1.0Transform Through Christhttps://transformthroughchrist.com/reflectionskompazoukgirl@yahoo.comhttps://transformthroughchrist.com/reflections/author/kompazoukgirlyahoo-com/rich600338<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content" data-secret="pvHdgaVvSu"><a href="https://transformthroughchrist.com/reflections/2026/04/09/christ-our-rest-part-4/">Christ Our Rest: A Biblical Examination of the Sabbath and the New Covenant (4 of 6)</a></blockquote><iframe sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" src="https://transformthroughchrist.com/reflections/2026/04/09/christ-our-rest-part-4/embed/#?secret=pvHdgaVvSu" width="600" height="338" title="“Christ Our Rest: A Biblical Examination of the Sabbath and the New Covenant (4 of 6)” — Transform Through Christ" data-secret="pvHdgaVvSu" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" class="wp-embedded-content"></iframe><script> /*! This file is auto-generated */ !function(d,l){"use strict";l.querySelector&&d.addEventListener&&"undefined"!=typeof URL&&(d.wp=d.wp||{},d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage||(d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage=function(e){var t=e.data;if((t||t.secret||t.message||t.value)&&!/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/.test(t.secret)){for(var s,r,n,a=l.querySelectorAll('iframe[data-secret="'+t.secret+'"]'),o=l.querySelectorAll('blockquote[data-secret="'+t.secret+'"]'),c=new RegExp("^https?:$","i"),i=0;i<o.length;i++)o[i].style.display="none";for(i=0;i<a.length;i++)s=a[i],e.source===s.contentWindow&&(s.removeAttribute("style"),"height"===t.message?(1e3<(r=parseInt(t.value,10))?r=1e3:~~r<200&&(r=200),s.height=r):"link"===t.message&&(r=new URL(s.getAttribute("src")),n=new URL(t.value),c.test(n.protocol))&&n.host===r.host&&l.activeElement===s&&(d.top.location.href=t.value))}},d.addEventListener("message",d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage,!1),l.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){for(var e,t,s=l.querySelectorAll("iframe.wp-embedded-content"),r=0;r<s.length;r++)(t=(e=s[r]).getAttribute("data-secret"))||(t=Math.random().toString(36).substring(2,12),e.src+="#?secret="+t,e.setAttribute("data-secret",t)),e.contentWindow.postMessage({message:"ready",secret:t},"*")},!1)))}(window,document); //# sourceURL=https://transformthroughchrist.com/reflections/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js </script> https://transformthroughchrist.com/reflections/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/moon-scaled-e1780165952625.jpg500300Part 4: The New Covenant Established Worship in Spirit and Truth Even before the cross, Jesus had begun dismantling the Old Covenant coordinates of worship. He did not wait for the Temple’s destruction in AD 70 to redirect His followers; He prepared them in advance for the new reality His death and resurrection would inaugurate. The most explicit instance comes in His conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. She raises the standard Old Covenant question—where is the legitimate place of worship, this mountain or Jerusalem? Jesus’ answer dismantles the question itself: “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father… But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” — John 4:21–24 Notice what is happening. Jesus does not choose between the Samaritan and Jewish sites of worship—He removes the entire category. The hour of localized Old Covenant worship is ending; the hour of Spirit-and-truth worship is “now here” in His own person. The very nature of God—”God is spirit”—demands worship that is not bound to geography. The Father has always been seeking such worshipers; the localized Old Covenant arrangement was preparatory, not ultimate. This conversation is decisive for the Sabbath question, because it reveals the structural pattern Jesus is establishing. The Old Covenant localized worship in two dimensions: in space (the Temple, “the place that the LORD your God will choose”—Deuteronomy 12:5) and in time (the Sabbath and the appointed feasts—Leviticus 23). In John 4, Jesus eliminates the spatial coordinate. In Matthew 11, He performs the identical work on the temporal coordinate: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” — Matthew 11:28–29 The language is Sabbath language—rest, yoke, refreshment for the weary—but the locus has shifted from a day to a Person. And Matthew’s structure is deliberate: this saying is followed immediately by the great Sabbath conflicts of chapter 12, in which Jesus declares Himself “Lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8) and demonstrates His authority over its observance. The rest the Sabbath had always pointed to is found in coming to Christ Himself. The apostolic church understood the dismantling perfectly. Stephen was stoned for declaring that ‘the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands’ (Acts 7:48–50)—the same temple-logic Jesus had already voiced in John 4. Paul preached the same at Athens: “The God who made the world and everything in it… does not live in temples made by man” (Acts 17:24). The locus of God’s presence shifted from the Temple in Jerusalem to the indwelt believer (1 Corinthians 6:19), to the corporate body of Christ (Ephesians 2:19–22; 1 Peter 2:4–5). And the eschatological vision of Revelation confirms the same trajectory: “And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” — Revelation 21:22 The new creation contains no Temple—not because something has been lost, but because the substance has replaced the shadow forever. By exact parallel logic, no eschatological scheme that envisions a restored Sabbath observance in the new earth can stand against Revelation’s vision; the Lamb Himself is the rest, just as He is the Temple. The counter-text most often pressed here is Isaiah’s own portrait of that new creation: “From new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, declares the LORD” (Isaiah 66:23). If Sabbath worship persists in the new heavens and new earth, the argument runs, it can hardly be a shadow that has passed. But the verse proves at once more and less than its users intend. It proves more, because the same clause binds the new moon alongside the Sabbath: whoever reads it as mandating perpetual seventh-day observance cannot consistently decline the monthly festival named in the very same breath—yet no Sabbatarian keeps the new moon. The reading that secures the Sabbath here secures the new moon with it, and the whole sacred calendar besides. And it proves less, because the entire oracle is painted in the cultic vocabulary of the prophet’s own