The Rest God has for us

The Dad’s unfinished task

It might be a stereotype, but I suspect that there are a lot of dad’s out there who have a lot of handyman jobs around the house, many of which have been started, although some haven’t even got that far, that just sit there unfinished.

You know, I’m just a bit busy this week… but I think I’ll have a bit of time next week, so I’ll fix that broken drawer then. Bur of course, you know what happens. Next week comes along, and there are a whole bunch of new priorities that have now come up.

You do get a few moments, but in those few moments you just need to sit down and relax.

I think we all know, you’ll never be finished all the jobs around the house. Because new jobs just keep appearing.

But yet we keep telling ourselves - it won’t be long, I’ll soon be done and then life will settle down.

Have you ever said those words? Once that jobs done, then things will settle down.

There might be a little bit of truth to that statement. After all, sometimes we do have an extraordinarily high demanding job which really does take us out of things… but for the most part, it’s usually a hollow statement.

We want rest - but rest becomes so elusive. When we do rest, quite often we feel guilty. We should be doing something else.

Part of that guilty feeling is in knowing that there is more to be done. How can we rest when more can be done?

Particularly if your tasks involve caring for others, it can feel particularly hard to rest. How can you rest when you know that resting means that that other person isn’t going to miss out on some care?

It’s one of the reason many people burn out. They work themselves so hard because they feel that they have to. Not necessarily because people say they have to, but quite often because they feel to overwhelming burden of tasks that lay before them.

The reality is, we often don’t have a very good framework in which we think about rest. And so this morning, as we continue our way through the opening chapters of Genesis, I want to explore this idea of rest. I’m going to start here, with the first three verses of chapter 2, but then I’m going to see how this theme moves throughout the entire bible.

But then I’ll come back and think what this means for us today and how we should understand rest.

Day 7

So let’s dive back into the creation account.

Genesis 1 describes for us six day of creation. Six days where God is active. Each day things become more and more creative. More and more extravagant.

And as we explored last week, it was topped with the finest of his creations - humanity. What made us as human the finest, was not just that we were better at doing anything, but that we bore the image of God - we became representatives of God here on earth.

It all ended with God declaring it all… very good!

There was evening, and there was morning - the sixth day

Chapter 2 then starts with a declaration. The heavens and the earth are complete in all of their vast array.

It’s done. There is no more creating necessary. God has created what he has set out to create.

So now we have the seventh day. But this day is very different to all of the other days. This one doesn’t start with the words “And God said...”

Nothing new appears.

No evening and no morning is mentioned. This is a different kind of day.

On this day, we’re told that God rested from all of his work.

Well, you can hardly blame him - he has after all, just created the entire world.

Except, this is a different kind of rest. We think of rest because we’re exhausted. There is absolutely no indication that God is exhausted and just needs to have a little lie down.

The Hebrew word for rest here, is actually the word Sabat - where the word Sabbath derives from.

It can mean to rest, but it actually more means to cease, or to bring to an end. In other words, to say you ‘sabat’ something, is to say you finished what you were doing.

This is actually clear from the context of the whole passage.

The rest is actually a sign of completion.

We talk about the never ending jobs we have. Well, when it comes to creation, it’s actually a little different.

God knew what he wanted. He achieved it. And once it was done, that was it.

His rest is the indication that all is done.

It’s exactly as he wants it.

But God does do something. He blesses this final day and he made it holy.

To be holy is to be worthy of God’s presence.

He makes this day holy - but there is almost the sense that this day is not meant to end. It doesn’t need to end because no more creation is needed. We don’t need to go back and re-create. What we have is worthy of God. We’re done.

We are now ready for humanity - God’s special creation - to enjoy this world.

Now, into this discussion, I want to add another word which we find a close link with - the word shalom.

I often talk about this word. It’s the word that is usually translated as peace, but it actually means more than that. It carries the conatation of being complete. Later, we find Jewish people often combining the words Sabbath and Shalom together to form a greeting - Shabat Shalom.

You see, even though the word shalom is not directly used here, this is what we’ve got on this sabat day - the day of rest. We’ve got shalom - and it must have been glorious!

If only we could stay in this moment.

I’m sure you’ve all probably had that wondering - what would it have been like if Adam and Eve didn’t eat that fruit.

Could it possibly be that we could still be in this state now?

It is of course one of those theoretical exercises, but I can’t help but think that if Adam and Eve didn’t eat the fruit, I suspect someone else along the line probably would have.

Losing the rest

But let me end that speculation, because, as we all know, that state was altered.

We’ll explore this in more detail in a few weeks, but things take a big dive downwards.

The basic problem: the ones that God made in his image, they want more. They take what was not theirs, and in the process, turn their back on God.

That state of rest, or shalom if you will, is damaged.

What’s more, they keep moving further and further away from the rest that God intended.

By the day of Noah, we’re a long way from shalom.

And even though we get a clearing, a new start of sorts, we quickly see that shalom has not been restored. Oh how we long for shabat shalom. The state in which God intended the world, but a state in which the world no longer knows.

God’s plan of restoration

But, God has a plan...

It starts with Abraham. And through him, a blessing that will eventually flow to all nations.

From Abraham, a nation is formed.

And so begins a quest to restore the rest.

Let me pick out a few highlights.

Entering the Promised Land

First, let me take you to the time where we find a newly formed nation enslaved in Egypt. But in extraordinary circumstances thanks to an all-powerful God, they are freed, and then after 40 years wandering throughout the wilderness, they finally entered the Promised Land.

It is this Promised Land where the motif of finding rest becomes very clear.

