AP

Exodus 35:1-2  Moses assembled the whole Israelite community and said to them, “These are the things the LORD has commanded you to do:  For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a day of sabbath rest to the LORD.  Whoever does any work on it is to be put to death.

Sabbath observance has been a vexed question that has exercised the minds of God’s people for three-and-a-half millennia – it did in the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry, and still does.  In spite of the difficulties, it cannot be simply set aside and forgotten.

Here was Moses organising an amazing and complex construction project in the middle of the desert – the building of the Tabernacle as the focus of their meeting with God and of corporate worship – and at the outset he reminds the workers about the LORD’s requirement to make one day in every seven a day of complete rest ‘to the LORD’.  It is one of the specific laws that found a key place in the 10 Commandments written on Mt Horeb/Sinai by the very finger of God.  Many OT leaders emphasised its requirements (eg Nehemiah 13:19-22; Isaiah 56:1-8; 58:13-14; Jeremiah 17:19-27).

However, throughout Israel’s history, and especially by the time of Jesus, the essential meaning and purpose of the Sabbath was lost, either by careless non-observance or hypocritical over-observance.  It was this latter abuse on the part of the Pharisees that attracted Jesus’ harsh denunciation by them.

Sabbath observance was intended as a practical expression of man’s absolute dependence on God for everything.  It was to be embraced and enjoyed as such.  “‘If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight and the LORD’s holy day honourable, and if you honour it by not going your own way and not doing as you please or speaking idle words, then you will find your joy in the LORD, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.’  The mouth of the LORD has spoken.” (Isaiah 58:13-14)

It seems that our biggest problem today is that we are so intent on not making the same mistake the Pharisees made, that we are missing out on the real joy, wholeness and re-creation God intends for us through his “holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD”.  Has it even become for us more ‘holiday’ than ‘holy day’, more emphasis on ‘rest’ and less on ‘to the LORD’?  Should we also take into account the reality that the increasingly militant anti-Christian culture in which we are finding ourselves is working hard to get rid of something that a generation ago we were happy to refer to as ‘the Lord’s Day’, not because we were implying that the other six days of the week did not also ‘belong to the Lord’, nor because we didn’t see all of life as ‘worship’ of him 24/7, but because it was a way of letting the surrounding culture know, as was intended for Israel, that serving/worshipping the Lord is something to which we gladly give top priority in all our lives!

– Bruce Christian