Dear friends,
The creation account of Genesis finishes in a most unexpected place – rest. The idea of God resting on the seventh day is so familiar to us that we sometimes miss how extraordinary it is. That God should rest and bless the seventh day, inviting us to share it with him is one of the wonders of the Bible.
In a society dominated by and priding itself in ‘busyness’ and confused and conflicted over ‘work/life balance’, God’s teaching on the Sabbath day is a welcome relief for Christians. Yet it is not simply an individual issue, for the Sabbath is to be celebrated by all of creation.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip: Today we are going to talk about the Sabbath, but there's some feedback to address first. We are very glad for your feedback, especially nice feedback. Alan has written to us with a very helpful comment.
The claim that the Bible interprets the Bible is simplistic, even misleading, in my view. Context is critical to understanding the signifier, that is, the text and what it signifies. Is it not the historical, cultural, and social factors shaping language and idiom that enable understanding of a text? And the understanding of relationships between the texts, written in different languages by different people in different eras? Is there not a huge risk to the Bible interprets the Bible, in that dots are joined that are simply not there, and perhaps even more importantly, that actual correlations between and within texts are lost because idiomatic nuances are missed?
I think it was your phrase, Peter, “the Bible interprets the Bible”. What's your response to Alan?
Peter: I thank Alan for this because it's worth raising the issue and putting it as succinctly as he has. First, we need to recognize that ‘the Bible interprets the Bible’ is a fundamental point, but it's certainly by no means the end of this subject. Huge books are written on what's called hermeneutics or the interpretation of the Bible. Secondly, however, and more importantly, I think Alan is correct. Exegesis, or the careful reading of texts, is again absolutely basic. You have to focus on the text in front of you. You have to understand the context. The ultimate context for any particular part of the Bible is the Bible as a whole. To take an example, Psalm 23, “the LORD is my shepherd”. You can only understand that in terms of who the Lord has disclosed himself to be in Exodus. It is the God who has disclosed himself in Genesis. It is not just a collection of books, higgledy-piggledy on the shelf. It is a canon. It is a set of books brought together because the original readers could see that they tell a story. There were a number of books that were not included for various reasons. But one of the key reasons was they were not consistent with the message as a whole. If you believe, as I do, that God is the author of scripture by his Holy Spirit, it does indeed speak with one voice. That is exactly how we see Jesus and the apostles treating the Old Testament. They do not discard it. They reinterpret it in the light of the great events of the incarnation, the cross and the resurrection, and the coming of the Spirit. They bring out what they regard as its true meaning. Therefore, they are happy to call upon the Old Testament to bear witness to the great events in the New Testament.
Phillip: In your usage of “the LORD is my Shepherd”, for example, ‘the LORD’ there is Yahweh. Now, the rest of the scripture teaches us that Yahweh is God. But there is that subtle difference between ‘God’ and ‘Yahweh’, in that ‘Yahweh’ is his name and ‘God’ is what he is, so to speak. That is part of what Alan is saying. That when we come to read any text, we have to look at the words in their context. At the same time, the point you're making is right, that Yahweh is Yahweh throughout the whole scripture. But when I'm talking of Yahweh, I am talking of a personal relationship with God in a way that I may not be when I use the word ‘God’.
Peter: That example confirms what Alan is saying, although it is evidence for what I'm saying too. Who said, “I am the Good Shepherd”? Was it not Jesus? Which is interesting because it is very difficult to read what Jesus said without thinking of Psalm 23.
Phillip: In fact, one of the evidential arguments on the divinity of Jesus is where Old Testament references to Yahweh are taken and applied to Jesus. So “all who call upon the name of the LORD”, which is Joel, turns out in Romans 10:13 to be Jesus.
Peter: “Every knee will bow to him" is originally referenced to God, as translated in Isaiah 45. You cannot understand Philippians 2, where it appears, without understanding Isaiah 45. The two belong together. The position I am putting forward is not just idiosyncratic. It reflects very much the Reformation teaching and the teaching of the 39 Articles. So, I stick by it, “the Bible interprets the Bible”.
Phillip: Let’s come to our topic for today, the Sabbath. Genesis 2:1-3
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 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. 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.
Now, this is the background to our whole issue of the seventh day, the Sabbath day. That is a big issue in life itself. You and I have some memories of a different age when we were children in which Sabbath-keeping in our community really was quite different.
