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Text Comment:
v. 2 The word "Sabbath" is not used, but the related verb "to
rest" is used in both v. 2 and v. 3. As Derek Kidner puts it, this rest is the rest
of achievement, not inactivity, for God continues to nurture, to rule, and to involve
himself with what he has made. It is like Jesus being "seated" after completing
his redeeming work to dispense from heaven its benefits.
The Lord has done us proud this morning, bringing us to this text on Super Bowl Sunday.
That was his doing, so take careful note, brothers and sisters, what the Spirit of God is
saying to the church and to you and to me.
In 1981 a film appeared that was almost unique among recent Hollywood offerings in
presenting principled, evangelical Christianity in a highly positive light. It was a huge
success as a movie, making lots of money and winning the Oscar for Best Picture. A lesson
Hollywood promptly forgot in its mad dash to make movies that despise the Christian faith
instead.
"Chariots of Fire" told a true story though taking many liberties along the
way. The hero of the movie, a Scottish seminarian and soon to be China missionary, Eric
Liddell, was a track star in 1920s Britain and, as you remember, was to represent Britain
in the 1924 Olympics in the 100 meter dash. But when he discovered, at the last minute,
that the qualifying heats were scheduled for a Sunday, he withdrew from the event. He
gained notoriety for his stand for the holiness of the Lord's Day, a stand that seemed
still more heroic when, offered a chance to compete in the 400 meters instead, he won a
gold medal for Britain after all. I remember the days when Chariots of Fire was soon to
come to the theaters. The studio marketed the movie to churches in a way no movie has been
since. Christianity Today featured the movie in various articles and in its news
section. Evangelicals flocked to see it because of its sympathetic, even heroic portrayal
of one of their own and for its celebration of a Christian's standing up for the law of
God.
The irony, of course, missed by most Christians who so enjoyed the movie, was that they
themselves would not have done as Liddell did, would not have counseled anyone else to do
it either, and, in fact, would have considered legalistic and unbiblical Liddell's
conviction that, as a Christian, he was obliged to keep the Lord's Day holy, come wind,
come weather. Who was right? Liddell, or the evangelicals who so admired him for a
completely unnecessary crisis of conscience and sacrifice? Is the holiness of the Sabbath
an obligation for us today, or is it not?
We are perhaps too familiar with these verses in Genesis 2 to appreciate how striking,
how unexpected, how full of meaning and significance they are. God made the heavens and
the earth and all that they contain in six days. But why should God himself
"rest" on the seventh day? Certainly the Almighty who brought all things into
being by the mere utterance of his word was not weary! And if it were that kind of rest, a
bare cessation from labor, there would be no need to say that he rested "the
seventh day." It would have been enough to say that at the end of the sixth day
he rested. No, his resting on the seventh day has another purpose. It was to bless and to
hallow or sanctify the seventh day. It was, by his example, to establish as a rule for
mankind, a rhythm of six days of labor and a seventh of spiritual rest. Spiritual rest not
simply physical rest, for God's rest was not the rest of inactivity, as the Bible teaches
us. That God intended his resting on the seventh day to be a pattern for man is also
demonstrated conclusively by the 4th commandment which says that we are to work six days
and rest a seventh because that is what God did when he created the world.
The great and most high God could have made the entire world in a moment, why did he
make it then in six days and rest a seventh except as an example to man.
Now what does it mean that God blessed the day and made it holy? God is holy, it is the
essence of his character. He alone is holy by nature, intrinsically. Everything else that
is holy in the Bible is either chosen by God for some special purpose relating to
him, or given to God for his worship and service. So when the Scripture says that
God made the seventh day "holy" it means that he set it apart for his use and
gave it to us to be part of our worship and service of him.
Now that is straightforward enough and almost everyone agrees that that is what the
words mean. The problem is, of course, is that this statement comes when it does.
For the widespread belief of many Christians today is that the Sabbath was something
for the days of Moses and that it has been superseded in the NT. Some will continue to say
that we should worship on Sunday, the NT Lord's Day. But even many of them will admit that
the obligation to keep the Lord's Day holy belonged to the age before Christ and
Pentecost. It was part of Jewish worship and does not continue today. This is the common,
the majority view in American evangelical Christianity today.
