Sabbath – a Cathedral in time[1]
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. For six days you shall labor 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 slave or your female slave, or your cattle, or your resident who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and everything that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; for that reason, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Exodus 20:8-11 (NASB)
Obedience precedes revelation
About 30 years ago, as I was asking God to reveal to me more of who He is, I remembered a phrase I had heard in Bible school: “obedience precedes revelation”. It got me thinking about what the obvious things in the Bible were that I was not obeying, and two came to mind. Keep the Sabbath and pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:5). How could I expect God to reveal more of Himself to me in the treasures of Scripture if I didn’t do those clearly articulated things?! How could He trust me with what’s on His heart and mind, when I am not to be trusted with those two obvious things?! I promptly incorporated both into my daily life. And God, true to Himself, opened up the windows of heaven for me to see what He’s up to both in my daily time with Him, in my going about life with other people, and also in how He reveals His character in the beautiful nature He created.
The Sabbath
Right from the beginning, God talks about taking the seventh day of rest, which is what the word Sabbath means – “abstaining from work”. Genesis 1 describes the days when God worked to create the heavens and the earth, then Genesis 2 opens with the day of rest. Did God have to rest?! No! He was establishing a precedence of all precedences. It’s the first thing He called holy.
People often interpret holy to mean ‘set apart’, and so it is. But it’s not a setting apart of something similar, such as setting apart some salt from the bag of salt to be used in a recipe. It’s so much more than that. It is setting something apart because it is altogether other, altogether different.
A day of rest is altogether different from a day of work. One can carry this on to other things that are called holy in Scripture. Israel is called a holy nation (Exodus 19:6) because the nation is altogether different from other nations in the world. This is evident in the preservation of their ancient language or their land, for example. The Tabernacle is called holy[2] because it is an altogether different place for worship than the surrounding nations who worshipped in forest groves or high places. God also calls His name holy[3] because it is altogether different from anyone else’s – it is the only name by which men can be delivered from the oppressive dominion of Satan.[4]
The day is so altogether delineated that in Jewish weeks it’s called something different , the days are numbered – 1, 2,3,4,5 and 6, but the 7th day is called Shabbat (the Hebrew for Sabbath and means ‘he rested’).
God gave tangible concrete examples of holiness – a separate time, a separate place or a separate people – so that finite human beings could comprehend that part of His infinite nature. God is Holy – altogether other, altogether separate. And in His desire to be known, He gives tangible proof of who He is.
A legal injunction
God’s view of the Sabbath is so significant that He made it an absolute mandate in the Ten Commandments; it’s applicable to any geographic place or any historical time. It applies to the highest to the lowliest person on the social spectrum. No one is above this law.
This sounds so Old Testament, so legalistic. Yes, it is. It is a judicial injunction imposed on all humans. The breaking of the Sabbath is tantamount to stealing. Yeshua called Satan out for who he is – a liar and father of lies; he’s a stealer, destroyer, and murderer.[5]
According to religious leaders, Yeshua broke the law of the Sabbath by healing on it. His response was that man was not made for the Sabbath, but Sabbath was made for man.[6] And He fulfilled the Sabbath by healing what was out of order in these people. This is what the Sabbath is all about – reordering humans through rest, in an otherwise chaotic disordered world.
(Yeshua is translated into Greek as Jesus, but because He is Jewish, I call by His Jewish name.)
Paul, a Rabbi who thoroughly understood the Scriptures recognized in Romans 14, that some people need a different day of rest than the traditional Saturday. He adds that we need not judge a person on which day they choose under the presumption that they do take the prescribed rest day. In a church, for example, the accepted day of rest is Sunday, but pastors work on that day. Therefore, many will take Monday as a day off.
Breaking the law of the Sabbath
Keeping the Sabbath is so significant to God that He talks about it from Genesis to Revelation. One need only look up all the references to ‘rest’ or ‘Sabbath’ to see that this is important to Him. He talks about what to do or not do on it. He talks about what will happen if one obeys it. He also talks about the consequences when people (including land) are not given a day (or year) of rest.
