Culture Shifts:the 'progressive' Generation

As she describes the joy and peace of Sabbath keeping, I long for that. I need that time, away from the world. I suspect we all do. We need that time to take the weight of the world off our shoulders, to slow down the pace at which we are traveling, to renew and reflect on our relationship with God, to reconnect with our loved ones and the love of God. We need Sabbath time.

Christians cannot keep Sabbath as Jews do. We know God most fully not through the perpetual covenant God made with the Israelites at Sinai but through Jesus Christ. Yet we also honor the Mosaic commandments, and we stand in spiritual and historical kinship with the Jewish people, of whom Jesus was one. In an authentically Christian form of Sabbath keeping, we may affirm the grateful relationship to the Creator that Jews celebrate each Sabbath, and we may share the joyful liberation from drudgery first experienced by the slaves who left Egypt. But we add to these celebrations our weekly festival for the source of our greatest joy: Christ’s victory over the powers of death. For Christians, this victory makes of each weekly day of rest and worship a celebration of Easter.

Our failure to keep that day holy - set aside - brings about the ‘mediocritness’ given to the first three commandments concerning our devotion to God.

We cannot count valuable what we do not treasure above all else, and take time to honor and remember.

The message we find in these first four commandments is this:

God desires worship that sets God’s people apart from the surrounding culture. We are called not to be entrapped by the many truths out there. They are empty, having no past, offering us no hope for the future.

God wants to be in a relationship with people. That’s what the 10 Commandments are all about. They are not simply a list of “do’s & don’ts” like parents setting limits for their children, although limits are a part of the 10 Commandments. Through following them, we come into closer communion with God. We come to know God better. The 10 Commandments are a way for us to be in relationship with God.

These first 4 commandments set God a part from the idols the Israelites were tempted to follow. In the same way, God is set a part for us from the competing voices we are bombarded with in the commercials that tempt us to believe all choices available to us are equally relevant, based upon how happy those choices will make us.

But God is different. God is the one who brings us up out of slavery to our culture, providing for our salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Loving us that much to be one among us, to suffer with us, to free us from slavery to the sinful things we do.

Finally, God is not an object to be used for human purposes. We cannot pick and choose the elements of the Christian faith we wish to keep, discarding the ones we feel don’t fit us. We cannot combine it with elements of other faiths or elements of secularism to create our own path, and still have a true relationship with God. We must not forget that the 10 Commandments call us into covenant faithfulness to follow God and God alone.