But, Gen. 2:2-3 poses an immense problem for that way of thinking about the Sabbath
Day. For here we have word of the day being made holy not only long before Moses, but even
before the fall of man into sin. The first two chapters of Genesis introduce us to the
fundamental structures of human life: marriage, family, a life of work, and a day
of rest. Theologians call these structures or institutions "creation ordinances"
because the Scripture lays them down as fundamental to human life already at its
beginning, and as so fundamental to God's intention for human life that they belong to
human life even before there is sin in the world.
Now we don't imagine that marriage, or family, or work do not continue to be
fundamental structures of human life. We know that they are. How then is it possible to
extract the Lord's holy day from these other creation ordinances and consider it alone to
have been abolished at Pentecost? The pattern of human life as a rhythm of six days of
work and a day of rest, already revealed before the fall and patterned after God's own
behavior in creation, seems, on any simple and straightforward reading of Gen. 2, to be
the divine purpose for human life perpetually. He made the seventh day holy,
he set it apart for holy use.
But you see, if you once admit that fact: that the seventh day is already holy in Gen.
2 and already a part of the divine pattern for human life, it is going to be very
difficult to argue that the Sabbath is a Jewish matter superceded in the NT. Marriage
isn't Jewish, family wasn't invented by Moses, the life of work isn't Jewish -- these all
belong to the human race because God made these things for mankind and established human
life on their basis even before the fall. But he did the same regarding the Sabbath Day.
This seemed to be Jesus' own thinking when, for example in Mark 2, he confronted the
Pharisees about their perversion of the Sabbath obligation, their betrayal of the true
purpose of the day. He told them, "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the
Sabbath." He did not say that it was made for the Jew, but for man.
Now this problem is appreciated by those who believe that the obligation to keep one
day in seven holy to the Lord has been done away. They fully appreciate that a Sabbath in
Eden would be a death blow to that view. And so they argue that, in fact, what we have in
Gen. 2 is not the institution of the Sabbath at all, but a prolepsis, an anticipation of
what only happened much later. They argue that actually the Sabbath did not originate
until Exodus 16 when the instructions to the Jews for gathering manna in the wilderness
included a specific rule not to gather manna on the seventh day. That was the first anyone
knew about the Sabbath Day or keeping one day holy in seven. But Moses, who wrote Genesis
after the Sabbath had been given to Israel, stuck in a reference to it here in Gen. 2 as
an anticipation of what we actually won't read about until Exodus 16.
Now, it should be said that this interpretation is theoretically possible and that good
men have held it through the years. But, let me tell you why I so strongly believe that
you should not accept it and, instead, should face squarely the implications of the fact
that the Sabbath was made for man and given to man for his life already before the fall.
1. First, it is not the natural reading of the verse. No one would ever take these
verses
that way unless they were driven to by other considerations. Nothing else in Genesis 1
or 2 is taken to be a prolepsis. The simple meaning of the words is that the nature of the
holy day comes not from its being given to the Jews as a law, but because it replicates
the pattern of God's own working and resting. It was holy from the beginning because it is
the day -- for anyone and for everyone -- on which God rested from his work of creating
everyone and everything.
2. Second, the pattern of seven day weeks, which is not based on any lunar or
astronomical feature appears subsequently in Genesis, although according to the prolepsis
interpretation seven-day weeks should not appear until the Sabbath is revealed in Exodus
16. Remember, for example, that Noah twice waited a week, seven days, to send out the dove
from the ark. There are other examples.
3. Third, Exodus 16 does not appear to expect us to understand this to be the origin of
the Sabbath day. The subject is the gathering of manna. The word Sabbath is used as if it
were already understood. Nothing is said in Exodus 16 about where this day came from or
for what purpose it might be observed. Yet, according to the prolepsis interpretation, no
one knew anything about such a day until these instructions were given not to gather manna
on the seventh day of the week.
4. Fourth, as everyone knows, the keeping of the Sabbath holy is also a part of the ten
commandments; it is the fourth commandment. Now, nothing else in the ten commandments is
temporary; nothing else was done away with at Pentecost. Nothing else was strictly Jewish.
