Before I became a Christian I got into a lot of New Age stuff, from Tarot to numerology. I didn’t spend a lot of time on numerology, I didn’t really start enjoying numbers until I got my computer, but I did find out that my personal number was seven. I don’t remember exactly how the formula goes but it has something to do with assigning numerical values to the letters of your name. It didn’t make a great deal of sense to me at the time, I was more into palmistry and astrology, but a lot of the people I hung around with really put a lot of stock in numbers. People who don’t know Christ look for meaning in all kinds of unlikely places.
But it may come as a surprise to you that numbers have a great deal of significance in Scripture. A lot of them have to do with perfection, or completion. One is God’s number.
Anybody remember the old song, “Green grow the Rushes, Ho”? It’s an old English song full of medieval folk religion. Much of it is quite Biblical:
“I’ll give you one, Ho, (Green grow the rushes, Ho)
“What is your one, Ho? One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.”
One is the number for God, the one, the only, the unique. Three, of course, is the number of the trinity, but it is also the number of days Jonah was in the whale and the number of days from Jesus’ death to his resurrection. It signals completion of a particular task or event. Four and ten also means completeness, but they’re not often used with time. There are four winds and four letters in God’s name and four evangelists. There were 10 commandments and ten plagues. Ten times four gives you 40, which is the length of a generation, and it’s the way history is measured in Scripture, from genealogies to the rules of various kings. The most famous, of course, is the 480 years of Egyptian captivity, which is 12 generations. Twelve is the number of the tribes of Israel, and later the apostles, and it signifies election, the totality of God’s chosen and the working out of God’s purposes.
But of all the numbers meaning completion, seven has the highest place. Not only does it mean that something is complete, it means that it is perfectly fulfilled. The number seven was used to establish the pattern of Israel’s religious life. The number seven pointed the Israelites first to creation, and then to redemption as God established his worship in their midst. The Sabbath is an integral part of the divinely ordained cosmic order. It is filled with blessing and sanctity by God himself, and is entirely independent of any human effort.
And the surprising thing is that there is absolutely no known analogy anywhere in the ancient world to the idea of a seven-day week - or indeed any period of time - marked by a halt to economic activity.
Not that there isn’t any significance to the seventh day. There is. In Ugaritic and Assyrian and Sumerian mythology, all predating Abraham’s departure to Canaan, all kinds of important things happen in seven-day cycles. But most of them are bad. And the 7th, 14th or 21st of some lunar months were unlucky; many people thought that demons had special powers on those days.
Furthermore, and this is truly astonishing, whereas all major units of time in the Ancient Near east, the year, the month and the week, were all based on the phases of the moon and the solar cycle, the Israelite seven-day week is totally independent of either. It is completely independent of the movement of the celestial bodies. This is just another confirmation of the fact that God has already emphasized in the previous three commandments: that YHWH God, Israel’s God, is entirely outside of and sovereign over nature. He is Lord of time as well as Lord of space. In a very real sense, then, the institution of the Sabbath day constitutes a suspension of ordinary time.
But even more than simply a suspension of time, the institution of the Sabbath implies a suspension of the curse.
Until Genesis 3, human oversight of God’s creation was an honor, one to be celebrated. But things changed. In Genesis 3, God curses Adam and Eve after driving them out of the garden, saying
"…cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you... by the sweat of your face shall you eat your bread."[Gen 3:17b-19a]
This is in pretty sharp contrast to the original condition. We are made to be joyful workers, creators, doers - in God’s image - but the fall has poisoned our labor with struggle and bitterness. That seventh day of rest that God gave his people at Sinai was to be a day free of struggle and bitterness, a day to contemplate unfallen creation, not a day to give or receive orders, to rule or be ruled, but a day to rejoice in the gifts of God.
But why is it, do you suppose, that God thought this commandment was necessary? I think there are two reasons.
One is maybe a little obscure, but I think quite important. It is my opinion that the idea of the seventh day being special came from a sort of leftover spiritual memory in the Near Eastern cultures. The people knew there was something important, some-thing powerful about that seventh day, but out of fear and guilt and shame, like Adam in the garden, instead of welcoming God’s presence in the day, they feared it, calling it evil. They took a good gift of God, a blessing, and made it a curse, instead.
