THE LORD'S SABBATH

Welcome to Bible Study online! This week's topic, as you can see, is rest. There are several scriptures to look up, so I hope you will grab your Bibles. After all, truth is not what I say, but what God has said to us in His word.


THE LORD’S SABBATH

In studying the subject of Sabbath and rest in general, I found that there are many different Hebrew and Greek words that can be translated as “rest” in the English. However, the Bible seems to begin and end with the idea of a special kind of rest, the Sabbath, and I would like to focus mainly on this idea.

THE DIVINE IDEA OF SABBATH

As most know, the book of Genesis begins with God creating the heavens and the earth. It gives the details of what was created each day during the first week. Finally, Genesis 1:31 – 2:3 says,

“Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.”

First, we see that at the end of the sixth day, God looked at all the things that He had made. Have you ever taken a good bit of time and effort making something, and when you felt like you were done, you just stopped and looked closely to see if you were really satisfied with it? Was anything else needed? I think that this is what the “looking” of God at this point was all about. He had spent time creating many wonderful things and now He was just giving a final, careful look. All of the planets, and suns, and stars throughout the universe, galaxy after galaxy, were finished and in place. The earth, which had received so much careful attention, had everything needed to support and maintain all the many different forms of life that He had created to live on it. Man, who had received the most special attention of all, together with his wife, was walking around in the Garden of Eden. All the hosts of heaven, the angelic creations, were finished also. Everything that God had planned to create was finished. Nothing needed rearranging or remaking. Nothing needed to be added.

Next, we see that as God looked everything over, He was completely satisfied with all He had made. Now, I have to admit, that many times when I make something, I am not totally satisfied when I get done, but I just accept it as it turned out and go on. Occasionally, I may find that I am really happy with the dress, the cake, the paint job, whatever, but usually there are little things that I would have liked to have done better, but I have to accept my own limitations. God, however, found everything that He had made to be very good. Everything that He had made reflected His own qualities of goodness and perfection. The Psalmist says,

“The heavens declare the glory of God and the earth shows His handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1)

The works of His hands were meant to bring God glory, that is, to reflect Who He really is, and in the beginning that is just what we find. Everything that He had made reflected His perfect goodness.

After this, we see from the verses in Genesis that on the seventh day, God rested from His work. This does not mean that God was tired at the end of the sixth day and had to take a nap or something. God is a Spirit and He does not tire from doing things. This word for rest simply means that He stopped creating. Everything that He had intended to make had been made and it was perfect. There was nothing else to make, so He stopped. Have you ever been working on something and kept tweaking it here and there until it was actually marred because you kept messing with it too long? Well, God knew that once He had it done, it was time to stop. This does not mean that He was no longer active with His creation. Some theological views hold that God made everything and sort of wound it all up like a top and then stepped back and left it running on its own. However, when questioned regarding the Sabbath, Jesus said, “My Father is working and I Myself am working.” (John 5:17) This seems to indicate pretty plainly that God has always had an active role in the working of His creation. Indeed, I do not see how a person could read the Bible and not see that God is constantly at work in the lives of people, nations, the weather, geologic disturbances, etc. So we see that this Sabbath rest is not based on inactivity, but rather a satisfied completion of creation.

I think the most important feature to notice about the Sabbath rest on the seventh day is that it is based on the fact that, not only was everything complete, but everything was very good. If there had not been a divine perfection in the work of God’s hands, I do not believe that He would have been able to rest. He would not have been satisfied. Another important feature regarding the Lord’s Sabbath, is that it is perpetual. Throughout the first chapter of Genesis as each day drew to a close, the Scriptures say, “And the evening and the morning were the first day, “ then second, third, etc., but it does not at any point say, “And the evening and the morning were the seventh day.” The Sabbath rest of God never ended. He was always perfectly satisfied with His creation and there was never a need to create anything else. I think it is very important to keep in mind that from God’s point of view, the Sabbath rest is eternal and we will see that He invites us to participate in it with Him.

Finally, it says that God blessed and sanctified the seventh day because He had finished His creation. Now, from our earthly standpoint, we mark the days in terms of weeks and call the days by different names (based, incidentally upon the sun, moon, and planets), but I get the idea that from God’s standpoint, He is in His Sabbath perpetually. The heavenly standpoint is that of eternal Sabbath. All that God purposed to accomplish in the creation of the universe, despite the fall into sin, remains fulfilled and He is satisfied. Of course, He has been active in dealing with sin and redemption, but the Scriptures tell us that He had this all worked out before He ever even began the creation because it says that Jesus was “the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the earth.” (Revelation 13:8) This tells us that in the mind and heart of God, before He ever made anything, He had redemption through sending His Son all worked out. So despite the fact that sin entered the world, God was still able to rest in an eternal Sabbath.