This is the moral law that reflects God's own holiness and which God has made the basis of
his judgment of mankind. I tell you this plainly, brothers and sisters, the very idea that
one of the ten commandments should fall out of the law, with no word to that effect in the
NT, and no explanation, is, in the context of the Bible, simply preposterous. "I have
not come to abolish..., "not one jot.... "Do we abolish the law by this
faith..."
5. Fifth, the reason why folk have thought the Sabbath has been done away with is no
reason at all. As you may remember, three times in the NT -- in Gal. 4; Col. 2; and Rom.
15 Paul says that the Sabbath does not need to be kept by Gentiles. It is from these
statements that people have concluded that the fourth commandment has been done away with
in the new epoch. But, in context, it is perfectly plain that Paul means no such thing.
The problem he faced in all of those passages was the great problem of NT Christianity,
that of the transition from a Jewish church to a mixed church of Jews and Gentiles. The
greatest, the most important elements of Jewish piety in the first century were
circumcision and the keeping of the Sabbath day. Close behind were laws regarding clean
and unclean food. It is no surprise at all, then, that these would be the issues around
which the controversies swirled in first century Christianity.
Further, the Jewish Christians happily accepted baptism and the change of day for the
new Lord's day, to Sunday, marking the resurrection of the Lord. They had no difficulty
with these new developments at all. Their problem was that they wanted the old
elements preserved as well. They accepted the new elements, but only as additions.
They were happy to have Gentiles in the church and to have them baptized, but they
wanted them to have to be circumcised also! But Paul argued that the demand that they be
circumcised fundamentally altered the meaning of the rite and masked legalistic views of
circumcision that were fatal to the gospel. Hence, he ordered that Gentiles did not need
to be circumcised to be Christians in good standing. Baptism, which had come in
circumcisions's place, was enough for them.
In the same way, Jewish Christians were happy to have the new Lord's Day celebrated as
Paul was causing it to be celebrated and observed in his Gentile churches. But they wanted
Gentile Christians to have to keep the old Jewish Sabbath, the seventh day of the week,
holy as well. No, said Paul, Gentile Christians do not have to keep the Jewish Sabbath as
well as the Lord's Day. Which was the NT form of the Sabbath. In the context of those
letters and of the first century church, that is all that his statements mean and all that
they can mean.
The simple fact is that if you took Paul to be abolishing the Sabbath, his statements
prove to much, for they would have to mean that there is no day that any Christians need
to observe in any way. And the NT says plainly that there is: the Lord's Day as John calls
it (another OT name for the Sabbath, by the way); the first day of the week as Paul
himself practiced it in his churches, as for example in Acts 20:7. Just as baptism
replaced circumcision so Sunday replaced Saturday--but it is the Lord's Day.
6. Sixth, and finally, if the Sabbath were merely a Jewish institution, it is hard to
understand why it serves as an inclusio for human history as a whole: being introduced in
Gen. 2 and being used to describe the life of heaven as the rest of God in Hebrews 4.
Sabbath and the day of rest seem to be in the Bible a basic category of thought about
human life. It is a way of describing the way of human life in the world, the state and
condition of salvation, and the life of heaven.
But, then, if we should not seek to evade the clear implication of Gen. 2:2-3, that the
Sabbath day is to be a part of our life today, a fundamental obligation of human existence
in the world, why has there been such resistance to this in the church herself?
1. Well, to begin with, there has been resistance to all the commandments of God.
Marriage was corrupted from the beginning by bigamy and divorce as well as by cruelty and
the contest of wills. The creation ordinance of work was violated both by laziness and by
human pride. Idolatry, murder, lying, theft, in all their forms of thought, word, and
deed, have been characteristic of both human life in general and life in the church from
the beginning.
2. But, also, in the case of the Sabbath, as with many other of God's provisions and
commandments, the true meaning and significance of the law was buried under layers of
misunderstanding. This was the problem in the Pharisee's day and Jesus had to rescue the
Sabbath from those who purported to be its friends but who had turned the Lord's gift into
a burden and a drudgery. And in the Christian era, the Sabbath has continued to suffer
great harm at the hands of its best friends -- even, dare I say it, the Puritans. They
loved the Sabbath and the strove to keep it and were grateful for it. But, they developed
a view of what it means to keep the Sabbath holy that went beyond anything the Bible ever
taught.
