Disciples Plucking Grain on the SabbathBible World
6:2Luke 6:2
And certain of the Pharisees said unto them, Why do ye that which is not lawful to do on the sabbath days?
The verse belongs to the episode in which Christ passes through a grainfield and His followers pluck ears of grain, an event followed closely by His healing of the man with a withered hand. The charge arose when the disciples, returning from worship and passing through a field of ripening grain, plucked heads of wheat because they were hungry and rubbed out the kernels in their hands to eat. That act of eating to satisfy hunger while passing through a neighbor's field was permitted by God's law, which allowed a passerby to gather from a field, orchard, or vineyard and provided harvest gleanings for the poor.
The rabbis treated the same act on the Sabbath as a double offense, counting gathering as a kind of reaping and rubbing in the hands as a kind of threshing. The accusation rested not on God's law but on burdensome human requirements that had perverted the Sabbath and stripped it of significance after departure from God and failure to receive righteousness by faith. Those distorted Sabbath rules made observance reflect selfish, arbitrary men rather than the loving Heavenly Father, representing God as a tyrant giving impossible laws and making Sabbath-keeping hard-hearted and cruel, a perversion promoted by Satan because the Sabbath is the sign of Christ's power.
Jesus denied the charge of unlawful Sabbath-breaking and declared the disciples guiltless, showing their actions were fully in harmony with the Sabbath commandment. Christ did not conform to the human requirements but kept the Sabbath according to God's law in order to clear away the misconception, rejecting the false teaching despite the hostility of the rabbis. He repelled the charge and established the innocence of His disciples by covering them with the shield of His own prerogatives, with the dignity He alone possessed as God in the flesh in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, the divine and human united to act out the principles that govern heaven.
The verse shows scribes and Pharisees impatient to accuse Christ, wide awake to condemn Him and critically spying upon all His words and actions, and when finding nothing against Him charging His disciples. Though He gave unmistakable evidence that He was sent of God, they charged Him who made the Sabbath and is Lord of the Sabbath with being a Sabbath-breaker, in a work prompted by the enemy. Their blind judgment exposes the foolishness and weakness of men who assume the place of judges over God's work, as if they had put out their own eyes, and illustrates how insisting on carrying God's work in one's own way causes loss of bearings.
The verse belongs to the episode in which Christ passes through a grainfield and His followers pluck ears of grain, an event followed closely by His healing of the man with a withered hand. The charge arose when the disciples, returning from worship and passing through a field of ripening grain, plucked heads of wheat because they were hungry and rubbed out the kernels in their hands to eat. That act of eating to satisfy hunger while passing through a neighbor's field was permitted by God's law, which allowed a passerby to gather from a field, orchard, or vineyard and provided harvest gleanings for the poor.
The rabbis treated the same act on the Sabbath as a double offense, counting gathering as a kind of reaping and rubbing in the hands as a kind of threshing. The accusation rested not on God's law but on burdensome human requirements that had perverted the Sabbath and stripped it of significance after departure from God and failure to receive righteousness by faith. Those distorted Sabbath rules made observance reflect selfish, arbitrary men rather than the loving Heavenly Father, representing God as a tyrant giving impossible laws and making Sabbath-keeping hard-hearted and cruel, a perversion promoted by Satan because the Sabbath is the sign of Christ's power.
Jesus denied the charge of unlawful Sabbath-breaking and declared the disciples guiltless, showing their actions were fully in harmony with the Sabbath commandment. Christ did not conform to the human requirements but kept the Sabbath according to God's law in order to clear away the misconception, rejecting the false teaching despite the hostility of the rabbis. He repelled the charge and established the innocence of His disciples by covering them with the shield of His own prerogatives, with the dignity He alone possessed as God in the flesh in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, the divine and human united to act out the principles that govern heaven.
The verse shows scribes and Pharisees impatient to accuse Christ, wide awake to condemn Him and critically spying upon all His words and actions, and when finding nothing against Him charging His disciples. Though He gave unmistakable evidence that He was sent of God, they charged Him who made the Sabbath and is Lord of the Sabbath with being a Sabbath-breaker, in a work prompted by the enemy. Their blind judgment exposes the foolishness and weakness of men who assume the place of judges over God's work, as if they had put out their own eyes, and illustrates how insisting on carrying God's work in one's own way causes loss of bearings.