A couple of years ago, I wrote a number of posts trying to work through how to understand and practice the Sabbath. Too often, I think, we look at the Sabbath through one of two lenses: the first has us thinking about what we are not supposed to do on the Sabbath, and the second has us saying that as long as we go to church, the rest of the day is free for us to do whatever we want.

My point is simply that in thinking about the Sabbath this way, we are making it about us actively doing something, and so we have missed the point of the Sabbath altogether. Yesterday morning I was reading Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, and came to a part where Eugene Peterson talks about the need for a Sabbath:

If there is no Sabbath—no regular and commanded not-working, not-talking—we soon become totally absorbed in what we are doing and saying, and God's work is either forgotten or marginalized. When we work we are most god-like, which means that it is in our work that it is easiest to develop god-pretensions. Un-sabbathed, our work becomes the entire context in which we define our lives.We lose God-consciousness, God-awareness, sightings of resurrection. We lose the capacity to sing 'This is my Father's world' and end up chirping little self-centered ditties about what we are doing and feeling.

This is a most difficult command to keep, a most difficult practice to cultivate. It is one of the most abused and distorted practices of the Christian life. Many through the centuries have suffered much under oppressive Sabbath regimens. And more than a few of us have been among the oppressors. It is difficult to assemble a congregation of Christians today that does not number in its company both oppressed and oppressors. John gives us accounts of two of Jesus' Sabbath healings (chapters 5 and 9) that serve as serious warnings against glib or legalistic or oppressive Sabbath practices. Jesus spent a good deal of his time at odds with people who had wrong ideas about keeping Sabbath. (See also Mark 3:1-6; 3:23-30; Luke 14:1-6). And one contributing cause of their wrong ideas was that they had severed the connection between Sabbath and work.

But I don't see any way out of it: if we are going to live appropriately in the creation we must keep the Sabbath. We must stop running around long enough to see what he has done and is doing. We must shut up long enough to hear what he has said and is saying. All our ancestors agree that without silence and stillness there is no spirituality, no God-attentive, God-responsive life.

For Peterson, then, the Sabbath is not about keeping a set of rules, but resting in order to take the focus off of ourselves and look to God. We rest from our toils in order both to imitate God's rest from his creative work, and as a means of remembering the rest we find in redemption.

More to come on this. Maybe.

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If we understand the Sabbath to be a creation ordinance (Gen. 2:2-3) rather than a Mosaic ordinance (Ex. 20:8-11), and also understand it to be the destiny of man (that is, our eschatological rest, as per Heb. 3:7-4:13), then the implications of what it means to observe that day should be relatively clear.

I emphasize should. I am still confused. More to follow. I know I said I'd leave the issue to rest, but I can't.

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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.

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As is self-evident by the fact that this is the fourth post on the topic, I’ve been trying to work through what it means to observe the Sabbath or Lord’s Day. Thanks especially to those who have commented previously helping me work through these considerations. Please bear with me as I do this, it has been something that has long been turning over in my mind. And to titillate y'all (does living in the South warrant me to say that?), I will definitely have one more post on this topic.

John Barach commented with some thoughts offering the suggestion that the “Lord’s Day” may be redefined even more and constricted just to the period when we are meeting to worship. I reproduce his comment in full here:

It might be profitable in this connection, not only to trace the links between the Sabbath (which was the seventh day of the week from the Old Creation on) and the Lord's Day (which is the first day of the week), but also to trace the link between 'the Day of the Lord' in the Old Testament and the 'Lord's Day' in the New.

The Day of the Lord, the Day of Yahweh, is a major biblical theme, which starts already in Genesis 1 when God creates light and calls the light 'Day.' The basic definition of 'Day,' then, is 'Light-time.' It's only by extension that the whole 24-hour period, including both light-time and dark-time, is called 'Day.' It's named after the light-time, which surely has significance in itself. And as we see again and again in Genesis 1, the 'Day' is the time of judgment, the time when God 'sees' (and sight has to do with judgment in Scripture) that what He has made is 'good.'

So the 'Day of Yahweh' is first of all the time of light, which means that its the time of judgment. The Seventh Day, then, is the climax of all those days. It is, par excellence, the time of judgment, the time Yahweh draws near to inspect and to enjoy His creation.

It seems to me that Scripture indicates that Adam and the Woman fell before they ever entered into God's rest. Yahweh then appears 'as the Spirit of the Day' (Gen. 3:8; see [Meredith] Kline's exegesis in Images of the Spirit). None of this 'walking with Adam in the cool of the evening' stuff. Rather, Yahweh comes in the Spirit, in the Glory-Cloud, which is the 'Spirit of the Day,' the Spirit of Light-time, the Spirit whose light shines out, the Spirit of Sabbath, the Spirit of judgment. (Whoops! I think I started preaching there.)

