The Rest of the Story

Thus says the LORD: Take care for the sake of your lives, and do not bear a burden on the Sabbath day or bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem. -- Jeremiah 17:21

This is not about whether you and I keep a Jewish Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday nor if we have to work on Sunday.  I do think it is good to consider Sunday the first day of the week and, when possible, to take time that day to dedicate the week to the Lord.  But I used to have a job that had a Thursday-Friday weekend.  There are people who keep things going for the rest of us.  We don’t always get to set our schedule the way a more agricultural, less electrified society did. 

It’s good to have a day of rest.  I appreciate this more now that I am older, and remembering the Sabbath to keep it holy is one of the Ten.  In the gospel narratives, though, one of the things that drove the conflict between Jesus and the religious leadership was the Lord’s apparent liberality in interpreting Sabbath rules.  The Pharisees were very strict, but [Jesus ] said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28)

The Sabbath is not a rule to bind us, but a rule to release us.  And, being set free, we ought not allow ourselves to go back into bondage.  The people of Jeremiah’s day were working and ordering their lives by the rules of the unbelieving world.  Keeping the Sabbath by shutting down business as usual, letting their servants and their animals rest, stopping for twenty-four hours to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Lord over their lives would have broken the chains of fear, greed, envy, and covetousness. 

In the same way, for us, the Sabbath is the symbol of the reality that our salvation and our relationship to God are not dependent upon our works.  Gentile Christians were never bound to keep the Sabbath as evidenced by the Jerusalem Council’s letter in Acts 15:28-29:  For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.

That’s because Christ is our Sabbath rest.  We can read Jeremiah’s warning this way:  Stop carrying your sins around.  Stop trying to come into the City of Peace a burden of guilt and shame that has been dealt with and taken away by the Cross.  Trust the Lord and lay down your burdens before you try to come through the gates into the City of God, into the presence of the King.  But Jesus said it better than anyone else can:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Whose Life

Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies' land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbaths. -- Leviticus 26:34

The land of Canaan is the life of Christ, full and abundant.  As we can discern from numerous passages like the one above, it is not life after death, heaven as we often think of it, or a carefree paradise.  We can enter His rest, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, right now from wherever we may find ourselves.  It does take faith and courage to enter this rest, and, once we are there, we have to continue to walk with and in the Lord, surrendered and trusting.

The Lord warned the Israelites against exploiting their Promised Land for their own material enrichment.  It would be possible for them to do that, just as it is possible for us today to abuse the grace of God and misuse our faith for self-gratification.  The temptation of Simon Magus lies before some, but the majority are merely entranced by the attractions of Mammon. 

Every seventh year the land was supposed to be allowed to lie fallow.  As time went on, the inhabitants were more and more likely to ignore this statute.  How could they be expected, they would argue, to survive until the harvest of the following year if they skipped a year of planting?  More importantly, perhaps, how were they supposed to “get ahead”?  The Sabbath year meant that every eighth year was more or less starting all over from scratch.  Even if their grain and produce lasted through, they would be living on the edge of poverty and starvation on a regular basis.

But the Lord had said that He would bless the harvest of the sixth year such that it would keep His people in plenty through three full years.  God promised to take care of them – if they would adhere to this covenant and allow the land to rest.  They failed.  To give the land its Sabbaths, the Lord tore down Israel’s hedge of protection, allowing their enemies to carry them into captivity for seventy years.  You can read of the fulfillment in Jeremiah 29.

It’s a dichotomy that has caused me – and possibly others – a great deal of trouble.  We must fight, but we must not fight in our own strength.  We must do works, but we must do them resting in faith.  So what do You want me to do, Lord?  Fight or surrender?  Work or rest?  I’m so confused. 

And I will be confused so long as I think it’s about me.  For those Israelites, it was about the land, a land God loved.  He wanted caretakers for His land.  His people were those He called, appointed and empowered to manage Canaan that it might prosper, be fruitful, rich, and beautiful.

We have an advantage in that we abide in Christ, resting always in Him.  We have seasons of fruitfulness and seasons where we lie barren.  That’s as it should be.  We shouldn’t try to produce out of season or when the Husbandman has called for a break.

Sunday Go to Meetin’

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.  -- Exodus 20:8

If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. -- Isaiah 58:13-14

The Sabbath has always been something of a difficulty for me.  As a child I was willing enough to accept that “keeping the Sabbath” was equivalent to “going to church”.  When I was older, I learned more about the Sabbath, the rules for keeping it, the various restraints God had placed on His people, Israel.  I encountered Adventists and others who insisted on a true Saturday Sabbath and on adhering to some of the Jewish requirements.  There are many variations in understanding.  I was standing outside a little rural church one Sunday morning after service.  The pastor, in addition to his work at the church, ran a herd of beef cattle.  As he was shaking hands and speaking to members of the congregation, he came up to a man, Jim, standing next to me – a family member by marriage.  Following the more typical exchange, the pastor added that he was interested in buying a bull that Jim had for sale.  Without rebuke, Jim replied, “I never talk business on Sunday.”  But Jim was going back to the house to watch sports on television all afternoon. 

