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Creation Ordinances Family Marriage · Procreation Dominion Work · (Rest/Sabbath) Related Topic Natural Law · Covenant of Works This box: view • talk • edit

The Sabbath is a divinely given Creation Ordinance of rest after six days of labor. Other Sabbaths were God-given holidays in the Jewish liturgical calendar. The Sabbath has been amended to become the Lord's Day in the current epoch, but not abrogated.

Contents 1 Creation Ordinance 1.1 Prolepsis? 1.2 Against Anticipation 2 The Fourth Commandment 3 Casuistry 3.1 Numbers 15:32-36 4 Not a Burden 5 Inactivity? 5.1 Isaiah 58:13-14

Creation Ordinance

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.God blessed the seventh day, and made it holy, because he rested in it from all his work which he had created and made.

- Genesis 2:2,3

Here we learn that the seventh day was sanctified or set apart – that is what is meant that it was made "holy" – from the other six days because God himself had worked for six days and rested on the seventh. When, later, we are told that man was to work six days and rest the seventh, we are taken back to this moment. God's work and rest was made the pattern for man's. But all of this takes place in Eden before the Fall. What seems to be said is that this pattern of work and rest for man – hence the sanctifying of the seventh day, that is setting it apart to a holy use – took place at the very headwaters of human life in the world. The Sabbath day as a day set apart to God, for worship, for the rest of the man's body and soul, is one of those fundamental ordinances or institutions of human life like work, marriage and family that are also introduced to the life of mankind prior to the Fall.

Human life, in other words, had there been no sin, would have been a life of six days of work and one of rest, even as it would have been a life of marriage and family. This makes of the Sabbath day and of Sabbath-keeping what theologians call a creation ordinance. And what is so significant about that is that the Sabbath is thus – like work, marriage, and family – a fundamental obligation of human life, a fundamental structure or pattern of human life as God created it and intended it. And if it is that, it becomes very difficult to believe that it would have been abrogated by the coming of Christ. To abrogate the Sabbath would, for some reason, make obsolescent, outdated, and no longer necessary this one alone of the creation ordinances. Christ didn't abolish work; he didn't abolish marriage or family. Why then would the Sabbath be abolished? All the more insofar as it is paired with work as a counterpart to it. Are we now to work all seven days? Is there to be no rest for us? Is this the better, higher life to which Christ has brought us in the new epoch?

Prolepsis?

Some have argued that Genesis 2 should be taken as a prolepsis, an anticipation, of what would come later in Exodus 16. The defenders of this interpretation point out that it does not say that God told Adam not to work on the seventh day. As Michael Horton says, "nothing is said about bringing creatures into the enjoyment of God's rest until the Fourth Commandment…" ^[1] There is no commandment not to work on the seventh day in Gen. 2 though there is a commandment given to Adam to work and care for the garden. He is told to work, but he is not told to rest. And they added other arguments.

1. In several places we read that God gave the Sabbath to Israel (Exod. 16:29; Ezek. 20:12) and that the Sabbath was to be kept as part of Yahweh's covenant with Israel. In other words, the Sabbath was not created for mankind in general, but only for Israel.
2. Before the fall the Sabbath would not have been necessary. Man served the Lord continuously and his work was not a burden from which he had to rest. Let me say here, as an aside, that one of the reasons why I don't take such arguments seriously – that life without sin should have been a life of continuous work (besides, that is, the fact that the perfect God rested from his work – is that advocates of this view never argue that therefore, in the new epoch Christians should work all seven days and never take a day off. They deny the Sabbath but still want a day off – or two – every week! It is a very cheap deliverance from the Sabbath day these people advocate.
3. The heathen did not know a Sabbath day.
4. The heathen are not condemned for failing to keep the Sabbath as they are for other sins.
5. The patriarchs were unacquainted with the Sabbath and did not observe it.
6. If the Sabbath had been instituted in Eden before the fall, then the circumstance of its time – that is, the seventh day of the week – cannot be ceremonial and thus cannot be abrogated but must continue in force. That is, we should still be worshiping on Saturday, not Sunday. With Adam in the state of righteousness hardly anything was ceremonial.
7. Moses, in giving reason for the keeping of the Sabbath day in the second giving of the Ten Commandments in Dt 5, mentions not the creation in six days and God's resting the seventh, but, instead, God's deliverance of Israel from bondage in Egypt.

