This will be my final thought on this issue, and after this I will leave it to rest (no pun intended). I want to leave it off with a question for consideration. Earlier I mentioned that as we live in the already/not yet period of redemptive history, we are to understand the rest that we observe on the Lord’s Day as a foretaste of the eternal rest that we will enjoy when the Kingdom comes in fullness.

Now, there is a lot of ambiguity about what that rest will look like, and rightly so. Any of our discussions about eschatological things are going to be ambiguous, because we simply cannot know the future in its entirety, nor can we begin to comprehend the glory that awaits us when Christ returns. But for our considerations here, should we be thinking of what it means to rest on the Sabbath by thinking about what rest will be like in the Kingdom?

Thinking that way has the possibility of leaving this issue very open-ended. Since we don’t know what our rest will be like in the future, it could be left to a matter of interpretation for now. For me, it is clear that the Lord’s Day requires two things: engaging in worship, and refraining from work. I think those are very clear. But after that, we might just have to concede that it is a matter of conscience.