Feast: Stewardship of God's Temple (Part Three)
#FT21-03
David F. Maas
Given 23-Sep-21; 61 minutes
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transcript:
I Corinthians 3:16-17 Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are.
I Corinthians 6:19-20 Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price: therefore, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.
In this third installment of “The Stewardship of God’s Temple” (namely the tending and keeping of our physical bodies—which are indeed the temples of God’s Holy Spirit), I wish to focus on the topic of sleep and rest, particularly entering God’s rest pictured both in the weekly Sabbath (as my dear mentor, the late Bob Hoops described as a miniature and weekly reminder of the Feast of Tabernacles) depicting the grand Millennial Sabbath, allowing a blessed time of refreshing for the exhausted and downtrodden peoples of the earth who have had to endure tyrannical harassment from Gentile and renegade rulers of modern Israel, who are currently rejecting God’s laws regarding the sanctity of the family, rejecting laws prohibiting murder, sodomy, and now the healing covenant, embracing pagan gods of medicine rather than trusting God for healing, and rejecting God’s Sabbath commands, preventing their subjects to enter God’s rest (referencing Hebrews 4:1-11).
Dr. Roderick Meredith, in his booklet “The Seven Laws of Radiant Health” (available in PDF form in several locations on the Internet), proclaimed,
Many people, especially students, are inclined to delude themselves with the idea they can drive themselves relentlessly on in work or play, then ‘catch up on sleep’ later on, and be none the worse for it. Nothing will ever take the place of regular sleep in its recuperative effects on the human body. Man can go much longer without food than he can without sleep. Sleep becomes unbelievably necessary after long periods of sleeplessness. Sufficient, regular sleep for most adult’s ranges from seven to nine hours.
I might point out that since the publication of this booklet, several major sleep studies have taken issue with that figure suggesting that the low-ball eight hours rule is not sufficient for maximum alertness, creativity, or productivity.
Dr. Meredith insists that
Sleep is definitely not wasted time. It will enable one to be fully alive during his work and play, and to live a longer and fuller life in the end.” He continues, “In addition to regular sleep, many physical education and health authorities recommend one or more short periods of rest throughout the day to recharge our worn nerve batteries. When the Creator said, ‘Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work,’ He was giving a law of health—as well as a spiritual principle—which will never grow old. Both physically and mentally, as well as spiritually, we need to rest every seventh day—and so God gave the Sabbath rest as a great blessing. Thousands of years ago, God knew and enunciated what too many of us still have not found out, that in depriving ourselves of sufficient sleep and rest, we will accomplish not more but less in the end.
Perhaps that gives a new slant to the old Yiddish Proverb, “Az men hot a sakh tsu ton, leygt men zikh shlofn,” “When you have a lot to do, go to sleep”—or as a local elder in the Minneapolis Radio Church of God back in 1965 once proclaimed, “The key to the next day is the time you hit the hay.” Incidentally, in countering the vacuous, ignorant arguments of mainstream Protestant theologians and their often hopelessly muddled commentaries, both the Sabbath command and the clean and unclean laws were in force long before Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, or one single solitary Jew lived on the planet, and more importantly, are still in force for all of mankind today (referencing Genesis 2:2-3 and Genesis 7:2).
God’s eternal laws govern and establish the eternal principles behind the physical laws regarding consuming food and water, fasting, sleep and rest, physical exercise, avoiding bodily injury, maintaining cleanliness, and maintaining a tranquil mind. All physical laws were patented and copyrighted by Almighty God. Through the spirit in man, God has allowed researchers to discover what God Almighty has encoded from eternity. The precious eternal laws of God sadly have been perverted by carnal human beings who have, since the time of the Garden of Eden, found or invented evil as well as good uses for all of God’s creation—what military uses can we make of them, or how can we exploit them for profit or greedy financial gain?
