Word of Salvation - August 2010

 

RESTING FROM, RESTING FOR, John de Hoog

(Sermon 5 in a series on the Ten Commandments)

 

Text – Exodus 20:8-11

Reading – Hebrews 4:1-11

Singing – BOW 346, 474, “Jesus is our Song (Percival)”, “I am Carried (Bullock)”

 

How is your day going? What are your plans for today?

 

Here we are, gathered together as a church for our regular Sunday morning service. Why do we do this?

 

If an alien from outer space were to observe the world from his space ship, one bit of evidence that there are Christians on this planet is that they gather on a certain day of the week at particular places and times. If he should then travel in a time machine and scan the history of the last two thousand years, he would see this pattern repeated through the centuries.

 

The alien would see great differences in these meetings. A mega church in America will have fourteen services spread across five campuses today. Other people will kneel before altars shrouded in incense, others will sing only Psalms given out by a presenter, others will be shouting and lifting up their hands in religious ecstasy, others will sit quietly and listen to Biblical preaching, but they will generally all meet today, Sunday.

 

Why is this so? Is it just convenience, tradition? Or is it in obedience to the Fourth Commandment?

 

What should we plan to do today, or not do today?

 

I am planning to preach a couple of sermons on this commandment, starting today. I believe it has much to say to us about work and rest and redemption, and we need to obey this commandment. But what God expects of us has changed, and the coming of Jesus Christ has made all the difference.

 

Headings: 1. The meaning of the fourth commandment. 2. The original design for the seventh day. 3. Resting from, resting for.

 

First, the meaning of the fourth commandment.

 

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates.”

 

First, this word “Sabbath”. A Sabbath day is a day in which you stop your normal work.

 

Vs 8 introduces the positive command. “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” I don’t think this is such a great translation; most other English translations agree. It should read, “Remember the Sabbath day in order to keep it holy.”

 

The emphasis is not on remembering the day but on the keeping it holy.

 

“We’ll remember your birthday so that we can celebrate it.” Remembering a birthday is a good start, but the emphasis is on the celebrating it. The focus is on hallowing the Sabbath Day, on making it holy.

 

The Fourth Commandment is not mainly about working for six days and resting for one. It’s mainly about making that seventh day holy. Why must you work six days and rest one? So that the Sabbath day can be made holy.

 

You have not obeyed the Fourth Commandment if all you have done is worked six days and rested for one. That’s just the means to the end – the great objective is to make that one day holy.

 

If that’s true, then we had better come to grips with what it means to make the day holy, hadn’t we! What does it mean to hallow the Sabbath day?

 

Here we can move on straight away to our second point: The original design for the seventh day.

 

The argument here in Exodus is that we should hallow it because God hallowed it.

 

Vs 11 “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

 

We need to go back to Genesis to see how God made the universe to start with. In Genesis 2:1 we read these words. “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. ² By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested (he “sabbathed”) from all his work. ³ And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested (he “sabbathed”) from all the work of creating that he had done.” (Gen 2:1-3)

 

Why did God rest? Because his creating work was done, it was complete. The creation is perfect, God has done his work, it is all very good, and on the seventh day he rejoices in what he has done and he rests, he “sabbaths” from it.

 

Does God rest because he’s tired? Has six days of creating work worn him out? Of course not! Indeed, you could rightly ask, “Why did it take God so long to make the universe? Why did it take him six days? He could have just called all of creation into existence in a snap, with just a single word. But he didn’t; he took six days over it, and then “sabbathed” on the seventh day. Why did he spread his work over six days and then rest one?”

 

I think it was because he already had us, his people, in mind when he created the universe. He was already thinking that a pattern of six days work, one day rest, so that we could make one day holy, would be right for us. As part of his creation he created a pattern that would be good for us – six days work, one day rest.

 

The seventh day in Genesis 2 is different from the other days. It is a day that it is without end. For every day in Genesis 1, the first six days, we read, “And there was evening, and there was morning – the first day,” and so for the second day, and the third, and so on, through to the sixth day. But there is no such formula for the end of the seventh day. There is no time when God picks up where he left off and begins his creating work again. His work of creation is finished, it is complete, God continues ever after to rest from it.

 

The Biblical picture is that God is still enjoying the rest of the seventh day. It is not the rest of inactivity of course. In John 5, Jesus is debating with the Jewish authorities about the meaning and purpose of the Sabbath day (NB), and he says in vs 17, “My Father is always at work to this very day and I, too, am working.” God has been doing his work of sustaining the universe and ruling history and blessing and saving his people and judging sinners ever since the six days of creation. God has not been doing nothing, but he has rested from his originating work of creation.

 

The rest that God is enjoying is referred to in Hebrews 4 in the passage we read earlier. Constantly in the passage God calls it “my rest”, or the writer calls it “his rest”. It’s God’s rest; it’s the rest God is enjoying and has enjoyed since the creation of the universe. The question is: will we enter that rest? Hebrews 4 says that we enter it by believing the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The eternal rest, God’s perfect rest, is that eternity in the new creation that we are looking forward to.

 

Jesus calls us to enter that rest. He says, “Come to me and I will give you rest!” It’s a call to that same rest. Now don’t imagine that this rest is some kind of “floating on clouds strumming harps with spiritual hands” kind of rest – this is full life enjoyed in a perfect creation.

 

When my Mum lay dying, someone said that she was just a shell of her normal self. We know that expression, don’t we! But this life that we enjoy now, even at its best, is just a shell of what life will be like. We will have imperishable bodies, fully physical perfect imperishable bodies, and what you are at your most robust and healthy now is just a shell of what you will be. This is life, full rich life, eternal life, physical and spiritual that we are looking forward to. So when we speak of God’s rest, think of that. Don’t think of a passive life in an ethereal invisible spiritual body. Think of active, full, rich physical and spiritual life!

