Exposing The Noahide Laws and Defending The Faith
A personal response to the legalism flooding my inbox, and a call to return to pure grace.
Lately, a wave of people has flooded my inbox and comments section with various explanations for the Sabbath, utilizing the well known reasoning of Saturday keepers, the Hebrew Roots movement, and Seventh-day Adventists.
They all repeat the same writings and arguments, but what they completely forget is that I was there myself.
I used those exact same reasonings when I used to literally keep the seventh-day Sabbath.
I originally intended for that first Sabbath article to be the only one I wrote, since I don’t deal with this topic extensively on my Substack, but that single piece has caused Sabbath defenders to flood me both publicly and through private emails.
Some are even overtly hostile, and most of them even go so far as to attack Christianity itself – something I came here specifically to defend.
The title of my Substack is “Exposing the Noahide Laws and Defending the Faith,” and what I mean by that, folks, is defending the Christian faith. When I talk about the Christian faith, I am talking about defending the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who is God manifest in the flesh, sent by the Father into the world to live a perfect life, die a death on the cross for our sins, and rise again to reconcile humanity to God.
This core message of grace and redemption is what these hostile arguments target, and it comes across with a sense of self righteousness, as if they know better, which made me recognize the presence of a deep religious spirit very similar to the Pharisees.
I tell you honestly, I don’t judge them because I was there, and once you are under that kind of spirit, it is a real and difficult thing to break off.
The best approach is to let these folks be, politely say what needs to be said, move on, and agree to disagree – which I am perfectly capable of doing. However, this is my Substack, and I happen to decide what I choose to write here, and I don’t force anyone to read it.
You can leave your reasonings below and I will answer the best I can, but at a certain point, I will no longer engage.
There is no way I would ever return to literal Sabbath keeping, not after the deep revelation I had about this subject that profoundly changed me, transformed my faith in Christ, and personalized and strengthened my relationship with Him.
Returning to literal day keeping would be, for me personally, like a dog returning to its vomit, or like returning to suck my mother’s milk instead of eating a dinner prepared for a mature person.
I don’t judge you and I love you, but on this subject, we are not united, so accept this or don’t read any further. The brothers and sisters who understand what I am saying about the Sabbath are those who grasp the deep spiritual revelation of what I am explaining.
There is a tragic irony that happens when people try to pull the physical shadow of the Sabbath forward into the modern world.
When individuals or religious groups insist that we must still legally keep a specific day of the week to stay right with God, they believe they are showing deep obedience. But if we follow the logic of the shadow and the substance, the reality is exactly the opposite: focusing on the physical day actually misses the entire point of what Jesus did.
By retreating back into the rules of the shadow, they are inadvertently violating the true Sabbath.
It feels like a massive punch to the gut when you first read it: the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness, trying to figure out how to be a nation after generations of brutal Egyptian slavery. A man goes out on the Sabbath day and starts gathering sticks. He’s caught, put in custody because nobody is quite sure what to do with him yet, and then the text delivers a verdict that makes modern readers shudder.
God tells Moses that the entire community must take this man outside the camp and stone him to death.
By any modern standard of human rights and ethics it feels incredibly, undeniably cruel. It is the kind of passage that makes people slam the Bible shut and walk away.
But if we look closer, using a lens that the New Testament itself hands us, the picture completely changes.
In the first century, the Apostle Paul wrote something in his letter to the Colossians that acts like a skeleton key for these difficult ancient laws. He said that things like the dietary restrictions, festivals, and the Sabbath day were just a shadow of the things to come, but the reality is found in Christ.
Think about how a shadow works.
A shadow is dark, flat, and lacks detail, but it only exists because a real, solid object is casting it. In the Old Testament, God was dealing with a tribal people, using physical things to draw a blueprint for a future spiritual reality.
In that wilderness setting, the Sabbath was a literal, physical day where you had to completely stop your physical labor. Gathering wood on that day wasn’t just a minor oversight; it was a deliberate choice to refuse the rest and the provision that God had promised. It was a declaration of self reliance, a statement that says, “I have to work and provide for myself because I don’t trust the provision of God.”