And how easy it is still to do that. Where did the idea of “a month of Sundays” being a bad thing, if not from our propensity to turn God’s presence among us from a blessing to a curse? From “It’s Sunday, you can’t work,” there is only a short step to “it’s Sunday, you can’t play” and from there to “God disapproves of anything that gives you pleasure.” That’s blasphemy, and it drives people away from God, just as the Pharisees drove people away from God by making the Sabbath observance a burden rather than a joy. God gave us the Sabbath to remind us that even that old tyrant, Time, bows before the awesome reality of our God. The Sabbath reminds us that God is good, that his creation is something to be celebrated, and that our prosperity – even our survival – is his gift.
And that leads us right into the second reason God gave us this commandment. Another effect of the fall is that human beings have a tendency to put a price tag on everything. We are always asking, “What’s in it for me?” “What will I get out of it?” So much of our relationships - especially in our prosperous consumer society - are tainted by economic utilitarianism. And on this day - this one day of the week - we consciously act out what Jesus said, “Do not worry about your life, what you are to eat or to drink, or about your body, what you will wear... It is the Gentiles who strive for all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
The Sabbath is a day to set aside worry and to remember - and praise - the God who clothed the lilies of the field, and to give thanks. It is a day to give thanks for all the gifts of God, including laughter, relationships, food and drink, music, baseball, or tinkering with the car - as long as you are doing it for love, with delight and gratitude to God, and not for economic gain, or to acquire an edge over a competitor, or to earn enough brownie points to ignore God for the rest of the week.
And it is a day to gather with the people of God, as the writer to the Hebrews wrote. We need to meet together to remind one another of the power and goodness of God, and to encourage one another, he said, "…to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another."
I’m sure you all know people who say they can worship God just as effectively by themselves, in their gardens or in the mountains or wherever. And I agree. Not only is it possible to worship God in those places, it is commanded. The heavens are filled with the glory of God, and the whole earth speaks of his goodness. But it is not a substitute for gathering with the people of God to worship as a community.
Again, there are two reasons. The first is that even if you are spiritual enough not to need to gather with fellow Christians in praise and worship and study in order to keep your faith strong, your reliance on the providence of God unwavering, and your relationships free of thoughts of gain and loss, most of us need each other. And so if you are a spiritual giant, we need you here, to encourage and lift up those of us – like me - who are not.
And the second is that there may just be something to the idea that the seventh day is an integral part of the cosmic order, a number with spiritual significance, establishing a sacred rhythm to our days to keep us in continual conversation with the creator of the universe.
So the Sabbath is a gift. It is a gift from God to remind us that he is Lord not only of created things, of food and drink and work and play, of cities and farms, of kings and nations, but also Lord of time. All our days were given by God and belong to God; but this particular day he gives us is a day of freedom. Free of having to produce. Free of making others perform. Free of worrying where the next meal is coming from. Free from the world’s pressures. Free to rejoice. Free to delight in God and his creation.
This commandment is the only one that is not repeated and underlined in the New Testament. Why is that? Again, there are two reasons. The first is the obvious one – that the Pharisees had ruined the freedom of the Sabbath by making it a prison instead. But the second one is that in Christ we are already free from that Genesis 3 curse. Because of the presence of Jesus in our lives, the Holy Spirit in our hearts, we have been enabled to look at God’s creation – including our neighbors – in a new light. Instead of having one day a week to give thanks to God, relying on his provision and enjoying his creation, we now have seven. Each one of those days is a gift from God, to rejoice and be glad in. That doesn’t mean we don’t have economic identities and responsibilities. But it means that we exercise them differently. There’s enough of God’s grace to go around. And the rest Jesus promises us is not only available on Sundays.
But if we don’t practice rest and freedom on Sundays, how can we experience it the rest of the week? Yes – we are gathered here, in this place, to encourage one another and learn from one another and to serve one another. And there’s a certain amount of necessary activity that goes along with that. But how much of the rest of our Sundays is crammed with all the errands and obligations we couldn’t fit in the other 6 days of the week? Are we even capable of carving out a space for rest and freedom without the threat of God’s displeasure? Sometimes I think the Orthodox Jews have a point, to so rigidly mark out the difference between Sabbath time and ordinary time. Because rather than allowing the Sabbath rest to overflow into the other 6 days of the week, more often than not we let ordinary time crowd out the Sabbath. As the poet Wordsworth put it,
The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away.
Do you think it might be possible that God knew what he was doing, to carve out a seventh of our time for rest? I suspect we need that much time just for de-tox, not to mention re-creation.
2000 years ago Jesus told the Pharisees, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath." [Mk 2:27-28]
Is Jesus the Lord of your Sabbath? Is it his yoke you are carrying, or the world’s?
