So,

So, Some people today find Jesus teaching on the Sabbath to be comforting.

Others find it confusing.

Still others dismiss it as a relic of a bygone era.

How is it possible for the same teaching to evoke such different responses?

We'll consider the answer today on Truth for Life as Alistair Begg teaches from the opening

verses in Luke chapter six. Now technically, healing according the law, was permitted only if the illness was life-threatening.

And this, you see, was the kind of technicality that these Pharisees loved.

Well, is the man going to die?

No, he's clearly not going to die.

He's had a shriveled hand for some time.

Then if he's not going to die, it violates the letter of the law because it is only if the illness is life-threatening,

that healing may take place. And Jesus says, away with all that kind of legalistic nonsense.

Here, this man has the opportunity to be healed. It would be sinful to leave him in his

pitiable condition, but you want

to use the synagogue and you want to use the law as a means of putting a barrier between those

who are in great need and the liberation that they may discover. Isn't that a dreadful thing?

When people will seek to employ the word of God and the worship of God's people and use it

as the very

antithesis to what God intends for to be done with it. And it happens all the time. It's the spirit

of Phariseism, alive and well in contemporary evangelicalism. Seizing the law of God, to add to it our own accretions, to build into it our own

shibbolets, and to use it then as a means of saying, well, you can stay hungry and you can

...