I have always figured that keeping the Sabbath had a deeper significance than whether or not the cows got milked – ours always did.  A lot of us in certain lines of work have or have had no option other than to show up and do our jobs on Saturday or Sunday.  We all seem, though, to understand Eric Liddell’s refusal to run in the Olympics on what he considered his Sabbath and realize that it was not a sign of legalism.  Liddell was honoring God, his refusal a testimony to God’s place and presence in his life. 

If we look again at the verses from Isaiah – in fact, it makes even more sense if you read the whole chapter – we realize that the Sabbath, like fasting, is about self-denial.  A denial is a negation but it can also be an affirmation.  If I say that one thing is not true I am often asserting, by my denial, that something else is true.  This is the case with the Sabbath and fasting.  We are saying that human nature, human effort, human energy, intellect, power, and strength are not driving the whole she-bang.  The positive side is that we are demonstrating by our self-denying actions that God is in control. 

The man who gets up on Sunday morning and goes with his wife and children to sit in a church building for a couple of hours instead of going golfing or fishing or cranking up his John Deere is making a statement about God’s place in his life.  He is denying self and honoring God.  So, sometimes, is the man who gets up and goes to work at a part-time job on Sunday morning in order to pay off his debts and honor his commitments. 

In Christ, self-denial is not limited to public displays.  Remember that in Liddell’s case he was a very famous and well-known figure in the world of athletics, especially in Scotland.  We are generally known only to our family, friends and neighbors.  They may watch what we do, but many of them get to see – for better or worse – what we are.  I think regular public, corporate worship is good.  I think an effort to go to church and “keep the Sabbath” in that way is good.  But I also think it can become, not just unnecessary, but a hindrance at times.  It can become a means of compartmentalizing our world – putting God in a box, restricting Him, His access to us and our access to Him to a unique and limited time and place. 

The truth and the reality is that we are able to live our lives daily, hourly in the presence of God, carrying out the tasks of life, bearing the burdens of existence and relationships and commitments while involving and acknowledging the Divine even in minutia.  What we really need to find -- and what I think most of us seek, is that closet that we have talked about recently, that place of peace within our own hearts.  In that Meetin’ House, it is always Sunday Mornin’.  

Out of Order, and Order Out of

Come, my people, enter into your rooms,
And close the door behind you;
Hide for a little while,
Until indignation runs its course.

For behold, the LORD is about to come out from His place
To punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity;
And the earth shall reveal her bloodshed,
And will no longer cover the slain.

In that day the LORD will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent,
With His fierce and great and mighty sword,
Even Leviathan the twisted serpent;
And He will kill the dragon who lives in the sea.

--Isaiah 26:20,21; 27:1

Though the first two verses caught my attention, I don't really have any comment on them. There may be difficult days ahead, but I'm certainly not predicting anything or raising any prophetic flags. If anything, I would think God may be calling His people to private prayer, intercession and soul-searching. The passage sounds remarkably like Matthew 6:6, as Jesus said, "But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you."

Leviathan is usually seen as something like chaos, something that rises in opposition to God. The sea is also viewed as chaotic and primordial.

We see horrible events, sometimes perpetrated by humans, sometimes random natural disasters. Christians are fond of saying, “God is in control.” We build all kinds of explanations for why God allows evil to exist. I don’t have any answers, just more questions.

For example, consider if God is still creating. We know the Genesis account says God completed His work and rested on the seventh day. Yet, after the Fall, God rose up and by His own hand shed blood and provided a covering for Adam and Eve. He intervened in purging evil from the earth with the flood of Noah. He spoke with Abraham and established a covenant, and He called out Israel.

Speaking of Noah, it may be significant that God used the chaos of flood waters to cleanse the earth.

I get the impression sometimes that the sixth day lasted a long time. The book of Hebrews describes Jesus as finally sitting down at the right hand of the Father, but, according to 1 Corinthians 15, He is still in the process of conquering enemies. Perhaps in our timeline, the seventh day has not yet come. It exists, and we draw toward it, but it’s like the “Rocky Road to Dublin” and may require a right good fight to clear the way.

There is still unconquered chaos that wars against us. We are of God, seeking rest and order. It is randomness, disorder, and destruction, seen in loss, decay, and deterioration. You don’t even need to assume a malevolent intelligence, though it seems obvious that it has its own agents. You could look it as just “stuff” that is still potentially a part of the creative process of building the kingdom. It kind of makes sense, for we are not generally in the business of creating ex nihilo. We take iron ore and refine it, and we make plows or swords.

They say that when it is time for the marriage supper of the Lamb, a great pavilion will be needed. So the Lord will slay Leviathan, and we will sit in the shade of that adversary’s skin and celebrate the consummation of the kingdom.