I think you’d have to agree that the fourth commandment has led to more legalism than all the other 9 put together. It’s such a quantifiable thing isn’t it? "Six days you shall labor and do all your work but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work." So we make up lists of things we shouldn’t do: housework, sport, gardening, shopping, movies, and the list goes on and on. Basically anything that looks like work or that might be fun is excluded. And we’re left feeling cheated. All the goodness of life as God created it is gone. All the fun of life has gone. All celebration has gone. And that actually defeats the whole point of the Sabbath.
So I want to avoid giving us another set of rules today as we look at the fourth commandment. Rather I want to give us a feel for what I think God intended by this commandment. I want us to end up wanting to celebrate the Sabbath with the people of God, every week, as our greatest desire.
The Sabbath rest marks the end of God’s creative process. God looks at his work and sees that everything he’s made is very good. If I can be allowed to apply human emotions to God, it’s as though he sits back with a grin on his face and a sigh of satisfaction and thinks, "Now I can relax and enjoy it all." So there’s a real sense of celebration in the rest of God.
The Rhythm of Time
In fact we can’t really understand the Sabbath unless we understand the first chapter of Genesis. Genesis 1 is all about time. When you get to Genesis 2 you discover that creation is also set in a place, but in Chapter 1 the focus is on time. The creation account is structured to give us a sense not just of time but of the rhythm of life. There’s that repeated cycle: each day goes "And God said ...", "And it was so", "And God saw that it was good;" "And there was evening, and there was morning -- the ... day." You almost feel like tapping your feet as it’s read out. There’s a rhythm to the creation story that reflects the natural rhythms of life.
But when we come to the seventh day there’s a change. Here we read "on the seventh day God finished ..." Then seventh day is repeated two more times. It’s as though God wants us to sit up and take notice of this seventh day. The seventh day is different.
What’s more as you look at the creation account you find the days are grouped into threes. And then you notice that on the third and sixth day there are two creation activities of God. So you get this development of the rhythm into a 1,2,3,3, / 4,5,6,6, / 7,7,7; in rhythmic cycles that come to a climax on the 7th day.
I’ve just been overseas so I know all about the natural rhythms of life. My body clock was totally out of sync for several days both when I went and when I returned. We’re designed with that rhythm built in.
One of the things we learn from this chapter is that time is part of God’s gift to us. God opens his revelation of himself with this account of creation in time because he wants us to see that time is a gift that allows us to participate in the ongoing work of God. Sabbath and work aren’t in conflict. In fact the opposite is the case. Sabbath actually completes work, brings it to fulfilment.
Sabbath as the Completion of Work
You see, God resting on the seventh day doesn’t mean that he does nothing. Forget my suggestion a moment ago that God’s sitting back relaxing, enjoying his success. That’s actually far from the truth. Ours isn’t a clockwork universe, set in motion by God but then left to its own devices. No, God continues his work in it, even on the seventh day. Colossians 1, in that great hymn to Christ, tells us that in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, and in him all things hold together. The universe continues to be held together by the word of God. John’s gospel makes much of the fact that Jesus has come to continue God’s work in the world. The word work occurs 27 times in John, often in a context like this: "My Father is still working, and I also am working." (Jn 5:17) Jesus tells his disciples: "14:12Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father." So God continues to work through us as time moves towards it’s conclusion.
So the Sabbath isn’t a cessation of God’s work, it’s simply the fulfilment of it. The creation account fills 7 days, not six and the seventh is the culmination of all that’s gone before.
So when we read that God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, when we’re told to remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy, we realise that we’re invited as co-workers with God to enter into his rest. This isn’t a commandment to stop us having fun. It’s an invitation to enter into the life of God and of the work of God and it’s weekly rhythm.
We’ll talk in a moment about our meeting together as a community as part of the experiencing of God’s rest but I just want, at this point, to comment on the way we sometimes think of our gathering together on a Sunday. I think sometimes we think of this as just another one of the activities of the church. This is just one of the events that the church puts on that we can take part in, or not, as the mood takes us. So if we have something on on a Saturday night, that can be our Church activity for the week.
But what that does to our thinking is that it puts our meeting together on Sundays in the same category as any other activity we do as part of our work life or our family life. So we get this compartmentalised attitude to our life. Sundays is when we do church, Mondays is when I do work or school or uni, or do the washing, or vacuum the floors. Or we think of work and Sabbath as being opposites, even competitors perhaps. And suddenly we lose the idea that all of life, all of work, all of our leisure time is part of our life with God.
What I think this commandment says to us is that all of life is a participation in God’s life, and the fact that he’s set apart one day a week for rest is because that’s the fulfilment of the cycle of our life with God.
Sabbath as the Fulfilment of the Worker
But in fact there’s even more to it than that. Not only does the Sabbath fulfil the work of God in which we’re participants, but I’d also like to suggest that it also leads to fulfilment for the individual. As we stop and pull back from the busyness of life we give ourselves space to realise that all of our life is part of our work for God and his working with us. It allows us to realise the significance we have as fellow workers with God.
If we see Sundays as an interruption or a competing demand on our time, we end up thinking of God as an interruption and maybe even our work as somehow more important than God’s.
This is one of the things that God says to the people of Israel through Amos: (Amos 8:4-6 NRSV) "4Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, 5saying, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale?" They were annoyed that the Sabbath was interfering with their money making schemes, stopping them from exploiting the poor for that one day a week.
