pilgrim people

About ten years ago an in-flight magazine for United Airlines published an article that identified a common problem amongst Westerners today. “Not so long ago,” the author wrote, “I was just another harried mom, rushing through the day with one thought always in mind: Why isn’t there any time?” She went on to describe how she felt the effects of a crazy-busy life of multi-tasking and over-extended commitments and goals, and then described the uncommon solution she found:

“Now, if someone told you there was a way to stop the onslaught of every-day obligations, improve your social life, keep the house clean, revive your tired marriage, elevate spiritual awareness, and improve productivity at work – all overnight and w/o cost – you’d probably say the claim was absurd. I certainly did. But I was willing to see if some cosmic miracle cure might really work, and after a year of earnest research, I’ve discovered that adherence to a...Sabbath...yields a precious gift of time...My personal life, my professional life, and my family life have all improved, and I plan to go on celebrating the Sabbath.”

Why would this author attribute the general improvement of her life with the practice of celebrating a weekly Sabbath? She gave no indication whatsoever that she was a Christian. She didn’t connect a day of rest with faith in Christ. So how is it that she was able to experience the blessing of a Sabbath? 

The answer, of course, is that God created her, like all human beings, in his image. And part of our function as God’s image-bearers is to reflect God by resting from our ordinary labors, and ceasing from all the buzz and noise of this life. God gave the Sabbath to human beings as a gift to be enjoyed.

Patterned After God's Own Rest

The tendency of many, if not most, Christians today is to think of the Sabbath as a uniquely Jewish practice and something that is not applicable to New Covenant Christians. What we must bear in mind, however, is that the Sabbath predates Mt. Sinai and the national covenant God made with Israel. The Sabbath has its roots in creation, not the Mosaic Covenant.

The Sabbath goes back to this six-and-one pattern God instituted in the beginning. The weekly pattern of the Sabbath is part of the way that we, as God’s image-bearers, reflect his holy ways. The opening chaps of Genesis reveal that human beings were created to reflect God’s holy nature at our own creaturely level in three primary ways: in our rule over creation, our work in the world, and by our rest.

Let me explain. Not only is God the ruler over the universe, he also made human beings to be his vice-regent, his vice-ruler over creation. We read in Genesis 1 that God made man to have dominion over all things, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Ps 8 praises God for this, saying, “you have given [man] dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.” So, as beings whom God made to rule over creation, humans reflect the image of God by exercising dominion over the earth.

We also reflect his image through our work. Again, in Genesis 1 we read of God working by creating the universe. God worked, and his image bearers, Adam and Eve, were to work as well. Adam was to work the garden and to protect it, and Eve was to be his helper. Work is a way that we reflect the holy ways of God.

But we also read of God resting on what is described as the seventh day. Genesis 2.2-3 tells us, “And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, bec on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”

When the Bible says that God rested, we must remember that it speaks in a way that we can understand as finite creatures. It is not as though God was tired or needed rest – God cannot be tired or weary. But by saying that he rested, God gave us a pattern to follow as his image-bearers. Just as God worked, so too are we to work. And just as God rested, so too are we to rest. This beautiful, weekly pattern of six-and-one is built-in to creation and given to us to follow as image-bearers of our Creator.

Adam was not designed to work perpetually, seven days a week. He was to follow the pattern God instituted. As God ruled, worked, and rested, his image-bearers were to do the same. The Hebrew word for Sabbath, Shabbat, means “to cease, to stop.” Like pressing a pause button on a DVD player, the Sabbath brings ordinary activity to a halt. The Sabbath is a ceasing, a stopping from the ordinary activity of the week to be freed up for worship and rest.

To keep the Sabbath, therefore, is part of being human in the way God designed. That is why God commanded Israel to keep it. As a nation, they were to reflect his holy ways, and one of the ways they did that was by keeping holy the day God had set apart and made holy in creation. It was to be for them “a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD.”

A Market Day for the Soul

That was a term used by many of the Puritans in the seventeenth century: The Sabbath is “the market day of the soul.” It is a helpful term because it gets at the point and purpose of this wonderful gift God has given us. Notice how the Lord describes his gift in Exodus 16 (which, again, was before the institution of the Mosaic covenant!). He calls it a "solemn rest." He doesn’t say, “this is a day off from work to be devoted to entertainment.” He doesn’t call it “free time on the weekend.” That may be how we tend to think of the Sabbath, but it is not how the Lord thinks of it. And as his disciples and those who belong to him, we need to be shaped and conformed by his Word, not by the culture around us.

This is precisely why the Lord emphasized his Sabbath to Israel. They needed to be renewed in the mind after 400 years in Egypt. They needed to be catechized in the ways of the Lord, reshaped in their thinking, and redirected in their paths.

And the same is true for us, loved ones. If we and our children are not being catechized by God’s Word, then we will be catechized by the culture. It is inevitable. There is no such thing as remaining neutral. In the Sabbath, the Lord says to his people, “This is how I designed you to live. This is how I want you to live. It is good for your soul.”

And so, the Lord calls the Sabbath “a solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord.” The Sabbath is more than just a day off from work, it is a day of solemn rest. It is a holy day in which we, as God’s holy people, withdraw from the culture and gather in holy assembly with his people. It is a whole day of ceasing from the labor and noise of the market place, to have a market day for the soul.

