I am writing a series of posts on the subject of “living justly” as Christians. I am in the middle of a discussion of Work and Rest, the observation of the Sabbath in Israelite culture, and its ramifications for living justly. In my last post, I wrote about “labor practices” – working six days and resting one, and giving rest to those we employ. Today we will look at deeper lessons from the fourth commandment.
The next passage I want to examine is from the second giving of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5:
12 “‘Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. 15 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
Here Moses is teaching the next generation of Israelites as they are on the brink of entering the land God promised to them. There is much about the second version that resembles the first version, but there is also something different. Here, Moses doesn’t remind them about God’s creation pattern, but instead about the Exodus from Egypt. God rescued his people from slavery in Egypt with his mighty power, and that is what they are to remember on the Sabbath while they rest.
One thing we learn in between Exodus and Deuteronomy is that the Israelites were taught to gather to worship God on their day of rest. It is a day not only to rest from work, but also to remember the God who powerfully provides for our needs. Our most insurmountable need is rescue from any form of slavery – slavery to sin being paramount. Powerless slaves need a rescuer. God showed himself to be an awesomely powerful rescuer and protector. And while the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years, they also learned that He was the provider of their daily needs as well. Their “daily bread” fell from heaven six days of the week, and on the sixth day, He provided enough for them to last through the Sabbath day. He is our provider, both of our daily needs and our insurmountable needs.
The literal slavery of the Israelites to the Egyptians was meant to point to an even greater slavery to Satan and to the reigning power of sin and death. How do I know that? An important event immediately preceded the Exodus – the Passover (Exodus 12). On the night of the Passover, the Israelites, and anyone else who would take God at His word, were to kill an unblemished lamb and paint its blood on their doorposts. They were instructed to stay inside that house all night while the Angel of the Lord passed over the land and killed the firstborn sons in all the homes not marked with the blood. The blood of the lamb was poured out in each house to protect the sons of Israel from death. The Apostles testified repeatedly in the New Testament Scriptures that Jesus Christ was the Ultimate and final passover lamb to deliver us from slavery to sin and from death (John 1:36, 1 Corinthians 5:7). And Moses records that God called his entire people, all of Israel, his firstborn son (Exodus 4:22: “Thus says the LORD, Israel is my firstborn son, and I say to you, ‘Let my son go that he may serve me.’”). He redeemed them from slavery in Egypt so that they could serve Him. By analogy, we know now that we are God’s redeemed people. To all who will take Jesus at his word, his blood serves to rescue our lives from slavery to sin and death and to regenerate us as “new creations,” who willingly serve God. Jesus rescued us from the unseen or spiritual slavery to Satan, the “dominion of darkness,” and brought us into a heavenly kingdom, in which we are now citizens with Him spiritually, but we will go to be with Him bodily in the future after death. We did not rescue or redeem ourselves from sin. The Lamb of God did it for us. This is the Gospel or Good News.
So coming back to the Sabbath – one of its functions was to remind us of the God who powerfully works for our benefit, the God who provides for his people both daily bread and salvation. When we rest, we cease from our work. We take a day to not provide for ourselves and to instead remember the God who provides. This helps us avoid the tendency to worship the work of our hands, rather than God. Practicing rest in this way reminds me that it is God who frees me from sin and death, not the work of my hands.
As we think of the implications of the Gospel, we could slip into some distorted ways of thinking and living. Because Jesus and the apostles point us to a heavenly kingdom for all of God’s children, we could have no concern for the alleviation of social and economic oppression experienced by many people presently on the earth. The sufferings of the present life will all be washed away in the future bliss of heaven, so why expend energy now on reforming systems that cause humans to suffer? Some might say, “Just preach the Gospel!” It is only eternity that matters, and the real peril from which we must rescue people is eternal.
But Jesus and the apostles taught us that we are to pray that God’s kingdom would begin to come here “on earth as it is in heaven.” The Gospel isn’t only a message from God of life in heaven, to pass from one person to another, with no personal transformation lived out as verification of the new redeemed life the message imparts. We are redeemed to serve Him now. We are not to be complacent about the present suffering caused by personal and systemic sins of racism or oppression. Jesus teaches us that loving our neighbor as ourselves means showing compassion for the needs of everyone around us, including the least significant members of our society. I could enumerate stories, parables and teachings of Jesus which instruct us show compassion “to the least of these,” but one parable which especially convicts me is in Matthew 25:31-46, which equates our care in this life for the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned with our love of Jesus.
It’s important to remember that the Israelites who received this Sabbath command literally had been slaves in Egypt. God literally had rescued them from slavery with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. The Israelites had a personal memory of both enslavement and God’s powerful rescue. That would have given them conviction of the rightness of this command, both to rest and to give rest to all in Israel, including their servants, and the foreigners among them. God reminds them of their former servitude and how He cared that they were suffering. They did not rescue or redeem themselves, but He did it for them. God then commands them to be rest-giving people. They are to include their own servants, the sojourners, and even their livestock in their sabbath rest. Even though the Exodus points to the more ultimate redemption God worked for us all through the blood of Jesus, it also applies in the practical everyday lives of Christians today. For those of us who have no personal history of literal enslavement, we must tune our hearts to hear the cries of the Israelites, and of people around us living in a different economic and social reality. There should be obvious resemblance of our Heavenly Father, who hears and loves all peoples and cares about the suffering of the needy. A significant part of Jesus’ earthly ministry included alleviating suffering for many, even though their deepest need was eternal life. As “new creations” in His image, we should look like him in both ways – loving God and preaching the ultimate rescue in Jesus Christ and loving others – providing temporal rest and rescue wherever we are able.
So to recap, what are some further applications for us?
- As I rest, I am called to worship God, not myself, or the work of my hands.
- As I rest, I am called to remember God my Savior, my rescuer from slavery to all forms of sin and death.
- God’s call for us to have regular rhythms of work and rest is a call to imitate God my Savior by proclaiming his plan of rescue from slavery to sin and death for all of humanity.
- And we are called to imitate God in taking an active role to combat earthly oppression as one critical facet of the righteousness of God.