The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 7-4
To do any of the things you’ve learned in the last three series, and do them properly, the soul needs time to scout ahead. Time to process your life, and develop a plan for the future. And that means the soul needs rest.
Now the Hebrew word for rest is, in fact, sabbath. And that, of course, is no accident. For the Sabbath is the cure for all of these things; and your soul is tired because you never gave it a Sabbath… even if you “kept” the Sabbath.
I told you long ago that the Sabbath made sense. That it was derived from “do unto others” like all the other commandments. And as I said then, it really is summed up in a single, fore-head slappingly obvious verse.
Jeremiah 6:16 Thus saith the LORD, STAND ye in the ways, and SEE, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.
Look at this verse carefully; these people were lost, they had fallen away from the way. Their way, as any other verse in this book will show, had become crooked. So God was telling them to STOP walking; to STAND still in the way, and SEE!
I know I say this all the time, but it can’t be said too often: read the words God said. He said STAND! When you stand, you are by definition not walking down the path of life. You have stopped moving forward, and when do you do that? When you’re not working! On the Sabbath!
He said stop, SEE, and look for the GOOD WAY. To use their eyes, their soul, to look around; to ask their spirit “where was the old path”, for it is the spirit’s job to shine a light on it (Psalms 119:105, Proverbs 20:27).
To stand still, before they got even more lost, and find the original path they were walking and get back on the good and narrow way that leads to life, and have their beasts walk down it. And THEN, once they did that, they would HAVE rest for their souls!
But instead, they said “No, we already know the way! This path is better!” (compare Jeremiah 44:15-19). As, well, pretty much everyone does when they are corrected. “How dare you judge me!” could be on the tombstone of every person alive today.
God said to stand and SEE! To use your soul’s eyes to look ahead down the path of your life, and see what’s coming in the days ahead! This means the Sabbath was not meant to be spent listening to a 2 hour lecture; it was meant to be the time you devote every week to STAND and SEE and LOOK for the old ways!
STANDING
By not walking in the path, you are standing. By definition, then, you are resting. Which is to say… keeping the Sabbath. Now if “standing” equals “keeping the Sabbath”, a lot of scriptures make more sense.
In Psalms 1:1, God praises those who keep the Sabbath properly, not standing like the world does when they keep the Sabbath; they’re praised because they are standing and LOOKING forward along the way; not standing and looking UP! (Acts 1:11).
God is not “up”, not in any practical sense (Deuteronomy 30:12). So why look for Him where He isn’t? Yet “praise and worship services” are all about looking up… not at all about looking down at the path before us.
They’re all about looking back at Jesus’ death… not looking forward at the city we’re walking towards (Luke 9:62). So since they don’t stand and judge the path ahead of them… they shall not stand before God (Psalms 1:5).
Now standing means resting; which means, they will not enter into His rest (Hebrews 3:11), specifically because they are resting wrong TODAY! (Isaiah 1:11-15). Think about it; if you can’t rest the right way now… why would God want you to rest with Him then?
What you should be doing on the Sabbath is in Psalms 4:4. You are trying to be the person in Psalms 24:3. So you need to carefully consider your path up that hill, week by week. What should you be “watching” for? Luke 21:36.
Notice that! Contrary to what most people think, that’s not about watching the news to see the signs of a temple being built in Jerusalem; it’s about watching your own path, watching to make sure you will be accounted WORTHY to stand on His holy hill.
Churches are full of the people who stand like those in Isaiah 65:4-5, or Luke 18:11-12. But God is not standing with them – they won’t let Him (Revelation 3:20). So when they’re standing, what they should be doing is in 1 Corinthians 10:12.
They are absolutely sure they’re standing. But are they really? Or are they racing down the wide path? How can they tell, if they don’t look around once in awhile? Because if you don’t stand and look where you are going, you will trip and fall by the wayside!
SCOUTING AHEAD
Do you see how everything is connected, and all these symbols weave together seamlessly, if you just follow the Golden Rule and treat God’s words as you would mine, or even your own?
As soon as you stop walking, you automatically look around. You adjust your pack, check for dangers nearby, and so on. But once that’s done, you start looking ahead. You check your map to see what comes next, how far it is until you can make camp for the night.
First, you take care of the emergencies; but as soon as you know that things are in order, you start looking ahead, and things that might make them not be in order. And that’s what the Sabbath was for – a mandated rest stop to give you time to do that.
