What is the Sabbath?
Growing up Jewish, I can remember as a young boy walking with my grandfather to Synagogue on the Sabbath (Shabbat). It was a very traditional time and religious time in Jewish life. Of course, Shabbat was Friday-Saturday.
These are traditions I grew up with. And to be fair, the whole observance of the Sabbath comes out of the Scriptures. EXODUS 20:8-11:
8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and 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.
We have a problem.
But for us today, as believers, how are we to understand the place that the Sabbath plays - if any - in the life of the people of God? Should we be observing the Sabbath on Saturday, or replacing it with Sunday. That is our problem.
To answer that, we need to go back to Genesis 2, which opens with the indication that creation is complete.
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 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. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
By the 7th day, it says,
He rested from all He had done.
He blessed the 7th day.
He sanctified it (made it holy - first time that word is used in the Bible).
He declares it holy for three reasons:
All of creation was finished
He rested from all His work. It doesn’t imply weariness. “The Lord does not grow weary” (Isaiah 40:28). He rested b/c He was satisfied. That takes you back to 1:31 - “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.”
He completed His creation; satisfied; He ceased (rest); And then “He blessed the 7th day. A memorial to His creation and its original perfection.
Because every 7th day is a reminder of the power and glory of God expressed in this magnificent six-day creation….to reject all of that is to unbless the 7th day. To say that somehow God used thousands, millions, billions of years is to desanctify the 7th day.
Every 7th day (Shabbat) stands as a testimony to the Creator. It’s a constant witness to God as Creator. SO, when you go back to Genesis 2, there’s no mention of Sabbath being law or a day of worship.
The next time you even run into the word is in Exodus 16. Hundreds of years have passed, the patriarchs have come and gone - none of them worshiped on the Sabbath. It was not mandated.
It’s brought up again in Exodus, when God feeds the people manna from heaven as they wander in the wilderness. Manna comes every day except the Sabbath, when they get enough the day before for two days. It’s kind of a preview of what’s coming in chapter 20 when the Ten Commandments are given.
THEN there are laws governing the Sabbath day. “It is a sign between Me and the sons of Israel forever,” - why? - “for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day He ceased” (rested).
Here we find that Sabbath is a sign. It points to something else.
When God made a covenant with:
Noah - won’t destroy the world again - what was the sign: Rainbow.
Abraham - participation among covenant people: Circumcision.
Mosaic covenant - another sign, and the sign this time is the Sabbath.
It was only a sign. For example, Isaiah 1:13 - “Bring your worthless offerings no longer, Incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and Sabbath…”
Outward observance without a heart of love and devotion to God was meaningless. What was the sign for? It was a reminder of creation.
The Sabbath was to remind the children of Israel that man had forfeited paradise.
So, the Sabbath, every Sabbath that went by, when they rested, they were reminded of a perfect creation, a paradise of God dominated by righteousness, which had been forfeited by sin and could only be regained again by righteousness.
It was a time of reflection when, on the 7th day, they would rest and examine their own lives in light of the law of God; seeing the divine standard and recognizing sin and bringing them to repentance. SO….
The first seventh day identified God as Creator. It was to produce a gratitude for the wonder of creation.
But the institution of the Sabbath in the Mosaic economy identified God as the law-giver: to produce repentance for the forfeiture of all that is right.
This was unique for the people of Israel. But, something happened along the way. So how did Jesus deal with the religious leaders and the issue of Sabbath? We get tremendous insights from the Lord as He connects Act I and Act II of the two-act play. More to come on the next post.
