Feasting on God's WordNäide

Day 6 - Anchored in Sabbath

I think most people would agree that life has a way of knocking rest right out of us. We become creatures of striving and straining along the way because life is hard. Life has punched us all in the face a time or two. Circumstances have come at us that we were not expecting or ready for, that we didn’t know how to respond to. In the midst of a broken world, who is the living God? And what is Sabbath? We are about to find out!

Our English word Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word Shabbat, which means “to cease.” Shabbat does not just mean “to rest.” The heart of Sabbath is about us ceasing from our work to remember the living God’s work. In Revelation 21:5, Jesus says, “I am making everything new!” I don’t know what kind of work you are doing today, whether that includes mowing your yard, paying bills, picking up the kids—all of us have our to-do list. I certainly don’t know all of what the living God is doing. But according to this passage in Revelation, through Jesus, the living God is at work making all things new. This is at the heart of Sabbath.

Anchored in Sabbath

There are many Scriptures we could look at to expound on the Sabbath, but we are going to focus on one which comes from Exodus 20:

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping 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 not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

The command—or mitzvah—of Sabbath is given here. For the Jewish people, the commandments of God function like an adhesive that binds them to God and to one another, back to harmony and shalom. Referring to Deuteronomy 6, what did Jesus say is the greatest commandment? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” Quoting Leviticus 19:18, Jesus says the second greatest is “love your neighbor as yourself” (see Mark 12:28-31). What might be the outcome if we viewed the instructions or commandments of the Lord not as laws we have to obey, but as rhythms and practices that bind us in harmony and shalom to the living God and to one another?

In a world of empire anchored in scarcity and acquisition, functioning through striving and straining, we are Kingdom citizens. We are of another world that we have not yet fully participated in, tasted, or seen. The Kingdom of God is anchored in Sabbath, functioning within sufficiency, relinquishment, and a quiet trust in the living God as our Father. We are not orphans or fatherless. We can rest because the living God is always working on our behalf. For the Israelites, after hundreds of years of enslavement to the Egyptians and never getting a day-off but working for the pharaoh and brutal taskmasters from sunup to sundown, the command of Sabbath—a rhythm of the seventh day being set apart as holy—would have been an incredible gift.

What’s beautiful about the heart of God as revealed through Sabbath is that as you and I become more sabbathed people, we invite others into it. We become the agency of Sabbath in a world of striving and straining where there’s never enough, where the focus is on the acquisition of more. As we Sabbath, we embody that there is enough, that the Kingdom is anchored in sufficiency, not scarcity. I don’t have to take anything from you. I have a good Father who is funding my whole life. I can choose to be anchored in Sabbath.