Against Anticipation

1. One may conclude that God, in fact, did command Adam to do no work on the Sabbath day because God's rest was introduced to Adam and his posterity for their imitation, which is confirmed by the fact that in Gen. 2:3 we read that God "hallowed" or "sanctified" the day, which means in biblical parlance that he set it apart for a special use. For what use? Well, for rest. That is what Sabbath means! The Hebrew word means rest. But that use is man's use, not God's use. Things are sanctified for man to use in his service of God, they are not sanctified for God to use. When God sanctifies something, it is for man to use. In other words, in the compressed narrative of Genesis 2 all that needed to be said to indicate that the Sabbath day was to be not only a rest for God but a day of rest for man is said when it is said that God "blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." No Israelite reader of that text would understand it in any other way. As one Reformed father put it: to sanctify the day is to order it to be sanctified ^[2]
2. It is incorrect to say that, because it is said that God gave the Sabbath to Israel, therefore it was not given to mankind in Eden. In Ezekiel 20:11,12, for example, where God says explicitly that he "gave them my Sabbaths" it also says that "I gave them my decrees and made known to them my laws, for the man who obeys them will live by them." That is, it appears that God gave all his laws to Israel, even those that already belonged to the law of nature and the revealed will of God. It is not only the 4th commandment that God gave to Israel; he gave all ten to her! There is undoubtedly a sense in which God gives his laws to his people in a special way that he has also given to mankind in general. He gave the Ten Commandments to Israel, but that hardly means that she was the only nation obliged not to murder, lie, and commit adultery.
3. There was certainly need for a Sabbath in Eden for even then man had to serve God with rites of worship and had need for and was capable of enjoying special occasions of communion with God. The Sabbath, as the other creation patterns for human life, has to do with the very nature of human life as God created it and not merely with its condition in sin. But the whole Bible teaches us that human beings would have worshiped God and found joy in assemblies for such worship had there never been a Fall, just as we see such worship going on now in heaven, as in the book of Revelation. Everything in the narrative of Holy Scripture suggests that had there never been a Fall, there would still have been holidays in the kingdom of God and those holidays would have been for the purpose of communion with God in the company of his people, good works of various kinds, and joyful feasts: all the things the Sabbath is said to be for in Holy Scripture. This anticipates an argument we will make later about precisely what the Sabbath is for, but it is worth saying now that "resting" from the labor of work is not the primary sense of the "rest" of the Sabbath day. One sleeps at night to recover from the exertions of the day. The Sabbath rest is rest of another, a deeper kind. And that rest would have been given men had they continued to enjoy perfect satisfaction in their work and never found it wearying and laborious. And the proof of that is precisely and obviously that God rested from his work and his rest plainly had nothing to do with him being exhausted or his labor being toilsome. This was rest of an entirely positive kind, rest that even the omnipotent and the perfect wants and will enjoy. To deny this, as Michael Horton does, is, in my mind, to mistake something very basic about worship and the Christian life.
4. There is evidence that both the heathen and the patriarchs did know the Sabbath though in the heathens' case, as is to be expected, in a corrupted form. I could take time to marshal the considerable evidence in detail but I will not bore you with all of that. Simply think of the weeks that Noah observed as he waited for the waters to recede after the flood or to the reference to Leah's "bridal week" in Gen. 29:27. There are quite a number of such references in the patriarchal period, that is, before Moses and before the specific mention of Sabbath-keeping in Exodus 16. It is true that keeping the Sabbath is not mentioned in Genesis, but, then, it is not mentioned between Deuteronomy and 2 Kings. But, for that matter, circumcision is not mentioned in the narrative books of the OT after Joshua. The fact that something is not mentioned does not necessarily mean very much. What is more there is evidence of the division of the month into four seven day periods in ancient Babylon. Such a seven day week is interesting because there is no astronomical reason for a week of seven days. Seven doesn't evenly divide the month based on either the lunar or the solar calendar. ^[3]
5. There were ceremonial features of the life of man in Eden; the sacramental trees being one of them, which were later altered. Reading Gen. 2:2-3 by itself we certainly do not expect that there will be millennia later a change of the day of rest from the seventh to the first day of the week; but then we don't expect any of the remarkable things that are yet to come. This is an argument from silence that is of little importance in my view. As we will see later, there are other reasons beside creation for keeping the Lord's Day holy and those reasons have to do with redemption. So, it is not impossible to think that the day of the week would change even as the obligation of keeping the Lord's Day holy would remain the same.
6. The nations are not condemned for failing to keep the Sabbath day, but, then, there are a great many of their sins for which there is no biblical record of the Lord's condemnation. They aren't, for example, condemned for working too much or too little.
7. When the instructions for gathering manna are given in Exodus 16 and explicit mention is made for the first time in the Bible of keeping the day of rest, it is not obvious that Israel is being told, for the very first time, that she will work six days and rest the seventh. It seems rather to be accommodating the genuinely new thing – manna gathering – to the established law (keeping the Sabbath rest). ^[4]

