In my last post, I talked about three things that have made a big difference in my life since I started this Substack: abandoning manuscript preaching, abandoning office hours, and taking real time off. Near the end of that post, I noted that all of those things—and, really, so many more of the things that have made a difference—are related to time. And what has really made a difference is that I’ve been reclaiming time for myself, time to be myself, and time to simply be.
And that got me thinking about sabbath.
According to the book of Exodus, about three months after the Israelites left Egypt, they arrived at the wilderness around Sinai. A few days after that, Moses went up the mountain. And, on the mountain, God gave the law to Moses, so that Moses could give the law to the people. That law starts with the list that we call the Ten Commandments. And the fourth commandment is about the sabbath:
Remember the Sabbath day and 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; you shall not do any work: you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it. (Exodus 20:8-11)
Most Christians probably don’t think about this commandment too often. But the idea of sabbath is a revolutionary one, for at least three reasons:
First, simply because it demands that the world-as-it-is stop for a full day. The command to take a sabbath is not simply a command for each Israelite to take a day off from their official job. Instead, it is a command for everyone in Israel—from the leader of the people to the livestock—to take a day of rest. No business, no housework, no nothing.
Second, because it connects that demand to divine rest. Just as God made the world and all that is in it in six days, God’s people are to do all of their work in six days. And, just as God rested on the seventh day, God’s people should rest on the seventh day. The act of taking the sabbath as a day of rest is an act of imitating God.
Third, and this is connected to the second reason, because it reminds us of who we are.
In The Lost World of Genesis One, John Walton proposes that the creation story in Genesis 1 is a story about God creating a cosmic temple, and the seventh day is the day when God rests—when God takes up residence—in the temple. In this understanding, God doesn’t simply stop working on the seventh day, and, of course, there’s no question about what God does on the eighth day. Instead, the sabbath is when God ceases the work of setting things up and takes up the work of being the sovereign of the cosmos.1
We recognize that the world-as-it-is is broken and that the lives that we lead in that broken world are not the lives that we are meant to have. We do not live in a garden. Instead, we toil for our food and eat our bread by the sweat of our brows. In the face of this, the sabbath is a reminder of the what the world was created to be and what the world will be like when it is restored. It is a time for us—for all of creation, again, from the leader of the people to the livestock and beyond—to put aside our toil and simply be.
We are good at filling time with toil.
In principle, I take one or two days off each week: days when I do not have official church activities and try not to do any real church work. In practice, I usually do something related to the church on each of those days. I think about my sermon, or make note of something that I have to do on one of my days on, or send a couple of emails, or whatever. But, in principle, I take one or two days off each week.
But even when I don’t do church work, I rarely take either of those days as a sabbath. I go grocery shopping. I mow the lawn. I clean the bathroom. I do laundry. I do all of the things that are not part of my work, but that life demands all the same.
And, normally, I wouldn’t describe them as toil. But they also are not restful.
So, as I prepare to head out on sabbatical—a time of sustained study, travel, and personal and professional renewal—one of the questions that I’m asking is what rest would look like. Not simply the rest of taking a nap or sitting on a beach, but the rest of being who I am called to be and living in a world that is no longer broken: the rest of being redeemed and restored.
John Walton. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 72-86.