Speaker 1
Spring has sprung and it's the end of the week, which means it's time to pull up a chair, sit back, and enjoy the view as we meet up with Pastor Mike Fabarez for another edition of Ask Pastor Mike today on Focal Point.
Welcome to Focal Point. I'm your host, Dave Drouehe, and I'm glad to be here with you to probe the mind of our teacher, Pastor Mike Fabarez, with an interesting question from a listener.
Now, coming from various church traditions, you might be accustomed to certain rituals associated with Holy Week, and we're talking today about the facts surrounding what's known as Ash Wednesday. Should Christians be observing Lent? Why or why not?
Well, let's join executive director Jay Wortin and Pastor Mike Fabarez for the answer.
Speaker 2
Well, thank you, Dave. I am here with Pastor Mike, and I have a question from a listener, and they're wondering, is it appropriate for Christians to observe Lent?
Speaker 3
Well, I will be as transparent as possible here and be upfront that I'm not a fan, and not that there's anything inherently wrong with Christians fasting or giving something up. Nothing wrong with that at all. You can do that anytime you'd like throughout the year, throughout the week.
But, you know, to look at the tradition of Lent, maybe a little background would be good here. A couple of sketchy references early in the church, but mostly the medieval church popularized this time of self-deprivation, this fasting leading up to Easter. As you said, it's Ash Wednesday that begins this, where there's a time of penance, which, by the way, the day before is Fat Tuesday or, in French, Mardi Gras. That's your time to live it up and party, eat as much as you want, and do all you can traditionally, so you can start your 40 days of fasting before Easter.
If you listen to my program here, you probably get a sense that I'm a bit of an iconoclast, which means I'm not real big on extra-biblical ritual forms or ceremonies. When I look at something like this and realize that it's become more of a tradition or a form or a ritual to engage in, as opposed to being prompted in my own heart or my own life to say I need to seek God in this season and I need to deprive myself of some meals so I can seek the Lord in prayer, I just don't want the church, and certainly the church leaders, to insist upon a fast.
I think Colossians 2 reminds me that the church doesn't have that authority to come into people's lives or Christians telling one another, "Hey, you got to deprive yourself of this. You can't have that," or "You shouldn't be eating this kind of food," or "This should be your period of fasting." The Bible doesn't set up that kind of ritual schedule, that traditional ceremonial schedule for us. So I don't think anyone should ever feel pressured to engage in the fast.
And since this is a medieval popularized tradition, I certainly don't talk about it in our church or recommend that people do it. And yet, at the same time, as I started, I will say there's nothing inherently wrong if someone wants to engage in fasting or giving something up during a time that leads up to Easter or any other time.
Speaker 2
Well, Pastor Mike, is there any biblical background for Lent? How did it come about in the church? Is it practiced in the early, early church, or was this something that came about afterwards?
Speaker 3
Well, there were early references to some fasting before Easter Sunday, and usually it involved, in the earliest references that I've been able to research, just a few days—maybe from Good Friday leading into Easter Sunday. But over the centuries, it grew into a 40-day fast, and most people assume it came from Matthew 4 or Luke chapter 4 with the 40 days of Christ fasting in the wilderness, which, of course, had nothing to do with any time leading up to the resurrection.
That 40 days has been important in a lot of historical accounts in the Bible of things happening over 40 days. The 40 days of Christ's fasting became adopted in the medieval church as a time of some kind of deprivation and fasting, at least a partial fast, leading up to Easter. So it has grown as tradition, but certainly it isn't biblically based.
As a matter of fact, you could make the case that those who tell others that they can't eat certain things or that they have to fast are certainly not adhering to a biblical principle. No Christian has the authority to come into your life and say you should not eat this or you should not have that as it relates to our normal eating of food.
Although I'm all for fasting, usually, as Jesus put it, our fasting should be something done in private and should be something that we choose to do. And then again, I’d hate to sound like a flip-flopper, but if someone says, "Well, our church is going to have a fast because we're dealing with a big issue in our church or our city," and the leaders want to encourage people to fast together for a particular time, there's nothing wrong with that. Nothing inherently wrong with that.