The Fourth Commandment

Sbbath obligation is part of the moral law, God's will for the life of mankind published in the Ten Commandments, the Ten Words that summarize the will of God for mankind and, all the more, for his people. Think of those commandments: You shall have no other gods but the living and true God; you shall honor your father and mother; you shall not murder, commit adultery, steal, or lie. Which other of these commandments do we imagine is not a perpetual obligation for all human beings? That is the first fact to consider: we understand the Ten Commandments to be a summary of human ethical obligation? Why would only one part of that summary no longer apply? What is more, the 4th commandment requires not only a resting on the seventh day, but working the other six. Surely everyone thinks that human beings ought to work. So the question becomes: on what principle and according to what instruction are we to drop out of the Ten Commandments only one part of only one of the Ten Commandments? And still more, why would we now look to the government to preserve our weekly holiday—for we don't intend to give that up whatever we say about the 4th commandment in the new epoch—instead of to God who gave it to us in the first place!

These Ten Commandments are the law, after all, of which Jesus was speaking when he said in his Sermon on the Mount that not one jot or tittle would fall from the law until all was fulfilled. This is the law of which Paul was speaking when he said that, far from nullifying the law, his doctrine of justification by faith establishes the law. This is the law of which the Apostle spoke when he said that circumcision was nothing and uncircumcision nothing, what mattered was keeping God's commandments. This was the law that Jesus himself carefully kept, even while pronouncing Jewish ceremonies null and void or soon to be abolished.

Casuistry

The Sabbath is to be a day of rest from work – to that the Law speaks most often and most emphatically. In Exodus, on several occasions, the requirement not to work on the Lord's Day is mentioned in connection with the instructions for building the tabernacle and the furniture that it would contain. Lest anyone think that work on the temple would surely continue on the Sabbath day, it is expressly said that it should not. Exodus 31:14-16; 35:2

In this context Exodus 32:3 that we read, "Do not light a fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day." In the context it refers not to any fire, but to a fire necessary for the doing of work. The very next verses speak of the precious metals that were to be used in the construction and furnishing of the tabernacle, all of which would have to be melted. Interestingly, there is a text from Ugarit that speaks of a fire burning for six days before the construction of a sanctuary to Baal. It will be different in Israel. They will rest on God's holy day, not work; not even to build his sanctuary. But we are reminded here of the importance of reading the Bible contextually. It flies in the face of everything we read in Holy Scripture to imagine that the command not to light a fire in one's dwelling on the Sabbath day meant that to keep the Lord's Day holy on a cold day, one's family must shiver away the hours waiting for the moment when a fire could be lit!

Numbers 15:32-36

This is the famous account of the man who was ordered to be executed for gathering wood on the Sabbath day. That has seemed to a great many a very harsh punishment for a minor infraction and perhaps no other text in the Bible has been so influential in forming the opinion in many Christian minds that the OT Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath law was harsh and oppressive. So many Christians have thought that the Pharisees were actually pretty close to getting the OT Sabbath right: it was an oppressive yoke and a heavy burden to bear. And it was the idea of the stoning of this poor man for gathering wood that convinced them that it was so. No wonder, then, that the Lord Jesus should deliver us from the Sabbath of the Law of Moses. How useful to us could a law be that required the execution of a man simply for gathering wood? But that is a very serious misunderstanding of the passage.