God gives us six days a week to labor and fulfill our vocations in the world – six days a week to go to market, so to speak, for the body, laboring in our callings and posts in society. But the Sabbath is a day in which all of that labor and ordinary activity comes to a halt so that the soul can be cared for. Each week, we have a whole day freed up in order to worship the Lord, do acts of mercy, and rest.

Now, if this idea seems foreign to us, it may be because we have allowed ourselves to shaped too much by the thinking of this present evil age. Christians today increasingly think of Sunday as just another day of the week. And yet, that is not how the church has understood the Lord’s Day for the past 2000 years. As Michael Horton put it in his book A Better Way, “For generations of faithful believers, Sunday was not about football or shopping but about God and feeding at his luxuriant table. But somehow, we got caught up in the buzz, and we wonder if we can ever get out.” Historians have made the observation that, in this country, Sabbath-keeping was a practice that had universal acceptance amongst Protestants until around 1960. The explanation is usually attributed to the rise of leisure activities and professional sports and the triumph of the automobile that brought weekend resorts within reach of the middle class.

Historian Darryl Hart points out that, “In sociological terms, what happened was secularization, especially a secularized view of work and rest.” “All of this is true,” says Hart, “but it is not the whole story. When American Protestants changed their observance of the Lord’s Day, they also developed a peculiar form of spirituality, a particular understanding of how spiritual growth should take place.” Hart goes on to show that while Protestants used to understand the Sabbath as the market day of the soul, a gift for spiritual refreshment and nurture, American Christianity has replaced the Sabbath with a full range of spiritual programs from which the consumer can choose and tailor make to fit his or her lifestyle. Why bother with the Sabbath when one can get spiritual benefit from personal bible study or small groups during the week?

But when we fail to see this gift God has given us for our souls, when we crowd out the Sabbath by surrendering it to the forces of consumerism, entertainment, greed, and ambition, we become more like the world and culture around us rather than being salt and light to the world. And we miss out on a huge blessing for our souls!

The Sabbath is given for our good, and our Creator and Redeemer-God knows what is best for us! He has given us a day to refrain from our crazy-busy schedules and hectic lives to find refreshment in his green pastures and by the still waters, receiving from him when his Word is served to us, and having the time – finally – to pray, to meditate upon him, to rest, to do acts of mercy – all of those things that we so often say we wish we had more time to do.

The Sabbath is a delight, not a burden. It is a weekly gift not to be crowded out with collecting manna or by entertaining ourselves to death, but a day made holy and set apart for worship and rest.

A Pointer to Heaven

One of the reasons the Sabbath was given to Adam was to point him to the eternal, heavenly rest that would be his if he remained faithful and obedient in the Covenant of Works. While we do not know how many weeks Adam lived in the Garden, we do know that very seventh day was a reminder of something greater that would be his if he obeyed the conditions of the Covenant of Works. Every seventh day pointed him to the glorious eternal Sabbath of heaven.

Like Adam, Israel was placed in a covenant in which their obedience would bring a rest; not the ultimate rest of heaven, but an earthly rest in the land of Canaan, as a type and shadow of the ultimate rest. That is the interpretation that the writer to the Hebrews places on the Sabbath when he says, “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God” (Heb 4.9).

As God gave the Sabbath sign to Adam in the Garden, he also renewed the Sabbath sign with Israel. Their weekly Sabbath was just like Adam's: it came at the end of the week, after the preceding six days of work. Like Adam, Israel was to work first, then rest once that work was finished. Israel's Sabbath was a sign of the covenant into which God placed them.

In the Mosaic covenant, the Lord was, in many ways, republishing those commands he gave to his first image-bearer, Adam. But he also wanted his people to be reminded constantly that there was a Sabbath rest yet to come. Every Sabbath in the wilderness pointed the nation Israel to the Promised Land of Canaan, which was a type and picture of that glorious eternal Sabbath of heaven.

On Our Way

Naturally, many questions come up with regard to the Sabbath. By nature, we find it difficult to avoid the extremes to which our flesh is drawn: either legalism or antinomianism. Let me offer a few pastoral questions for the Christian to ask himself when th various "dos and don'ts" enter his mind. Ask yourself:  

1. Does this activity hinder or promote my participation in the means of grace on the Lord’s Day?

2. Does this activity hinder or promote the purpose of the day?

3. Does it hinder or promote a spiritually restful frame of mind in which I am reminded that I am a pilgrim on the way to heaven?

The Sabbath is a gift and a delight. We now enjoy this weekly link to both past great and future consummation. The pattern of six days of activity interrupted by one day of rest is a reminder that human beings are not caught up in a meaningless flow of days, one after another without end, but that history has a beginning and ending and is headed toward final judgment and the consummation of all things.

As Horton has pointed out in A Better Way, "The Buzz is claiming us - though we are already claimed by Another. And it will increasingly come for our children and grandchildren. But we don't have to accept this as a fate, any more than we simply accept any other truce with worldliness.And while our responses will not only be varied but characterized by faithfulness and unfaithfulness - even simultaneously - may God give us the grace that will help us shake off the fake yellow glow from the Buzz of a fading age and lustily sing:"

Savior, if of Zion's city I, through grace, a member am,

Let the world deride or pity, I will glory in Thy name.

Fading is the worldling's pleasures, all his boasted pomp and show;

Solid joys and lasting treasures none but Zion's children know.

[John Newton, "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken"]