Peter: And in the generation before that as well. Our dad grew up in Cowra. I remember him telling me that Cowra was the centre of the universe. He told me that if a woman hung out her washing on a Sunday, she would be in trouble with the neighbours and looked down upon because she was working on the Sunday. There were a number of men he knew would not come to church at all because they played tennis or golf on a Sunday afternoon, and therefore, they did not want to be accused of hypocrisy. The Sabbath command was taken so seriously by many and had so gripped not just the churches but the community that it had those effects.
Phillip: I remember that shops shut at twelve o'clock on Saturday and didn't open again until nine o'clock on Monday. Certain shops, like pharmacists or newsagents, opened early Sunday morning for a while. The society in the 40s and 50s, early 60s, had a weekend. The adults played sports on Saturday afternoon; the kids did on Saturday morning. Sunday was just a day in which not much happened. That characteristic was the cultural society built out of Christianity.
Peter: It was called Sabbath-keeping, but it wasn't really the Sabbath day, was it?
Phillip: Christians have had this terrific conflict. I think you see it in America more than Australia as to whether Sunday is the Sabbath or whether Sunday is the Lord's Day and whether the Lord's Day is the Sabbath. There are Seventh-day Baptists in America. The Lord's Day observance committees were a very big part of the culture, weren't they?
Peter: Phillip, do you know where that phrase “The Lord's Day” came from?
Phillip: In Revelation 1:10, John the Apostle says, “It was on the Lord's Day”, which may refer to the first day of the week, the day of the resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 16, it mentions collecting money on the first day of the week. The Lord's Day in Revelation may be referring to being in the kingdom, the final Sabbath, rather than necessarily the first day of the week, but I think that's where the phrase comes from.
Peter: The phrase has to do with the resurrection. It was the Lord's Day, not the Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath, but the resurrection day.
Phillip: When we were children, we heard the Ten Commandments being read in communion service every Sunday, and we prayed that God would write them on our hearts. It comes from the idea of Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36, that the law would not be just written on the tablets of stone, but written on the hearts of God's people, and so we are to keep the Sabbath day. But how do we keep the Sabbath day? It had to do with creation. Because the commandment pointed back to this creation day when God rested from his labour. What do you think it means that God rested? Because John 5 says he works continuously.
Peter: It points forward to what we call “the rest”, namely the denouement, the final fulfilment of all things when God rests in the sense that the thing that has been made, he has declared it to be, on the sixth day, “good, very good.” He's done his labour. It is what he wanted it to be, as it will be again on that last day. Another way in which it is used, of course, is in referring to the promised land, when the people of Israel are in the desert and they come to their rest in the promised land. It does not mean they cease to work. It means that they have now come to the end of their striving. They have arrived at the place of peace and rest in that sense. There is a deep sense of rest in having reached your conclusion, the heavenly realm if you like. It is an eschatological phrase.
Phillip: Genesis is saying that God has finished creating. That does not mean he has finished working. God is not now creating new things out of nothing. The world was set up and finished, and then God rested from the work of creating. That does not mean he has finished his work of sustaining the world. Otherwise, we would be in big trouble. But you are taking it to also speak of the eschaton, an end to the world, something deeper than just that he has stopped creating.
Peter: I think that it will be his rest again when there is a new heaven and a new earth at the end of all things. Sin has entered the world. Sin has defaced the wonderful creation of God and continues to do so. The world groans, seeking for it to be set free; Romans 8. At that time, rest will be established again. We will have reached the culmination of God's great creative work, and we will be in heaven. That's what Hebrews 3 and 4 is pointing to.
Phillip: The author uses Psalm 95 to speak about rest in the promised land but then warns the readers about the rest that is yet to come for them. Hebrews 4:9-10
So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.
Peter: In Exodus 20:8-11 we read:
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of 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. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
The reason given for this weekly pause of work is that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth.
Phillip: When people want to try and play Pharisee with the commandment in Exodus 20 and say, “Ah, yes, but what does it precisely mean?”, they have missed the point completely. It means to take time off. It is to stop.
There are several interesting twists to the fourth commandment. The second account of the commandments in Deuteronomy 5 is different to Exodus 20. In Deuteronomy 5:15 the reason given is not the creation but slavery in Egypt. The whole household is to stop work, right down to animals. The creation as a whole needs the break. The land needs rest, the animals need rest, and the slaves need rest. Everybody must take a rest. It is the person who is responsible for other people's work who can fulfil this commandment.
Peter: What a brilliant command it is. How wonderful. But what did Jesus mean when he said that my father works still? Why was he saying that?
