Remember the Sabbath
Father, I believe that the good you intend for us in the fourth commandment is greater than we could dare to dream. And that is because you are a good God. You, the one, true God — the holy God who saves, our Father in Jesus Christ — your heart is to magnify your glory in the joy of your people, and this morning as we open your Word we trust you in that. We trust you in your goodness, and we ask that you would show us your goodness, in Jesus’s name. Amen.
So this morning in Exodus 20 we’re looking at the fourth commandment to “Remember the Sabbath” and I want to say right from the start that this commandment is not confusing — it’s as easy to read as the other nine commandments, however, when it comes to actual practice, this commandment is the most controversial. There is debate here not so much on the commandment itself, but on how we apply it, and when we apply it, and in what ways it’s different for us as Christians than it was for Israel.
And just to be clear, this is the only commandment of the ten where we do this. All the others have more straightforward application, but the Sabbath commandment — which is the longest commandment, and which has rationale included with it — this is the one we’re less sure about, and therefore it’s the commandment we’re most likely to ignore. I think we tend to assume: “God doesn’t really expect us to remember the Sabbath like he expects us not to murder” … does he?
We treat the Sabbath commandment differently than the other nine, and I think it’s less because “each one is fully convinced in his own mind” by conviction (see Romans 14:5), and I think it’s more because we just really understand it. I don’t think we’ve appreciated this commandment.
Now, the fourth commandment is a different commandment from the others because, two reasons:
Its application has changed in redemptive history.
In the Gospels we see how the Pharisees abused the Sabbath — and we’re going to look at both of these — but my macro goal for this sermon is simply to show you that the fourth commandment counts. It matters! And we should not ignore it.
So here’s the plan. I would like for us to look at two things:
What is the Sabbath?
How do we remember it?
What Is the Sabbath?
Now, I have a little statement definition, but I don’t want to start there; I want us to get there more inductively, so look at verse 8 again. I want you to hear the command. Verse 8: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”
Notice that Sabbath itself is not the command; but the command is to remember the Sabbath. Which means that Sabbath is already a thing. And we know this. We’ve seen this. The Sabbath has been a thing a long time before we get to Exodus 20. It actually goes back to Genesis 2 in the act of creation. Here’s Genesis 2, verses 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. (Genesis 2:1-3)
So the seventh day is blessed by God and set apart as holy because the seventh day is when God rested from his creation work. And that word for “rest” in Genesis 2:2 is the Hebrew word shabbat which gets transliterated in English as Sabbath. So the meaning of Sabbath is literally to rest or stop, and before it has anything to do with a commandment, we should know that it first has to do with God himself.
Rooted in the Glory of God
God is a God who rests. He is able to rest. He is a God who completes his work — which means he’s not endlessly laboring and wringing his hands under the pressure to get more done. Instead, in creation he worked and he stopped — and God shows us this in Genesis 2 because he wants us to know this about him. Genesis 2 is pointing to a truth about God that’s meant to shed light on everything else we see him do. God is able to work and stop because he knows he is sufficient in his glory to accomplish what he intends. God’s rest is a reflection of God’s majesty, and here’s why:
God’s design for the universe is what you call teleological. It has a telos, or an end-point. It means that the universe is not a never-ending hamster wheel and just spins on and on, but it starts with a purpose, and it has a finish line.
God has a purpose for everything in the universe and one day it will all be fulfilled. God’s purpose will be accomplished and God knows that.
But see, for us, when we have work or projects, we’re not exactly sure how they’re going to pan out, and so our work has a sense of unpredictability and therefore insecurity, but it is not that way with God. God knows exactly what he intends, and he knows he has the resources of power and wisdom and grace to accomplish what he intends. That’s his glory. And because of his glory, one day all of this will come to a stop. God’s work and purpose for the universe will be complete, it will reach its end-point, and there will be final rest. And Genesis 2 ‘foreshadows’ that.
Designed into Creation
It’s interesting in Genesis 2 that the seventh day of rest is the only day that doesn’t end. All the other days are “there was morning and evening, the so-and-so day.” But not the seventh. The seventh day of rest just is (see Hebrews 4:9–10).
This rest is so central to God and his reality that he has built it into the DNA of creation. God has designed creation with this work/rest rhythm — this 6-and-1 rhythm — that flows from the fact of his majesty. This rhythm is not arbitrary, but it’s rooted in the glory of God, in his power and wisdom and grace. God is able to rest.
