Exodus 20
8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
The fourth commandment is one with which many Christians have an uneasy relationship. We know it is in God’s word and we know it is a commandment, yet must of us know that (a) Sunday is more of a Sabbath for us than Saturday, the seventh day of the week, was and is for the Jews and (b) even at that, we do not really honor the Sabbath on Sunday either! To put it simply, most Christians today do not really know quite what to do with the commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”
What is the Sabbath? Before we begin, let us try to construct a basic definition based on the text.
The Hebrew word šābat literally means “stop.” So we should stop something on the Sabbath. We also know that the Sabbath is a day: “Remember the Sabbath day…” So, at a minimum, we know that there is a day in which we stop. Stop what? Verse 9 tells us: “work.” We should stop work on the Sabbath. That is what we should give up. But there also appears to be an idea of taking something up. First, we should take up rest. Second, we should take up activities that honor the holiness of the day, for “the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” The primary activity that would lead us into rest and the sanctifying of the Sabbath day would appear to be worship. We should worship God on the Sabbath.
This is a very basic definition, and one that may raise more questions than it answers. Even so, let us begin with it and then move forward into a deeper consideration of the text and the implications of Sabbath rest.
Sabbath observance honors God and imitates the pattern of His creative work and rest.
We first notice that the fourth commandment calls us to an act of imitation and, specifically, to an imitation of a pattern and rhythm.
8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
We are called to imitate God. The key here is verse 11: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” The implication is clear: we should “remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy” because this is what God did in the act of creation. We should imitate what God did. Victor Hamilton writes:
Nowhere in the Bible is the concept of imitatio dei as transparent as it is here. Leviticus 19:2b is another classic imitatio dei verse, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy,” but nowhere does Lev. 19 spell out anything God is or does that identifies him as holy and that we can do too. God was not a workaholic. Don’t you be one, says this fourth commandment.[1]
That is humorously put, but well said: “God was not a workaholic. Don’t you be one, says this fourth commandment.” So we are called to imitation: imitation of God. Specifically, we are called to a particular pattern and rhythm of life, the rhythm we find in Genesis: six days labor followed by one day of holy rest.
8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Six days work.
One day rest.
Six days work.
One day rest.
This is the basic pattern of life.
Set aside, for a moment, the thousand questions that come to mind when hearing about this rhythm. Most of them are borne of legalism and basically miss the whole point. The main point, for now, is that God, in creation, demonstrated a rhythm that we are called likewise to follow: six days work and one day rest.
If we are commanded to follow this pattern, and if God Himself followed this pattern, then how important do you think this is? It is apparently very important.
Again, setting aside our legalistic parsing of these verses, let me ask you to take a moment, step back from this text, look at it, look at the current rhythm of your life, and see how they match up. In other words, in terms of the broad strokes of our text, is your life following this kind of rhythm, this kind of pattern, this kind of divine example?
If your life is not following this rhythm, let me ask you another question: how are you doing right now? Are you happy? Healthy? Whole? Content? At peace?
I daresay that most of us are not following this pattern. Our society is not structured to honor this Sabbath rhythm. We are doing too much, though, paradoxically, it feels like we are accomplishing less. The regular week for most of us feels like we are in a Nascar race, but we are tied to the roof of the car and not driving it. Even the way we rest is exhausting. Much of our rest consists of diversions that cost money and take energy from us. It is not true rest.
Sabbath observance should include rest and worship.
And, at the end of the day, for many of us, worship does not fit very prominently into our patterns and rhythms, if it is present at all. But note that the Sabbath day is holy. It is not a day of laziness. It is a day of holy, God-honoring, worshipful rest.
8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Abraham Heschel has helpfully called the Sabbath “a sanctuary in time” (Sabbath).[2] That is a beautiful way to think about it. Furthermore, Patrick Miller has pointed out that God granting His people Sabbath rest is the antithesis of the cruel response of Pharaoh to the Israelites when they appealed to him for an opportunity to worship.
When Israelite slaves in Egypt sought time off to worship the Lord their God, when the people sought release from the service of the Pharaoh for the service of God, the forces of human tyranny and oppressive economic exploitation of slave labor were set against this request for time that is sacred and holy and restful, demanding for more work. Pharaoh said: “They cry, ‘Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.’ Let heavier work be laid on them” (5:8–9). The service of God is rejected in behalf of a secular exploitation of human life and human work. That is what triggered the Lord’s gift of the Sabbath. What is required is what is needed to make and to keep human life human— and not inhumane, as it was in Egypt.[3]
The Sabbath is a gift. It is a gift from God. It is therefore amazing and sad that we approach the topic of the Sabbath begrudgingly wondering how an observance of this sacred day will potentially disrupt our routines instead of approaching it joyfully and with gratitude. Do you see how God, unlike Pharaoh, wanted to bless His people by drawing them into His presence in a special way on this special day? The Sabbath reveals the kindness and mercy of God.