However, I’d be real careful about adopting some kind of tradition and feeling like this is a good and godly thing that God expects from His people.
Speaker 2
I want to jump back to the subject of Mardi Gras. Isn't it a little hypocritical to be partying it up just before you're going to.
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Speaker 2
On a Lent or a fast.
Speaker 3
Right. Well, and again, this was part of a Christian culture having a celebration or a party grow out of a time when Christians and churches and pastors expected people and called on people to fast and start their time of penance, their time of repentance on Ash Wednesday.
So, of course, today, I mean, you go to parts of our country and see these huge, lawless, immoral Mardi Gras celebrations. It has nothing to do with Christianity. It's the antithesis of what we would think is Christian.
So, yeah, but the reason there is a Mardi Gras is because of the Christian calendar, which grew out of the medieval church, as I've said, starting a fast the very next day on this day of penance and repentance and being sober in our Christian lives. That started on Ash Wednesday. Fat Tuesday—that's what Mardi Gras means. And that was fatten yourself up because tomorrow we're going to start fasting.
Speaker 2
Yeah, certainly. What we see on TV regarding Mardi Gras and things of that nature, it looks a little debauched.
Speaker 3
Yes, of course.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 3
And I'm not. I'm not in favor of Mardi Gras, obviously. And as I started, I'm not a real big fan of any kind of church called for annual fasts. I mean, we don't have that kind of ceremonial ritual schedule now.
People may write us and say, well, I've been ministered to because I've engaged in Lent and all that, and that's fine. But it's seemingly a trendy thing these days for, you know, Protestant churches, evangelical churches, to try and get their churches to engage in some of these rituals and ceremonies.
And I'm just saying Colossians, chapter 2, verses 16 through 23, just to name one passage, clearly would tell us that those things are not to be mandated by churches or church leaders.
Speaker 2
Well, thank you, Pastor Mike. We're going to hear a little bit more on this topic. In a message you gave called Sorting Out God's Orders from our opinions.
Speaker 4
In Luke 6, we see Jesus dealing with religious people who had expectations and said, "If you want to please God, you better do this." Jesus, of course, knows exactly what it takes to please the Father, and he's not dissuaded. But it certainly is a lesson for us. We want to live for Christ circumspectly, wisely, carefully, giving thought to our ways. So I want to learn from these two scenes in verses 1 through 5. If you've opened to it, you can glance through that.
There's one scene about Jesus on the Sabbath, and then in the second scene, verses 6 through 11, there's another scene where he's running into problems with the opinions of the day regarding the Sabbath. Here is Jesus dealing with the expectations of the day regarding the Sabbath and interacting with what the law of God says regarding the Sabbath. As we try to live out our Christian life in this era, I want to make sure I rightly understand how to file the Sabbath in my thinking as a theological concept.
Verse 1: On a Sabbath, Jesus happened to be going through the grain fields. While he was, his disciples had plucked some and ate some of the heads of grain, and they would rub them together in their hands, which I suppose, as I've learned, is the way you do that. They took the husk off of them, popped them in their mouths, and were eating them.
Verse 2: Some of the Pharisees said, "Why are you doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?" Clearly, they looked at what Christ and his disciples were doing and said, "You're breaking God's law." Jesus answered them with a bit of a curious response, quoting now from 1 Samuel 1. He asked them a rhetorical question because, of course, they're Pharisees; they've read the whole Testament. He says, "Haven't you read what David did when he was hungry and he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God, took and ate the bread of the Presence, which you may be familiar with as the showbread? It's also called that; it was the 12 loaves they baked and put out there, part of the symbolic worship in the tabernacle.
As it says, it's only lawful for the priests to eat it; it would feed the priest's family, among other things, like the sacrifices, and they would eat it, but only the priests could eat it. He says, "Do you have any bread?" They said, "Well, we got this." And they gave it to him, and he ate it and gave it to his posse.
