The Rest

Transcript

I’m going to pray one more time. I know Sam just prayed, but I want to pray as I open up God’s word this morning. Let’s pray. Father in heaven, thank you for the privilege that it is, God, to preach and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I pray that you would help us to believe it. Father, cut our hearts where they need to feel conviction, but also, God, comfort our hearts where they need your hand of peace to make us feel rest in Jesus Christ and him alone. I hope for that. I pray for it. In Jesus’ name, amen. I’m going to continue today in our series in Genesis, and we come to day seven in Genesis chapter 2, verses 1 through 3, where we see and behold that God, the creator God of the universe, rests. And before we read the text, I have

to make a confession to you. I am ironically tired of being told to rest by Christians. I am. I am bombarded with this message over and over again that we need to rest, that we’re bad at rest, that we need to slow down, that we need to not hurry so often. And I am just, ever since becoming a Christian, I have been inundated with this message that I am bad at resting. And it’s an easy sell, because the majority of us, yes, we’re overworked. We’re all overstimulated. And most of us are overwhelmed. So it’s a good message. Just oftentimes, it is misguided using specifically the text that we’re going to look at today. So I have only two goals this morning. The first is I’m going to take us basically through the whole Bible. My goal is to fill in the definition of what it means that God rested and then implemented

a call to rest to his people. I want to fill that in for us. I think we have to go through the whole Bible, because it’s not one verse and you’re done. It’s a thread. It’s a trajectory. You see where it all goes. And so we’re going to follow that throughout the Bible for most of our time this morning. And then at the end, the last thing I want to do is offer just four suggestions on how we can honor the teaching that we interact with throughout the sermon. And so I hope that I’m able to give some practical things, some practical outworking. So if you’re like, you really want practical stuff, you really want ways that you can rest, I hope that my suggestions at the end at least begin that. Because most of this is Bible. You guys ready? Whole Bible. No kidding.

God’s Rest in Genesis

We’re going beginning to end today. All right? So look with me if you would. We’ll start at the very beginning of this theme in Genesis chapter 2, verses 1 through 3. Look there with me. Hear God’s word.

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

(ESV)

This is God’s word. At first, just generally, I want to observe some stuff about this passage. Generally, the very first thing to notice is it is very different from all the other days. This is different, right? And so let’s observe a few things

that are different about this day than the six days that led up to it. The first is God did not say anything. We don’t get a lot of information in these three verses. We essentially get that God rested. Over and over again, that’s what we’re told is he rested, he didn’t work, he rested, he didn’t work, he rested. But he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t speak anything into existence. His not working is that he did not speak. The second thing is God did not create or make anything on the seventh day. A word, a refrain that made its way through the first six days stops on day seven. He does not create or make anything. And then number three is we’re not told that there was evening or morning on the seventh day. Do you guys notice that? Every single other day, we get it that happened.

It came to a close and a new day begins. What that does is we don’t get a conclusion in the seventh day. All we get is anticipation. We don’t get conclusion. It’s not over, it’s not done. God rested and that’s what we’re told. So instead of these things, we get something different. The first is we are told. God finished creating everything, right? Look at the very beginning of verse one. Thus, the heavens and the earth were finished. Remember the very beginning? God created the heavens and the earth. Here in day seven, we’re told he’s done. It’s finished. The heavens and the earth, meaning everything, is created. The second thing and the most prominent thing is we are told God rested. And we have to understand what that means because that is going to guide us through the rest of this theme, through the rest of the Bible, okay?

And it can’t mean that God was tired, so he napped. I don’t like, and I hope that you join me in this, I don’t like over-complicating simple things, but I also don’t like over-simplifying complicated things. And to simply say God napped or God was tired and so he took a day off is over-simplifying the God of the universe when it says he rested. What does that mean? And what we’ve been seeing throughout Genesis, or throughout Genesis one, throughout the first six days, is God is taking chaos and he is ordering it. He is taking what is out of control and he is making it beautiful. And here we’re then told he is resting. He is done working and he is resting. And what we see here is that God in his sovereignty, in his majesty, he has been setting up his kingdom. And the picture that you can get here of his resting

is then him sitting down, ready to rule and reign over the cosmos that is ordered under his sovereignty. G.K. Beal said it best. He said, resting is best understood as the enjoyment of a position of sovereign rule in a cosmic temple after the quelling of chaotic forces. God has blessed the seventh day and set it apart so that his people would commemorate his assumption of kingship. He’s king now. And beginning rule over the cosmic temple which he had created. That’s the resting that he’s talking about. He is ruling and reigning king over the cosmos. That is what is taking place. One Hebrew scholar defined the word as settling in. Rather than like napping, he is there settling in, ready to rule and reign as things are now in order. The chaos is ordered and now he is going to enjoy the normal ordinary life of an ordered creation.

