Sabbath Was Made For Man

(Mark 2:23-28)

In these verses, Jesus and His disciples are walking through a grainfield on the Sabbath and they are pulling off the heads of the grain and eating it. It was Saturday and they were hungry. So they ate. The Pharisees saw this and accused Jesus and His followers of breaking the Law.
The Law said to remember the Sabbath and to keep it holy and that man was to do no work on that day. (Exodus 20:8-10) Humans determined what God meant by that. They had added to the Law a number of "oral" laws that were intended to clarify the meaning of the command. (As if God needed our help to say what He means to say) The Sabbath was given by God to provide a day of rest for people and to remind them of all that God had done for them. People in turn, with good motives no doubt began to bind on others their definition of "work".
Jesus in Mark 2:27 says, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." I believe His point is that God created the Sabbath to benefit people; to give them rest and clarity of mind. People then took His command and twisted it into some legalistic burden that man was to keep. In other words, man was here first and God gave him a day of rest, with the distorted view being that God created the Sabbath and then created man for it.
The point is simply this..... God has provided us a book of instruction (we call it the Bible) that is given for our benefit. It is not just a book of commands to keep in order to please God, rather it is guidance for living a life filled with joy. Jesus said "I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly." Go back and read John 1. He is the Word, and so the Word came that we might have the abundant life! Whether we understand it or not, every single command throughout the Bible is given for our benefit.
Take a moment to contemplate that idea. If you, if we truly grasp that God's commands were given to benefit us, it changes our entire outlook towards His Word. Suddenly, it is no longer a book of rules to be kept in order to get the prize when we die; rather, it becomes God's love letter to us. No longer are we checklist keepers; we become the bride of the Lamb. (Rev 19:6-8) The Jews got it wrong. They turned His instruction into a list of dos and don'ts and thought by keeping the list perfectly that He would be pleased. What they missed was that God is pleased when His people are faithful and by being faithful, they would be blessed and the world would see Him through them.
Nothing has changed in God's plan or nature. Yes, we live under a New Covenant and yes, we are no longer under the Old Testament law, but God still desires us to be faithful to Him. His promise is that blessings will flow to those that live by His word. When we depart from His path, we will suffer the  consequences. His way is "the way" that leads to the abundant life and any other path leads to something less. Jesus tells us that He is "the way" and that "no one comes to the Father except through me". (John 14:6) He still intends for the world to see Him through us. When we live out our lives by His plan and our lives are filled with the joy that only He can bring, the world sees Him.
"His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness."
(2 Peter 1:3) Through our knowledge of Him, we are given everything we need! His glory and goodness call us into a life of faithfulness in which we are given everything we need for life. It's not bookkeeping, it's a relationship. We are the bride and He is the groom! He is not an IRS agent checking to see if we have an error on our returns. He is the groom and what groom would treat his bride like that? Through our relationship with Him, all of our errors are taken care of by Him. (1 John 1:7)
"The Sabbath was made for man". God's Word is for our benefit. We receive the blessing when we live faithfully by His instruction and we pay the price when we choose to follow our own wisdom. May we reconsider how we approach His love letter and begin to see that everything He has written is an extension of His love for each of us. May God richly bless you as you live out your faith.