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May 04, 2003
Why the Sabbath Day Anyway?
Why the Sabbath Day Anyway?
Psalm 17: 1-7 / Exodus 20: 8-11
Luke 6: 1-11
May 4th, 2003
One of the earliest memories I associate with the term, “The Sabbath Day,” connects to a song with a mournful tune. We used to sing it on Sunday mornings out on the big porch at the mission boarding school, when I was growing up in India. We must have sung it often for me to remember it so well. “O Day of Rest and Gladness.” The tune was anything but glad. But what a happy idea, one day a week you have to rest. God insists!
The old Israelites and us kids and you grown-ups should have responded to the fourth commandment as kindergarten kids do to recess. School’s out; we can go play.
The Lord told Moses to tell the hard-working Israelites, “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy. On it you shall do no work.” What a happy thing. A free day, one out of seven, to get some rest, to get some recreation, to feel refreshed. Parents could talk and play with their children. Husbands and wives could talk with and enjoy each other. Friends could enjoy each other. The Sabbath, like every festival day, was a day to bring people together! God is specially with us when we are together. Our native independence is replaced by something more noble. What a wonderful gift, the Sabbath Day.
Why did God command us to rest one day in seven? Two different reasons are given in the Old Testament. We just read in Exodus that the reason why we are to rest every seven days is because God rested on the seventh day after creating everything. God blessed and consecrated the Sabbath because He rested on the seventh day. This reason applied to everyone—Jew and Gentile alike.
In Deuteronomy we read another reason for resting on the Sabbath. Because once Israel was enslaved in Egypt. They had to work seven days a week, week after week. They could never rest. So when God brought Israel out of slavery, He said, “Never again will you have to work all the time. In fact, I insist that you rest one day in seven.” This reason applied specially to the Jews.
But things have a way of developing once they get to be part of “religion.” In Jesus’ day the religious leaders were upset with Him because He accepted the fourth commandment just the way it was, nothing more. They thought it needed something more. Like many of us pastors, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day read their Bible carefully and asked the probing question, “What does it mean?”
They asked, “What did God mean by ‘work’?” Maybe the answer is obvious; maybe it isn’t. Already in Moses’ day they started to ask and answer that question. What is work? Not working meant more than just not going to work. It meant not gathering sticks and building a fire, presumably to cook. In fact, a pretty serious penalty was set for building a fire on the Sabbath—death. So Israelites knew they should get the Sabbath’s food ready on Friday so that they could really rest on the Sabbath. When my wife cooks, I can see it’s hard work. She loves to do it and is terrific at it, but its work. Even though the fourth commandment doesn’t mention wives specifically, the meaning of work made it clear mother was to get rest on the Sabbath too.
But thinking about work didn’t stop there. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day came up with more refined definitions of work. In fact, in our lesson from Luke’s Gospel this morning we see Jesus running afoul two of these definitions of work. Plucking grain as you walk through a field is work. What kind of work? Harvesting. No harvesting on the Sabbath Day.
Healing someone who is sick is work. If he’s had an accident that might kill him, you can save his life. But you can’t make him better if he’s just sick, or has a withered hand. That’s work. These “blue laws” changed the picture of the Sabbath Day from a day of refreshment to a day of worrying about some activity being defined as work. At one point Jesus said “Let’s get something straight. God made the Sabbath for the benefit of people, not people for the benefit of the Sabbath.”
The earliest Christians tried to figure out how to carry on after Jesus left. Since they were mostly Jews, they thought they should just carry on where they were when Jesus was with them.
But more and more people who were not Jews were coming to trust in Jesus. But what to do when non-Jews and Jews worshipped Jesus together? The earliest Christians all started to treat Sunday as important. Why? Because Jesus rose from the grave on a Sunday. But Jewish Christians went to the synagogue on Saturday too.
In the second century letters from the governor of Bithynia in northern Turkey to the emperor of Rome let us know that the Christians there met on Sunday mornings at dawn to sing, pray, take the Lord’s Supper, and to promise to be good citizens. And you think 9:30 is early? So what should Christians do about the Sabbath, that is, Saturday, if they did this on Sunday?
Some Jewish Christians thought that since God told Moses to command Israel to keep the Sabbath Day, it was Saturday in particular that was important—even for non-Jews worshipping with them on Sunday.
The Apostle Paul recognized the problem. He wrote, “Do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths.” The Sabbath Day, that is, Saturday, wasn’t the specific command God intended for everyone. It was rest that God intended for everyone. The law of the Sabbath, Paul said, was only a shadow. The substance was Christ who said, “Come to me and I will give you rest.”
What is a shadow? It is something that changes as the light casting the shadow behind the object changes position. You see the sun come up in the morning and the shadow of the trees is on one side. Then the sun keeps creeping up, and soon the shadow of the tree is directly underneath. By late afternoon the shadow has moved to the other side. Everyone knows that the shadow is only a shadow, and when the sun goes down, there won’t be any shadow—but the tree is still there. Jesus is permanent and is here for everyone, everywhere, of all time. The shadow changes.
F.W. Robertson, whom you have heard me mention before, noticed something else about Jesus’ remarks about the Sabbath day. The Sabbath separated the Jews from everyone else. The principle of Sabbath keeping for the Jews was maintaining their separate identity, remembering that they were a specially chosen people.