And this is kind of the way the word is used throughout the Old Testament. So something like Deuteronomy chapter 12 verse 10. It says, when you go over the Jordan and live in the land that the Lord your God has given you to inherit and when he gives you rest from all your enemies around so that you live in safety. He is not saying when you beat all your enemies, God’s gonna give you a nap. You guys are gonna snooze for a little bit. He is saying you’re done fighting. All of that is over with now. You can begin normal life, ordinary life in the land because God has given you rest from all your enemies. That’s the same thing. Settle in. Settle into ordinary life here. And then the third observation that we have instead here is that God blessed and sanctified the seventh day.

Now, there’s a clue here that sends us into the rest of the Bible. When God blesses something, it is for his people, not typically himself. So this comes at the end of just being told that God created his image bearers and the only things that he blesses in the creation scene are his people and the seventh day. And here it says he set it apart for that we would remember it, that we would keep it holy. And so the clue that we get here is this. Whatever we’re doing with this resting of God, it’s for us. We’re supposed to learn something from it. But let’s be honest, and I want us to be honest here. These observations don’t actually teach us very much, do they? Like, what do we do with this? Why are we told this? It is clear that this is like an exclamation point

at the end of the creation scene. Here, God rested, but if only left with these words, I think we would be extremely confused. Like, okay, God rested, what am I supposed to do with that? Why am I supposed to know that? And I think Augustine probably said it best. He said, in this creation scene, there is sufficient clearness to enlighten the elect and sufficient obscurity to humble them. Amen and amen. We read that and think, okay, I get it. God created, then he rested, but like, so what? And if we’re honest, we’re left wondering how we are to actually put this into action. What do we do? We need help interpreting it. And I think the Lord, in his kindness, helps us. The author of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, has not left us without an interpretation.

The Sabbath Law

In fact, the Lord fills in and then even develops this idea of resting, and we’re gonna spend the rest of our time together just walking through what the Bible says, asking God to fill this in for us, to help us figure out what we’re supposed to do with this resting. And the key interpretive passage for this resting has to be when God gives his law to Moses at Sinai in Exodus 20. And we’re gonna go there in a second, but I wanna tell you something, make sure I’m clear on something. As we make our way through this, I’m going to be applying what we learn to all of us in this room from two angles, okay? So Genesis 2 comes right after Genesis 1, and where the creation of humanity is clear. And so I think whatever we’re told in Genesis 2 is designed for humans as well.

So if you’re here this morning and you’re not a Christian, you don’t understand yourself to be a follower of Jesus, all that I say about resting today is meant for you, and you are invited into it. You are invited to receive this creative design that God has offered to all of humanity. And so I’m gonna apply it to you, and I want you to know that there is an open invitation of everything that I say today to you. And then the other application is to us as God’s people, which I hope that you are going to see throughout that it is meant for his people to obey. All right, here we go. The key interpretive passage is in Exodus 20, God gives the fourth commandment there at Sinai, and it says this in verses eight through 11. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

Now that’s the noun verb, or the noun word for the verb of God rested. Here is Sabbath, the noun, okay? So same word, same root word. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall do no work. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. What do we learn about resting here? What are we supposed to understand? And the first thing that I want you to see is our resting is defined by God’s resting, okay? And we need to understand that. So it says, remember the Sabbath day, six days you shall labor and do all your work.

