Shabbat Worship

^{Picture: First Fruits of Zion}

Luke 4:16-21 (CJB)

¹⁶ Now when he went to Natzeret, where he had been brought up, on Shabbat he went to the synagogue as usual. He stood up to read, ¹⁷ and he was given the scroll of the prophet Yesha‘yahu. Unrolling the scroll, he found the place where it was written,

¹⁸  “The Spirit of ADONAI is upon me
because he has anointed me
to announce Good News to the poor;
he has sent me to proclaim freedom for the imprisoned
and renewed sight for the blind,
to release those who have been crushed,
¹⁹  to proclaim a year of the favor of ADONAI.”

²⁰ After closing the scroll and returning it to the shammash, he sat down; and the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹ He started to speak to them: “Today, as you heard it read, this passage of the Tanakh was fulfilled!”

Luke 4:16-21 The first-century synagogue service is briefly described in Luke 4:16-21. Notice the reading from the Torah and Haftarah. When Yeshua turned to Isaiah 61, a messianic section, he read from the Haftarah portion. The last reader in the service was customarily given the honour of expounding on the reading with a sermon, which was why Yeshua spoke on fulfilling the words of the prophet Isaiah. Yeshua made it his habit to worship at the weekly Shabbat service. What else would he do? He was born a Jew and lived a life consistent with much of the traditional Judaism of the day. Likewise, the first Jewish disciples continued in the traditional forms of synagogue worship (see Acts 13:14 and 18:4). This does not imply that Yeshua agreed with every detail of every rabbinic teaching of Sabbath observance. In deed he tried to correct imbalances in rabbinic perspective by reminding the people that “Shabbat was made for mankind, not mankind for Shabbat” (Mark 2:27). Yeshua challenged the people of his day to remain biblically balanced, to enter in the true rest of God’s spirit.