But the principle of our faith in Jesus is not separation but saturation. Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” The light of the sun shines on everything. He said, “You are the salt of the world.” The salt seasons the whole loaf of bread. Jesus wanted His followers, though separated inwardly by love for Him, to go everywhere, saturating the world with the good news that He died to free them from the grip of sin and death. Sunday replaced Saturday not by a command, but as a natural product of gratitude to Jesus—as you celebrate your anniversary on a particular day because you love each other. December 20th is special to Bonnie and me. We need no command to celebrate it. This is the day our marriage started. Sunday is this kind of day, a weekly anniversary.
Paul was very concerned that Christians not begin to gather to themselves trademark practices as the Sabbath was for the Jews. What separates us is inward, our love and devotion to Jesus and people. Outwardly the attraction of Sunday is to be its holy joy.
This morning, after we take the Lord’s supper together, we’ll pray that God will make us as this bread. As the wheat is ground, crushed between the stones of the mill before it can become bread, so God takes the events that crush us in life, and uses them to bring us together. We find our togetherness in Him. We come here on Sunday to be with each other in Jesus’ name. We need Jesus. We need each other. Lots of people need to feel that here is a safe place, a haven, a place to find rest. Jesus gives rest.
How can we both preserve a regular day of rest and worship and not have it become a mere day of obligation? All of us are aware that many Christians keep Sunday very haphazardly. Soccer leagues take precedence over Sunday School for a lot of Christian boys and girls, and many Christian parents support this. Sunday soccer is almost treated as sacramental. A work project sometimes keeps some of you at home on Sunday. Something is not quite right when our very freedom from the law becomes the reason why Christians relegate worship to time not demanded by the sports leagues, by work, or by other kinds of entertainment on Sunday. Anyone can quote St. Paul to support this drift: “Let no one judge you concerning Sundays.” And we politely apply no pressure about Sunday. We do with it as we please. What is the end of this kind of thinking? We suffer in various ways when we choose not to make rest and worship indispensable.
Do you think there is a correlation between Christians getting drawn into a culture of buying and selling and working and yard sales and wasting, and what has happened to Sunday? Do you think there is anything tying in participation of Christians in the overall drift of morals, the decaying entertainment industry, and what has happened to Sunday? Do you think there is any tie-in between the decline of the family and the home and forgetting how God intended us to live together, and what has happened to Sunday?
John Calvin made the interesting observation that each of the Ten Commandments really is just one example of a general aspect of life in which God guides us to a good life. The fifth commandment that tells us to honor our fathers and mothers, teaches us to respect authority generally. The sixth commandment, telling us not to kill, teaches us not only not to kill, but that God has put other people into our care. I think he is right.
And the fourth commandment about the Sabbath day, is a reminder that we need rest. We find our rest in God. Whether it is the seventh day on which we rest and think of God’s goodness or the first day, the principle is the same: all our days, all our time, is a gift from God that we do well to remember and thank Him for. Sunday serves us in other ways. It brings us together to remember the meaning of life–– Jesus died and rose again for us. It is the antidote to loneliness as well as to godlessness.
There is some special genius to one in seven days of rest for body, heart, and mind. After the French Revolution, anti-church sentiment led to changing from one day in seven to one day in ten as a day of rest. The Church’s Sunday was discarded. But changing from one in seven to one in ten days for rest didn’t work. Production diminished. The psychological health of workers went down with the increase of weariness. They went back to one day in seven for rest. There is some genius to the sequence of one in seven days for rest.
Check out your own life. When you work day after day, what happens to your emotional and physical health? We’ve become used to feeling bad. Hearts attacks seem normal now. Rest is a sacred duty, God’s antidote to many ills.
John Calvin rightly observed that we don’t observe the Sabbath as a ceremonial duty, but when we keep one day in seven for rest and worship, we enjoy what God wants to offer us, the restoration of mind, heart, and body, as a regular part of life.
When we regularly join with others of like desires to live in devotion to Jesus Christ, we remind ourselves of what is really important in life. When we are not regularly together on Sunday, we gradually forget. We gradually lose contact with others who want to live with a high purpose, as unto God.
One day we will no longer need this rest. All of life will be unceasing rest, which means that garden work won’t contend with weeds. The seventh day of rest is like a medicine a doctor might prescribe as long as it is needed. When you have an infection, you take the antibiotic. When the infection is past, you stop taking the medicine. Sunday is God’s medicine for us.
You need to be with others here every Sunday. I close with a story from the land of my father’s birth, Scotland. A Scots pastor called on a member of his flock who’d not been in church for a long time. He was a silent fellow, a man of few words. The pastor heard that he was facing some dilemmas in life, and came by for a visit. When the pastor knocked on the door, his truant parishioner opened it and with a gesture invited him in. He motioned to a seat by the fireplace where a fire was burning. The pastor sat there. Nothing was said at all. The pastor noticed a piece of wood that had fallen off the fire. The fire was going out on that piece of wood. He got up, took tongs and put the piece of wood back with the other pieces of wood that were burning merrily. It soon leaped into flame again. The pastor then nodded to his parishioner, still not saying a word. The fellow saw him to the front door and nodded as the pastor left. The next Sunday his parishioner was in church, and it was observed afterward that the flame of his faith resumed, and his life became happier.
Remember the seventh day, to keep it holy.
O Lord, thank you for life, and for sustaining us, and for giving us the rest of the seventh day. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at May 4, 2003 09:30 AM