On the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord. On it you shall do no any work for, or because God did that. You do this because God did this. So our resting, whatever we’re supposed to do with resting, is defined by the resting that God did on the seventh day. But what does that immediately teach us, friends? It can’t have anything to do with being tired. Such a thought is blasphemous, right? Because that is to claim God got tired and that’s why he needed his seventh day off. It can’t be that. It can’t be that simplistic. If God’s, whatever God did on the seventh day is meant to paint a picture for us of what we are to do with our seventh day, it can’t be simply exhaustion. Now listen, we do, he says, you stop working because he stopped working. We do stop, we do cease from working.

But it can’t primarily be some sort of cheap self-care. It can’t be that. It can’t be just simply us getting rid of the hustle from our lives for a minute. It can’t just be a break because that would say that is what God needed and that’s not at all biblical. It is meant instead to be evidence of our faith that God is ruling and reigning over the universe. As God sat down on his throne to look over his cosmos that he created to rule and to reign over it, that was his rest. And that is meant to define our rest that we are stopping by faith, declaring God rules and reigns over the universe. And we actually see this in the very first mention of the word Sabbath in the Bible. It is not the law that is being referenced. It is instead a principle.

And this is important because the Sabbath principle actually began before the Sabbath law. Like that we should rest on the seventh day was a principle before God said, you shall do this, okay? So the first time we ever see this is in Exodus 16. You guys remember this story in Exodus 16? It’s like they’re just getting across the Red Sea. God did this big miraculous thing and their tummies start grumbling, right? And they’re just like, you know what was better than being hungry out here in freedom was when we were slaves, remember? And they start grumbling almost immediately. And so what does God do? I mean, I wish he would have let them be a little bit hungry a little bit longer, but he doesn’t. And I’m glad because he’s kind to us as well. But what he does is he sends meat and he sends that stuff that they’re like,

what is this stuff? And it’s manna, right? And he feeds them. But he says on the sixth day, collect enough for two days because on the seventh, you’re not getting any, right? And then they still break that law. They collect too much. And the next day it’s rotting and it stinks and stuff like that, right? And so what we learn is in Exodus 16, it says this. This is what the Lord has commanded. Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. And then at the end of the passage, it says, six days you shall gather your food, but on the seventh day, which is a Sabbath, there will be none. So what are we supposed to learn here? It says our resting demonstrates our surrender to God’s rule. That’s what it’s meant to be, that they would gather this food

and they would trust that they would have enough, that like they wouldn’t get any food on the seventh day and they had to collect enough. God was in charge and they were gonna be well fed even though they were not going to collect on that day. And so it’s faith, it’s trust, it’s confidence and that God is actually in control. So what we learn here is that our rest is primarily to overthrow our self-sufficiency. That’s what it’s for. They could have collected food, they could have made food, but they were to say, no, they were not supposed to do that because God is God and they were not. And so it’s to overthrow our self-sufficiency, not our exhaustion. And I need to keep saying that. Listen, we’re tired, right? We are tired. It’s okay to nod your head at that. Younger parents, you’re super tired, come on.

Like that you’re here today, thank you so much for being here, right? It’s hard, we’re tired. Should you take breaks when you’re tired? Absolutely you should. Like we shouldn’t be wise about the way that we spend our time. Burning out for the kingdom isn’t a good thing. That doesn’t glorify God at all. But our Sabbath is designed not simply for you to take a break, it’s designed to dethrone all other would-be gods in our lives. That’s what it’s for. Our Sabbath is to return to the true king of the universe and to say, you are in charge of my life. I am surrendering who I am. I could do more, I could accomplish more, I could get more, I could depend on myself more, but I’m not, I’m gonna stop because you’re king, you’re God, I’m not. So I want you to see that Sabbath

is not primarily an elimination of hurry or busyness, it is an elimination of idolatry and faithlessness. That’s what it’s for. Genesis scholar Meredith Klein said, observance of the Sabbath by man is thus a confession that Yahweh is Lord and Lord of all Lords. Sabbath keeping expresses man’s commitment to the service of the Lord. That’s what we’re doing. And so our resting is this sort of coming back to God and surrender that he is God and we are not. That’s what it’s for. And we learn that in our exhaustion, sure we do, but we do that weekly, regularly, because we need to constantly come back and surrender ourselves to God. But there’s one more thing I want us to see in the Sabbath law that I left out the first time. Going back to Exodus 20, it says, remember to keep the Sabbath day, but then it also says this,

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, all of it, on that day, none of you do work. None of you do work. What this says is our resting is meant to be experienced with God’s people. It is never meant, from its beginning to now, it was never meant to be an act of selfishness. Do you see, if let’s say somebody said, hey, I’m gonna take my Sabbath today, but what this says is if their son or their daughter or even the sojourner, the random guy that’s staying with them, if they worked that day, they would have been breaking the law. They would have been breaking the commandment. So they were responsible to not only participate in the Sabbath themselves, but also to assure that the community was also observing the Sabbath together.

