Genesis 2:1–3:
So the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed. By the seventh day God completed His work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work that He had done. God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it He rested from His work of creation.
Last week, Mercy showed me her notebook. She had drawn an image for each day of creation. Everything looked great until she flipped to day seven. There I saw a picture of a bed and a circle on that bed which represented God. Yikes! The number of theological errors that flooded my mind were too numerous to count. But I honestly couldn’t ponder quickly enough simple words to counteract the errors. But I would like to address this directly as some of us may have a bit of a skewed idea of that seventh day “rest.”
What exactly is God’s rest? The verb used in verse 2 is “shavát.” It means to cease or stop or end. It’s the verb form of Shabbát that we translate Sabbath. So these few verses in Genesis do not tell us that God took a nap, they don’t tell us that God stopped paying attention or that He was tired and needed to rest. These verses tell us specifically that there was a task to be completed — the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them. This work was completed, and therefore God ceased from His work because the work was fully completed. It was all finished, therefore all work on it ceased. This definition is pivotal I believe to understanding the Sabbath rest that God calls us to. So hang on to it: God ceased from His work because it was completely finished.
So having established exactly what it means that God rested on the seventh day, let’s talk about what God means by calling us to Sabbath rest. In verse 3 it says that God set the seventh day apart as Holy. There’s not much of a command given here. It only says that he consecrated it or “declared it holy.” Now if we keep reading in the book of Genesis we won’t find out anything else about a weekly seventh-day-rest until we get to the book of Exodus chapter 16. After the people of Israel had been saved from slavery in Egypt they were provided for miraculously in the dessert with an unknown white substance that they called “Manna.” This is where God begins to call them back to a weekly Sabbath rest. Exodus 16:21-23 says…
They gathered it every morning. Each gathered as much as he needed to eat, but when the sun grew hot, it melted. On the sixth day they gathered twice as much food, four quarts apiece, and all the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. He told them, “This is what the Lord has said: ‘Tomorrow is a day of complete rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you want to bake, and boil what you want to boil, and set aside everything left over to be kept until morning.’”
God provided supernatural food for His people in a miraculous way. They did nothing to earn the food. It was a free gift, and the message of grace that runs way deeper than the gift of manna was not to be missed during this event. Specifically they were not allowed to gather on the seventh day — the sabbath. They were supposed to store extra from the day before so that they could do no work at all on that day. So the story of manna is the first place that we find the sabbath really explained after the second chapter of Genesis.
After this we read about God specifically instructing His people concerning the Sabbath when He gives the Law to Moses:
Exodus 20:8–11 says…
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 slave, your livestock, or the foreigner who is within your 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.
So on a weekly basis God essentially established a “holiday” for his people to be able to rest from their labor, to cease from their work and to remember the Lord and His creating work as well as His saving work. Apart from simply not working, Isaiah gives us a clue as to what God’s people were expected to do on the day:
Isaiah 58:13–14 says…
“If you keep from desecrating the Sabbath, from doing whatever you want on My holy day; if you call the Sabbath a delight, and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, seeking your own pleasure, or talking too much; then you will delight yourself in the LORD, and I will make you ride over the heights of the land, and let you enjoy the heritage of your father Jacob.” For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.
What I see laid out in this verse is that the Sabbath is a day to specifically keep from indulging in fleshly desires and selfish pursuits. A day to pursue what the Lord desires and values. A day to be quiet and listen for the Lord to speak and to enjoy relationship with the Lord.
Now this day along with it’s requirements carries with it a promise and a hope. From the very beginning it reminds us (as we talked about earlier) that God has completed the work, and therefore we are invited to share with Him in ceasing from our striving, because the work has been completely finished by Him. I believe that the Sabbath being directly tied to the Salvation from Egypt first is also tied to God’s deliverance into the promised land and ultimately Jesus’ work of salvation from the power of sin and death. In Deuteronomy 5:12-15, the Sabbath rest is tied directly with the Israelites redemption from slavery in Egypt. It says…
Be careful to remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy as the Lord your God has commanded you… Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
You see the connection there with remembering God’s work of salvation? This verse says that the purpose is remembering God’s completed work of salvation. If we turn to the book of Hebrews, we find a lot of information about the Sabbath rest. Firstly, the author of Hebrews implied that everyone know the correlation between the Sabbath rest and God’s deliverance of His people into the promised land. Hebrews 4:8 says…
For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day.