We should want to worship on the Sabbath! That is what the Jews asked of Pharaoh: “Let us worship our God!” This was rest, true, but it was worshipful rest. “There really is a difference,” Patrick Miller writes, “between taking a day off and taking a day off and sanctifying it to the Lord.”[4] J.I. Packer has likewise offered some helpful insights into the nature of what we set aside and what we take up on the Sabbath.
Third, the ethical problem: if the Lord’s day is the Christian Sabbath, how do we keep it holy? Answer—by behaving as Jesus did. His Sabbaths were days not for idle amusement, but for worshiping God and doing good—what the Shorter Catechism calls “works of necessity and mercy” (see Luke 4:16; 13:10–17; 14:1–6). Freedom from secular chores secures freedom to serve the Lord on his own day. Matthew Henry says that the Sabbath was made a day of holy rest so that it might be a day of holy work. From this holy work, in our sedentary and lonely world, physical recreation and family fun will not be excluded, but worship and Christian fellowship will come first.[5]
Matthew Henry’s words stand out: “the Sabbath was made a day of holy rest so that it might be a day of holy work.” This “holy work” is worship and praise with the assembly of God’s people.
Dear church, honor our times of corporate worship. They are food for our souls. The rhythm of consistent gathering and consistent praise is what we need to remain human in a dehumanizing world and to remain Christian in a world that is anti-Christ.
My father is a hardware salesman. He has worked hard his entire life. When I was growing up he would be gone a night or two every week out on the road traveling and selling hardware. But he honored the sacredness of worship. It always made an impression on me.
I recall one Wednesday night when our Minister of Youth was out of town and we had to go to the prayer meeting in the sanctuary. I am ashamed to say that this was not an exciting prospect for me! But I went. I remember sitting over to the side with a few other kids trying not to look as bored as I felt. My dad had been out of town working. Our mom had brought us to church, if I recall. So we sat there through the whole service. There were only about five to ten minutes left when the back doors opened and I saw my father, looking tired and worn, come in and sit down in the back.
He had rushed in for the last few minutes of worship instead of just going home.
I do not know that I have ever told him just what kind of impression that made on me. I do not recall what was said from the platform that night, but I do recall what my dad was saying just by walking through that door: “This matters to me. This is important. The corporate gathering of the church should be kept sacred.”
Father and mothers: let us let our children see us valuing and honoring worship! Let us let them see that it matters to us. If they see it matters to us then it will likewise matter to them.
Honor the twin Sabbath privileges of rest and worship.
Sabbath observance for the Church is bound to the liberation and rest we find in the resurrected Jesus.
We know the call to Sabbath observance is binding and we know that it is important. Yet we meet on Sundays. How can this be? Are we violating the Sabbath by meeting on Sunday for worship instead of Saturday?
For the early Church, the resurrection was a paradigm-shifting act of redefinition. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead did not obliterate the Sabbath, but it did situate it in the person and work of Christ, who, I will remind us, referred to Himself as “Lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8).
The resurrection, of course, happened on the first day of the week. In Mark 16:2 we read, “And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.” As a result, the Church began to meet on the first day of the week, the Lord’s day. Thus, in Acts 20:7 we find this: “On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the next day, and he prolonged his speech until midnight.” Furthermore, In Revelation 1:10 John writes of this day as a settled and recognized day in the life of the Church: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet.”
The resurrection of Jesus therefore redefined the Sabbath and situated it on the first day of the week. The Westminster Shorter Catechism says:
From the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, God appointed the seventh day of the week to be a weekly Sabbath; and the first day of the week ever since…which is the Christian Sabbath.[6]
For Christians, the Lord’s day is our Sabbath day. That is because Jesus, Lord of the Sabbath, who conquered death on Easter Sunday, is Himself the fulfillment of all that the Sabbath was intended to be. It gives new meaning to His beautiful words in Matthew 11:28: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
He is our rest. Jesus is our Sabbath rest. He is our cessation from toil and our holy work of worship. But there is more. He is also our Jubilee, our release from bondage and debt and enslavement. David VanDrunen has offered a fascinating argument concerning the ways in which Sunday, the eighth day, was hinted at in the Old Testament as a day of special favor, a day in which God would do something extraordinary and liberating for His people. In other words, the Old Testament itself alluded to a unique outpouring of divine favor on Sunday that anticipated the resurrection of Christ and the coming sacredness of the first day of the week.