Do you see that? Sabbath is not given as self-care. It’s given that the whole community would trust God together. They would commit themselves and surrender themselves to God. So whatever it is that our Sabbath looks like, if it is not including others in the worship, surrender, and restating our faith in God, it’s not actually a biblical Sabbath. And again, I’ll keep saying, it’s fine to take a break. Like nobody’s like trying to condemn naps here. I’m trying to fill in what the Bible says about the Sabbath. And it is from the beginning of the law of the Sabbath, it was meant to include the community. It’s not selfish. That is a rejection of what it actually teaches. But there’s another, it built, it kind of grows. God gives another layer to the meaning of Sabbath in Exodus 31. It says this in verse 12, the Lord said to Moses,

you are to speak to the people of Israel and say, above all, you shall keep my Sabbaths. Why? Because this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations. So the fourth thing we learn from the Bible is that our resting is actually a sign that we belong to God’s people. It is an outward demonstration, a lived out proof or evidence that we belong to God. And we’re into that, right? Like we have lots of those, right? Like baptism is this outward demonstration that we have died with Jesus and we’ve been raised with Jesus and it’s meant to be expressed as a lived out demonstrated sign. Communion, which we’ll all gather around the Lord’s table later in this service. That is a lived out sign that we belong to Jesus. It’s a sign of our covenant with him that his body and his spilled blood

is enough to welcome us into the family of God. But we live that out. We demonstrate it. Church membership is a way to put your hand up and say, I want to be counted among the Lord’s people and for the chance for the church to affirm that and say, this person belongs to the family of God. So we’re into that. And God gave the Sabbath as this outward demonstration that we belong to him. So when we refuse to cease, when we refuse to stop our working, to confess and surrender to the Lord and say, you are king, we are actually saying and demonstrating outwardly, I don’t belong to God. It’s meant to function as this outwardly demonstrated sign that we are God’s people. But there’s more. Before the Israelites go into the promised land, Moses repeats the law to them in Deuteronomy. And when it comes to the commandment

of the law of the Sabbath, he actually adjusts this and he gives another element to our resting. So in Deuteronomy chapter five, when he’s going through the 10 commandments, when he comes to the Sabbath law, he adds this at the end of that law. He says pretty much the same thing, but then he says, 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. So we have this whole other layer of something that we’re supposed to do when we commit ourselves to observing and honoring the Sabbath is our resting is a reminder of God’s grace. It’s meant to teach us that. It’s meant to teach us that we belong to God by grace.

Sabbath is designed to help us remember that we don’t work for or earn our salvation. Sabbath is the opportunity to sit still in some way and remember if I belong to Jesus, if I belong to God, if I am his son or I am his daughter, that’s because he picked me and he wants me. And I am saved not because I made myself worthy of it, not because I deserved it, not because I was working towards it, but because by his grace, he chose to make me a part of his family. And the Sabbath is meant and designed to remind us of this and praise God for it, because man, we need those reminders and here is yet another one. So where does all this go if you keep following this? Because so far, I think this is beautiful, right? The Lord gave us this law based on this principle.

