Part 1 traced how the Sabbath functioned within the Old Testament as the sign of the Mosaic Covenant—Israel’s weekly, annual, sabbatical, and jubilee rhythms—marking her as the nation consecrated to the Lord who redeemed her from Egypt. That covenantal frame ruled out two wrong understandings: (1) the Sabbath sign was neither detachable from its covenant nor transferable forward to the New Covenant simply by changing the day; (2) nor could the Sabbath be dismissed as an irrelevant relic of a bygone era. Both misunderstandings, in different ways, overlook what the heavenly reality to which the sign pointed.
Part 2 turns to that question directly. If the Sabbath was Israel’s sign of a covenant now fulfilled, what becomes of the sign when the covenant it signified reaches its appointed goal in Christ? The New Testament’s answer, argued across the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and Hebrews, is neither simplistic perpetuation nor mere abolition but fulfillment. Jesus Christ presents himself as the reality every Sabbath foreshadowed. Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath, greater than the Temple, the one who grants true rest to the weary, and, in the sermon to the Hebrews, the one whose finished work at last opens for God’s people the Sabbath Rest that God’s resting from his work of creation established at the beginning.
Jesus Christ the True Sabbath Rest, the Sign’s Fulfillment
Unlike the inherently moral prohibitions of disobeying parents, murder, adultery, theft, or false witness—which are reaffirmed within the New Testament as expressions of love for one’s neighbor (Rom. 13:8–10)—the positive Sabbath command is treated differently by Jesus and his apostles. Nowhere does the New Testament command Christians to keep the seventh-day Sabbath holy. Instead, Paul explicitly cautions believers against allowing anyone to judge them regarding “a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths,” describing these observances as shadows whose substance belongs to Christ (Col. 2:16–17). Likewise, Romans 14 affirms the New Covenant believer’s liberty about the observance of days. These and other apostolic directives are not isolated exceptions but are consistent applications of the fulfillment of the Mosaic Covenant in Christ Jesus. Because the covenant itself has reached its fulfilled goal, its covenant sign likewise reached its appointed termination.
This does not mean that the Old Covenant, embedded within the Old Testament, has become irrelevant. On the contrary, as Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Words etched in stone, so Jesus, the latter-day and greater Moses, went up on a mountain where he uttered Nine Beatitudes, assuring his hearers, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17). Again, when John and his disciples questioned whether Jesus was the promised Messiah, he explained, “For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John” (Matt. 11:13).1 After his resurrection, Christ explained to his own puzzled disciples, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). In each of these passages, Jesus uses the “Law” and the “Law of Moses” to refer to the Pentateuch as Scripture. Thus, when he speaks of fulfilling the Law, as he does in Matthew 5:17, he is not speaking of perfectly obeying the Law Covenant but of bringing Scripture’s verbal and foreshadowing prophecies to their God-appointed completion.2 Of course, righteous and sinless Jesus obeyed every facet of the Law as Covenant even as he brought it to its completion and termination. Yet, this is not what Jesus spoke about in the passage. Rather, Jesus meant that every Old Testament earthly shadow of good things to come reached its climactic heavenly continuity and consummation in him, who is their substance. Thus, all the commandments in the Old Testament Scriptures are binding on Christians, but Christ’s fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets determines how we are to believe, obey, and instruct others concerning “the least of these commandments,” including the Sabbath.3 This means that the way Christ Jesus fulfilled the OT Scriptures, with all their teachings and commandments, determines how God’s New Covenant people are now to keep them. Succinctly stated, we are to observe all that the Old Testament teaches, not in the old way but in the new way, as Paul instructs, “Let us celebrate the Festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:8). Christians keep the Festivals of Unleavened Bread and the Passover, not as annual events but as daily patterns of obedience to Christ Jesus.
1. Noteworthy is the change of order in Matthew 11:13, “the Prophets and the Law prophesied,” from Matthew 5:17, “the Law and the Prophets,” to avoid placing the noun, Prophets, the verb, “prophesied,” together.