When an army marches into new territory, the whole body of the army doesn’t just wade into unknown jungles and figure it out as they go. They send scouts up ahead, to report the terrain, and then the general makes decisions about where to go next.
In this way, the army knows what to expect and can make minor detours far in advance of an obstacle, rather than having to backtrack and take a completely new trail. So we need a scout in our life; someone who can go a ways into our future, tell us what to expect, and then make minor adjustments now to avoid major adjustments later (Luke 14:28-32).
Someone to chart the hazards we’re likely to face in the next week, month, or year, and make an up-to-date map of the road ahead; a map we can later use in the moment to quickly and easily choose, with minimal stress and doubt, what to do.
This scout is, of course, your soul. And no, you can’t travel in time… but your soul lives in the future. Given what you know of your life, right now, you can predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, the things that are going to hit you next week.
And if you think about them ahead of time, instead of waiting until they slap you in the face, there will be no stress. How can you be stressed if you expected this event, and had a plan in motion weeks ago? Or better yet, avoided it altogether (Proverbs 22:3).
Look at the metaphor in that verse; the “simple” pass on – they keep going down the trail! The wise man looks ahead and says “Bandits! Let’s go a different way!”, or “Rain is coming! Let’s find a cave!”
On any job, any journey, no matter what the big picture plan is, there will always be surprises. There will always be decisions that need to be made throughout the trip. That’s why it’s important that the big decisions, the major course corrections, are planned out far in advance.
That way in the moment, when a sudden detour proves necessary, he can simply take a look at the course planned out beforehand and see which path best gets the crew back on track. (See how we already use expressions that say these things?)
So clearly, since the soul is expected to do this every day, the soul needs a separate time to catch up and plan ahead; a time that’s his, a time that belongs to the lord of the body who can use it freely without worrying about doing the laundry, going to work, or making dinner.
A time when none of the fractions are working, when nothing needs to be done; leaving the soul with no current demands on his time, nothing immediately that needs judged… so that he can judge the things that are yet to come.
A “perfect and entire” person (James 1:4) is made of the perfect work of patience (Luke 21:19), the fruit of a soul, for only souls can see the future and believe it’s coming. That certainty makes it possible for a soul to believe in something that it’s beast can’t actually see (Romans 8:24).
No dog, cow, or small child will stop eating today to leave more for tomorrow. There is no tomorrow, in the world of a beast; only now. And spirits live in the past, which means they can’t see what’s coming unless we’re repeating a journey we’ve made before.
So it is the soul’s ability to see the trail ahead, to predict an unpredictable future, that sets it above the fractions. The others, those who can’t see ahead, must content themselves with faith in their own soul. Because that should be enough, as it was for the beast in Psalms 23:1.
A DAY OF JUDGMENT
We know that Christ is returning in the Millennium, which will be the seventh thousand-year day, and the beginning of the Millennial Sabbath. So the “day of the Lord”, the “Lord’s day”, the “Sabbath of the Lord”, “judgment day” and “in that day” are all talking about that Sabbath.
These phrases are used hundreds of times in the Bible, and all of them show the same pattern we are supposed to be enacting each week on our Sabbath day. During that day, He will judge the nations (Micah 4:3). When He stands on the Earth and forces it to change direction (Zechariah 14:4).
The land will rest (Leviticus 26:32-35), and He will make His way known upon the Earth (Psalms 67:1-4), and they shall all come to Him Sabbath to Sabbath (Isaiah 66:23). Just as they came before Moses.
Exodus 18:13 And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses sat to judge the people: and the people stood by Moses from the morning unto the evening.
We’ve always assumed this was a daily event; but it doesn’t specifically say that. Moses apparently wasn’t doing this judging the day before, when Jethro arrived (Exodus 18:17-18). But knowing that the people stood by, it strongly suggests this was done only on the Sabbath days!
Which makes sense; because that was the day when the people were not working, so they could come before Moses, who judged the people and taught them out of the law while they stood by, and rested from their labors (Ezekiel 44:24).
But this type of Sabbath was wearying to Moses – and to the people. Which is why God didn’t tell us to keep it this way (Isaiah 1:12-14). Notice that these solemn Sabbath assemblies wearied God just as they wearied Moses!
