The Word Says that Christ is Lord over The Sabath fairly clearly and I’m not sure that you are picking up on The True Spiritual message Christ delivers. There are many who believe that living under self imposed rigorous obedience to a belief that salvation is based on your own works is how it works. I know that is not how salvation works.
God's Law straightforwardly does what it was given to do and does not do what it was not given to do, so the reason why we are not saved by obeying the Law is because it was never given for that purpose, so the fact that we should not obey the Law for that purpose does not mean that we should not obey the Law for the purposes for which it was given. Our salvation is from sin (Matthew 1:21) and sin is defined as the transgression of God's Law (1 John 3:4), so being trained by grace to live in obedience to God's Law through faith is what our salvation from living in disobedience to God's Law looks like. In Romans 1:5, we have received grace in order to bring about the obedience that faith requires, so we are not saved by our obedience, but rather the same grace and faith by which we are saved expresses itself as obedience. In Titus 2:11-14, our salvation is described as being trained by grace to do what is godly, righteous, and good, and to renounce doing what is ungodly, which is essentially what God's Law was given to instruct us how to do, so participating in this training is about fully receiving the grace that has been giving and about what our salvation looks like, not about trying to earn our salvation.
[15] Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.
Matt.23
[4] For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.
Jesus criticized the Pharisees for not obeying God's Law or for not obeying it correctly, but he never criticized them for obeying God. For example:
Matthew 23:23-24 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. 24 You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!
So you should be careful not to take a criticism of what the Pharisees were doing as being a criticism of what God commanded.
Please pray for Christ to show you the deep Spiritual Truth of The Word of God Above. If you absolutely believe that your sinning if you do a certain thing, it is a sin for it is done in willful rebellion. However, when Christ comes to you in your day of visitation and begins your born again experience with teaching and understanding of The mysteries in The Word, only then will you truly understand. The first mention of this day of visitation is first mentioned in Numbers 16:29 and the entire story that surrounds the use of The Word Visitation.
Has Christ come to you and spoken with you and opened your eyes to what should be the most exciting day of your life thus far. You will have no doubts. You will absolutely know that The GodHead is very real. It won’t be as much faith based after that time but you will absolutely know that The GodHead is very real and judgement is very real. The first thing anyone can do is seek God The Father with all that they have. About the only contribution to your own salvation that you have input on is the very tiny amount of faith required to let God in.
The existence of sin requires there to be a standard of what is and is not sin, and this standard is God's Law. In Romans 3:20, God's Law was given to make us conscious of sin, in Romans 7:7, Paul would not have known what sin is if it weren't for God's Law, in 1 John 3:4, sin is the transgression of God's Law, and when Jesus began his ministry with the Gospel message to repent from our sins for the Kingdom of God is at hand, the Law was how his audience knew what sin is. Gentiles are either under God's Law and are obligated to refrain from sin and are not under God's Law, have no obligation to refrain from sin, and have never needed Jesus to give himself to redeem them from all Lawlessness.
However, God is God, so all Gentiles are under God's Law and are obligated to obey it and to refrain from sin regardless of whether or not they are in a covenant relationship with Him. For example, God judged the world the the Flood for their sins, God will judge the world in Revelation, God threatened to judge Nineveh, and God judged Sodom and Gomorrah for their Lawless deeds (2 Peter 2:6-8). They didn't get the choice of whether they wanted to be under God's Law and neither do you. The choice that you do get to make is whether or not you are going to heed the Gospel, repent, and obey.
Until you experience Christ coming to you as a thief in the night, you can’t possibly understand The hidden mysteries contained in The Word. Someone has taught you that you put heavy burdens on yourself, somehow your extra burden will somehow save you. Again, your only input is having the faith of a grain of a mustard seed to let The GodHead in to commune with your soul and to grow you. You must know The Fear of The Lord. I have described it as bone paralyzing Terror. I know of what I speak as I have been taught directly by Christ. How can anyone possibly explain what you can only understand when your eyes and ears are opened.
In Deuteronomy 30:11-14, God said that His Law was not too difficult for us to obey and 1 John 5:3 confirms that to love God is to obey His commandments, which are not burdensome. Rather, it is the commandments of men that are burdensome.
In Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that faith is one of the weightier matters of the Law, so obedience to God's instructions is about having faith in Him to guide us in how to rightly live. Living by faith is always associated with having a willingness to obey God's instructions, such as with the examples of saving faith listed in Hebrews 11, whereas disobedience to God's instructions is referred to as breaking faith, such as in Numbers 5:6. In James 2:17-18, he said that faith without works is dead and that that he would show his faith by his works, so obedience to God's Law is not about adding our own efforts on top of our faith, but rather it is what our faith looks like, which is why Paul said in Romans 2:13 that it is only the doers of the Law who will be justified. So we are not saved by our obedience to the Law, but rather we have received grace to bring about the obedience that faith requires (Romans 1:5), so the same grace and faith by which we are saved also requires our obedience, which is why Paul said in Ephesians 2:8-10 that we have been saved by grace through faith, not by works, but rather we have been made creations in Christ for the purpose of doing good works.
[9] But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?
[10] Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years.
[11] I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.
[12] Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am; for I am as ye are: ye have not injured me at all.
Do you observe days and months and times and years? I’m afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain from Verse 11 directly above. Do you teach other men your guidelines for being saved? I truly hope that you fast and pray without ceasing and seek. The line between works based salvation and being saved by Grace are two completely different things. Only Christ has lived as a sin free man. Yet, all things that were created were created by, through and for Christ. Perhaps you also believe in dietary laws.
In Galatians 4:8, Paul addressed those verses to those who formerly did not know God, also known as former pagans. As such they were not formerly keeping God's holy days and thus Paul could not have been criticizing them for going back to keeping them. Paul would not have referred to the holy, righteous, and good commandments of God as weak and worthless principles of the world, but rather that is how he referred to paganism. So whatever he was speaking about in verse 10 is in the context of paganism, not in regard to God's holy days. Again, you should be careful not to take something that was only against obeying man-made laws as being against obeying what God has commanded.
All things are lawful to me but all things are not expedient.
1Cor.6
- [12] All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
Galatians 4:10 above nails it. Christ is The Way The Truth and The Life. He who Christ sets free is free indeed. When you are living “in The Way”, you quickly understand that you can only live “in The Way” through Christ. Christ didn’t add burdens to man, He gave man The Truth. You might recall when David and his men ate the Shewbread in the temple.
1Sam.21
[6] So the priest gave him hallowed bread: for there was no bread there but the shewbread, that was taken from before the LORD, to put hot bread in the day when it was taken away.
Do you think that Paul thought that everything that he listed in the preceding verses was lawful?:
1 Corinthians 6:9-11 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
One of the main issues that Paul was writing the book of Corinthians to correct was that they considered everything to be lawful, especially in regard to sexual sin, so he was quoting that to argue against that position, not to endorse it.