Genesis 2:16-17 And the LORD God commanded the man saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Psalm 8:6-8 reveals that it was God’s intended purpose to give mankind dominion over the entire earth to tend and keep His creation. The late Herbert W. Armstrong in his book, Mystery of the Ages, asks
But what has man done on the earth where God placed him? Man has made ugly, polluted, defiled, and profane everything his hands have touched. He has polluted the air and befouled the water in the rivers, lakes, and seas. He has deteriorated the land, denuded the forests, thus altering rainfall and causing the expansion of deserts. He has worn out the soil by neglecting to give it its sabbaths of rest every seven years. Man has built cities and allowed them to deteriorate into crime-infested slums, filth, and squalor. All because the very first human rejected and turned from God, relying solely on himself—and all of Adam’s children have done likewise. Consequently, Adam and Eve’s children have constructed a man-made and Satan-influenced civilization. Mankind not only has ruined the earth he should have developed and improved, but he has also destroyed his own health by wrong living, tragically degrading and perverting his own spiritual character.
Now at last as we near the end of 6,000 years, God has allowed man free rein wherein he has created the Frankenstein of weapons of mass destruction [including the recent deadly BSL-4 bioweapon which has tragically murdered some of our brethren in the last several months and is on target to kill much of the world’s population] that can and would destroy mankind utterly—unless a merciful God intervenes to save us from ourselves. In short, mankind has polluted, contaminated, perverted, abused, misused everything a benevolent God has placed within the reach of his hands.
Our Lord has promised His chosen saints that if they remain steadfast to His holy spiritual and physical laws that He would spare them from the curses of disease and sickness.
Exodus 15:26 and [the LORD] said “If you diligently heed the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in His sight, give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have brought on the Egyptians. For I am the LORD who heals you.”
Remember these promises and blessings are conditional upon our willingness to obey God in everything He asks.
Deuteronomy 7:14-15 “You shall be blessed above all peoples; there shall not be a male or female barren among you or among your livestock. And the Lord will take away from you all sickness and will afflict you with none of the terrible diseases of Egypt which you have known but will lay them on all those who hate you.”
All sickness and disease can be traced to broken health laws, whether transgressed deliberately, ignorantly, or as a result of an entire society over generation upon generation snubbing God’s laws, dragging God’s chosen saints into affliction with them. As the late Dr. Herman Hoeh often warned, the sins and behaviors of the world will eventually, and indeed have already, infiltrated into the church of God. Thankfully, as my former student, colleague, and dear brother in Christ, Sheldon Monson, has reminded us in his August 21, 2021 sermon on the need to trust God (posted on several locations on the internet), we have been given the blessing of asking one of God’s elders for anointing in the event that they are afflicted with disease (referencing James 5:14). Sheldon mentioned that God miraculously healed him from stage 4 cancer and Covid-19.
Sleep, one of the major health laws, has been broken over the past 6,000 years, but perhaps more since the invention of the incandescent light bulb by Thomas Edison in 1879, when it became possible to artificially create endless 24/7 illumination (decidedly inferior to natural sunlight) but nevertheless creating that enigmatic troubling aberration, “the city that never sleeps.”
Interestingly, Thomas Edison typically slept only three to four hours a night, regarding sleep as a waste of precious time. Some of Edison’s colleagues, however, noted that he frequently nodded off in the middle of a conversation and dozed intermittently throughout the day. Albert Einstein, on the other hand, needed 10 hours to function well, while Calvin Coolidge (as well as Dave Maas) thrive better on about 11 hours. God Almighty is the author of both sleep and rest as He modeled resting on the Sabbath for mankind long before He gave Moses the Ten Commandments.
Genesis 2:1-3 Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh from all His work which He had done. Then God [not Emperor Constantine or the Roman Catholic Church] blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God created and made.
It was Almighty God who built into our nervous systems the need for sleep. The very first occasion sleep is mentioned in the Bible is Genesis 2:21, when God placed Adam into a profound anesthetic deep sleep, forming Eve from one of his ribs. Immediately, God establishes a connection between sleep and creativity. Likewise, the Sabbath rest is a state of creativity in which the physical work may cease, but the spiritual work only begins.