2. When reading and explaining Matthew 5:17–19, it is crucial to distinguish between the Law as Scripture and the Law as Covenant. The antithesis Jesus points to is not “between ‘abolish’ and ‘keep’ [as in ‘obey’] but between ‘abolish’ and ‘fulfill’” (D. A. Carson, “Matthew,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 8, Matthew, Mark, Luke (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 143). Cf. Vern Poythress, The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses (Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1991), 267–69.
3. Carson, “Matthew,” 145–46; Poythress, The Shadow of Christ, 268–69.
Come to Me . . . I Will Give You Rest
Matthew 11–12 is highly instructive concerning how Jesus is the heavenly reality which all the earthly Sabbaths shadowed and thus foreshadowed. Within the four Gospels, Matthew 11:28–12:14 is the most explicit, where Jesus presents himself as the one who gives the True Rest foreshadowed by every Old Covenant Sabbath. Jesus’s call, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” appears only in Matthew’s Gospel, but the other three Gospels present him, in their own ways, as the climactic fulfillment of Sabbath (See Mark 2:23—3:6; Luke 13:10–17; John 5:1–17). In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’s welcoming appeal follows his denunciation of cities—Chorazin, Bethsaida, Tyre, Sidon—where he performed mighty deeds among people who did not repent (Matt. 11:20–24). Then, he prays audibly, thanking the Father that he has “hidden the things” of God from people considered “wise and understanding” but has “revealed them to little children” (Matt. 11:25; cf. Isa. 29:14; Dan. 2:19–23). He also praises the Father for the authority he has been given over all things, including an authority to reveal knowledge of the Father and his identity as God’s Son to whomever he desires (Matt. 11:26–27). So, immediately following these words—“no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him”—Jesus utters his revelatory invitation:
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matt. 11:28–30).
With his invitation’s double mention of rest, first with a verb and then the noun, Jesus implicitly reveals himself as the reality to which the Sabbath commandment, the sign of the Mosaic Covenant, pointed. Integral to his invitation to accept his yoke is discipleship to him who is not only “gentle and lowly in heart” but also who alone imparts knowledge of the Father.
Jesus’s invitation draws an implicit contrast between the burden of submitting to the Sabbath commandment with the Pharisees’ added and exacting regulations and the relief of accepting his teaching as the gentle and lowly True Rest, the one in whom every Sabbath cycle, whether weekly, yearly, septennially, or jubilean, finds fulfillment and its end.4
4. Cf. Carson, “Matthew,” 278.
Jesus, Greater than the Temple and Sabbath
Immediately following Jesus’s presentation of himself as the one who provides true Sabbath rest is the occasion when he announces, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Matt. 12:1–8). This took place when he and the Twelve passed through a grain field on a Sabbath day, and watchful Pharisees accused his hungry disciples of violating the Sabbath by harvesting heads of grain to eat. Though Jesus knew reaping was one of their many added prohibitions to the law, he did not dispute the validity of their excessive claim. He took a different approach, calling attention to the time when David and his companions, pursued by Saul’s confederates, entered the Tabernacle and ate the consecrated bread reserved for the priests (1 Sam. 21:1–6). Why did Jesus appeal to this account? Not because his disciples were starving like David and his companions. Instead, Jesus makes an implicit case that, just as when the Law Covenant’s unambiguous restrictions were set aside for David and his band of men, so the Pharisees should disregard their Sabbath regulations that are not grounded in the written law for him and his Twelve. Jesus knows his connection to David calls for reinforcements, so he presents four.
- First, he appeals to the priests who, by carrying out their priestly duties, “profane the Sabbath and are guiltless” because the law that established the Sabbath freed the priests to do their work (Matt. 12:5).
- Second, by reasoning from the lesser to the greater, Jesus makes this allusive, enigmatic saying, “I tell you, something greater than the Temple is here” (Matt. 12:6). He refers to himself much like his riddle elsewhere, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19).5 Thus, Jesus’s authority, which exceeds that of the Temple, is greater than that of the priests who are guiltless while working on the Sabbath in the Temple.