day: the preceding verses bring grain offerings in clean vessels to “the house of the LORD” and take priests and Levites from among the nations (Isaiah 66:20–21), and the scene closes over the corpses of the rebels (66:24). Isaiah describes the age to come in the only worship-language his hearers possessed—temple, offering, priest, Sabbath, new moon—exactly as Revelation later describes it with a “temple” that turns out to be the Lord God and the Lamb (Revelation 21:22). The merism “from new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath” signifies unceasing worship by all flesh—the Gentiles now streaming in—not the survival of a calendar into eternity. Its substance, like every shadow’s, belongs to Christ. The implications for the Sabbath are exact. To insist that New Covenant worship must still be bound to a particular day is structurally identical to insisting that it must still be bound to a particular mountain. Jesus eliminated both coordinates in the same motion, by the same logic, for the same reason. Worship is no longer where; worship is no longer when. Worship is now Whom—the Father, in the Spirit, through the Son who is Himself the truth. That is the worship the Father is seeking. That is the worship the New Covenant inaugurates. And it is the worship to which every Old Covenant sign—Temple and Sabbath alike—was always pointing. The New Covenant Established in His Blood Against this backdrop, the promise of a New Covenant becomes crucial. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God declared that He would establish a covenant “not like” the one made at Sinai. This was not a revision of the old system, but something fundamentally different: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” — Jeremiah 31:31–34 The covenant God promised is defined explicitly as not like the covenant at Sinai. The relationship would no longer be mediated through external structures alone, but through internal transformation. The law would no longer be written on stone but on the heart. And notice the promise at the covenant’s heart: “they shall all know me.” The New Covenant is not finally about a better set of obligations; it is about knowing God personally — the very thing Israel lacked even while keeping her rituals (Hosea 4:6; 6:6), and the very thing Jesus calls eternal life: “that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). The rest the Sabbath pointed toward is ultimately the rest of being known by God and knowing Him in return.  (I explore this more personally in a companion reflection on Hosea, surrender, and the rest of knowing God.) Paul contrasts these covenant administrations directly: “…not in a written code but in the Spirit. For the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). His contrast is not between bad law and good morality, but between external covenant administration and inward transformation through the Spirit. The same point is made even more starkly when Jesus, on the night before His crucifixion, takes the cup and declares: “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). His blood is not presented as another sacrifice within the Mosaic system, but as the covenant-establishing blood of the New Covenant itself. To place Christ back into the framework of the Old Covenant as though His sacrifice merely replaces animal offerings while leaving the Sinai covenant structurally intact is to misunderstand the very covenant His blood established. Jesus had anticipated—in vivid metaphor—that the fresh reality His ministry brings cannot simply be poured into vessels calibrated only for what came before. Alongside the mismatched patch—new cloth on an old garment—He warns: “Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; if it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved” (Matthew 9:17; cf. Mark 2:22; Luke 5:37–38). He is not declaring Israel’s former covenant worthless; He is declaring that what He is bringing cannot be housed as a mere retrofit inside older covenant forms without tearing what they were meant to carry. To reinscribe Sinai-era obligations—including the Sabbath as an enduring covenant signature—as necessities for standing before God under Christ is not preserving faithfulness; it presses new covenant reality back into an administrative frame Scripture repeatedly depicts as surpassed—and risks the very rupture the images warn against. The issue is not whether Christ fulfills Mosaic typology—Scripture explicitly says He does. The issue is whether fulfilled Sinai covenant signs may continue functioning as binding covenant requirements for justification or covenant membership after the inauguration of the New Covenant. Paul’s answer is no. To retain Sabbath as a salvific covenant marker while simultaneously replacing its sacrificial administration with Christ is to treat the Mosaic covenant as selectively continuing under a hybrid structure Scripture nowhere describes. A contract cannot be chopped up or mixed with another. You cannot sign a mortgage, cross out the interest and foreclosure clauses, and claim you still keep its “moral core” because you intend to pay the principal. Nor can you paste a softer rate from a different loan onto the first contract’s collateral terms. The agreement stands or falls as one legal unit. In the same way, Sinai’s covenant is not a buffet of preferred clauses, and Christ is not a patch from the New Covenant to be inserted into the Old Covenant so that it can continue selectively. And bringing the Sabbath-sign forward into the New Covenant as its loyalty marker is the same kind of splice in the opposite direction. Such hybrid arrangements produce confusion—two administrations claimed at once, neither kept as God gave it. God’s ways are ordered: fulfillment and transfer of headship, not bidirectional borrowing. The New Covenant Jeremiah spoke of is *”not like”* the one Israel broke; Jesus warns that new wine cannot be poured into old wineskins; and Paul says believers have died to the law in order to belong to another, Christ (Romans 7:4). That transfer of headship is exactly Paul’s point. He declares that “now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law… the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe” (Romans 3:21–22). Human boasting is excluded—not by a law of works, but by the law of faith: “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Romans 3:27–28). Believers are described as released from the law as a covenant authority and brought into a new way of living defined by the Spirit (Romans 7:6). This is not a rejection of righteousness but a transformation of how righteousness...