A TEMPORAL DISTURBANCE IN ETERNAL REST

Although God is resting in the completeness of His creation, something has happened to disturb its perfection, and this disturbance He moves to deal with. The disturbance is sin, and I refer to it as temporal because it exists only for the time being, but it has already been dealt with perfectly and will end when time ends. The disturbance occurs in Genesis 3 in the familiar story of the serpent, the woman, and the forbidden fruit. I believe that when the first couple disobeyed God and in so doing took upon themselves the “right to themselves”, even though they were clearly the creations of God, they fell out of the Sabbath rest of God. Let’s take a look at Genesis 3:17-19 where the effects of falling out of God’s rest are to be seen.

“Then to Adam He said, ‘Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, “You shall not eat of it”: Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.’”

This sounds like anything but rest. Adam and Eve have fallen out of the perfection of God’s Sabbath rest, and the result is wearisome toil. I think that this toil represents the burden of sin in their lives. The burden of sin is really the burden of self, because the root of sin is wanting to be our own little god, but we are not strong enough to carry the weight of all that ego, insecurity, and need. Only God can do that. In the punishment of Eve, we see that there will be pain in childbirth—not for the child, but for the mother. I think that this symbolizes the pain that God Himself would have to endure in order to provide a new birth for mankind through the death of His Son. The punishment of the serpent shows us that pride and rebellion are content to slither on the ground eating dust when they might have walked among the stars as God intended.

We see at the end of Genesis 3 that man was left without the Sabbath rest, but not without hope. But what does sin do to God? We have seen what it did to man, but how does it disturb God? Let’s look at Zechariah 6:1-8. In this passage, the prophet Zechariah sees an apocalyptic vision of horses pulling chariots, very reminiscent of the horses that we see in the book of Revelation. The fact that they come out between two bronze mountains symbolizes judgment and the colors of the horses indicate that they represent war, bloodshed, and death. They are sent into different parts of the earth to execute judgment. In verse 8, God says,

“See, those who go toward the north country have given rest to My Spirit in the north country.”

Why did war, bloodshed, and death give rest to God’s Spirit? Because it worked to stop the sin that was going on. Sin is a great disturbance to the Spirit of God. It does not disturb His Sabbath rest (there is still no need for any further creating) but it disturbs His Spirit, and it should likewise disturb our spirits.

QUESTION: Is God at rest in our hearts? Is God at rest in our homes? Is God disturbed when He walks through the halls and sanctuaries of our churches? Is God at rest in our nation?

God says something very interesting in Isaiah 62:1-3.

“For Zion’s sake I will not hold My peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her righteousness goes forth as brightness, and her salvation as a lamp that burns. The Gentiles shall see your righteousness, and all kings your glory. You shall be called by a new name, which the mouth of the LORD will name. You shall also be a crown of glory in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.”

Notice He says that He won’t rest until righteousness and salvation shine from Jerusalem to the whole world. This reference to rest is not Sabbath rest (He is still not planning to create anything else) but rather that He is actively working to bring about salvation and righteousness and that He will do it through Jerusalem. Salvation was accomplished in Jerusalem with the death and resurrection of Jesus, but the final fulfillment of these verses will come when He returns to rule the world from Jerusalem. This, I believe, will occur in the seventh millennium, so we are pretty well there and I think this will soon be accomplished.

THE JEWISH SABBATH

In the history of the Jewish people, we will see that the land of Canaan was symbolic of Sabbath rest. God rescues them from slavery in Egypt (slavery is symbolic of sin) and leads them out of Egypt. He takes them through the desert to Mount Sinai. In the desert wilderness, they are to be consecrated—that is, they are to enter into covenant with God to be His people. From Mount Sinai, God gives all His commands as to how they are to live in the land that He intends to give them, how they are to worship, think, eat, work, etc. The people respond by saying, “All that the LORD has said we will do and we will be obedient.” (Exodus 24:7) Very soon afterward, however, in Numbers 14:6-10, we see that the people would not obey when put to the test. They refused to enter the land and trust God to provide victory and rest for them, so they were left to wander in the wilderness for 40 years. After 40 years, Joshua led the people victoriously into the Promised Land, and in Joshua 1:13-15 we read,

“Remember the word which Moses the servant of the LORD commanded you, saying, ‘The LORD your God is giving you rest and is giving you this land.’ Your wives, your little ones, and your livestock shall remain in the land which Moses gave you on this side of the Jordan. But you shall pass before your brethren armed, all your mighty men of valor, and help them, until the LORD has given your brethren rest, as He gave you and they also have taken possession of the land which the LORD your God is giving them. Then you shall return to the land of your possession and enjoy it, which Moses the LORD’s servant gave you on this side of the Jordan toward the sunrise.”

