In the Ten Commandments, we find the core of a body of rules for life and society that are God’s gift to a floundering race. In them, He reveals the rudiments of the path of life in His world. Today, I want to meditate on the fourth of the great commandments… the keeping of Sabbath.
In Exodus 20:8-11, we read:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
There are so many things that deserve attention in these verses, I hardly know where to begin. The sacred, that which is called upon in terms of “keeping holy” is always a big deal. It is connected to God’s own Sabbath in creation… which is a whole different level of the onion. Sabbath is about care and concern not just for your own wellbeing, but for the wellbeing of everyone around you, including beasts of burden. It wasn’t uncommon to work people to death if you had full power over them, no matter how counterproductive that seems to us. Also, the giving of the Sabbath to Israel, is made a “covenant sign” for the Moses covenant sworn in Exodus 20-24 and the whole book of Deuteronomy,[1] just as circumcision was the sign of the Abrahamic covenant;[2] covenant signs are always a big deal. Then we have the issue of what does and doesn’t constitute work… a nasty affair in Jesus’ day. For instance, “If I find and egg under my chicken at the end of the Sabbath, and I eat that egg, am I participating in the work of the chicken?” And you thought this was going to be just a lot of silly religious talk.
But let’s start with the elephant in the room, even if you thought it was just a decorative coat rack. In Scripture, the Sabbath is Friday at sunset to Saturday at sunset. The Jewish people still keep this time slot as their holy Sabbath. In Israel, we watched the sky—three visible stars marked the change. Most Christians, however, revere Sundays midnight to midnight as their “Sabbath day,” because Jesus was resurrected on Sunday. Are we Christians being disobedient by doing this? Some groups like the Seventh Day Adventists and Seventh Day Baptists think so. I… reluctantly… think not. My arguments in this regard would prove too much for this devotion, but I’ll cut to the heart of it all below.
But first, let’s look at the elephant’s bigger brother; he’s standing in the shadows over there behind the thing you thought was a coatrack. Christians today tend to give very little concern to the issue of work even on their own Sabbath. I had fathered a few children before my own area of the country canceled “the blue laws” and became a 24/7 society. Even before that, however, few concerned themselves with all 39 categories of work disallowed by strict Judaism.[3] Being gentiles (That’s Bible talk for Not-Jewish) we have been called to the New Covenant of Faith in Christ, just as Jewish believers who meet Jesus are, but without officially swearing into the Mosiaic covenant.[4] We may grant that Jesus seemed to hate the way His fellow Jews kept the Sabbath and the tyrannical expansion of the “letter” of keeping it, with more and more restrictions, niggling over minutia without understanding the heart of keeping it at all. They took that which God gave to them to be a blessing, and turned it into an instrument of oppression.[5] That which God gave to heal, they used to hurt. Jesus was always pushing the envelope on how the religious leaders of His day kept the Sabbath, soooo…. No worries! We were good, right?
But are we? (read that with a really annoying high pitch at the end) I know we’re good with ourselves, but doesn’t a command of such weight demand some consideration? It’s one of the big ten after all. It’s saturated in the language of the holy. It connects to our mindfulness of God in creation, and to the call to care for all God’s creatures, including those made in His very image. Are we missing out on some blessing that God has for us by being less than attentive to even the idea of a biblical Sabbath?
I think so. I would never want to use some sense of Sabbath LAW to deliver with a curse that which was given to us as a blessing. We live in a 24/7/365 society, for good or ill, and sometimes in order to take care of our own, we have to make hard choices. But imagine taking one day a week to really rest. Image using that day to focus on family… whether spiritual or physical. Imagine that on that day, you worship, pray, receive instruction from the Scriptures, see your friends, do something to bless others, have people to your home, visit other in theirs… and most importantly, just breathe and think how lucky you are to know the one who made the world, however big of a mess people have made of it. I can’t help but think that this just might become the blessing to mind, body, spirit, and community that God meant it to be when he broke into the demanding world of the Ancient Near East with His Sabbath command in the first place.
~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD
[1] Exodus 31:15-18.
[2] Genesis 17:10-14.
[3] Here is the list: 1. Carrying 2. Burning 3. Extinguishing 4. Finishing 5. Writing 6. Erasing 7. Cooking 8. Washing 9. Sewing 10. Tearing 11. Knotting 12. Untying 13. Shaping 14. Plowing 15. Planting 16. Reaping 17. Harvesting 18. Threshing 19. Winnowing 20. Selecting 21. Sifting 22. Grinding 23. Kneading 24. Combing 25. Spinning 26. Dyeing 27. Chain-stitching 28. Warping 29. Weaving 30. Unraveling 31. Building 32. Demolishing 33. Trapping 34. Shearing 35. Slaughtering 36. Skinning 37. Tanning 38. Smoothing 39. Marking (Orthodox Union, The Melachos Table, https://www.ou.org/holidays/the_thirty_nine_categories_of_Sabbath_work_prohibited_by_law/ (8/15/2023)
[4] Acts 15 tells the tale, as does Colossians 2:1-17.
[5] Mark 2:23-28 and 3:1-6. John 5, 7, and 9.