So when it comes to a little statement definition of Sabbath, here’s the first part: Sabbath is a rhythm rooted in the glory of God and designed into creation.
And I think verse 11 is getting at this. The fourth commandment is one of only two commandments that includes rationale. The first rationale is with the second commandment in verse 5 — Yahweh forbids idolatry because he is a jealous God. The only other place rationale is provided is here in the fourth commandment, in verse 11. Why should Israel remember the Sabbath?
Because in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:11).
Again, the fourth commandment doesn’t make Sabbath a thing — it’s already been a thing since Genesis 2. The fourth commandment is specifically to remember that. Remember that God designed Sabbath in the beginning mainly to say something about himself.
And one more example of Sabbath preexisting the Ten Commandments is in Exodus 16 when God sent manna from heaven to feed the people of Israel. God gave the people instructions on how to gather the manna, and if you remember, he gave them a 6-and-1 rhythm. Moses said they could gather all the manna they wanted six days, but not on the seventh day because the “seventh day is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to Yahweh” — that’s Exodus 16, verse 23. So Moses uses the word Sabbath here just like in Genesis 2, and this is before God gave any laws. Even before the law, before Mount Sinai, God still expected Israel to appreciate Sabbath because it’s built into creation.
Not in Egypt Anymore
And God knew Israel would have a hard time with this because of their sinfulness. So he has to mandate Sabbath just like he has to mandate only worshiping him. God has to spell out his will for his people, and obedience to his will is not going to look like what everybody else is doing.
That’s absolutely in view with the Ten Commandments, starting with the first commandment to have no other gods. Yahweh demands our total allegiance. He has no rivals. He wants all of us for only him. Don’t bow to anything else. Only worship Yahweh in the way of Yahweh. Don’t take his name in vain — everything you do, with your mind and your mouth and your hands, do it all to magnify his worth. These are the first three commandments, and if we’re living in obedience to the first three commandments, it’s not going to look like we’re still in Egypt. It will look nothing like Egypt. We’re the opposite of Egypt.
Total allegiance to Yahweh means a radical break from the allegiances of the surrounding world, and that is especially true in the fourth commandment. Sabbath is a rhythm designed into creation, but remembering the Sabbath is an act of resistance to the false gods of this world.
So think rhythm and resistance. Let me explain.
In the System of Pharaoh
Remember back in verse 2 that Yahweh grounds the whole Ten Commandments in his salvation. Verse 2: “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” That’s the first thing he says. And we should consider what the land of Egypt was like? What was the environment from which God saved Israel?
It was an environment of endless labor. It was bricks, bricks, and more bricks. Work, work, and more work. Ancient Egypt is the historical paragon of industry and commerce. To this day, we can still see the pyramids and storehouses ancient Egypt built to hold their stuff. The Egyptians were religious workaholics. And I mean that literally. Religiously, Egyptians believed you could take your wealth with you. So there were actual hearses that pulled U-Hauls.
And get this: because you could take stuff with you, there was no cap to the accumulation. More was always better. Their entire economy was engineered so that people could get more and more because you had to build your heaven on earth.
So the harder you worked — or the harder you made your slaves work — the more you had, and the more you had, it meant better promotion for the deity you served. See, there was divine motivation for Egypt’s workaholism. Egypt believed their wealth and glory reflected well on the false gods they worshiped. One way to say it is that: the false gods of Egypt really cared about how their children dressed.
Pharaoh had to make his false gods look good. The false gods of Egypt (driven by demons) wanted Pharaoh to prosper because his prosperity is what determined their worth.
An Act of Resistance
One Old Testament scholar explains that Egypt’s religion was intertwined with the enhancement of Pharaoh’s system. The gods of Egypt needed Egypt to be richer, and therefore the gods of Egypt needed Egypt to work constantly, and the people of Israel lived in that environment for four hundred years. It was work, work, and more work because the gods of Egypt needed the work, but then Yahweh rescues Israel and says Stop.
Remember how I designed the universe. Remember the Sabbath. There’s a 6-and-1 rhythm here. There’s a day of rest. It’s the Sabbath. And when God tells Israel to remember the Sabbath, they know that he’s telling them to stop living like they lived in their slavery. He’s saying to them: I’m not like the gods of Egypt because I don’t need your work.
