A Sabbath Rest for God’s People

Does your family have a common rest day? Do you feel that you are getting a regular time to rest from your worries and your work? God made it very clear to his people Israel that they were to keep the Sabbath day holy to the LORD by not doing any work. Can you imagine keeping such a commandment in today’s society? A day with no shopping, with no eating out, no television or radio programming and no public transit service. Can you imagine such a day where no one did any work? It is hard to imagine a day of complete rest in a modern world.

Why then did God command his people to keep the Sabbath day holy by doing no work? This idea was completely counter-cultural, even in the ancient world. Pagan mythology explained that the gods created humans to serve them so they might be able to rest. We were created to be their temple slaves. As such worship for pagans is inherently “work.” But the God of Israel is different. He created us in order that he might serve us and that we might have rest. Biblical worship really is an anti-ritual ritual. We worship in order to rest and let God do his work! The purpose for which God created us is for us to rest from our work and let him work for us.

When you look back to the account of creation (Genesis 2:1-6), you will find that when God created the seventh day, there was no morning and evening mentioned following it as with the other six days of God’s creative activity. Instead, we see that God blessed the seventh day. When God blessed the animals it was so they could procreate – give birth to new life. By blessing the seventh day God gave it life. It now became the means by which we humans receive God’s blessings: His rest. And because the day has no conclusion to it, it is a day of eternity in time; it is a day on earth that is open to heaven.

What can be so important about resting? About spending a whole day simply doing nothing? It is not difficult for us to see this as a terrible waste of precious time and lost productivity. But it is here that God confronts us with our fundamental human problem: That we live as if we are the ones who create our own living and that we create our rest. Practically, this means that we make ourselves to be our own gods. The basic philosophy is that we work in order to create happiness, to create our own blessing; we work in order to retire. As far as I can see, the Bible knows of no such thing as retirement—of a blessing we create through our work. Rather, God freely offers his people rest in order to receive blessing for work. By keeping the Sabbath, the Sabbath served to bless the six workdays so that the whole week becomes a blessing.

In our text from Deuteronomy, God gives the Israelites another reason for the Sabbath rest day. In the world there are basically two types of people: Those who are free, who are economically independent and those who are “slaves,” those who have no assured livelihood. Those who are free enjoy the luxury of being able to rest whenever they like while those who are “slaves” must work in order to survive and so the “free” can rest.

God tells the Israelites that they are to observe the Sabbath because he brought them out of slavery in Egypt. They had all been slaves before and now all Israelites, whether slave or free, landowners or labourers, should have one day on which they would all be “free” citizens. On the Sabbath all would enjoy the luxury of “rest” that is normally reserved only for the wealthy in pagan societies.

Because the LORD had freed the Israelites from economic slavery, he did not want them to become slaves again. There would be one day each week set aside for them to remember the freedom God gave them. On that day there would be no difference between the rich and the poor and they would all share equally in the blessing of rest as God’s free people.

We see the inequality between the rich and the poor worsening in our society since the laws against doing business on Sundays have been relaxed. Those who do not enjoy the luxury of a regular Monday to Friday salaried job find it difficult to have a common day off which they can enjoy together with their families. As the common day of rest is phased out, so economic oppression grows.

So what are we to do? Are we to go on a crusade to keep people from working on Sunday’s? The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were eager to defend the sanctity of the Sabbath day. In our Gospel lesson we heard how they confronted Jesus for allowing his disciples to desecrate the Sabbath. They were picking heads of grain as they walked along the grain fields. They were doing work on the Sabbath and Jesus wasn’t doing anything about it!

Jesus responded with two very important comments. First he said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28). By this he showed that the Pharisees were missing the point of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was meant to give men rest, not to bind them down with legalistic rules and burdens. Secondly, Jesus identifies himself as the “Lord of the Sabbath.” As the Sabbath was the means through which we receive God’s blessing, so Jesus is the Lord, or the source of that blessing. Jesus is the one from whom we receive God’s true blessings and obtain rest as his free people. For it is in him that we receive forgiveness of sins and release from the burden of guilt. Here Jesus brings to us the true meaning of the Sabbath rest that God has established for our blessing. The Sabbath is not just about freedom from economic oppression, but more importantly, about freedom from spiritual oppression.

We see this truth also reflected in the life and work of Jesus. The culmination of his work was his rest: Jesus, for example, began his work at his Baptism and following his temptation in the desert, he went to the synagogue, proclaiming freedom for the prisoners and release of the oppressed (Luke 4:18). His work brings us rest. In our Baptism, we receive release from the burden of our sins and receive adoption into God’s spiritual household of faith. We see this truth also in how Jesus completed his work in his final passion: On Palm Sunday, the first day of the week, he began his passion and it ended with his death on the cross on Good Friday. On the Holy Sabbath he rested from his work as he lay in the tomb. As we take up our cross to follow Christ, so we also have the promise that we shall enter our permanent rest in our own death, when we will receive a new resurrection body and shall live before God in perfect holiness forever and ever.

So what does the command to keep the Sabbath holy mean for us today? Luther, in his explanation to the third commandment says: “We should fear and love God that we may not despise preaching and his word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.” Many, however, have trouble with this explanation. How on earth could Luther make this leap from the command to rest on the Sabbath to honouring the word of God? Luther gets this idea not only from Jesus, but also from the Old Testament: The psalmist says, “O that you would hear his voice and not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me, though they had seen what I did. So I decided on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’” (Psalm 95:7b-9, 10). How we listen to the voice of God and how we respond to his message is key to keeping the Sabbath holy and for receiving its blessing.

What makes today holy? Is it because Jesus rose on Sunday? While that is the reason we worship on Sunday, his resurrection is not what makes Sunday any holier than any other day. What makes today holy is the word of God. The divine service we celebrate is what makes today holy. Today we hear God’s words of grace, words which give us rest. Rest not just from work and for ourselves, but rest to be enjoyed with others and in the presence of God, today and for eternity. The blessing of God’s gracious words to us extend even into the rest of the week as we are refreshed in our assurance of God’s love for us and encouraged in our love for our neighbour. And it is not only today that is holy to the Lord. As we begin each day by making the sign of the cross and saying, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” those days are also made holy to the Lord through his holy name he has given us in Baptism.

Observing the Sabbath day by keeping it holy means that we listen to the voice of God. It means that we physically go to the place where his voice is most clearly heard. We hear it where the Gospel is preached in all its purity and where the divine service is celebrated: where we hear Jesus speak his words of forgiveness through the mouth of his called servant and where Jesus himself meets us and we hear him say: “This is my body given for you” and “This is my blood shed for you for the forgiveness of all your sins.” Keeping the Sabbath also means fostering a desire and hunger for the word of God in all of our life: To see God’s word bring life and meaning to every day of our lives. Finally, keeping the Sabbath also means that we must distinguish between God’s voice and all the other voices we hear that would rob us of our Sabbath rest. Voices that would urge us to create our own rest through our work and not rely on Jesus as the source of our rest. For example, there are those who may claim that you are not a real Christian unless you speak in tongues or do door-to-door evangelism, or who insist that you must be in church every Sunday or give a tenth of all you earn in order to receive God’s Sabbath blessing. No, God gives you his Sabbath blessing as a gift without requiring any work from you. He gives you the Lord Jesus who did his work for you that you may have rest. And now that we have been blessed with his gift of rest, we are refreshed to go and do the work he has called us to do throughout the rest of this week with his blessing.