Verse 5: Jesus said, "The Son of Man, speaking of himself, is the Lord of the Sabbath." On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching. A man came up whose right hand was withered. The scribes and the Pharisees watched him, i.e., Christ, to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, so that they might find a reason to accuse him. "Look, he's going to break the Sabbath. We're going to watch for that." But he knew their thoughts.
He said to the man with a withered hand, "Come and stand here." And he rose and stood there. Jesus said to him, "I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?" After looking around at all of them, he said to him, "Stretch out your hand." He did so, and his hand was restored. They were filled with fury and disgust with one another about what they might do to Jesus.
Okay, two scenes, two Sabbath situations. In the first, he's walking through the grain fields and eating with his disciples the heads of grain by rubbing the husks off in their hands and eating them. They said, as we've read, "You're doing something that's not lawful." Jot these references down, if you would, as I read them for you. Let's start in Exodus 16:23. This is the scene when they're out in the wilderness. We've already gotten the command to rest on the seventh day. By the way, that's what the word Sabbath means. It means to rest, to cease from activity. He's already given the command God has through Moses: everybody's supposed to rest on the seventh day, Saturday. Then some of the details of how to deal with things like, I don't know, cooking. Now, think this through. He said, "No work on the seventh day."
Speaker 3
Saturday.
Speaker 4
Don't work. So, okay, we're going to shut down whether it's harvest time or not. Not going to work. We're not cooking meals. We're not gathering, going to the store to get it. And we're not bringing it back and cooking it. Okay, we're eating leftovers on Saturday. That's the picture.
Now, if you want a modern equivalent to what Jesus is doing in verse number one, going through the grain fields as he's walking through there, plucking them and eating some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. That's like you stopping by the little stand on the road by your house and buying a Snicker bar, right?
Here's my contention, though not every commentator will tell you this. Jesus is not violating the Sabbath according to the law. And you're going to ask, well, wait a minute. Jesus even says it. It was not lawful for anyone but the Levites to eat this. The priests could eat it. David couldn't eat it. Now, why would he bring that up? Not because there's a correspondence to the infraction of the law. He's enlisting it because of what the Rabbis of the first century taught about what David did when he got into the temple there in Nob and ate the showbread.
The rabbis, if you read what they wrote, believed David was exempt. He was exempt. He did break the law. There's no way around that. But he is not guilty because he is David. The correspondence that's being made is what he's wanting them to do with their knowledge of Christ. That's why he enlists this verse, verse 5.
Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath. In other words, you're giving David a pass because he's a man after God's own heart and the greatest king of Old Testament Israel; I am the Son of Man. Does Jesus really need to get circumcised on the eighth day? Does he really need to bring sacrifices? Does he really need to keep the Sabbath?
Speaker 3
No.
Speaker 4
Why? Because if he is the Son of Man, the ancient of days has put all dominion on, then all those things are really symbolic of him. All of those things should serve him. When it comes down to it, Jesus is above this ceremonial law because he's the whole purpose of the ceremonial law. They gave David a pass, but they wouldn't even see Jesus for who he really was. And they weren't willing to cut him any slack at all. When in reality, David did break the law and he shouldn't have. And Jesus, he wasn't breaking the law, but he could, and he had all authority. What he was breaking, and here's my pastoral point, is what the Pharisees expected of him. The Pharisees in their mind thought that he was displeasing the Father because they had expectations.
All you got to do is hear any sermon on this or read any book or any commentary, and they immediately start quoting what all the Pharisees required of people when it came to the Sabbath day. The Bible, oh, it has regulations about the Sabbath, and it doesn't take long for us to read them and see. You can't do this. You can't do that on the Sabbath. It's a day of ceasing from work, and God has to go and say, listen, you can't work the servants. You can't even work your animals. Everybody rests, including the cook. Everybody rests in honor of God. That is a sign, as the Bible says, between Israel and their God. It's about ceasing from work.