First, we can be fairly sure that the man was gathering wood not to keep his family warm but to do work. So he was violating the commandment that God had given to Israel and was doing so in a public way. He was throwing the Lord's holiday back in his face. Second, and much more important, this account of the man caught gathering wood comes immediately after an explanation of the two kinds of sins that there are: unintentional sins as the NIV has it, and defiant sins. Indeed, the words immediately before are:

Because he has despised the word of the LORD, and has broken his commandment, that soul shall utterly be cut off; his iniquity shall be on him.'"

- Numbers 15:31

The man gathering wood then is offered as an example of a defiant sinner. Unintentional sins in the Law of Moses are not sins that one commits by accident – they can be, as when someone touches an unclean thing unawares – but primarily they are the sins that Christians commit every day, the sins of frailty, the sins of our weak and unreliable flesh. Defiant sins, on the other hand, are the sins of the apostate; the unforgivable sin because it amounts to a rejection of the Lord and his covenant.

As we read also in the New Testament, the man who sins that way will not be renewed to repentance. The sin itself can be any sort of sin; it is the attitude of apostasy in it that makes it a defiant sin, its character as a rejection of the authority of the Lord and as a willful repudiation of his covenant. That is the sin of the man who was gathering wood. He serves as an illustration of the defiant sin just discussed. It is no surprise that shortly after giving the law there should have been an exemplary punishment meted out to someone who sinned in that defiant way. It served as a warning for Israel as to the absolute necessity of their remaining faithful to the covenant, which even weak and sinful people can do!

And lest we think that event something still peculiar to the ancient epoch, shortly after the inauguration of the new epoch, a similarly defiant sin was punished in the same stern way. Ananias and Sapphira were executed directly by the Lord for lying about their tithe. That also has seemed to many Christians to be too severe a punishment for a small offense. But, of course, taking the Bible together, their sin was so severely punished because it was motivated by and expressed a spirit of apostasy. And Luke makes a point of telling us about it precisely for its exemplary value, for the way it warns us against allowing a spirit of disloyalty to God to take root in our hearts. So, taking all of this together, the execution of the man gathering wood in Numbers 15 says a great deal about the difference between unintentional and defiant sins, between Christian frailty on the one hand and apostasy on the other. It says virtually nothing about how to keep the Sabbath except to reinforce the general prohibition against working on the Lord's Day.

Not a Burden

But if you will not listen to me to make the Sabbath day holy, and not to bear a burden and enter in at the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day; then will I kindle a fire in its gates, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched.

- Jeremiah 17:27

Sabbath sanctification was widely conceived in Christian circles in an excessively narrow and negative way and that resulted in a prejudice against the day. That prejudice, in turn, provoked the effort to find a reason to think that the obligation of observing the Lord's Day had been done away with. When keeping the Sabbath is conceived of as an oppressive burden, it is natural to think that the Lord Jesus would have wanted to deliver us from it. We are reminded, in this way, that it is always very important to place a proper construction on the laws of God, to draw out the good in them and the blessing of them, lest people conceive God's laws in a negative way and find it difficult to imagine that a good heavenly Father would ever demand such grinding misery of his children. All of God's laws are regarded as oppressive by unbelievers, of course, but it is not the church's business to make it easier for them to think hard thoughts about God's commandments and too often the church has done just that!

For example, in Acts 15:10 – in the midst of a discussion of the relationship of Gentile Christians to the Jewish practice of circumcision – we hear Peter say, "Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear?" Peter there uses "yoke" – with its suggestion of captivity and burden bearing – as a description of the law as it was understood in the Judaism of his time. He is not referring there to the law of God rightly understood, but to the law as it was perverted in the Judaism of his time when obedience to the law was made the principle of salvation. Peter, in other words, was saying the same thing as Jesus said, when he condemned the Pharisees in Matthew 23:4, saying, "They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders…" This is not what God's law did – Jesus was always a defender of God's law – but what those who misunderstand and misapply the law do. Law conceived that legalistic way is an oppressive burden because no one can keep it well enough. It demands more than we can supply. As the poet has it,