Which is not to say that people can’t be helped by such services; sometimes they were and are (Jeremiah 23:22). But more often than not, these services are just reenacting Jeremiah 7:3-10; note the phrase “amend your ways”, which is why you should come to God’s house on the Sabbath.
But that’s not why they went there: Jeremiah 9:1-6. Notice the place for wayfaring men, travelers, is in the wilderness! And they wearied themselves to worship God this way! “Through deceit they refuse to know me”, He said.
What church doesn’t fulfill that verse? Which of the things you’ve learned in these lessons were hard to see in the Bible? It took work to refuse to believe Jesus was dead 36 hours instead of 72; it took effort to argue that Sunday is the Sabbath!
So did Jeremiah stand with them? Jeremiah 15:15-17. Instead, Jeremiah sat alone and asked why his PATH was hard! Jeremiah 15:18. And found, in God’s words, the answer… the answer that would improve his path in the coming weeks! ( Jeremiah 15:19-21).
The Sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27). Not for man to assemble on for its own sake, but for man to use for a vital purpose. The purpose of the Sabbath is to find rest. One cannot do that while battling with unbelievers, which was why Jeremiah rested alone.
Occasionally it’s necessary to go into a synagogue and tick some people off (Acts 17:17), but it’s not the point, it’s not why the Sabbath was made. Because solemn assemblies full of empty ceremony and insincere formality are as boring to God as they are to you.
And if you think those hours of droning sermon drag on endlessly… try doing it when you’re a Being for whom a day is as a thousand years! (Although even I’ve heard some sermons that came pretty close.)
LOOKING AROUND
As always, the keeping of the Sabbath day, the judging of the people out of the laws of Moses, that never was abolished. But as always, it was moved. Moved to where God had always wanted it… inside us.
In the Millennial layer, the Lord of the Earth judges the beast and the false prophet for their sins (Revelation 19:20). In the OT layer, the “God” whom God had appointed (Exodus 7:1), judged his spirit (Aaron) and his beast (the people of Israel) every Sabbath day.
As NC Christians, we just move all that inside. On the Sabbath day, you’re supposed to judge your heart and your spirit. If you can’t do it, as the OC people couldn’t, then you should have someone do it for you. But if you do it yourself… then no one else will have to (1 Corinthians 11:31).
Remember, we’re talking about standing in the path, taking a rest along the journey. Which means we can say the same thing a different way, using a different metaphor; by judging the spirit, we’re asking it why it failed to shine light on the path so our souls could have made a better choice! Proverbs 20:27, Psalms 18:28.
By judging the heart, we’re asking why it kept being turned aside from the way by lust (1 Samuel 8:3); when you ride a horse, it often wants to stop, eat, drink, even when it doesn’t need to (Isaiah 29:21); or they turn aside because they see other animals they want to hang out with (Song of Solomon 1:7).
Thus, in every sense, the Sabbath is about looking at your path; about judging your recent actions so your future steps can be better; looking around, with the goal of being able to walk quickly in the right direction next week.
Consider the work of your hands last week… is it “very good”? (Genesis 1:31). This is what God did as the Sabbath began. And if your work is not good, find out why and reorient yourself in a better direction. Do things in a better way.
And when what we did wrong has been understood and the lessons from it learned, the soul can finally rest (Proverbs 29:17). That way next week, the Lord can lead us in the paths of righteousness (Psalms 23:3). And that’s why… Psalms 23:4-6. Because this lesson, as always, can be summed up in a single verse:
Proverbs 2:8-9 The Lord keepeth the paths of judgment, and preserveth the way of his saints. Then shalt thou understand righteousness [doing – beast], and judgment [soul], and equity [fairness – spirit]; yea, every good path.
REST AREA
On any long journey, you have to stop every so often to book your hotels, plan your tours, and get your visas. So you always take advantage of every layover to organize your baggage, and pick out your next few stops; so, as always, the Sabbath is obvious… in light of the Golden Rule.
Whenever you are doing anything there are going to be things your soul has to judge. Even the most routine of tasks occasionally has surprises; when you’re driving, 95% of the time it’s excruciatingly boring, but your soul must still be awake, eyes open, judging all you see just in case.
So if you’re going to be able to judge what’s coming next, the soul needs to not be doing that. So don’t we pull over to the side of the road, before we pull out our phones to figure out what our next stop is? If we’re having a fight with our companion, do we keep driving, or do we pull over until it’s worked out?
