filled with worms tomorrow.
It will not be foul and out-of-date.
Every word that has come since the end-time move of God began is just as alive to us now as the day in which it came, if not more so.
The Bible is coming alive, more now than in the past.
read the Old Bible commentaries on some chapter and than compare them with the recent expositions of the same chapter.
You will wonder where the life came from.
We have not seen it before.
It is today's manna- the manna that is coming in the sixth day.
It is preparing us to walk with God in all of the days of the Kingdom ahead of us.
Do not draw back.
Open your heart to keep the Sabbath, not as they did in the Old Testament when they were commemorating creation.
We will keep it by commemorating the new creation, the sons of God who will loose all creation from futility and bring forth the will of God as His Kingdom is being established.
We will enter His courts with praise and thanksgiving ( Psalm 100:4 ) .
We will come to the house of God to worship Him because that which He has begun, He will perform to a point of completion ( Philippians 1:6 ) .
Do Not Forget the Lord
Be careful to follow every command I am giving you today, so that you may live and increase and may enter and possess the land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors.
Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.
He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.Deuteronomy 8:1-3.
God will teach you as you wander and as you are tested.
The manna then was a type of the living word today.
This is illustrated in John 6.
Jesus said, "Your fathers ate manna, but they perished.
But you will eat this bread that I give you, for My words are spirit and they are life and they shall never perish."
God is bringing forth a living manna today which will never spoil.
It will be a double portion, an adequate word that will govern the world for at least the next thousand years.
I am not persuaded that the Kingdom will embrace only one thousand years.
The book of Revelation is symbolical when it speaks about ruling and reigning for a thousand years ( Revelation 20:4 ) .
It could possibly be seventy thousand years, as well as a thousand.
The word "day," as used in the Word, is not always a determined period of twenty-four hours.
This seventh thousand-year period could be extended.
It is the seventh day.
For six days the Israelites marched around Jericho, and on the seventh day they went around seven times.
This indicates that the seventh day could have embraced a longer period of time than each of the other six days.
"Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you."
Deuteronomy 8:4-5.
God leads you, but as you wander through the wilderness, He has to teach you that you are not going to make it into the Kingdom by your own devices.
This is the truth of the Sabbath.
You will not live by bread alone.
You will not live by deliverance's alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
Gods teaching that it is neither human effort nor organization that is bringing forth maturity in His people; it is the living word which comes to their hearts.
And it is coming in a double portion.
This is the key.
The clothes will not wear out; the shoes will not wear out.
You can enter into a place of immunity, a place of deliverance, a place where you can possess all that God has for you, because in this sixth day He is giving a double portion of the living word; and it is creative.
As you receive a double portion of the word, you must walk in the fullness of it.
"The works that I do," Jesus said, "ye will do also, and greater works shall ye do' ( John 14:12 ) .
We must enter into this double portion.
Ask the Lord to give you a new vision of the Sabbath, to make it live and burn in your heart so that you will want to come to the house of Gd on the Sabbath day.
Let God lay upon your heart the burden of the Sabbath day.
Let God lay upon your heart the burden of the Sabbath- not a dead, legalistic bondage to a Sabbath observance, but of the Sabbath which is to come.
Isaiah 66:23 tells us that from one new moon to another, from one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come up to worship the Lord.
It will be a different kind of Sabbath than we have known.
As a concluding Scripture we will read Exodus 31:12-18.
And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "But as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, 'You shall surely observe My sabbaths; for this is a sign," It was merely a ritual; it was a sign.
It had a symbolical meaning, and that is what we are entering into- the fulfillment of the symbolical meaning for which they kept the Sabbath.
The Passover, too, has a symbolical meaning for us.
Christ our Passover was crucified for us.
We no longer kill a Passover lamb;we come humbly and appropriate Christ as our Passover Lamb.
The day of fulfillment through rituals, stringent laws, and punishment is passed.
The Sabbath as a sign can now be spiritually fulfilled in our lives.
We should love it even more now than they did in the Old Testament.
As the Scripture says, "Call the Sabbath a delight" ( Isaiah 58:13 ) .
Come and worship the Lord.
"For this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.
Therefore you are to observe the sabbath, for it is holy to you.
Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; fr whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among the people."
There is no other way but the way of grace.
You cannot mix the grace of God with the old legalism and the works of the flesh.
You must cease to rely upon the human element, the human labor, and the human organization, and come into a purity of spirit, into a divine order.
"For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the sabbath day will surely be put to death."
We must cast off the human frustration and striving and come into the Sabbath rest of the Lord.
It must become a reality to those who desire a walk with God.
God's people are not destined forever to come to the house of God in a battle.
Stop bringing the burdens to church with you.