- Third, Jesus explains what he has just said when he rebukes his accusers for not apprehending the Prophet Hosea’s saying, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,” citing the prophet Hosea (Matt. 12:7; Hos. 6:6).6 With Hosea, Jesus means that to offer sacrifice, the earthly shadow ritual, becomes irrelevant and pointless ritualism apart from embracing the heavenly reality that it shadows.
- And fourth, less enigmatically than his allusion concerning himself being greater than the Temple, Jesus implicitly claims messianic status: “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Matt. 12:8). Thus, Jesus, as Son of Man, has authority over the Sabbath just as he has over the Temple, vindicating his disciples from allegedly breaking the Sabbath.
5. Carson, “Matthew,” 282.
6. Previously, Jesus quoted Hosea 6:6 to rebuke the Pharisees who disputed his dining with tax collectors and sinners: “Go learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13).
Jesus, the Healer on the Sabbath
One cannot read the four Gospels without noticing how often Jesus deliberately performed miraculous healing on Sabbath days.
- Exorcism of Unclean Spirit (Mark 1:21–28; Luke 4:31–37).
- Healing Peter’s Mother-in-Law (Matt. 8:14–15; Mark 1:29–31; Luke 4:38–39).
- Healing a Man with a Withered Hand (Matt. 12:9–14; Mark 3:1–6; Luke 6:6–11).
- Healing of a Lame Man (John 5:1–18).
- Healing of a Crippled Woman (Luke 13:10–17).
- Healing of a Man with Great Swelling (Luke 14:1–6).
- Healing of a Man Born Blind (John 9:1–41).
Careful reading discovers that Jesus’s mission called for purposefully acting on Sabbath days to provoke the anger of his mistaken and fastidious religious opponents to conspire his crucifixion. So, on a Sabbath, after entering a Synagogue, Jesus met a man with a deformed hand. Knowing some with hardened hearts were watching for an opportunity to accuse him of violating Sabbath laws, Jesus asked, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 3:4). The Pharisees who seethed as they watched Jesus heal the man left the synagogue to conspire with the Herodians, whom they despised, how to kill him who healed individuals on Sabbath days (Mark 3:5–6). Tom Schreiner explains
Healing on the Sabbath is intriguing, for it points back to the seventh day of creation (Gen 2:1–3) and forward to the new creation where the world is free of death and disease. Jesus’ healings on the Sabbath signal the kingdom’s inauguration, anticipating a world where there is no disease and death.7
7. Thomas R. Schreiner, “Good-Bye and Hello: The Sabbath Command for New Covenant Believers,” in Progressive Covenantalism: Charting a Course Between Dispensational and Covenantal Theologies, ed. S. J. Wellum and B. E. Parker (B&H Academic, 2016), 173.
Though his religious opponents, especially the Pharisees, held him in violation of both the Law as Scripture (Pentateuch) and the Law as Covenant (Mosaic Law), Jesus persevered in his messianic mission concerning both. By inaugurating the New Covenant, Christ Jesus fulfilled the Law as Scripture and terminated the Law as Covenant, which the Apostle Paul affirms. He “has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances” (Eph. 2:14–15). More than this, Christ has fulfilled all the prophetic foreshadowing of the Pentateuch.
Jesus Rested on the Law’s Sabbath Day and Arose to Inaugurate the New Covenant
With the opening words of the Fourth Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word,” John compels us to ponder the imponderable: that the Word is God, having no beginning but already existing, not created. He beckons us to acknowledge that the historical advent of Jesus has an eternal antecedence that takes us back beyond “the beginning” of primordial history to the time of no beginning when “the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning” (John 1:1–2, NIV). Thus, John’s borrowed beginning line from Genesis 1:1 confronts readers and hearers with a not-so-subtle invitation to ponder how the arrival of God’s Son, the promised Messiah, brings with him the dawning of a new creation.
