Numbers 15:35
And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp. And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp.
The verse is God's answer when Moses asked how to punish a man caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath in the wilderness. The man acted soon after Israel was told they would be disinherited, angry at exclusion from Canaan and determined to defy God's law. Gathering fuel broke the strict ban on kindling fires on the seventh day in the wilderness, where fire was not needed for warmth as it would be in Canaan.
When a man openly went before the congregation to gather wood for a fire or do other unnecessary work, he acted against the Lord's commandment and was cut off from the people for his transgression. His act was willful and deliberate presumption, not thoughtlessness or ignorance. Death for Sabbath-breaking had already been declared, but the manner had not yet been revealed. The prescribed manner for one who knowingly committed this sin was to be taken outside the camp and stoned to death by all the congregation.
Willful Sabbath-breaking received the same punishment as blasphemy because both equally express contempt for God's authority. Although the Sabbath was made for the benefit of man, knowingly working on the seventh day and transgressing the holy commandment forbidding labor is a crime of great magnitude in the sight of Heaven. Under the Mosaic law its magnitude was so great as to require the death of the offender. That death was not all the offender was to suffer, for God will not take a transgressor of His law to heaven, and he must also suffer the second death, which is the full and final penalty for transgressing God's law.
The judgment also applies to breaking the seventh commandment, whose offenders faced temporal and eternal death. God is very particular regarding observance of His holy law. The death penalty for Sabbath-breaking is not now exacted and God may not now punish transgression with temporal penalties.
Because stoning is no longer the penalty, the sin is wrongly treated as a small offense. The death penalty does not make the fourth commandment only Jewish, any more than the same penalty makes the third, the fifth, and nearly all the ten precepts only Jewish, for the wages of sin is death and in the final execution of judgment death will be the portion of those who violate His sacred precepts. A time is coming when everyone must answer for every disregard of God's law, so there rests a solemn duty to study how to observe the Lord's Sabbath and to teach others its sacredness.