Phillip: He was defending the accusation of healing on the Sabbath. Jesus looks to the principle behind the law and applies it vigorously. The Pharisees are always looking for the loophole by which they can avoid what the law is saying. In Mark 3, there is a man with a withered arm. The Pharisees are looking to see whether Jesus will heal on the Sabbath in order to trap him in breaking the law. Jesus is the one who brings the Sabbath; he's the Lord of the Sabbath there. That is where you are talking about the end-point Sabbath. The Sabbath is the day for healing. The Sabbath is the day for doing good. So he heals the man. He rebukes the people who are trying to trap him. The Pharisees and the Herodians get together in order to kill Jesus because he shows them up in his Sabbatarian view.
Peter: We have shown evidence in the churches, I think, of Pharisaism about this.
Phillip: Yes, we've turned “you shall not work on the Sabbath” into “you shall not play on the Lord’s Day”.
Peter: Looking back to Jesus and how he spoke of the Sabbath and how he healed on the Sabbath, we see that it was a day in which good works must be done. Not because you are aiming to please God by doing good works to win his approval but because you have his approval in Jesus and, as a result, you wish to glorify him.
The Sabbath is regarded as a covenant sign, as circumcision is a covenant sign of the ancient people of God. What it certainly did do, as did the food laws and other laws, was to make the people of God, the ancient people of God, Israel, stand out from the people around. It put a sort of wall around them because of their behaviour, which enabled them to be the people of God. It sends a message to us in the sense that in those ways, they were different from their neighbours, and so we too must be different from our neighbours in ways that are reflective of the new covenant. For example, loving each other and getting together on Sunday at church make us different from the world in which we're living. But it is not exactly the same.
Phillip: What are we, who are Gentile Christians, going to do in terms of a covenant sign of Israel? In Exodus 31:12-17, we are told that those in Israel who break the Sabbath are to be put to death. Now, for Sabbath keeping, that is a bit stark for us. But that is because we do not understand what the Sabbath was for Israel, because it was a sign. Exodus 31:17
It's a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.
It is a sign that Yahweh is God. Many people may accept that God, the God of gods or whoever, created the world. But Israel was testifying that it was Yahweh who is God. It is Yahweh who created the heavens and the earth, and we are Yahweh's people. And because we are Yahweh's people, we worship the God who created everything and everybody. Unfortunately, our translators, and it is a very ancient tradition, instead of using this word ‘Yahweh’, always put ‘LORD’ in uppercase. We miss the significance of the name. It was not just any God who created the world. The sign of being Yahweh's people is that we work as Yahweh works, taking the seventh day off each week. And for us not to do that is to deny being Yahweh's people, which then becomes a capital offence.
Peter: And we are the saved of the Lord as well, by Yahweh.
Phillip: In Deuteronomy, they were slaves of non-Israelites, the slaves of the Egyptians. They knew what it was like to be slaves. In Yahweh's land, they were to practice Yahweh's thing, and everybody in the land was to have the day off, including slaves, even as most of the slaves of Israel were foreigners and the sojourners who were not Israelites but just passing through.
Peter: Why capital punishment for breaking the Sabbath?
Phillip: Because you claim to be one of Yahweh's people, but you are denying Yahweh's character and his nature and the way he operates.
Peter: The Apostle Paul seems to denigrate the Sabbath, in a sense. He talks about it as a ceremony now gone in Colossians 2:16
Therefore let no one pass judgement on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.
In Romans 14:5 he writes:
One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.
How could Paul treat such an important command like that?
Phillip: I think it's important that people keep listening to Two Ways News because I think we need to deal with this next week. In the meantime, let me give a little indication. Paul is the Apostle to the Gentiles. The Sabbath is the sign of the Israelites. But now, the Gentiles have become Christians. Do they have to adopt the signs of the Israelites? At that point, you have all kinds of big issues. Are the New Testament people of God the same as, a replacement of, or different to the Old Testament people of God? Are we still Jew and Gentile after we become Christians? How much do we have to become Jewish? The Sabbath is a really important indication of this issue of moving from the Old Testament to the New Testament.
Peter: Next time, I'm going to ask you where that leaves us. Is it still a commandment of God, or are there only nine commandments?
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this series by Phillip on Work, given at the 2011 Australia Day Conference.
https://phillipjensen.com/resources/?_sorter=title_a_z&_series=australia-day-convention-2011-work
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