Understanding the physical process of sleep provides intriguing insights into the unseen reality of spiritual creation. Remember, that the only glimpse we have of spiritual truths through our naked eyes (minus the lens of faith) comes through analogies or metaphors from creation—a teaching device used profusely through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, his half-brother James, and the apostle Paul (referencing Romans 1:20).
Jonathan Parnell, in his article “Three Reasons to Get some Sleep,” emphatically proclaims that God created all creatures to require sleep for a healthy life, insisting that “Most of us (not all of us) know from painful experience that going without sleep has drastic effects on us physically and emotionally.” One of the latest studies warns that going one night with less than six hours of sleep may alter our genes and cause several troublesome side effects—ranging from a higher chance of catching a cold or flu to the apparently irreversible loss of brain tissue. Parnell observes that the psalmist David not only regards sleep as a blessing, but also as an article of faith in the Lord’s protection.
Psalm 3:5-6 I lay down and slept; I awoke for the LORD sustained me. I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around.
Psalm 4:8 I will both lie down in peace, and sleep; for You alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.
David’s faith in God’s protection, displayed by his sleep, is mirrored in the Son of David, Jesus Christ, who demonstrated that He could sleep through a turbulent storm, confident that His Father would protect Him (referencing Mark 4: 37-39). Parnell offers the insight that
Sleep [even more so than fasting] is the midwife of humility, calling it a heart virtue that gestates, maturing over time, having been born by truth and practice. We quickly learn that we humans are decidedly more needy than we are autonomous. Next to fasting, sleep may be the most central practice that lines up with the truth of who we are—helpless mortal human beings, deeply in need of God’s protection and intervention. Sleep is that necessary moment that comes every single day when our bodies go slow, and our minds start dragging. They witness to our fragility. And eventually, we will surrender.
Parnell concludes that “our problem, as the studies suggest, is that we do not surrender soon enough. Oftentimes, overpowered by our rebellious, sin-saturated, carnal natures, we push back. The invitation to sleep gets handed to us with generous terms, but we resist until we’re wrestled down.”
This past week we have been enjoying the blessing of a thousand-year or millennial Sabbath, having followed a 6,000-year period when all peoples over the entire earth, including Jacob’s offspring, have fought contentiously and savagely against God’s sanctified seventh day Sabbath, as well as the many spiritual principles governing the physical daily 24-hour laws of sleep and rest. The millennial Sabbath will for the first time allow the exhausted and beleaguered world to rest and recover from 6,000 years of human mismanagement inflicted by tyrannical governments managed by both Gentiles and the satanically influenced, rebellious children of Jacob right up to this day.
A perennial problem in the human family, long before poor Eutychus fell out the window listening to Paul’s lengthy Bible study (referencing Acts 20:7-12), is that mankind has not only been depriving himself of the weekly Sabbath, but has been robbing his daily sleep bank, cheating himself of badly needed spiritual and mental nourishment. Many have expressed outrage against the out-of-control deficit, promoted by the current woke United States House of Representatives, creating fake illusory mirage-wealth out of billions of worthless government IOU’s, creating a new Weimar Republic in which it will take a wheelbarrow full of Washington funny money to buy a loaf of bread.
According to the late Dr. William Dement, former chairman of the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research, “The national sleep debt is far larger and more important than the national financial debt.” When we look at this grim statistic worldwide, the results look even more grim and foreboding. Recently medical researchers have estimated that the population of the entire earth is getting, on the average, an hour less sleep that what is needed. While some may consider this figure slight, one hour less sleep per night constitutes a nightly 7.9-billion-hour debt, a precipitous cumulative debt decreasing the quality of life and gravely impacting the overall quality of life worldwide.
I have over the past several months explored the work of Dr. James Maas (someone I would dearly like to claim as a long-lost cousin), a researcher on the study of sleep, having served as the Chairman of the Psychology at Cornell University, teaching Basic Psychology at Cornell University for 48 years, having mentored more than 65,000 students. Dr. Maas authored the blockbuster best seller in 1999 Power Sleep, followed by Sleep for Success, Sleep to Win!, (all incidentally available on Kindle) a children’s book titled Remmy and the Brain Train: Traveling Through the Land of Good Sleep designed to help improve daytime alertness, mood, and performance, as well as a forthcoming book Sleep Made Simple; Tips for a Great Night’s Sleep and a Better Tomorrow, which I plan to purchase as soon as it comes off the press.