You see, the Promised Land is pictured as this return to where they belong. It’s where everything is going to be as it should. It’s going to be shalom. It going to be shabat - the rest!

You read through the book of Joshua, and certainly there are some pretty major hiccups along the way, but actually we almost feel that they’re going to achieve what they wanted.

Expect, the book of Joshua is closely followed by the book of Judges - and spoiler alert - rest is not achieved.

A new king

But let’s skip ahead. Israel gets a king. First up it’s Saul, and this does not go particularly great.

But then we get David - and while he’s not perfect, far from it in fact, but his heart is in the right place, he turns things back towards God, and yet again, it almost looks like we’ve got our Shabat Shalom. We’ve got the rest. Things are as they should be.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t last long either. After David, king after king seem to take the nation further away from God, and in the process, further away from rest.

Return from Exile

Things get so bad, that eventually, the whole nation is taken from the land into a place of exile. They’ve now gone effectively as far away from the rest as they can.

For seventy years, they stay in exile, then something remarkable happens. A new leader arises, and this one let’s the Jews go back to their land.

Are we finally going to get that rest? Certainly for some of them at the time, they would have been thinking so. But, alas, it does not eventuate.

The life for the returned exile is a shadow of how thing had previously been.

You see, throughout the Old Testament there is this constant yearning for the rest that God showed on that seventh day.

Rest in Christ

But then comes the New Testament, and with it, the longed for Messiah.

Now, the expectation of most at this point is that this longed for Messiah would actually bring rest like we’ve seen them trying to achieve earlier.

But something amazing happens. In Jesus, we find a different kind of rest. A rest that actually transcends the turmoil of this world.

Jesus declares - blessed are those who poor, for theirs is the kingdom. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Jesus is establishing a kingdom, but it’s a kingdom that is going to co-exist with the kingdom of this world. Yet in the midst of it, we actually can find shalom.

We can find shalom because Jesus defeated that which works against it - the evil forces of this world.

In the book of Hebrews, which we’ve only just finished going through, we see the author of this beautiful letter link all of this with the Sabbath.

Hebrews 4:9–10 NIV

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his.

In Jesus, this whole theme of rest and Sabbath finds it’s fulfillment.

The final rest

At this present moment, we experience this rest in the midst of the ongoing turmoil of this world. But a time is coming, when Jesus will return, and this Sabbath Rest will be known in it’s most fullest sense.

Revelation 21:4 describes a time when “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things [will have] passed away”

We may wonder what it would have been like if Eden was still in its unadulterated form. But we’ll get to experience something even greater.

Application

But what does all of this mean for how we understand rest in our daily lives.

You see, there is this much bigger picture that we have before us, but yet, what good does this framework for rest have to do with right now. Because as I said in our introduction, many of us are not very good at taking rest.

Well, God implemented for humanity a pattern of rest each week. On the Sabbath Day, that is the seventh day, which of course is Saturday, he told the Israelite people to do no work.

Interestingly, it was from this tradition that the rest of the world started taking a day off a week.

Now, that day off a week, was to bring focus back onto what God was doing… but, it was also there because God knew that it was needed.

A physical rest of work is the way our bodies are designed. It’s not healthy thinking that we can work work work and have no rest at all.

Having rest, actually reminds us that we can’t do it all.

Last week, I introduced the idea of being ‘human sized’. Last week I focussed on being smaller than human sized, however, sometimes when we think that we need to do everything and we need to solve every problem, we’re actually being bigger than human sized.

The Sabbath is a reminder that we can stop, because God has this.

Sabbath and legalism

Now, I just want to briefly touch on keeping the Sabbath and legalism. You see, there has often been a tendency to treat Sabbath keeping in a very legalistic way. That is to say, if you do any work on the Sabbath, you’re breaking one of the Ten Commandments.

Firstly, if we were going to strictly keep the fourth commandment, we should be keeping the Saturday clear, not Sunday. Observing the Sunday, by the way, is something that changed with the early Christians in the book of Acts. Sunday was of course the day Jesus rose from the dead, and so it took the title of the Lord’s Day.

Further, the fourth commandment also needs to be be considered in light of the rest we find in Jesus. Seeking after that rest is what we should be putting more focus into.

The avoiding of work, whether on the Saturday or Sunday, should be seen as a good pattern that is going to be helpful for the believer, not as something to be imposed on you.

A good pattern

You see, it is wise to set up patterns of rest. It’s a pattern established by God. But also a pattern which is both healthy for our bodies, and spiritually beneficial because it points us to God.

Now, the objection that naturally comes to mind is that we can’t afford to have a day off each week. There’s just too much to do.

Can I suggest, if that is the case, you perhaps need to re-evaluate what you are doing.

Now, I do want to make it clear at this point, I’m as guilty as anyone of what I’m talking about.

But, we need to ask ourselves, am I forgetting that God’s got this? Am I thinking that I need to solve it all?

Perhaps some things might fall over if you don’t do what you do. But on some occasions, maybe that thing falling over is what it needed before a new and better opportunity arises.

This is not easy. Relinquishing control to allow God to take over is never easy.

But when we allow patterns of rest to be part of our lives, perhaps it might become a little more natural.

Conclusion

God has given us a great pattern of rest. One that we are often good at ignoring.

God finished his great work of creation by resting and making the day holy.

We saw in this a glimpse of something even better.

Something which we can taste now by being with Christ. But we will taste fully when Jesus returns.

How good are you at resting?

When we establish good habits of rest, we can start to join in on God’s intended design. We can see the shalom that God wants for us.

Let me pray...