Israel’s Failure

His resting is meant to lead to our resting, that we would remember him, that we would trust in him, that our community would trust in him, that we would remember his grace, so beautiful. But where does it all go? Well, how does Israel do with keeping this Sabbath law? It, among many other things, are rejected by the people of God over and over again. And it becomes actually a refrain in the prophets that one of the reasons that they are sent into exile is they refused to keep the Sabbath. Or they call it over and over again, you have profaned the Sabbath of God. Here’s one example in Ezekiel chapter 20, verses 10 through 13. The Lord says, I gave them my Sabbaths, but the house of Israel rebelled against me. And he says, my Sabbaths, they greatly profaned. And his purposes, all of its benefits,

they were just, they were resisted, they were rejected. And the Lord says, you rebelled against me and you profaned my Sabbaths. And so what we learn here, and I think this is a sobering warning to us, anybody trying to fill in this teaching on Sabbath, is our resting can be abandoned. Our resting can be abandoned. And all, whatever benefits God had for us in this practice of Sabbath, in this principle of Sabbath, in this call for us to rest as he rested, all the benefits are foregone. When we rebel against the Lord’s call to this rest, we just give up everything he wanted for us in it. And I think this needs to teach us that we can, we can abandon this resting. So what happens? They go into exile, right? 70 years of exile out there, and they don’t keep the Sabbath even in, even in exile.

They don’t, they’re not learning, but the Lord in his grace, in his kindness, he brings them back to the land. They end up back in their promised land and they get right to work, setting it all up, building it all up, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re profaning the Sabbath all over again. They’re, they just got back. Only this time, there’s a couple of people that just aren’t having it. One of them is named Nehemiah. Now, I don’t condone his tactics if you read through the book of Nehemiah, and I don’t know that we’re supposed to. I don’t know if we’re supposed to say like, hey, that’s the way you should handle it when people are rebelling against the Lord, but one of the things that he does, they won’t keep the Sabbath, fine, I’ll lock you guys in. He literally, in Nehemiah 13, he locks the gates on the Sabbath,

and he says, I’ll unlock those when you guys, after the Sabbath’s over, you guys go back to doing what you were doing. In fact, I love at the end, in verse 22, he’s saying to people outside the gates that are trying to sell them stuff, he says, listen, why do you lodge outside the walls? If you do so again, I will lay hands on you. Like, that’s a crazy threat, right? It’s like, you guys try and make us break the law? I’m gonna sock you. Like, I am gonna beat you up if you try to make the people break the law of the Sabbath. And then, this attitude goes on for hundreds of years. What ends up happening, traditions begin forming around the Sabbath. They create a convoluted, rules-based protection around the Sabbath. They’re like, dude, not only do we not wanna profane the Sabbath anymore,

we don’t even wanna even get close to it. So they just create rules around it, and around it, and around it. So out of fear that they would end up back in exile, they created a man-made system around God’s word. And this attitude is one that we find alive and well in the religious leaders at the open of the New Testament. What began with Nehemiah saying, I’m gonna lay hands on you, we find in the Pharisees in the New Testament. These teachers had stripped the Sabbath of its actual meaning. There was no joy, there was no community, there was no grace. They essentially whittled it down to don’t do stuff. That’s the best thing that we can make sure the way that you will not profane the Sabbath is that you would just not do anything on that day. And friends, this is a danger for us.

It really is. Because what they did was it became a burden instead of rest. It weighed the people down. They were terrified of breaking it, of breaking the Sabbath. Instead of lifting them up, they became anxious. They weren’t peaceful. It made their lives heavier, made their lives harder. It enforced struggle and exhaustion. And above all, man, they were just missing the point. They were missing the point. Going back to Genesis 2, the Lord sitting down to rule and reign over the cosmos was not simply to say, don’t do anything. And this is the attitude around the Sabbath in so many circles today. And I want you to be aware of it. The modern sort of pseudo-Christian Sabbath gurus are far more like these religious leaders, these Pharisees, than they would ever like to admit. I’ve interacted with a handful of them this week,

kind of some prominent teachers in our day on the topic of Sabbath. And it’s so interesting to listen to because they’ll say things like, we don’t want you to feel bad. But then the entire teaching is, but you’re doing it completely wrong, right? They’ll say like, oh man, you don’t light candles for the Sabbath? You don’t eat Jewish meals? You bought your shirt at Old Navy? Do better, I can’t believe you. That’s like what the teaching sounds like. And these teachers function as a warning to us. The Pharisees of the first century and these guys that are teaching on the Sabbath today and all they’re doing is kind of going back to Jewish traditions, they’re a warning to us. We need to humbly apply the Bible’s teaching on Sabbath because apparently we can get it horribly wrong. We can end up with the same attitude as Nehemiah

that we see then in the Pharisees in the first century. And especially with what comes next. So you follow the storyline, Nehemiah trying to protect him, the Pharisees creating all these laws around him. Well, in the middle of all of this ruthless protection of the rest, a bomb drops in Israel that changes the entire trajectory of the storyline of Sabbath forever. A wandering rabbi who is stirring up the current professors, the teachers, the law keepers, they’re all getting super mad at him. He drops this bomb in the middle of all of their teachings and rules and man-made laws. In Matthew 11, 28 through 30, Jesus says, come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. 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.