And God brings Israel all the way back to his work of creation to make that point. God takes Israel back to the truth of creation to blow up the bad habits they learned from Egypt.
Stopping, resting, Sabbath — it is a distinctive quality of the person whose total allegiance is to Yahweh. And that means it’s an act of resistance to the false gods of this world. Okay, so now I want to add a second part to the definition statement. What is the Sabbath?
Sabbath is a rhythm rooted in the glory of God and designed into creation, that is an act of resistance to the false gods of this world. And there’s more. Rhythm and resistance get at the nature of Sabbath, but we need to know more about its content.
For Worship, Rest, and Refreshment
So let’s look again at verse 9. This is explaining more how we remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Verse 9: Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh 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.
We see two things here: Sabbath is for worship and actual rest (which means stopped work), and those two go together. In verse 10, notice the language is “the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God.” This means remembering the Sabbath is directed Godward. That’s worship.
And also on this holy day you shall not do any work — and not just you, but you can’t have people working for you. This is the rest part. You stop work, and this has an aspect of justice to it. I think justice is in view when Moses repeats the fourth commandment in Deuteronomy 5.
This is actually a theme on the Sabbath that see in the Prophets, and we don’t have time to go there now, but we see this in places like Ezekiel 22 and Isaiah 56 and Amos 8. Remembering the Sabbath means mercy for the vulnerable, and this is already evident in the book of Exodus. Moses repeats the Sabbath command in Exodus 23, verse 12 and there he says it’s so that everyone, including the least, may be refreshed. It’s a purpose statement. Refreshment is what’s supposed to happen on Sabbath.
So Sabbath is this rhythm and resistance for worship and rest that results in refreshment. So now I want to put it all together. This is how I’m trying to answer What is the Sabbath?
Sabbath is a rhythm rooted in the glory of God and designed in creation that’s an act of resistance to the false gods of this world, for the purpose of stopping work and worshiping God, and thereby being refreshed. That’s the definition. Now how does that actually look?
It looks like Jesus walking into a synagogue in Mark 3 and saying to a man with a withered hand, Stretch out your hand, and the man with the withered hand stretches out his withered hand and his withered hand is restored.
And the Pharisees thought Jesus was violating the Sabbath by doing this. It’s one of those few places in the Gospels where we see Jesus get angry. Mark 3:5 says that Jesus “looked around at [the Pharisees] with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart.” Jesus was angry and grieved by how badly they got the Sabbath wrong, and he had to teach them that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Don’t manipulate the Sabbath. Don’t abuse the Sabbath that goes all the way back to Genesis 2.
And it’s important to see that Jesus does not abolish the Sabbath; Jesus explains the Sabbath because he is Lord of the Sabbath. And his explanation is not mosaicy, it’s creationy.
The Sabbath is not a law to burden us; it’s a design to restore us. God intends more good for us in the Sabbath than we could dare to dream.
And it’s the one commandment we are most likely to ignore. Why?
So we’ve talked about what the Sabbath is, now how do we remember it? How do we obey the fourth commandment?
How Do We Remember the Sabbath?
First, we need to recognize the change in redemptive history. The 6-and-1 rhythm has never changed, but the specific day of rest has changed from the seventh day to the first day, and that is because Sunday, the first day, is the day when Jesus was raised from the dead. And we can see this practice happening the New Testament: Jesus was raised from the dead on a Sunday (see Mark 16:1–2), he appears to his disciples gathered together on Sunday (see John 20:26), he poured out the Spirit at Pentecost which was a Sunday (see Acts 2:30–31), in the book of Acts the church met to break bread on Sundays (see Acts 20:7), and in Paul’s letters he talks about the church gathering together on Sundays (see 1 Cor 16:1–2).
Sunday, because it was the day when Jesus was resurrected, it became the day of worship for Christians. And in Revelation 1:10, John calls it “the Lord’s Day.”
Sunday, the Lord’s Day, became the one day in seven when Christians would gather together to worship God, which meant stopping work and being refreshed. It’s the same 6-and-1 rhythm in Genesis, but now Sunday is the special day. And I think it’s good to talk about Sunday as the Lord’s Day or as the “Christian Sabbath” — which is not like the Mosaic Sabbath, and it looks nothing like how the Pharisees got it wrong.