Well sometimes I think people today are a bit like that. Even a couple of hours on Sunday is too much to waste on God.
But in fact keeping Sabbath isn’t a waste; it’s an opportunity to be refreshed and renewed as we reflect on our life with God. Wendell Berry, an American Poet puts it like this:
Sabbath (from "A Timbered Choir", by Wendell Berry)
The mind that comes to rest is tended
In ways that it cannot intend:
Is borne, preserved, and comprehended
By what it cannot comprehend.
Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by
Your will, not ours. And it is fit
Our only choice should be to die
Into that rest, or out of it.
Sabbath Rest and Freedom
One of the comments about the Sabbath that you might hear is the suggestion that if the Sabbath is a day of rest, why are we in church rather than relaxing by the beach or having a picnic in one of the beautiful parks around Melbourne? Why do we have half a dozen people working on a roster each week? Why not just let people do whatever they feel like that might give them a rest from the labours of the week?
Well, in Exodus, when the law is first given, two interesting things happen. Moses comes down from the mountain, having received the commandments and the people beg him to talk to God on their behalf because they’re scared to hear God’s voice speaking directly to them. So Moses goes back up the mountain and spends over a month there receiving God’s instructions for how they’re to live and especially to worship him. In fact he’s gone so long that they get impatient. They decide to exercise their freedom by getting Aaron to make a golden calf as a representation of God so they have something they feel they can worship. You see, freedom isn’t necessarily a good thing, is it? Sometimes freedom simply allows us to be rebellious or self-indulgent.
The second interesting thing that happens is that God gives Moses instructions for how the Sabbath rest is to be observed. He sets out instructions for the communal worship of the people. He chooses craftsmen to build and decorate the tabernacle. This is to be the focus of their life together and especially of their celebration of the Sabbath rest. In fact he uses that expression in Exodus 31. He says the Israelites are to celebrate the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a perpetual covenant. Now of course our celebration centres around the resurrection of Jesus Christ and so we observe it on a Sunday but it’s still a celebration of the community gathered together.
Sabbath and Community
So Sabbath is about community. Community is important because it’s as we gather together that we’re reminded of what God has done and are encouraged to persevere in our service of him. Community is important because often we need to reflect together on the fact that God is working alongside us in whatever it is we’re doing in the world. Sometimes we find it hard to imagine that our work during the week is significant as part of God’s work and we need others to encourage us in that. Community is important because it allows us to help one another celebrate the completion of another cycle of our life with God or to prepare for the next cycle.
Practical implications
Now of course that assumes that we’re actually communicating with one another when we meet together doesn’t it? It assumes that we’re making an effort to relate at a personal level with one another. This is one of the practical implications of the Sabbath law. If the Sabbath were just about keeping rules, if our meeting together on Sundays was just another activity to tick off on your ’to do list’, then all you’d need to do would be to turn up, say your prayers, not fall asleep during the sermon and then go home. Maybe that’s what you do anyway. But if that’s all you’re doing then let me suggest that you’re actually missing out on a large part of the meaning of the Sabbath. The Sabbath rest is meant as a time when we reconnect with God’s people, when we join as a community in praising God, in bringing our petitions to him, in hearing him speak to us as a community. The point of the Sabbath rest is that we give ourselves permission to spend time with others. It allows us to give up a Sunday afternoon to waste chatting around a dining room table. Let the Sabbath interrupt your busy lifestyle so you can relax for a few hours getting to know your Christian brothers and sisters. I know this is radical, counter-cultural stuff. Imagine spending an afternoon doing nothing! But of course the counter-cultural point is that it isn’t doing nothing: it’s actually participating in the work of God as we stop our labour and spend time with his people.
When you read these commandments in Deuteronomy 5 there’s a further explanation given for this law. He adds: "15Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm." There’s a social justice aspect to this command. It’s not just you who’s to rest. The command includes you, your sons and daughters, your slaves, your livestock, and the foreign residents in your towns. Their motivation is to be the memory of being slaves in Egypt where there was no rest.
Now, we don’t have slavery today, but sometimes it feels like it. I often think about the way parents encourage their children to do every possible activity they can manage, in order to better themselves. I call it the slavery of self-improvement. There’s such a pressure on parents to make sure their kids are playing sport, learning a musical instrument, doing ballet, having maths coaching, learning a foreign language. And the poor kids never get a chance to stop and relax. It’s no wonder depression is such an epidemic among young people! They never get a chance to relax and let it all out. So the Sabbath is for children as well. And how many workers will spend long hours on the weekend catching up with their work rather than stopping and being still. Do you remember the 40 hour week?
We need to stop running around long enough to see what God is doing in the world. We need to shut up long enough to hear what he’s saying. Sabbath-keeping allows us the opportunity to listen and see what God is doing in the world around us.
Finally, let me finish with a quote from G.K. Chesterton:
"What has really happened during the last seven days and nights? Seven times we have been dissolved into darkness as we shall be dissolved into dust; our very selves, so far as we know, have been wiped out of the world of living things; and seven times we have been raised alive like Lazarus, and found all our limbs and senses unaltered, with the coming of the day."
I finish with that because it reminds us that for Christians the day of rest has been transformed from Saturday to the Lord’s Day, to Sunday, the day of resurrection. For us the Sabbath is both a looking back to what God has done and a looking forward to what God might do among us in the week to come.
For more sermons from this source go to http://www.stthomasburwood.org.au