From then on, 'the Day of Yahweh' (a.k.a. 'the Day of the LORD') is the time when Yahweh draws near to visit and to judge His people, whether to judge in their favor by overthrowing their enemies (e.g., Babylon) or to judge against them.

In the Old Covenant, the weekly scheduled 'Day of Yahweh' was the Sabbath. That was the time of inspection, the time of judgment. Today, the 'Day of Yahweh' is on the first day. But then it is, in particular, the time of the liturgy.

That is the time in which Yahweh draws near to meet with and to judge His people, to deal with their sin, to speak to them His Word, to receive their good works in the form of their tribute, and to enjoy them by feasting with them, which may result in some people 'falling asleep' (1 Cor. 11) but which also results in nourishment. And that is also the time when Yahweh overthrows His enemies: When Yahweh is lifted up on our praises, His enemies are scattered.

It seems to me that a theology of the Lord's Day should work out these sorts of things, which I've only sketched here and which I certainly haven't worked out fully. But it might turn out that 'the Lord's Day' is particularly the time on the First Day when God's people gather to draw near to Him. That is the time when none of them should be working. But that may leave open the question of whether it's forbidden to work at other times on the first day of the week.

Let me leave it at that for now. I have some more thoughts lined up on the idea of rest that I gleaned from a class today, but I will formulate those some more and post them maybe tomorrow or the day after. Interact with John's thoughts here, though, let's discuss this. It seems to me so far that how you define rest, Sabbath/Lord's Day, and as I'll discuss next time, the Kingdom, has major impact on how you interpret the fourth commandment.

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I’ve been trying to work through what it means to observe the Sabbath in two previous posts and have so far been rather inconclusive. I want to pick up where I left off the last time, where I was talking about what it means to rest on the Sabbath.

The traditional understanding is that to rest on the Sabbath means that you refrain from most worldly pursuits—-working, shopping, eating out, recreation---and instead go to church, spend the day at home with family (typically), and idle away the hours over meals, an afternoon nap, or whatever. Certainly this is resting, but is it the type of rest that God intended when he commanded us to do so?

Mikey, in the comments to an earlier post, said that we have confused the idea of rest with the idea of not consuming goods, and I think he hits on a good point. If I am honest with myself, I would feel much better about sharing Christian fellowship over lunch at a restaurant with someone or a group of people than sitting in front of the television on a Sunday. One of the purposes of Sabbath rest means that we keep our minds on spiritual things, and I don’t think that watching the Packers mop the floor with the Vikings fits the bill. However, I do think that sharing fellowship with Christian brothers and sisters does.

Jesus engaged in “recreation” with his disciples on the Sabbath, walking through grain fields and even picking the heads off the grain. The Pharisees accused him of violating the Sabbath. He also healed a man on the Sabbath, also prompting the Pharisees to point fingers for breaking the law [Matthew 12:1-14, cf. Mark 2:23-28 and Luke 6:1-11]. This is what the Westminster Larger Catechism points to when it says that we are to spend the day in worship “except so much of it as is to be taken up in works of necessity and mercy” (WLC Q&A 117).

Seeing as how my tradition adheres to the Westminster Standards as their confessional statements, I thought I’d go a little farther. While I do not wish to submit the Standards as final authority here (obviously Scripture is), I find the concise nature of the following helpful. Here is what Q&A 119 says, asking the question, “What sins are forbidden in the fourth commandment?” The answer:

The sins forbidden in the fourth commandment are, all omissions of the duties required, all careless, negligent, and unprofitable performing of them, and being weary of them; all profaning the day by idleness, and doing that which is in itself sinful; and by all needless works, words, and thoughts, about our worldly employments and recreations.

So what is to be gleaned from all this? First of all, I believe firmly that the day must be set aside for worship---that we must gather together with God’s people to bow before his throne and offer him praise, here his word, partake of the sacraments, and present our offerings of gratitude to him. Second, we must refrain from our daily labors. This is where it gets tricky. What constitutes our daily labors? I believe our work/career/vocation is a daily labor, and that just as God rested from his work of creation on the seventh day, so must be rest from our work. However, does taking a walk, watching television, going out to eat, or changing the oil on our cars constitute our “daily labors”?

I still don’t know. I still don’t have the answers to this in my mind. However, I want to make this clear: this is not a life or death issue for me. Though I believe it is important that I learn what it means to properly observe the Lord’s Day and to engage in the type of rest that God commands, I will not hesitate to call those who understand these things differently than I do brothers and sisters in Christ. In fact, I hope that different understandings can be brought together to help figure all this out.

At this point, what observing the Sabbath is all about is what is in our hearts. Our ultimate intention in that day must be to focus all of ourselves on the worship of God, as he has explicitly commanded us to do. We must do it faithfully, reverently, and willingly. Our God expects nothing less.

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