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Jesus, Lord of Sabbath

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Can you imagine after years of profaning the Sabbath and then for centuries of them guarding the Sabbath, Jesus comes and says, come to me. Notice what Jesus does not say. He doesn’t say, go and obey Exodus 20 and it will give you rest. He doesn’t even say, go back to Genesis 2. Look, there, God rested. He says, come to me and I will give you rest for your souls.

This is one of the most prominent teachings that Jesus reorients for his people around himself, this teaching of the Sabbath. It was his activity on the Sabbath, healing people, taking care of people that led to so much controversy and conflict with the leaders of his day. It was his activity on the Sabbath that ultimately led the people, the teachers, to want to kill him. In fact, one story, right after he says, come to me and I’ll give you rest for my souls, him and his disciples in Matthew 12 are walking through a field and they’re hungry and so they eat some of the grain off the produce right there and the teachers, Pharisees, see them and they say, hey, look it, man, they’re breaking the law. They’re profaning the Sabbath. And Jesus does not say to these teachers, they’re not breaking the Sabbath. He does not argue with them.

He says, you don’t know your Bibles. He says, look it, I’ve got a couple of exceptions for you, right? Think about the guys who, the priests in the temple, they’re doing sacrifices on the Sabbath. David, remember what he did on the Sabbath? And he just tells them, you guys don’t know the whole story. And then he does not say to these teachers, you guys are wrong about the Sabbath. He says, it doesn’t even matter what you think because, and then the bomb, Matthew 12, the Son of Man, Jesus, is the Lord of the Sabbath. His defense is not, you’re wrong about the Sabbath.

His defense is, you’re wrong about me. It doesn’t matter what you teach on the Sabbath. I am the Lord who sat down and rested on the day I created the universe. I am Lord over the Sabbath. I’ll do whatever I want on the Sabbath. And then it went on, he went into the synagogue and there was a man there with a shriveled hand and he asks them, guys listen, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Or they ask him, they ask him, is it lawful? And he said to them, which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath will not take hold of it and lift it out? Oh, of how much more value is a man than a sheep? So is it, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. And that’s his point, it’s like, do good.

Like you guys are ruining the Sabbath because yes, you’re still supposed to be a neighbor. Yes, you’re still supposed to love. And he told the man to stretch out his hand. The man stretched it out. It was restored and healthy like the other. And then in verse 14, the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him. It was then and there that they began to plot his death. And they did it, they did it. He went to the cross and from the cross, he yelled out, it is finished. His work was done. And it wasn’t just, it wasn’t just that he was done living when he cries out, he is finished. It was all of his work. The law was fulfilled in that cry of, it is finished. All sin, all debt for sins paid. The entire law fulfilled, including the law of the Sabbath.

And there, and then I, he paid for your sins. Individually, your sins. Do you know that? And I, if I could, if I could, and you’re here this morning and you’re not a Christian, here can I stop and say this invitation, this extended hand is to you, that your sin, when Jesus hung from that cross and declared it is finished, he is declaring your sins against God, your rebellion against God, your breaking of God’s law is paid for. Once and for all, and therefore his offer for you to come to him and find rest for your souls, it’s now, it’s here, it’s this very moment, come to Jesus, come to Jesus, even this morning, even in this room, right now, come to Jesus, trust in him and find rest for your souls. And at the resurrection of our Lord, he burst into the world a brand new transformed way