 

That was God’s purpose for the original perfect unending seventh day.

 

God’s seventh day in Genesis is blessed, holy, unending, and it provides the context in which the rest of history is supposed to occur. The remainder of Chapter 2 pictures the ideal human life, lived in the Garden of Eden. The unending seventh day is the context in which this ideal human life is to be lived. Holy, blessed, perfect, ideal human life, lived in perfect communion with the Creator, who has finished his work of creating and is resting from it and delighting in it – that’s the vision of the seventh day that Genesis 2 presents!

 

The eternal seventh day, blessed, made holy, joy filling everyone and everything.

 

So what happened? We know what happened, don’t we! Genesis 3 explains. Adam and Eve rejected God, they wanted more than what they had, mankind fell into sin, and the idyllic seventh day perfect human life of Adam and Eve was shattered.

 

So what does that mean for our seventh day life? That brings us to our third point: 3. Resting from, resting for.

 

That eternal, idyllic, perfect seventh day was shattered when we, in Adam and Eve, ran away from God and went our own way. We’ve been doing that ever since. So what does God do with the idea of a seventh day? He’s enjoying it; he’s been enjoying it since the end of the sixth day, he could just go on enjoying it and leave us to our own devices. We shattered the seventh day as far as our world is concerned, so tough! But God doesn’t do that. Instead, he reintroduces the seventh day, and he does it by instituting the Sabbath Day!

 

Did you notice? The word “Sabbath” does not actually appear in Genesis 2. The explicit idea of the Sabbath day first appears in the Bible in Exodus 16, and in Exodus 20 it is incorporated as part of the Ten Commandments. Did Noah and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the others in the rest of Genesis after the Fall keep the Sabbath? We simply do not know; there is no evidence to say that they did, there is no evidence to say they did not.

 

But God explicitly reintroduces the Sabbath idea back into the life of his people immediately after he redeems them from the slavery of Egypt, that place where no rest at all was possible. And get this: God uses words to speak of the Sabbath that he first used to speak of the seventh day! In Genesis 2 it says he blessed the seventh day and made it holy. In Exodus 20, it says he blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. The idea of the holy, blessed, perfect, ideal human life of the seventh day is not dead, it is alive and well and living in the Sabbath day.

 

How does God go about reintroducing the possibility of the eternal rest of the perfect seventh day? He does it by sending Jesus Christ, so that, as the passage in Hebrews 4 put it, by believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ we might enter God’s rest. The Sabbath points to Jesus, who is our rest, the one who gives us seventh day blessings again.

 

Now in this life, while we wait for the perfect seventh day, we are supposed to work and rest like God did. God rests after creation; he stands back in satisfaction and delight and rejoices in his work. All of us have experienced something like that from time to time, haven’t we! We’ve completed a difficult task, we’ve done a good job, and we feel some satisfaction.

 

But think how different our rest now in this life is from God’s! God’s rest is enduring, ours is temporary. God entered into his perfect rest, but we know for sure that restlessness will always return to us. We might have a temporary sense of satisfaction for a while, but our hearts remain restless.

 

God’s rest is complete, ours is partial. We can rest for a while, but we know there will always be more to do.

 

God rests from works that are perfect, but our work is always flawed. There’s no such thing as a job without drudgery, because all our work suffers under the curse. Yes, our rest is different from God’s.

 

But our rest is meant to point to God’s rest, to the rest he has in store for us! God calls us to set aside one day in seven for resting from and resting for. We rest from our work, with all its drudgery and imperfection, and we rest for the eternal rest that God has waiting for us, looking ahead to the day when we will enter God’s rest. The one day of rest focuses our minds, not on ourselves and the value of having a rest day, but on God and what he has reserved for us – his eternal rest, the rest that he is enjoying now and that he invites us to join him in.

 

How will we enter into the rest that God is enjoying now? That’s what God wants for us, that’s what the one day of rest is designed to point us to, but how will we ever be able to enter it? The passage we read from Hebrews 4 points us to the way. It says that we enter that rest by believing the gospel. Our one day of rest in seven points us to Jesus Christ, who invites us into his rest.

 

Pause

 

So what have we seen today? First, don’t imagine that you can keep this commandment simply by working for six days and resting for one. That 6:1 pattern is not an end in itself, it’s designed for a purpose: to make it possible for you to make the one day holy – to set that day aside for God. That day is designed to allow you to rest from your own imperfect work and get a taste of God’s eternal rest. Think about it as a whole day! It’s not a day for attending church in the morning and then working the rest of the day. If you can’t spare one whole day then you are probably taking yourself too seriously.

 

Second, the day is not designed as a day of recuperation for people who get tired in working six days. God doesn’t wear himself out, yet he rests on the seventh day. We are to rest like he did. The day is designed to help us to focus on God and his plans and purposes. Yes, it does help people to recover from tiredness, but that’s a secondary benefit, not its first purpose.

 

Third, the one full day puts every other day into perspective. No matter how earth-shattering and important your regular work might be, there is something more important – your relationship with God and where it is leading.

 

Fourth, see what this commandment means for Mondays. It means that part of the purpose of tomorrow, Monday, is to work so that you can plan to have your day of rest to the Lord. The fourth commandment has a Monday bottom line.

 

And fifth, see how the one day/six day pattern challenges our priorities week in/week out. The regular Sunday tests our priorities like nothing else, and it happens every week of our lives! Can we spare one day in seven? If we can’t, what does that say about us and what we think of God?

 

And so I repeat the two questions I began with.

 

How is your day going? What are your plans for today?

 

Where is your heart in all this?

 

Amen