Now, when it comes to this, the Pharisees said, well, we've got to answer a lot of questions about what's okay and what's not okay and what is work, and what isn't work. And there was in the Talmud, which basically was the codification of all that these Pharisees taught about the Sabbath. I mean, there's over like 24 chapters in the Talmud about the instructions of what you can and can't do. As one irreverent commentator put it, one way he says to go raving crazy is to study the Talmud and the Book of the Sabbath with all of its rules and regulations as to what's permissible on the Sabbath and what isn't. And then they said, if you do what we think is wrong on the Sabbath, you know what? We don't think you're godly.
Well, now the question is, was it? No, it was their laws. It wasn't their laws. It was their traditions that they made out to be laws. And I don't have time to look at all these, but if you're taking notes, jot them down. Colossians, chapter 2, verses 16 and 17. It says that no one can come to you and say, you are not obeying God. You are doing something ungodly because you're not keeping the Sabbath. It says, let no one pass judgment on you in questions about food, drink, regard to festival, new moon, or Sabbath; those were the shadow of the things to come. But the substance is in Christ, as we learned in chapter nine of Hebrews, they're obsolete. All the ceremonies, obsolete.
In Galatians, chapter 5, verses 1 through 6, he says, if you want to turn back to those things, they're weak and worthless, elementary principles of the world. Paul says neither circumcision, verse 6, nor uncircumcision counts for anything. It's nothing. It's a waste of your time. Why? Because in Christ it's been fulfilled. We are not to go back to these things. These were all about the realities being found in Christ, lived out through faith in Christ. You want to know the exact moment this took place? Matthew 27:50-51. It was the moment he died, yielded up his spirit, when he said to Telesti, when he was dead on a cross. The Bible says the veil of the Temple tore. He wrecked the whole thing. The centerpiece of symbolic ceremonial worship made obsolete at the moment of his death.
Right then in First Thessalonians 4, he talks about moral law like, I don't know, sexual ethics and being faithful to your wife. And he says, listen, if you don't do this, not only will God be the avenger in all these things, but if you disregard what I've told you, you've disregarded God. I mean, if you want to talk about the difference between moral law and the ceremonial law, it couldn't be clearer. In the New Testament, the one that we're concerned with is New Testament believers, and that is that we get right with the living God through our faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ.
If we get back to the second scene here in Luke 6, on another Sabbath, he enters the synagogue. He's teaching a man with a withered hand. The right hand comes in. Scribes and Pharisees watched him to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath so that they might find a reason to accuse him. Now, all that you know about this passage because we read it earlier, tell me this. Did the Pharisees and scribes want him to heal the man on the Sabbath, yes or no? Yes. Why? So they could bust him.
Now, let's just think about this. You got Sabbath keepers in their heart wanting this man to break the Sabbath. Do you see the problem here, the hypocrisy of this? But he knew their thoughts. He knew that's what they wanted. So he says to the man, verse number eight, with a withered hand, hey, you, come stand here. You can see the indignant frustration of Christ. And he rose and he stood there, and he said, I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm? Now, that's what he wanted to do to the man with a withered hand. Not only prove his credentials, as he's doing throughout the synagogues in Galilee, but he wants to do good to this man. That's a good thing, he says.
Now, in the second couplet, he says, is it lawful to save life or destroy it? You don't need to have all your limbs working to live life. He's not saving a life here, but he uses the second couplet. Because in reality, what's happening is they are there on the Sabbath, plotting to destroy Christ. Look at him expose their motive. Here's what he says. You're here on the Sabbath, not only wanting me to break the Sabbath, but look at your own heart. You come here saying you're keeping the law of God. But in your heart, you've come here to destroy a person. I'm trying to speak a word and heal the person, and you're trying to condemn me for that.
Do you see the hypocrisy in this? The hypocrisy is they're there checking a box that they are Sabbath keepers, doing what God wants them to do, when in their heart they're doing something terrible. They're plotting to kill a man who's simply speaking a word. If you're talking about regulations from the law of Moses about healing, we have none. Why? Because it's a miracle? Because people don't do this. Is it much work anyway for Christ to speak a word and heal the man? Say, stretch out your hand.