The resurrection of Jesus gives Sunday a new creation meaning. A restoration meaning, which is what Sabbath is about. The resurrection of Jesus was the dawning of the new creation that is here “already, but not yet.” See, we who trust in Jesus have entered God’s rest, but that rest is not yet final. And Sundays are when we remember this.
And this had near-unanimous agreement in the early church. Most Christians, for most of church history, have regarded Sunday as special. Sunday is the Lord’s Day, and it is special for our good.
Tagging Along with Egypt
And it’s really only been in the last 30–40 years that Sunday has become less special for Christians in our country — and I can guarantee you that’s been driven not by theology, but by the economy.
A whole mass of Christians didn’t suddenly change their theological conviction about Sunday; it’s that the world around us has become more like Egypt and we’ve just tagged along.
And it makes sense when you consider Secularism and Consumerism. A couple weeks ago we talked about these false gods of our culture, and this is how it fits together: Secularism (God-absence) requires Consumerism (God-replacements), and this requires a workforce that cannot stop. It requires working more to make more to buy more — and just like that we turns our backs on the 6-and-1 rhythm … and how’s that going for us?
As a society, and even within the church, we are a people of endless work and stress and anxiety. We always have to have something to do — busyness is the new status symbol. Somehow, by accident, I think we’ve slipped into serving other gods. If the fourth commandment feels impossible to us, it’s probably because we don’t keep one to three.
Sabbath is rhythm and resistance for worship and rest that results in refreshment — this is so important for the Christian life. It is as relevant in our day as it has ever been.
What About Your Rhythms?
Think about the rhythms of your life for a minute — your schedule and calendar, your patterns. Do you have a rhythm of rest? Are you making the most of Sunday?
And when I ask that question, don’t think restriction or confinement. Think refreshment. This is for your good. And the exact application and details are going to be different for us. Some careers require you to work on Sunday — I get it. We’re not under Mosaic stipulation and sanctions. Obeying the fourth commandment most basically means that you have a rest rhythm for worshiping God that refreshes your soul, and because it involves worship, ideally it’s going to include Sundays, but there’s a not a strictness here. We don’t rigidly clock-in and clock-out, but it’s a rhythm. It’s a 6-and-1 creationy rhythm — and maybe it means all day Sunday; maybe it starts Saturday morning through Sunday morning; or maybe right after the kids’ nap-time on Saturday through the nap-time on Sunday.
Whatever the details, the point is that you stop, you rest, you worship God, and you are refreshed. Jesus wants your soul to be refreshed.
And this is something I want so badly to grow in. I think it’s something we all could grow in. I think we all should feel refreshed more often than we do.
Rest for Your Souls
Remember what Jesus says in Matthew 11:28, Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 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.
Jesus says that if we come to him he will give us rest for our souls. And there’s a spiritual aspect to this rest. When we stop our works for self-righteousness and we trust God, we enter his rest — Hebrews 4 talks that way. There’s a spiritual aspect to rest (see Hebrews 4:9–10; Romans 4:5). But it’s also more than that. Jesus talks about rest as an actual experience. It’s a felt-reality that one day we’re going to know fully, but we get a foretaste now. Jesus says rest for your souls now. He says if you come to him, he will give you rest.
Do you believe Jesus when he says that? Do you believe Jesus really means that he can give your soul rest? And if so, does your soul feel restful?
I going to say something here that might sound challenging, but it’s something I want us to consider. If we have believed in Jesus, if by faith we have stopped our works and entered God’s rest, if we have come to Jesus, but our hearts are never restful, we have to conclude that either Jesus doesn’t really mean what he says in Matthew 11 OR maybe we’re not following him like he calls us to.
Let’s not complexity this. Total allegiance to Jesus means you will have rest.
And I want you to hear that as an invitation. You can trust him enough to stop. You can have a rhythm of rest in your life now. You have to rest. Rhythm and resistance for worship and rest that means a refreshed soul. God made the Sabbath for us, and he intends more good for us in it than we would dare to dream.
Lord’s Table on Lord’s Day
And this morning as we come to the Table, it is an invitation to remember that. Remember the goodness of God in the death of Jesus for us. That’s the meaning of the Lord’s Table on the Lord’s Day. We remember God’s rest and we hope in the final rest yet to come. And if you would remember and hope this morning, if you trust in Jesus, we invite you to eat and drink with us.