What is more, conceived in legalistic terms, the actual commandments are almost always grotesquely misunderstood. In the case of the Sabbath, obedience was conceived by the Jewish rabbinical tradition as the observance of endless regulations that buried the true meaning of the commandment under a mountain of petty minutiae. One has only to read the tractate "Shabbath" in the Mishnah, that repository of rabbinical regulations from the time before, during, and shortly after, the days of Christ and his apostles, to know what Peter was talking about when he spoke of the law as a yoke that neither they nor their fathers could bear. The Bible is always concentrating on the main point of the commandment, the principle of goodness and love that is enshrined in the commandment. The Bible never reduces its commandments to a mass of regulations precisely because it never loses sight of the real interest of the commandment as a particular application of the law of love for God and neighbor. But, the fact is, the church has often lost sight of precisely that principle and that main point.

Inactivity?

Would the Law require Laura Ingalls Wilder to sit silent in a straight-backed chair all Sunday afternoon, listening to her father read the Bible, speaking only when asked questions concerning the text or to recite the Shorter Catechism, and struggling all the while with her childlike longing to be running free out on the prairie?

Isaiah 58:13-14

A great many interpreters have taken these words to provide a transcript of Sabbath sanctification, a definition of the holiness of the Lord's Day. "Not going your own way and not doing as you please" is taken to mean not doing things that would be entirely proper on the other six days of the week but which would be improper on the Sabbath because they are not directly a service offered to God. "Speaking idle words," still more fatefully is taken to refer to words that would be entirely appropriate any other day of the week, but which are inappropriate on the Lord's holy day because insufficiently serious: chit chat about business and the weather and the like. This was a fateful interpretation because, I suspect, it was the source of a way of looking at the Sabbath that was then imported into many other texts that, in fact, say no such thing about Sabbath sanctification. It is this text, more than any other, for example, that lies behind the Shorter Catechism's definition of Sabbath sanctification: "the Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days and in spending the whole time in the public and private exercises of God's worship, except so much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy." That phrase "spending the whole time in the public and private exercises of God's worship" is, in effect a deduction based on what they took to be the meaning of Isaiah 58:13-14. If you can't do anything else, then what is left is worship.

A more careful look at Isaiah 58:13-14, however, reveals that this is a mistaken view of Isaiah's meaning. In the context of this portion of Isaiah, of the prophecy as a whole, and of the prophets as a whole, "not going your own way" and "not doing as you please" do not mean doing things that are perfectly righteous in themselves but inappropriate on the Lord's Day. These phrases refer to sinful things, behavior that is sinful any and every day of the week (56:4; 57:17; 58:2-3; 59:8; 66:3). "Idle words" does not refer to chit chat or a casual jest; it refers to dishonest and unholy speech, what G.B. Caird describes as "deedless [words], loafers which ought to be up and busy about what they say, the broken promise, the unpaid vow, words which said 'I go, sir,' and never went" (59:3; Hos. 10:4; Deut. 18:20 [the last two being the other instances of the same idiom "speaking words" in the Hebrew Bible]; [The Language and Imagery of the Bible, pp. 21-22]

Isaiah, in this part of his prophecy, is contesting the spirit that led Israel and Judah to suppose that liturgical performances such as fasting and Sabbath-keeping (the two subjects of chapter 58) acted as a kind of talisman, protecting them from the consequences of their general indifference to the will of God and unconcern for a life lived in loving and grateful devotion to him. They were the fathers of those vast multitudes throughout the centuries who have sown their wild oats through the week and then gone to church on Sunday to pray for crop failure. Neither a true Sabbath nor a true fast can be kept by one who does not tremble at God's Word and desire to do God's will in all things for love's sake. But, promises Isaiah, let a man keep his fast or his Sabbath in the context of a believing, devout, gracious, and obedient life, and he will have blessing and pleasure of the purest kind. In other words, verse 13 does not tell us how the day itself is to be observed. It tells us rather what is the presupposition of Sabbath keeping, its essential prerequisite, viz. true faith and a godly life.

The last thing Isaiah intends in these verses, in this context – addressing as he is people who exploit their workers, quarrel and fight, give themselves to malicious talk, and oppress the poor but who all the while complain that God is not rewarding them for their fasts and their Sabbaths – I say, the last thing Isaiah intends is to tell his hearers exactly what particular works of Sabbath sanctification they need to concentrate on.