He holds owners and employers accountable when they abuse their slaves’ or workers’ right to the Sabbath. Often, He reminded Israel of what it was like for them to work under the slavery in Egypt to elicit the empathetic response for their workers’ need of rest. When the day is not kept, we steal: when we prevent others from keeping it, we steal from them their right. It is ultimately a human rights abuse.
Anyone who attempts to interfere with the Sabbath rest is abusing the boundary of the other. It’s as severe as one nation trespassing the border of another nation. It goes against God’s law as well as natural law. God set the time boundary and this includes the weekly cadence.
Time waits for no one
Man does not control time, neither does Satan. Time was created by God, and He alone sets the timetable or timeline. Daniel 2:21 confirms Genesis 1:14, by saying that God is He “who changes the times and the epochs”.
Peace of mind comes when one recognizes that God has ordained all one’s days (Psalm 139:16). And faith is demonstrated by keeping God’s weekly (and yearly cadence for that matter) because it shows God that we trust Him with the rest of the week.
Counter cultural
Keeping the Sabbath is counter cultural. Satan, knowing he cannot change time, attempts to interfere with the day of rest. He would like us to be frenetic, anxious, and full of ‘what ifs’. By intentionally obeying God’s preordained order of time, we demonstrate faith that God will take care of all the things that need doing, and Satan loses ground. It fulfills Philippians 4:6 and 7 in that one prays making “supplication, with thanksgiving to God, and His peace sets a guard round one’s mind” (emphasis added). This is picked up in 1 Peter 1:7 – by casting our anxiety on God, we believe that He cares about us. This is a mutual cooperation. We guard the day of rest; God guards our mind with peace.
Sabbath in a time of trouble
I taught the Holocaust six times a year for over 15 years. I wanted students to understand how a highly educated sophisticated culture succumbed to a mad man. Although I could have traced this repetition in history from the beginning of time, I chose to begin with the Enlightenment which borrowed a phrase from the Greeks: “man is the measure of all things”. Because of the progression of thought by the 19th century philosophers, the logical conclusion to the Enlightenment was the Holocaust – the logical progression of placing man as the measure of things leads to the humanistic ideal of relative truth, where the only truth that triumphs is that of the strong over the weak.
George Hegel was a contemporary of Friedrich Nietzsche – “God is dead and remains dead’, and lived at the same time as Charles Darwin – ‘survival of the fittest”. Hegel introduced a concept of humanism that permeated 20th century worldviews. His stated thesis was that ‘there’s a God’, but that its antithesis would then be “there is no God’, which he then said led to the synthesis that “man is God’. [7] This kind of thinking is so entrenched in society that unless one has a direct revelation from God, one can’t help but succumb to it (obedience does precede revelation). Man’s way of thinking counters God’s.
On a trip to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in 2011, I mentioned to the tour guide, that I did not have the emotional wherewithal to enter the spiritual emotional turmoil of the Holocaust yet again by looking at the pictures and reading the stories. He challenged me to look for the joy. I thought he was crazy, how can one find joy or hope in the chaos of war and of a deliberate targeting a people for destruction. So I asked God to open my eyes. And I found it. I found the joy.
Joy was in the Scriptures that so many Jews memorized. And it was in the Sabbath. No matter what was happening, they kept the Sabbath. They found rest in a disordered time by keeping the day holy – altogether different.
“If, because of the Sabbath, you restrain your foot from doing as you wish on My holy day,
And call the Sabbath a pleasure, and the holy day of the Lord honorable, and honor it, desisting from your own ways, from seeking your own pleasure and speaking your own word, then you will take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; and I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” Isaiah 58:13, 14 (NASB)
[1] Abraham Joshua Heshel’s full quote “The Sabbath is to time what the tabernacle and temple are to space: a cathedral in time. On the seventh day, we experience in time what the temple and tabernacle represented in spaces, which is eternal life with God in a complete creation.”
[2] Exodus 28 – 40
[3] Psalm 20, Philippians 2
[4] Acts 4:12, Colossians 1:13
[5] John 8:44, John 10:10
[6] Mark 2:27
[7] Francis Schaeffer wrote about this in his Escape from Reason and The Great Evangelical Disaster.