Because the kingdom of God at that time was a visible, physical nation, the boundaries were enforced with immediate, physical consequences.
The severity of the stoning wasn’t an act of random cruelty; it was a graphic, unforgettable object lesson meant to scream across history about the absolute seriousness of what that shadow represented. The physical execution was a shadow of a much deeper spiritual truth.
The true Sabbath rest isn’t a Saturday or a Sunday; it is a Person.
Jesus came to be our ultimate rest. To enter His rest means to finally stop striving, to stop trying to earn your own right standing with God through your own works, and to completely lean into what He accomplished on the cross.
When you see it this way, the warning of the stoning shifts from a story about ancient violence into a profound lesson for our time right now.
If Christ is the fulfillment of the Sabbath, then choosing to live outside of Him is a choice to rely entirely on your own strength, your own works, and your own labor to survive spiritually.
And the ultimate end of human effort apart from God is death.
It isn’t that God is waiting outside the camp with stones today, ready to strike us down the moment we slip up. It’s the simple reality that outside of the source of life, there is no life.
The Book of Hebrews spends a lot of time diving into this exact connection.
It warns us that the physical generation in the wilderness missed out on God’s rest because of a lack of faith, and it urges us not to make the same mistake today.
When Jesus stood in that grainfield centuries later, watching His hungry disciples pluck heads of wheat on the Sabbath, the religious leaders wanted to throw the book at them. They were stuck in the rigid, legalistic shadow.
But Jesus stepped in and declared that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, calling Himself the Lord of the Sabbath. He was stripping away the heavy, suffocating burdens of human tradition to show what the day was always meant to be about: mercy, life, and total reliance on Him.
The harshness of the ancient text doesn’t tell us that God is a monster.
It tells us just how incredibly vital it is to be found in Christ.
The physical shadow was brutal because the spiritual reality is a matter of eternal life and death. Once the reality arrives and invites us into a Rest we could never earn for ourselves, refusing that invitation leaves us with nothing but our own broken efforts – and that is a weight none of us were ever meant to carry.
This is exactly what the Apostle Paul was fiercely fighting against in his letter to the Galatians. He saw people who had heard the gospel of grace turning right back around to rely on their own works, trying to observe special days, months, seasons, and years.
He practically begged them to understand that by trying to make themselves righteous through keeping the law, they were cutting themselves off from the very grace they claimed to want.
Insisting on a physical Sabbath today reveals a deep, spiritual blind spot.
It shows a struggle to see the beautiful connection of how perfectly Jesus fulfilled every single letter of the law.
When someone insists that a specific day must be kept to maintain righteousness, they are quietly slipping back into self reliance. They are saying, “What Jesus did on the cross was a good start, but I still need to add my own efforts, my own rule keeping, and my own works to make sure I am secure.”
It becomes a subtle form of pride – a desire to display our own righteousness through visible, trackable behaviors rather than completely surrendering to the flawless righteousness of Christ.
The man gathering sticks in the wilderness faced physical death because he refused the physical rest provided by God, choosing instead to rely on his own labor.
Today, the danger is entirely spiritual, but the mechanics are the same.
Turning the Sabbath back into a legalistic requirement is the modern equivalent of going out to gather sticks. It is a refusal to sit down, rest, and trust that the provision is already complete.
True Sabbath keeping today isn’t about looking at the calendar; it is about looking at the cross.
It is a spiritual reality where we declare our total bankruptcy before God and accept that Jesus paid it all.
When He cried out, “It is finished,” the era of human striving to earn God’s favor died with Him.
To live in Christ is to live in a permanent, unending state of rest, knowing that our righteousness is completely tied to Him, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
At the end of the day, I want to be kind and understanding, so please know that I don’t judge you, Sabbath keepers.
I am fully able to love you and agree to disagree, and my genuine prayer is that God will reveal to you the truth about the fact that Christ is indeed our Sabbath rest.
There is absolutely nothing you can do to show yourself righteous or earn his favor except to trust that your life is in Him, surrender completely to Him, and live daily in Him.
Jana
Leave a Reply