of living our lives for God. And we have to figure out what that means now. Part of this brand new transformed life of disciples of Jesus, we have to figure out what to do. We have to know what to think specifically about the Sabbath and that’s kind of hard to work out, right? Like what do we do with this now? And in Colossians two, verse 16 through 17, the apostle Paul makes very plain. Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. What this means is that the law of the Sabbath was always meant to function as a shadow that pointed to Jesus. It is fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus is the substance. So whatever we were meant to learn

from the Sabbath through that whole thread, through the whole Bible, finds its fulfillment, its substance in Jesus. And so what we learn here is our resting comes from belonging to Jesus. Christ is the full reality of resting. That word substance there is the word body. Jesus is the flesh and bones of the commandments. He is the focus. He is the center. He is the point of all of it. So there is no Sabbath apart from Christ because he’s the final fulfillment of the Sabbath that it was always pointing to. And I want us to see that. But we need to know here and now, we only get a taste, don’t we? Trusting in Jesus definitely fills us with peace, with contentment, and even some sense of what we might call rest now. But we’re still here in this place, right? We still get tired. We still get anxious.

We still get sad and frustrated and angry. So more than anything, when we come to Jesus, it actually fills us with something more like anticipation. I think the author of Hebrews catches this well when he says in chapter four, verse nine, so then there remains still a Sabbath rest out there in the future for the people of God. For whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us, therefore, strive to enter that rest, that final rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience, so that we wouldn’t fall like, that we wouldn’t profane the Sabbath like the Israelites did again and again and again, but that we would strive. So the last thing that we’ll learn is our resting is incomplete for now. It’s incomplete for now, because we have to strive.

Striving to Rest

And this word that is used here, it describes the intense concentration of energy necessary to reach a desired goal. It is striving. It demands everything we got. And there’s a sense of irony there, isn’t there? Strive to rest. Work hard at ceasing to work, right? It’s the kind of irony that Jesus used when he said, come and find rest for your souls. Take my yoke upon you, right? Like, put this big, heavy thing on your shoulders, and ironically, you’ll find rest for your souls. Strive. Okay, the million dollar question. What does this striving look like, right? What do we do with the Sabbath principle today in our lives and in your church? As a Christian, as someone who belongs to Jesus, what do we do? And there’s two extremes, two ends spectrum here. You got one side where Christians must obey the Sabbath law. They still, there’s still sects of Christians

that teach that, that they’re essentially, they’re Jewish Christians, right? And they say, we are supposed to take the 24 hours on Saturdays, that’s what we’re supposed to do. And to me, this must be rejected, and it’s shocking that it could even be a teaching, because Jesus wouldn’t want that, right? He was very clear on what was happening, right? He is the Lord of the Sabbath. But then the other side of the spectrum is probably much more popular among a group like us is that Christians have absolutely nothing to do with the Sabbath law, right? You just heard me say, Jesus fulfilled the Sabbath, right? And so we just essentially end up like, viewing it as nothing, and we never even think about it. But the problem with that is, that is never Jesus’s attitude towards anything in the law. That’s never what he does. He says, I am fulfilling that,

so don’t even worry about it anymore. You guys don’t even like, bother reading that at all, right? That’s not what he says at all. He says, you guys heard that it was real bad to murder? Well, I’m telling you, if you got anger in your heart, that you already broke God’s law, right? He doesn’t seem to like, mellow it out. Jesus didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it and transform it through him. And now he gave us his spirit, that we would come back to his word, and we would learn to apply it in light of his death and resurrection. So the principle of Sabbath, threads its way through the entire Bible, from Genesis to on. So to simply disregard it, I would say, is probably an irresponsible reading of the Bible. Or like Pastor Ray Ortlund said, raising a hermeneutical, or just like,

studying objection to the Sabbath principle, doesn’t in itself actually help any of us. Like the Sabbath is given to us, to help us, to reestablish our worship of Jesus, and that we belong to Jesus. So to simply say like, oh, he fulfilled that, don’t even worry about that, is to disregard a giant chunk of the Bible, and I don’t think that helps any of us. So is there a way to apply the principle without being weird about it? Is there a way to apply the principle without drifting away from the good news of Jesus Christ? Can we still apply it? Here’s four suggestions for honoring the Sabbath principle, and this is where we’ll end today, okay? And I’m gonna call them four gentle suggestions. Nobody needs to go out of this and be like, I can’t believe Cody said that. Okay, well, just, they’re suggestions, all right?