Here's what's happening. You've got men who are on the outside, look like they're keeping the laws of God. And in fact, I suppose on the outside they were, but on the inside they weren't. Because we can be something on the outside and something else on the inside. Like the old story I often tell about the kid in class told to sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down. Finally, disgruntled and frustrated and defiant, the kid sits down and tells the teacher, I may be sitting on the outside, but I'm standing on the inside.
Now you say, well, I don't think that's happening in my life. Let me show you a passage. Mark chapter seven. With this, we'll wrap it up. Mark seven. Not only are they taking the teachings and commands of people and putting it on par with the teachings and doctrines of God, it's worse than that. They're raising those as a cover for evil behavior. Look at how he puts it, beginning in verse eight. When it comes to these two things, it's not only that you equate them and keep them equal, it's that you're actually leaving the commandment of God, Mark 7:8, and holding to the tradition of men.
And he said this. You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. For Moses said, for instance, honor your father and mother. Whoever reviles his father or mother shall surely be put to death. Clearly, those commands were having you be favorable and kind to your parents. That's the point of the command, and that's what they tell you to do. But you say, listen, I got a tradition here and another law. And what we'll do is, we'll say, if a man has property or money and he can help his father and mother, but he says to them, listen, I can't do it because whatever would have been gained if I gave you that, I've marked it Corbin, which is a word, as Mark explains, which means given to God.
I've kind of put an X on that for God. I've set the money aside for God. Then you no longer permit the man to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you handed down. And many such things you do. You do something that gives an appearance of godliness, but in many ways you're doing that while your heart's moving in the opposite direction. And when it comes to this, the Bible says, honor your parents. And look at this one practice where you'd say, well, I really don't want to honor my parents. And because I don't want to honor my parents, I've come up with a way to justify not honoring my parents by putting some kind of thing here that looks very religious, and that is, I've set the money aside for the Lord. I can't give it to you.
You're really breaking the law while you're giving the appearance that you're keeping the law. That's the kind of hypocrisy God has just had enough of. As a matter of fact, the Sermon on the Mount that's recorded there in Matthew chapter five is filled with those things. He says, you may be checking the box and you may never have murdered anybody. You have no rap sheet, and yet in your heart you harbor bitterness toward them. When you hate them and call them names, the Bible says, really, you're moving in this direction toward your neighbor. When the Bible says love your neighbor, it should be moving in this direction.
When it comes to adultery, hey, fantastic. Faithful to your wife, you haven't committed adultery. That's supposed to lead you to fidelity and this oneness in your marriage. But instead, you're moving in your heart in the opposite direction. With a lust-filled heart, you're keeping the law on the outside, but on the inside, your heart's running the other direction. Oaths, right? The Bible says that the oaths, yeah, to make an oath, make a commitment, do all that. Here's the thing, you're using that to say it only is applicable and my words are only binding when I'm making an oath. And I can then do the opposite. I can be untrustworthy and I can do something that really isn't real. It's not true, it's deceptive because I didn't make an oath.
God lists all those kinds of things and says, look at what you're doing. You're keeping the law on the outside, or at least you think you are. Maybe someone sees that you are, but on the inside your heart's running the other direction. Let that be the pattern for what you do all week. If you're going to tell the truth, tell the truth inside and out. If you're going to be faithful to your spouse, be faithful to your spouse inside and out. If you're going to deal with the issues at work and deal with the integrity the Bible asks for, do it inside and out. Don't let your heart be moving in the opposite direction. You make sure this is all something that's authentic, non-hypocritical, and make that your goal.
Speaker 3
A pattern for the rest of your week.
Speaker 1
You're listening to a special edition of Ask Pastor Mike with Pastor Mike Fabarez here on Focal Point. The message you heard is titled "Sorting Out God's Orders From Our Opinions," and you can hear a complete uncut version when you go to focalpointradio.org. You know, biblical Christianity requires thought and intention. We think through what the Bible says is true and try to follow it authentically.
And that's the launching point of the new book we're featuring this month. It's called "True for You But Not For Me" by Paul Copan. We learned today that certain practices are a matter of preference, but we can get in a heap of trouble when we start applying that rule to non-negotiable truths. Learn where that defining line falls.
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