While Pastor Nancy is away eating Yorkshire puddings, drinking french wine, and holding up unstable buildings in Pisa (or whatever else you do in Europe), It’s a great time to talk about rest. You may think of the sabbath as Sunday, the day where we go to church. Well… that’s not really it. The sabbath is a day to rest and be refreshed. Apparently it’s important enough to be part of the 10 commandments! Let’s dive in.
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy: You are to labor six days and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. You must not do any work — you, your son or daughter, your male or female servant, your livestock, or the resident alien who is within your city gates. For the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything in them in six days; then he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy.
Exodus 20:8-11, CSB
First of all in verse 8, we see that the sabbath is holy, but what does that even mean? Think of it like this; If I went up to the pulpit one Sunday and started tearing pages out of a dictionary, most people wouldn’t bat an eye. If I did that with the Bible, the congregation would be irate. A dictionary and a Bible are not fundamentally different on a physical level, are they? Not really. So then why is it offensive to tear pages out of one and not the other? Well, Christians treat the Bible as holy. Despite being physically identical to an ordinary book, we believe that it should be set apart and treated differently from ordinary books. In the same way, the sabbath isn’t fundamentally different from other days, but it is set apart and treated differently.
What is the sabbath set apart for? Next, verses 9 and 10 show us how we are supposed to practice the sabbath. It says that nobody is allowed to do any work (even the livestock!). It sounds like a really difficult task to stop all work, doesn’t it? Remember what Jesus had to say about the sabbath in Mark 2:27 “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.” The sabbath isn’t a rule that we cannot do work on a certain day, but it’s a gift of rest. Imagine if your job had mandatory vacation time. A time to relax and be refreshed. As Matthew Poole puts it in his commentary of Exodus 35:3, “The sabbath is rather a feast day than a fast day.” The sabbath is a day that should be enjoyed.
Lastly, verse 11 references Genesis 1 & 2, which describes God creating the earth in six days. But what did God do on the seventh day? He rested. He not only rested from His work, but rested in the completion of His perfect world which He made to enjoy with us. God didn’t simply rest from His work, He rested in His work. Every other day of creation in Genesis 1 ends with “… there was evening, and there was morning the [first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth] day”, but not the seventh. Imagine that, a never ending day wherein God rests in the world with His people. That’s the very same image we get in Revelation 21 & 22, a new creation, wherein God’s people live eternally in His presence. That is what God is redeeming His people to, the ultimate rest, an eternal sabbath. Pastor Jack used to say that “heaven is where God’s original view of creation is restored, and it’s a party!” So what is the sabbath if not a little taste of heaven?
On the Sabbath we can rest and look back in awe of what God has done, and look forward in anticipation of what we trust He will do, celebrating all of it.
Matt Smith