Four Gentle Suggestions

The first one is the one that I will say the strongest. Honor the Sabbath like a Christian, okay? Do this hard work of figuring out what resting means according to the Bible. So much of today’s literature on Sabbath is offering suggestions from things like rabbis and Jewish traditions, which is like fine, I guess, but I don’t really care that much, right? Like they do not know the one who said come to me and you will find rest for your souls. I am far more interested in applying that to my life, to what Jesus said. And so any attempt at honoring the Sabbath that makes you question core teachings of Christianity should be rejected. We don’t want that. So we have things that we know as Christians that help us figure out how we are to honor the Sabbath. Things like we know selfishness is wrong.

If something’s trying to get me to just focus on myself completely, I’m probably in good company to say like, no, that’s probably not the way that I’m supposed to do that. So suggestions that self care are probably pretty easy to reject. We know laziness is wrong and we know love for God and neighbor is meant to be sacrificial, right? And sometimes love for God and neighbor makes us imbalanced, right? We sometimes are pretty tired because we work pretty hard and that sometimes will happen. Talk to a missionary, right? And ask them, okay, what does your Sabbath look like, right? Say like, sometimes it looks like this, other times it looks like this. Or more locally, ask a mom, a young mom, and say like, what is your Sabbath, what does your resting look like? And they’re like, dude, what? I don’t even know what you’re talking about, right?

Like that is so, we don’t want to be like that. Or ask a church planter or anybody that like where there’s not going to be regimented balance sometimes, right? And just let me end by saying this, being perfectly well rested isn’t necessarily a biblical principle, okay? Like being just perfectly rested all the time is not like anything that we’re gonna find in the Bible all the time. I read the life of Paul, right? And I just don’t think that resting, like taking naps and sleeping in on Saturday were really a high priority for the Apostle Paul, right? Anyway, okay, second one, is honor the Sabbath practically and intentionally. All I mean by that is don’t let it be vague or abstract. Don’t let it be accidental or incidental. Like if you’re gonna do something, like do it, declare it and then do it regularly, right?

Stop working in some way and surrender by faith to God’s sovereign rule. Let that be your participation in Sabbath. Number three, honor the Sabbath with community and worship. Honor the Sabbath with community and worship. I think that’s one of the best ways we can honor this principle. Listen, I don’t have any interest in arguing for or against whether worship on the Lord’s Day replaced the Sabbath. That’s a big debate that you don’t really need to care that much about. All that I wanna say is I do hope that I just prove to you biblically that worship with your church every Lord’s Day is an obvious way to honor the Sabbath principle, obviously. And Christians for centuries have gathered together to say this is my honoring of the Sabbath. And then finally, number four, honor the Sabbath with anticipation. This is, I think, one of the best ways

because we’re not there yet. The rest is not complete yet. We come into church and here we get to have all our strivings settle down. We get to focus on the Lord, but that all ends, right? We worship, we remember, we refocus, but it ends, and that’s good. Sabbath is meant to carry us back weakly into the presence of the Lord, but we go back out there, right? Our imperfect, incomplete resting builds our anticipation that will one day end. This isn’t rest fully yet, and the Sabbath teaches us that. Ray Orland said, the point of Sabbath is a dress rehearsal for a future eternity of glad rest in God. And I think that’s where the storyline of Sabbath ends in the Bible. We started in Genesis, why not end in Revelation with an ultimate and complete final rest in the presence of God forever? Revelation 22 says this, here’s God’s word.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city also on either side of the river the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it and his servants will worship him. They will see his face and his name will be on their foreheads and night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun for the Lord God will be their light and they will reign forever and ever.

— Revelation 22

(ESV)

Our resting now is meant to point us there and build our anticipation for that day

when all striving ceases forever. Let’s pray. God in heaven, thank you, Father, for the privilege of walking through your word with your people and God, thank you for this resting. And Father, my prayer, I guess, for all of us, Lord, is that we would fill this word in and we would participate in this resting because you have given it to us and it is good. But Father, I pray with all my heart that it would lead us to further anticipating that full rest that is waiting for your people. I pray that, God, in Jesus’ name, amen.