Once he concludes his finely crafted introductory prelude (John 1:1–18), John situates day one of Jesus’s mission amid John’s ceremonial cleansing ministry, as the Synoptic Gospels do (John 1:19–28). Then he begins counting a series of seven days, culminating on a Sabbath at a festive wedding in Cana, where Jesus’s mother petitions him to resolve the awkward lack of wine for the guests. Jesus tells her, “My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4). Finally, Jesus performs his first miracle, replenishing the wine supply by having the servants fill six large stone crocks with well water. With subtlety rather than fanfare, Jesus presents himself as the True Bridegroom, revealed more clearly when John the Baptist affirms, “The one who has the bride is the bridegroom” (John 3:29).8
8. Ardel Caneday, “The Word Made Flesh as Mystery Incarnate: Revealing and Concealing Dramatized by Jesus as Portrayed in John’s Gospel,” JETS 60, no. 4 (2017): 754–57.
Later, in his Gospel, John again counts down seven days, this time the final week of Jesus’s mission, beginning with Mary’s anointing his feet (John 12:1–8), followed by his royal entry into Jerusalem (John 12:12ff). On the second day of that week, after arriving in Jerusalem, when some Greeks want to meet Jesus, he announces to his disciples, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23). Then, Jesus announces the same to the crowd, “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ But for this purpose, I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name” (John 12:27–28). That same day, Jesus, “the Light of the world,” hides himself for two days as a dramatized parabolic act of judgment (John 12:36; cf. John 7:32, 45–52; 8:49–59) until the night Judas betrays him.
John tells us how Jesus’s final week ends on the sixth day, the Day of Preparation before the Sabbath (John 19:31). There on the cross, “Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill Scripture), ‘I thirst.’ . . . When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, ‘It is finished,’ and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (John 19:28–30). Thus, as the Creator reviewed “everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good . . . and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done” (Gen. 1:31–2:2), so after the Word, God’s Son, announces from the cross, “It is finished,” they lay him in the nearby tomb. Thus, on the Sabbath, he rests in Paradise from all his work in bringing the Old Era to its intended climactic fulfillment, ending in anticipation of his resurrection, the New Era’s dawn the next morning, the First Day of the week.
Conclusion
In each of the Gospels, Jesus presents himself as Lord of the Sabbath. Hence, he does not yield to the Pharisees’ scrupulous demands that exceed the Law Covenant’s requirements. He reveals himself as greater than the Sabbath. He is the one to whom those weary and burdened may come for the rest the Fourth Commandment could only signify. He is greater than the Temple, its priests, and its sacrifices, and as Son of Man he holds authority over the Sabbath itself. His healings on Sabbath days were not incidental mercies but purposeful signs, the seventh day of creation breaking forward into the new creation his kingdom was inaugurating. And when his own work reached its finished hour, he kept the Sabbath in the fullest sense a man ever has: his labor of redemption complete, he rested in the tomb on the Law’s own Sabbath day before rising on the first day to inaugurate the New Covenant to which every Sabbath had always pointed.
Read together with Part 1, then, the whole argument comes to this: the Sabbath was never a timeless law detachable from its covenant, nor was it an empty relic safely discarded. It was a sign, and Christ is what it signified. To come to him and take his easy yoke is not to trade one Sabbath observance for another but to enter the very rest toward which every Sabbath, from the seventh day of creation onward, was always pointing. Part 3 will continue considering the Sabbath in the New Testament, featuring Hebrews 3–4 concerning Jesus Christ, God’s Son over his house, who is greater than Moses, a servant in God’s house (Heb. 3:1–6). In contrast to the faithful servant in the house, who was powerless to lead rebellious Israelites to their rest in the Promised Land, the Son over the house fulfilled the ancient promise of Sabbath Rest by resting from his redemptive works, inaugurating the new creation, on par with the Creator’s resting from his own creative works at the close of the first week of the old creation.