Thus, the Golden Rule tells us why we have to keep the Sabbath. But keep it properly. Not praising a God we don’t know, and lamenting a Son we never knew; but learning about God, and learning to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life as His Son did.
You can’t really do that, if you’re working, if you’re cleaning, if you’re doing anything you would ordinarily do. But neither can you do that while singing in church, while struggling to stay awake, while eating out at a restaurant with the brethren.
Your soul has no free time left over for the calm contemplation of the road ahead. So the Sabbath is a chance to pull over, so your soul can stop judging the routine things of the journey, and focus on the bigger picture of the road ahead.
Thus, each week is a complete cycle; each week is a lap on a race, an exam to be graded on. Not the Sabbath, but the week as a whole is the exam which you review on the Sabbath, while preparing for the coming one.
Which is why it says that the Earth comes before the Lord “from Sabbath to Sabbath” (Isaiah 66:23). Because it’s not the Sabbath that’s important, per se, but the passage of time between Sabbaths; that is what is being graded each Sabbath, to see “whether we have walked in the law or no” on the intervening days (Exodus 16:4).
And that’s how it derives from the 1-2-10 law. You want your children to grow up being who they need to be, and knowing what they need to know. So you give them regular health and dental checkups, family dinners, and report cards – to check in with their beast, their soul, and their spirit.
And therefore, by the Golden Rule, you must do the same for God. He commanded you to stand before Him once a week; to stop walking the way, and to look around – at yourself, and at the world around you, and at the job ahead of you; and to consider all your ways (Haggai 1:4-11). Whom today doesn’t that describe? All because they are not standing before Him. And therefore… they will not stand before Him.
THE SIMPLE ANSWER
In plain language, the point is this; every week, on the Sabbath, sit down, either by yourself or with your spouse and family, if it involves them; find out what you must do, what you should do, and what you all want to do.
Hear all the things that we expect, hope, or demand from the next week; all the good or evil we can reasonably foresee happening; and then chart a course. Find a way to arrange the events of your life such that you hit all of the musts, most of the shoulds, and hopefully a few of the wants.
By thinking ahead, you can plan your trips, and find the most efficient route possible so that you can have the most rest, or at least, get the most done this week. Plan your jobs, set reasonable goals that get done what needs done.
Then look back next week and see how close your plan was to reality; how well did we predict the events of this week? How well did we prepare for the evil ahead? How well did we meet our goals?
So judge your soul’s choices of the Sabbath before, learn what was unrealistic and what was too generous, understand what you should have seen coming but didn’t, what you couldn’t have seen coming but should have allowed for.
Then next week, do better. Because all we’re really trying to learn is that ability of our Father’s to “call the end from the beginning”, and from Saturday afternoon the things that won’t be done until the Thursday to come (Isaiah 46:10).
All we really need to accomplish that is a soul that can see ahead, a spirit that tells the truth and supplies the information the soul needs, and a willing heart. And the better you can do this, the better you’ll be able to manage a city or create a new species.
You already know this, you do it every time you pull over to find a place to eat or sleep on the road ahead. Every time you pause at a fork on a hike, you do this. Because you don’t want to get lost. You don’t want to fall away from the way. And above all, because you want to get to the city before dark (John 11:10, Jeremiah 13:16).
WAITING ON THE LORD
So on the Sabbath, your soul takes stock of its situation. It looks at the cards its been dealt, and comes up with a strategy to play them. It turns to the spirit, to deal with the injustices of the week and resolve them or explain them. And your beast has a day to call “a delight” (Isaiah 58:13).
Note again in that verse, always the three fractions, the three ways you break the Sabbath; doing your own ways – the soul. Your own words – the spirit. And your own pleasure – the heart. Then – again note the three promises – your soul shall delight in the Lord, your spirit will ride the high places, and your heart shall be fed.
Read Isaiah 40:28-31. God doesn’t need to rest, at least not on the scale we do, for He knows the way. He needn’t stop and consider His mistakes, for He has made none; and He needn’t chart the course ahead, because His heart knows the only perfect way to the destination.
When we weary along this journey, He gives us power to go on; because even a strong, young, healthy man will get tired before this journey is over. It is appointed unto us once to sleep, after all (Hebrews 9:27). But today, the young men fall asleep and die at only 70 or 80 years old!