Currently, having retired from teaching, Dr. Maas serves as the CEO of the on-line counseling service, Sleep for Success, helping thousands of desperate clients with sleeping problems or sleep disorders. His books, having been translated into 12 languages, have admonished the world’s populations that “Contrary to popular belief, a sleep debt does not dissipate by itself over time, and it is cumulative. A one-hour sleep loss per day for an entire week is equivalent to an all-nighter. It is impossible to repay years of sleep debt by one night of good sleep.”
Those of us who have though ignorance or carelessness of God’s health laws regarding sleep and rest have not been spared the consequences breaking them any more than our forebears on the Sinai were spared of their ignorance. God will forgive our sins only when we are ready to obey His laws, desiring to have them permanently etched on our hearts and the mind of Christ saturating our nervous systems as our spiritual DNA is altered forever (referencing Hebrews 8:10; 10:16, and Jeremiah 31:31-33).
Please turn over to Deuteronomy 10, reviewing a concept Mark Schindler mentioned in his offertory message yesterday.
Deuteronomy 10:17 “For the LORD God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality nor takes a bribe.”
Please scroll ahead to Acts 10:34-35, reviewing the apostle Peter’s proclamation to the Gentile Cornelius, welcoming him into the Body of Christ.
Acts 10:34-35 Then Peter opened his mouth and said: “In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality. But in every nation, whoever fears Him and works righteousness is accepted by Him.”
Now let us review what the apostle Paul cautions the Israel of God.
Romans 2:11-15 For there is no partiality with God. For as many as have sinned without law will perish without law, and as many as have sinned in the law will be judged by the law (for not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be justified; for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them.)
If we ignorantly flaunt God’s health laws, copying the living habits of the society around us, especially now governed by a worldly government (the most tyrannical sadly now led by Jacob’s offspring—in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States), we cannot expect that “Protestanty” cheap grace is going to make up for years and years and years of self-inflicted physical abuse. For 6,000 years, the world has been cheating itself of not only God’s Sabbath rest but has been robbing collectively the sleep bank for which God has mandated that we become stewards or custodians.
Dr. James Maas, beginning in 1999, began to warn the so-called ‘developed’ nations of the world of a run-away sleep-debt (which pales into insignificance the irresponsible “Infrastructure Bill” being mulled over by the United States Congress).
Most of us [insists James Maas], need at least one more hour of sleep every night than we get. The consequences of gradual yet continuous sleep deprivation might not be readily apparent at first glance, but over time, the insidious sleepiness will begin to take its toll on our mood, our performance, and our health. Our education, our job, and our family and social life will be affected. Unintended sleep seizures, for which there is no warning could be embarrassing, costly, and even fatal.
From the dawn of creation, Adam and Eve’s offspring have been messing around with time, upsetting the nervous system, and causing physiological calamity. We remember in the vision of Daniel 7 that the Beast Power has as one of its strategies to wear out the saints and will think to change times and laws (referencing Daniel 7:25).
During my own short 77 years, or more accurately 27,818 days on this earth, my own government has greatly messed around or tinkered around with our fragile nervous systems by passing Daylight Savings Time legislation. According to a Time Magazine article by Olivia Waxman, “The Real Reason Why Daylight Saving Time is a Thing,” the United States Congress, copying the Germans who established the first Daylight Saving time on May 1, 1916, established the first U.S. law on Daylight Saving time, March 19, 1918, twelve days before my father was born. Congress messed around again in 1942 with a more complicated bill, followed by the Uniform Time Act in 1966, signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, followed by Richard Nixon calling for year-round Daylight Savings Time. Since 2005, the U.S. has been observing eight months of Daylight Saving Time.