Whether it is Laura Ingalls Wilder sitting stiff and silent in a straight-backed chair
through a long and boring Sunday afternoon on the prairie, or a New England ship-captain
getting into trouble for kissing his wife on the doorstep when he returned home on a
Sunday from a long sea-voyage, hosts of people have supposed through the years that by
calling the day "holy," the Lord set his people a terrible burden to bear.
Over and again God's people have misread the Bible or have done what we all are
inclined to do: replace God's commandments with commandments of our own that soon hide the
real law from our view. "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the
Sabbath," Jesus said to people who had buried the pure law and the Lord's holy day
with a mass of man-made regulations and interpretations.
Here is what the Bible says and all that it says about the Lord's holy day. It is a day
of rest from work. That is the main thing: we work six days and rest the seventh. It is a
day of sacred assembly (Lev. 23): a day for the church's worship of God. And it is a day
to be offered to God, because it is his holy day, a day to be devoted to holy purposes.
Look at the example of our Savior, the only man who ever kept the Lord's Day in perfect
holiness. He ate with friends, even at rather magnificent meals, he healed the sick, he
walked with his disciples, he went to church to worship God. Nothing there at all about
straight-backed chairs or never kissing your wife!
The Sabbath was for the Lord Christ as it has been for countless saints through the
ages, a holiday every week, the best day of the week, a day that was kept free for the
best things of life, at least what godly folk would think are the best things of
life. There are a thousand good and happy and holy things that can be done on the Sabbath
day, a thousand ways to make it both the Lord's holy day and a day of rest and refreshment
and renewal for yourselves.
To keep this day, to sanctify it, to remember to keep it holy is so good, so right, so
necessary for us, so much a part of the true fulfillment of our lives that we would have
kept this day had there never been a fall, had the human race remained without sin and in
the closest and purest fellowship with God. That is how fundamental to human life -- as
God designed it -- the Sabbath is and so how fundamental to a Christian life, a holy life
in a sinful world such as ours.
The Sabbath, in the Bible, the keeping of it holy, the using of it rightly, the
fulfilling of its purposes and protecting of them from the encroachments of the world is
one of the greatest engines of faith and holiness God has provided us. As Thomas Shepard,
the founder of Harvard quaintly put it:
"It is easie to demonstrate by Scripture and argument as well as by experience
that religion is just as the Sabbath is, and decayes and growes as the Sabbath is
esteemed; the immediate honour and worship of God which is brought forth and swaddled in
the first three commandments, is nurst up and suckled in the bosome of the Sabbath."
Why ought we not to suppose that the spiritual doldrums, the childishness and
effeminacy, and the outright defections that now so plague American Christianity are not
in large part the consequence of the refusal of American Christians to make use of the day
God gave them as a free gift, a day for their drawing near to him, strengthening their
faith, increasing their love, and doing the works that not only bind them to other
Christians but extend the kingdom's reach.
It is not, of course, that these works are not to be done on other days, but everyone
knows how much we would profit from time given us for nothing else. It is the Sabbath that
produced an Eric Liddell and perhaps it is time for American Christians to admit that the
reason they have so few such heros is because we have so few Sabbath keepers among us! No
wonder the Devil has found so many other things for us to do on this day and made those
things so interesting and beguiling. He wants us to forsake the Sabbath!
God could have made us to work every day. After all, we can rest at night. But it was
God's goodness, and generosity, and his holy purpose for human life that led him to give
us a holiday every seven days. How like us sinners to turn his good gift into something
burdensome and irksome. No! brothers and sisters, and Christian parents, if the Sabbath is
not the best day of the week for us and for our children we have not learned its lesson or
yet rightly appreciated God's good gift. Why do human beings all over the world love and
crave holidays? It is because their generous maker wove the holiday into the very fabric
of human life. But if we do not use the holiday for the purpose for which he gave it to
us, this gift, like all of his other gifts -- marriage, family, fulfilling work -- will
lead us away from Him instead.
I want you to be a people that loves the Lord's Day and loves to keep it holy. I want
our young people to get used to and to take pleasure in turning down the world's
invitation to use this day for any other purposes, quickly and peremptorily to decline the
deceitful pleasures of sin in order to keep the Lord's Day holy to Him. To honor the Lord
as Eric Liddell did. And if we do and they do, I know you will be as well a holy people
and a very happy people and so will your children!
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