One way in which the Old Testament pointed them to the coming of Christ was by giving them a second kind of Sabbath that was different from the ordinary weekly Sabbaths. For a couple of special occasions God gave Israel the equivalent of an eighth day rest—or, a rest on the first day of the week (see Lev. 23:15–16, 21; 25:8–12; see vv. 1–12). Leviticus 23 teaches about the Feast of Weeks and commands a rest on the fiftieth day (a Sunday), following seven cycles of seven-day weeks. Leviticus 25 speaks about a Sabbath year, the Year of Jubilee, a time when people were released from their debts and restored to their inheritance. This Year of Jubilee took place on the fiftieth year, the year after “seven times seven years,” that is, seven squared, the perfect number of ordinary cycles of years. Liberty was to be proclaimed throughout the land (25:8,10). This was the year for showcasing the grace of God that conquers all evil. This practice of celebrating a Sabbath on the fiftieth day/year must have been wonderful for the Old Testament Israelites, but a little confusing nonetheless. The ordinary weekly Sabbath was about working first and only then taking a rest. But here they were instructed to rest at the beginning of the cycle of time, before the period for work. What was the meaning of this different kind of Old Testament Sabbath? It pointed ahead to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. During his earthly ministry Jesus announced on a Sabbath day (Saturday) the fulfillment of the proclamation of liberty, “the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:19; see vv. 16–21). Jesus pointed Israel to himself as the one who brings the true and ultimate Jubilee for his people. How exactly did he bring the final and greatest liberty to them, a liberty that far surpasses a (temporary) return to an earthly plot of land? He did it through the resurrection. Jesus rose “after the Sabbath” (Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:1), on the “first day of the week” (Luke 24:1; John 20:1)—Sunday. The timing is truly amazing. The day that Jesus lay dead in the tomb turned out to be the last Sabbath of the Old Testament era (for after his resurrection the old covenant was no more). Remember that the Old Testament Year of Jubilee had occurred on the fiftieth year—that is, the year immediately after the “perfect” number of Sabbath years (7 × 7 = 49). And thus Jesus rose from the dead on the day immediately after the number of Old Testament seventh-day Sabbaths had reached their complete and perfect number! His resurrection was the true Year of Jubilee. The weekly Old Testament Sabbath had looked back to God’s work of creation (Ex. 20:8–11) and reminded God’s people of the first Adam’s original obligation to work perfectly in this world and then to attain his rest. The resurrection now announces that Jesus, as the last Adam, has completed the task of the first Adam and has attained his reward of rest in the world-to-come.[7]
It would seem, then, that the consecration of the first day of the week is not, after all, so utterly alien to the Jewish Sabbath. Built into the rhythms of the life of Israel were these curious and provocative periodic hallowings of Sunday, of the beginning of the week, of the beginning of a new cycle of years. There is therefore precedence for seeing the eighth day as the day in which God does certain highly unusual and highly wonderful things! And it was on one eighth day in particular, the Sunday after the crucifixion, that God raised Jesus from the dead!
We live in the shadow of the cross and before the mouth of the open tomb. We live now – right now! – in the Jubilee of Christ Jesus: His setting free of those ensnared by sin, death, and hell! Our Sabbath is still a day, but it is now more: it is a person! It is Jesus, the lamb of God, the conquering King, the Shepherd who knows His sheep and calls us home!
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
[1] Hamilton, Victor P. (2011-11-01). Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Kindle Locations 11132-11136). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[2] Miller, Patrick D. (2009-08-06). The Ten Commandments: Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church (Kindle Locations 2675-2676). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.
[3] Miller, Patrick D., Kindle Locations 2648-2654.
[4] Miller, Patrick D., Kindle Locations 2686-2687.
[5] Packer, J. I. (2008-01-07). Keeping the Ten Commandments (Kindle Locations 570-575). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
[6] Packer, J. I., Kindle Locations 562-563.
[7] VanDrunen, David (2010-10-15). Living in God’s Two Kingdoms (p. 138-139). Good News Publishers. Kindle Edition.