But if you WAIT upon the Lord (keep the Sabbath), then you will be resting in every sense of the word. And you will renew the strength of the whole beast. And then you’ll be prepared to love God with all your heart, spirit, soul, and strength (Mark 12:30).
I can’t wrap up a lesson on soul rest without visiting Matthew 11:28-30. I’ve harped on the importance of reading the context since the very first lesson; and if you’d only read one more verse, perhaps you’d have seen this connection long ago… Matthew 12:1. This was said on the Sabbath day… for it was on the Sabbath that you were supposed to have rest for your souls.
Jesus’ way of keeping the Sabbath was very different from the Pharisee’s burdensome, unrestful way ( Matthew 12:2-14, 23:4). And by offering to let us share His yoke instead of theirs (Isaiah 58:6), He was inviting the crowd to share His way of keeping the Sabbath, so our souls could find true rest.
By standing in the way properly, you will never grow weary; which is to say, to never fall asleep; which is to say, to live forever; because you won’t be so weary that you fall asleep before you get to your destination; which is to say, you won’t die until you’ve become what you need to become (Psalms 132:3-5).
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
How well we manage our lives week to week demonstrates how well we are in charge of our lives, of our fractions… and how much we can be trusted to rule over in the world to come. But it doesn’t just demonstrate it; each new week gives us an opportunity to do better.
Each week’s failures showed us, if we’re looking, precisely where we went wrong and precisely why that was a bad choice. And so next time, think just a little farther ahead. Because all we’re really doing is learning to think it through.
It’s like I tell you all the time; in order to understand what God is saying, you have to think it through. You have all the pieces you need, just follow them a few steps farther to a conclusion – just like Matthew 12:1, above.
The Sabbath was always a test commandment (Exodus 16:4). Specifically, a test to see how good we are at WALKING. How good we are at thinking ahead, and planning for the future (Exodus 16:5).
Those who failed to realize they were going to be hungry on Saturday, or failed to realize they were going to be cold, were punished because they missed the point of USING this law of God to WALK better! ( Exodus 16:20-30).
So take everything you know about your life for the next week, put it all together, and think it through to the end. Put the pieces together in a way that you think will work, allowing for the unexpected – but not too much, so you don’t waste time and miss a chance to get something else accomplished.
The soul’s ability to make the most of its weekly rest determines how exhausted it will be at the end of next week. Because good choices mean an easy path; and bad choices mean late nights, stress, and backtracking.
But which choices it makes aren’t very important; it’s how well it chooses that’s important. Where we actually go doesn’t really matter. Rather, it is our skill at calling the end from the beginning which is the measure of our progress along that path.
So last week, did you call the end from the beginning? Last week we spoke of the “things that were not”… can we now call them “the things that are”? Can you say to your fractions, and to your family, what God said in Isaiah 42:9?
Because all “calling the end from the beginning” really means, is that you know what lays down every fork in the trail. And the better you know these trails, the more accurately you’ll be able to “prophesy”.
So prophesying (in the sense God does it, at least), or calling the end from the beginning, or “thinking it through” just means understanding every possibility, so you see what lies down every path… and knowing how to always choose the best path. Once you’ve done that… it’s hard not to see the end from the beginning.
Bonus thought: God makes His metaphors perfectly; and no matter how close you look at His images, you’ll keep seeing more and more detail, all of which was perfectly thought through. Yet truly, the scripture cannot be broken; you cannot look took closely at God’s metaphors.
For we have understood, in these lessons, only the most broad and general lessons to be had. For if you zoom in on each individual symbol you might meet on a journey, each one of them is in the Bible and reveals a new truth; or rather, connects to one we already know and fleshes it out.
And as you zoom in closer, you’ll see that everything we wear on that journey is also thought out. For if you truly understood how to dress for that journey, and what each of those things mean, you’d fully understand Ephesians 6:10-18; remember, it’s about standing.
And if you zoom in on the linen we might wear; or the flax that makes the linen; or the grass that becomes the flax; or the cow that eats the grass, or the dung that fertilizes it; or the soil and water and sun it needs to grow, or the hydrogen and oxygen in that water, or the protons and electrons in that oxygen, or the… well, you see what I mean (Romans 11:33).
God thought it through. And as His heirs, we need to at least be able to follow along on the things He’s already thought through!