What rest did Joshua give except that of leading the children of Israel into the promised land. This was a rest that they had anticipated for many many years. Now someone might say, “Well the Sabbath rest was representative of the rest that was accomplished in leaving Egypt and arriving victoriously in Canaan. It was fulfilled then and is not applicable anymore.” But the author of Hebrews explains that God has referenced yet a future rest which means that the fulfillment of the Sabbath did not come completely in the deliverance to the land of Canaan. I wonder what the author is referring to specifically by God referencing another rest, but he could very well be referring to Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:28…
“Come to Me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
So I believe there are two rests being referred to here that are applicable directly to you and me. There is the ceasing from our work toward the end of Salvation from Sin and the penalty of death, because that work has been finished completely by God in Christ Jesus on the cross. And there is also a ceasing from all work which none of us here have yet arrived at, because we have not arrived in glory.
There is a very interesting paradox in this cessation of this work, because it is not completely without laboring. Hebrews 4:11 says…
Let us then make every effort (or labor) to enter that rest, so that no one will fall into the same pattern of disobedience.
Now how can this be. On this side of heaven, we labor to enter the rest of God, because faith does not come naturally to us. In John 6 one man, seeking to demonstrate himself to be a spiritual person asked Jesus, “What can we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus’ response to him was very important… “This is the work of God-that you believe in the One He has sent.” So you see often times, it really is a labor for us to set aside our natural “Self-Saving” attitude and to allow God’s finished work to be sufficient for us. When we allow this truth to penetrate our hearts and minds, we loose all kinds of glory that we thought we had earned, but what we gain in exchange is far greater! We gain a depth of relationship with the Father that we couldn’t dream of! We gain and proximity to the heart of the Messiah that is more valuable than the most precious of stones. And this is the heart of the Sabbath Rest.
From the beginning God’s heart was to keep us pointed toward the Father’s completed work. His desire was that we might be freed up from striving to enjoy the freedom in Relationship – that obedience might spring up freely from the richness our relationship with our Kind and Gracious Creator. His desire was to keep us from traveling the road of self-sufficiency and self-righteousness, which He knew only lead toward death and despair. And so you and I are given the gift of the Sabbath. It is a gift in that we are physically rejuvenated. It is also a gift in that we are called to remember every single week in ceasing from our work, that we ought not ever strive to accomplish what our Creator and Savior has already accomplished for us in dying on the tree.
Now many in considering the Sabbath will bring up issues of Saturday vs. Sunday. Some believe that the early church set a model that demonstrates a shift from worshipping on Saturday to worshipping on Sunday. Other’s will contend that shifting from Saturday to Sunday is a deviation that occurred under Constantine in an effort to make something pagan sacred. Both of these arguments fall short in different ways. And while I personally see no grounds for shifting from one day to another, I think that the whole conversation of which day the Sabbath should be misses the whole purpose of the day entirely. It’s not about another regulation to keep. Many will ague about whether or not we are obligated to keep the Sabbath. This too misses the point. We have been given a gift. I believe that it’s roots are laid here at the very foundation of Creation itself.
I believe that the Sabbath was created for us on day 7 for our physical and spiritual well-being. I believe we would do well to honor the Sabbath, but not with a letter of the law, but the spirit of the law which leads us to weekly consider the amazing truth of how God has completed the work of freeing us from the power of sin and death. That was his work, and it is finished. Our work is to believe that He has done it and rest in knowing that it is done.
Praise Christ for His death that both invites us into a rest from our strivings today and ignites us with the hope of a complete and entire rest from all work on the day we meet Him face to face!