Notice that God was giving them rest, along with the land. And if the people of Israel had kept God’s commandments and made Him the center of their lives and worship, looking faithfully for the Sacrifice promised through their worship rituals, I think they would have enjoyed the Lord’s Sabbath. However, their history reveals that they soon followed the gods of the Canaanites and forsook the Lord their God, so they never realized the divine idea of rest. The Law that was given through Moses specified that the seventh day was to be a Sabbath of rest—no toilsome labor—and the seventh year was to be a Sabbath for the land and no crops were to be sown. So we see in the Law that God had intended for the people to enter into His rest. The observance of the Sabbath, with no toilsome work, should have shown to them the hope of redemption from sin because toilsome work was the punishment for sin in the Garden of Eden. But the people would not observe His Sabbath as commanded, and they could not enter into it because of disobedience and lack of faith.

Psalm 95:8-11 sums up the situation for the people of Israel:

“Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts, as in the rebellion, as in the day of trial in the wilderness, when your fathers tested Me; they tried Me, though they saw My work for forty years. I was grieved with that generation, and said, ‘It is a people who go astray in their hearts; and they do not know My ways.’ So I swore in My wrath, they shall not enter My rest.”


THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH

Hebrews 4 gives insight and promise to those who will believe God. Verses 1-2 say,

“Since a promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them (refers to the Israelites in the wilderness); but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it.”

So what is required to enter into the Sabbath rest? These verses tell us that faith is required. What is faith? Hebrews 11:1 tells us that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

QUESTION: What do you hope for? If you have fixed your hope in man’s ingenuity and in science and technology, you will find “evidence” that man came from apes all over the place. You will find “evidence” that the world just evolved out of who knows what and you will snub people who believe in God and say that God is just a crutch for the weak-minded. However, if your hope is in God and in His Son, Jesus Christ, you will look around and see all sorts of evidence that God made the world, that He has been working through history and individual lives, and you will scratch your head perplexedly at the notion that the universe just sort of “happened all by itself” and say, “It’s mathematically impossible! There must be a Designer and Builder.” So where do you place your hope—and I don’t mean, where do you place your hope when you are sitting in church and you know the answer you are supposed to give to that question. Where do you place your hope Monday – Saturday when the world is telling you to think and behave one way, but God has said to think and behave in another way. We live in a time when people “compartmentalize” their faith, but as we saw in the passages above, these people are in danger of failing to enter into God’s rest because of unbelief. The true Sabbath rest of God is eternal, not just one day out of the week.

To the Christian believers, the author of Hebrews wrote in 4:9-11,

“There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience.”

The Greek word used in verse 9 for rest is “sabbatismos,” and it refers to the Sabbath rest, tying this verse directly to the verse in Genesis in which God rested from His creative work on the seventh day. God is inviting those who will exercise real faith by obeying Him to enter into His perfect rest. He has provided the means by which we are to be made perfect—the atoning death of His Son. Jesus’ last words on the cross before He died were, “It is finished.” All the work that was necessary to enable man to enter into God’s Sabbath of perfect rest was complete. When one enters that perfect rest, he realizes that his own works could never have gotten him in. I am very much afraid that most people believe that when God weighs their good deeds against their evil deeds, the good will win out and they will be let into heaven. That is not what the writer to the Hebrews says in this passage, but rather that when we have entered into His rest by faith, we have stopped our own pitiful works and have placed our faith in Jesus for salvation from sin.

What does the author mean by exhorting us to be diligent to enter into that rest? Does this mean that we can lose our salvation along the way? Some do believe this very frightening thought.The Hebrews to whom this letter was written had been practicing Judaism before receiving Jesus as their Messiah and becoming Christians. They were in danger of letting themselves be dragged back into Judaism because it was really hard to buck their traditions, cultural and religious upbringing, and often even their own families. For Christians in the Western world, I think that he means that as long as we live on earth in bodies that are still influenced by the fleshly desires we will have to be diligent to remain faithful and obedient to God. The natural desires that have been corrupted by sin will not be done away with until we receive resurrection bodies like that of the Lord Jesus and they will always tend to drag us out of God’s rest. Also, there will always be those people whose words tend to influence us away from resting in the completed work of God and in His sovereignty and His willingness and ability to lead us. These are the folks that are always desperately doing and never restfully being.

QUESTION: Have you entered into the Lord’s Sabbath rest? Have you ceased trying to “be good” and placed your faith in Jesus and His death for your sins? Are you continuing in the Sabbath rest by trusting Him to lead you day by day and focusing your worshipful attention on Him, rather than the things of the world? Jesus said,

“Come to Me all you 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.” (Matthew 11:28-29)

Those who are carrying the burden of sin or who are trying hard to be “good enough” are invited to come to Jesus, submit to His yoke (self-denial and obedient following) and thereby find real rest.

Thanks for checking this out. I am planning a study on the life of Abraham, focusing on his worship and faith. Hopefully, I can have the first lesson ready to post in a couple of weeks.