According to Stanley Coren, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, in the four days after we lose one hour of sleep following the spring shift to daylight saving time, there is a 7 percent increase in accidental deaths compared to the week before and the week after—a pattern that is reversed in the fall when we gain one hour of sleep on a given night. Dr. James Maas asserts that for most people, it takes at least eight hours of sleep to provide for sixteen hours of sustained wakefulness.
Dr. Timothy Rowers and Thomas Roth at the Sleep Disorders Center of the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan have demonstrated that ten hours of sleep is required for optimal performance, maintaining that alertness significantly increases when eight-hour sleepers who claim to be well rested get an additional two hours of sleep. Energy, vigilance, and the ability to process information are all enhanced, as are critical thinking skills and creativity.
Our Lord and Creator has determined that we spend approximately one-seventh of our lives keeping His sanctified weekly and annual Sabbaths as we are doing this entire week. He has also determined that we spend one third of our physical lives in slumber—that would constitute 26 years for me personally.
If we attempt to cheat on our sleep-bank, imitating the world’s misguided behaviors, we can and should expect to reap the same curses as the world, taking on the diseases of Egypt (referencing Exodus 15:26 and Deuteronomy 7:15). James Maas has provided a list of disastrous consequences of cumulative sleep deprivation, including:
Daytime Drowsiness: Inability to get through the day without a temporary loss in energy, usually in the mid-afternoon trough. Feelings of inattentiveness and grogginess, particularly when doing soporific tasks. Especially likely to occur in a heavy meal or a low dose of alcohol, while you are sitting in a warm room, listening to a boring lecture, or participating in a dull meeting. Again, these factors do not cause sleepiness. They simply unmask the physiological sleepiness already in the body.
Microsleeps: Brief episodes of sleep lasting a few seconds at a time, which produce inattention and can result in accidents, even death.
Sleep Seizures: Unintended longer episodes of sleep that occur as rapidly as a seizure, without warning, in a severely sleep-deprived person.
Mood Shifts (including depression, increased irritability, and loss of sense of humor): Mood is one of the first things to be affected by sleep loss. With even minimal sleep loss, our threshold for containing anger is lowered—not a way to promote the righteousness of God (referencing James 1:20). We can quickly lose friends, anger spouses, and make enemies.
Stress, Anxiety, and Loss of Coping Skills: Overwhelming feelings of not being able to cope, even with simple problems or moderate workloads. Increase in worry, frustration, and nervousness. Inability to maintain perspective, or to relax under moderate pressure.
Lack of Interest in Socializing with Others: Wanting to avoid group participation or interacting with others owing to fatigue. Desire to disengage from the outside world.
Weight Gain: Consumption of beverages and foods high in sugar content used as an aid to stay awake when sleep deprived. Some people attempt to reduce anxiety or boredom through eating.
Feelings of Being Chilled: Often the result of trying to stay awake very late at night, after the circadian rhythm ebbs and causes body temperature to plummet.
Reduced Immunity to Disease and Viral Infection: The body’s natural killer immune cells stop functioning as sleep deprivation increases.
Feeling of Lethargy: Loss of motivation to maintain present tasks or pursue new endeavors.
Reduced Productivity: Reduction in cognitive functioning and reaction time including the following:
Reduced ability to concentrate.
Reduced ability to remember (especially short-term memory.
Reduced ability to handle complex tasks.
Reduced ability to think logically.
Reduced ability to assimilate and analyze new information.
Reduced ability to think critically.
Reduced decision-making skills.
Reduced vocabulary and communication skills.
Reduced creativity.
Reduced motor skills and coordination.
Reduced perceptual skills.
Can you imagine hiring someone to work for you with these traits? Tragically, people who go several days without sleep often experience such detrimental symptoms as slowed reflexes, impaired judgment, feelings of hostility, delusions of persecution, and fearful hallucinations.
We receive in God's Word promise after promise after promise that God will rescue, but there are conditions of obedience and reverence. God's delivery of the righteous shows that He is able to rescue His people when tempted and understands the best way to do it. He sees a solution to our problems when we cannot—though it is often a solution we would not have thought of on our own.
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