If the people of the Old Testament bore a burden on the Sabbath day, they could have been stoned.
Leave your burdens behind. Unload.
Enter into His rest.
"So the sons of Israel shall observe the sabbath, to celebrate the sabbath throughout the generations as a perpetual covenant.' It is a sign between Me ad the sons of Israel forever; for in six days the lord made the heaven and the earth, but on the seventh day He ceased from labor, and was refreshed."
The last revelation that Moses received on the mountain was this revelation of the Sabbath.
And when He had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, He gave Moses the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written by the finger of God.
God will teach you as you wander and as you are tested.
The manna then was a type of the living word today.
This is illustrated in John 6.
Jesus said, "Your fathers ate manna, but they perished.
But you will eat this bread that I give you, for My words are spirit and they are life and they shall never perish."
God is bringing forth a living manna today which will never spoil.
It will be a double portion, an adequate word that will govern the world for at least the next thousand years.
I am not persuaded that the Kingdom will embrace only one thousand years.
The book of Revelation is symbolical when it speaks about ruling and reigning for a thousand years ( Revelation 20:4 ) .
It could possibly be seventy thousand years, as well as a thousand.
The word "day," as used in the Word, is not always a determined period of twenty-four hours.
This seventh thousand-year period could be extended.
It is the seventh day.
For six days the Israelites marched around Jericho, and on the seventh day they went around seven times.
This indicates that the seventh day could have embraced a longer period of time than each of the other six days.
"Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you."
Deuteronomy 8:4-5.
God leads you, but as you wander through the wilderness, He has to teach you that you are not going to make it into the Kingdom by your own devices.
This is the truth of the Sabbath.
You will not live by bread alone.
You will not live by deliverance's alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
Gods teaching that it is neither human effort nor organization that is bringing forth maturity in His people; it is the living word which comes to their hearts.
And it is coming in a double portion.
This is the key.
The clothes will not wear out; the shoes will not wear out.
You can enter into a place of immunity, a place of deliverance, a place where you can possess all that God has for you, because in this sixth day He is giving a double portion of the living word; and it is creative.
As you receive a double portion of the word, you must walk in the fullness of it.
"The works that I do," Jesus said, "ye will do also, and greater works shall ye do' ( John 14:12 ) .
We must enter into this double portion.
Ask the Lord to give you a new vision of the Sabbath, to make it live and burn in your heart so that you will want to come to the house of Gd on the Sabbath day.
Let God lay upon your heart the burden of the Sabbath day.
Let God lay upon your heart the burden of the Sabbath- not a dead, legalistic bondage to a Sabbath observance, but of the Sabbath which is to come.
Isaiah 66:23 tells us that from one new moon to another, from one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come up to worship the Lord.
It will be a different kind of Sabbath than we have known.
As a concluding Scripture we will read Exodus 31:12-18.
And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "But as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, 'You shall surely observe My sabbaths; for this is a sign," It was merely a ritual; it was a sign.
It had a symbolical meaning, and that is what we are entering into- the fulfillment of the symbolical meaning for which they kept the Sabbath.
The Passover, too, has a symbolical meaning for us.
Christ our Passover was crucified for us.
We no longer kill a Passover lamb;we come humbly and appropriate Christ as our Passover Lamb.
The day of fulfillment through rituals, stringent laws, and punishment is passed.
The Sabbath as a sign can now be spiritually fulfilled in our lives.
We should love it even more now than they did in the Old Testament.
As the Scripture says, "Call the Sabbath a delight" ( Isaiah 58:13 ) .
Come and worship the Lord.
"For this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.
Therefore you are to observe the sabbath, for it is holy to you.
Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; fr whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among the people."
There is no other way but the way of grace.
You cannot mix the grace of God with the old legalism and the works of the flesh.
You must cease to rely upon the human element, the human labor, and the human organization, and come into a purity of spirit, into a divine order.
"For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the sabbath day will surely be put to death."
We must cast off the human frustration and striving and come into the Sabbath rest of the Lord.
It must become a reality to those who desire a walk with God.
God's people are not destined forever to come to the house of God in a battle.
Stop bringing the burdens to church with you.
If the people of the Old Testament bore a burden on the Sabbath day, they could have been stoned.
Leave your burdens behind. Unload.
Enter into His rest.
"So the sons of Israel shall observe the sabbath, to celebrate the sabbath throughout the generations as a perpetual covenant.' It is a sign between Me ad the sons of Israel forever; for in six days the lord made the heaven and the earth, but on the seventh day He ceased from labor, and was refreshed."
The last revelation that Moses received on the mountain was this revelation of the Sabbath.
And when He had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, He gave Moses the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written by the finger of God.
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