"Ten Words," Part 2

Billionaire Bill Gates was once asked why he didn’t believe in God. His reply is telling: “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.” (Bill Gates, quoted by Walter Isaacson, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates,” Time (January 13, 1997), p. 7)

Even if devoting a whole day to God may not seem very efficient, it must be important, because God has commanded it.

The sabbath has no parallel in the ancient Near East. As one of two positive commands, this commandment promises great benefit to those who honor it with the awareness the Yahweh is Lord over this holy time in a special way. There is no biblical evidence that God commanded any Gentile nation to observe the seventh day (Ps. 147:19–20).

Later the Lord would give commands that Israel was to follow once they were in the land He had promised: every seventh year was to be a sabbath year to give the land a year of rest (Lev. 25:2-7), and after seven periods of seven years would be the Year of Jubilee (Lev. 25:8-17). But this nation needed to learn to set aside a day for the LORD first.

III. The Words Regarding Right Relations in the Worship of God, 20:8-11.

In our text today, verse 8 tells us what to do, verses 9 and 10 specify how we are to do it, and verse 11 explains why.

A. What God wants us to do: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (v. 8).

The word “remember” has a double meaning.

For the Israelites, it was a reminder that they had heard about the Sabbath before. On their journey to Mount Sinai, God provided manna six days out of seven. The Israelites themselves had no awareness of a Sabbath concept until the manna incident of Exod. 16, so it is hardly likely that we will find the origin of the Sabbath outside of Israel. The seventh day was meant to be “a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD” (Exod. 16:23a). So when they reached Mount Sinai, God commanded them to “remember” the Sabbath.

This was something they needed to remember not just once, but every week. It is something we need to remember too; so the fourth commandment calls us to a weekly remembrance of the Sabbath.

Remembering involves more than just our memories; it demands the total engagement of our whole person in the service of God. Example: Remembering the Sabbath is like remembering one's anniversary.

B. How are we to remember the sabbath? (vs. 9-10)

1. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work” (Exod. 20:9).

Although this part of the fourth commandment is often overlooked, it is our duty to work. This does not mean that we have to work all day every day. But it does mean that God governs our work as well as our rest. He has given us six whole days to fulfill our earthly calling.

In a column for Time magazine, Lance Morrow claimed, “When God foreclosed on Eden, he condemned Adam and Eve to go to work. From the beginning, the Lord’s word said that work was something bad: a punishment, the great stone of mortality and toil laid upon a human spirit that might otherwise soar in the infinite, weightless playfulness of grace.” (Lance Morrow, quoted in Mark E. Dever, “The Call to Work and Worship,” Regeneration Quarterly (Spring 1996), p. 5.)

This is absolutely false. Work is a divine gift that goes back before the fall, when “The LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). We were made to work. The trouble is that our work has been cursed by our sin. It was only after Adam had sinned that God said, “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you will eat of it all the days of your life” (Gen. 3:17b). But it was not that way from the beginning. The fourth commandment reminds us to honor God by doing an honest week’s worth of work. We find God’s blessing in doing what he has called us to do.

2. “The seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God … you shall not do any work ...” (Exod. 20:10).

a. How do we keep the fourth commandment? By worshiping the Lord on his day. To keep something holy in the Biblical sense is to dedicate it exclusively for worship. Whereas the other six days of the week are for us and our work, the Sabbath is for God and his worship. This is the positive aspect of the fourth commandment: “the seventh day is a Sabbath of the LORD your God” (Exod. 20:10a).

No other nation could claim that the Lord was their God; so no other nation kept the Sabbath. There were other ancient civilizations that divided their time into periods of seven days. However, they generally associated the seventh day with misfortune. Only the Israelites kept the Sabbath as a day for worshiping the one true God as their Savior and Lord.

b. The Sabbath is not only a day for worship; it is also a day of rest. The word translated “Sabbath” comes from the Hebrew word meaning “to cease or to rest.” It is not a day for business as usual. Rather, it is a day for relaxation and recuperation, a day to step back from life’s ordinary routines in order to rediscover God’s goodness and grace. Here we need to notice that the fourth commandment is stated both positively and negatively. It is the only commandment to do so explicitly. The positive requirement comes first: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy” (Exod. 20:8). Then there is the absolute prohibition: “On it you shall not do any work” (v. 10).

To see how strict this command was under the law of Moses, consider the man who gathered wood on the Sabbath (Num. 15:32–36).

Numbers 15:32–36 NASB95

Now while the sons of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering wood on the sabbath day. Those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation; and they put him in custody because it had not been declared what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man shall surely be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.” So all the congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him to death with stones, just as the Lord had commanded Moses.

He was stoned to death.

Or let’s take a positive example and consider the women who wanted to prepare the body of Christ for burial: they went home and prepared spices and perfumes.

"And on the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56b).

Luke 23:56b NASB95

Then they returned and prepared spices and perfumes. And on the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

Gathering wood was such a small thing to do; what was the harm in doing it on the Sabbath? Taking spices to the tomb of Christ was a noble act of piety. So why not go ahead and do it? The answer was because God had commanded a day of rest.

This rest was for everyone to enjoy: “in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you” (Exod. 20:10b). Here we see that the fourth commandment has profound implications for the wider community. When it comes to work and leisure, parents are to set the agenda by teaching their children how to worship and rest.

The reason for this commandment is very simple. We are called to work and rest because we serve a working, resting God.

C. Why are we to remember the sabbath? (vs. 11)

The first time that God blessed anything, he blessed a day for us to share in his rest. We keep the Sabbath because God made it holy. Like work, leisure is “something that God put into the very fabric of human well-being in this world.”

The Sabbath looked back not only to creation itself but also to redemption. In the second giving of the law, Deuteronomy 5:15 reminded God’s people to remember the sabbath because they had been delivered from slavery in Egypt.

Deuteronomy 5:15 NASB95

‘You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day.

One of the benefits of their rescue was that now they didn’t have to work all the time. Pharaoh had refused to give them any rest in Egypt (Exod. 5:5); their new Master gives them a regular time of rest. The Sabbath was not a form of bondage to them but a day of freedom. It was a day to celebrate their liberation by giving glory to God.

It was also a new act of creation for the people of God were created anew at the exodus event, where all social classes, strangers, and even animals were allowed to observe the sabbath—it was a gracious gift given by the gracious Creator and Redeemer. Israel was to affirm the LORD as their God on a weekly basis by keeping this day.

It’s unfortunate in Israel’s history that the Israelites didn’t honor the Sabbath as God directed and had to be disciplined (2 Chron. 36:14–21; Ezek. 20; Isa. 58:13–14; Jer. 17:19–27). It’s also unfortunate that the scribes and Pharisees added thirty-nine forbidden acts to this commandment so that observing the Sabbath became a burden instead of a blessing (Mark 2:23–3:5). Example: well.

D. Observations on “The Lord’s day”

There is no indication in the New Testament that the seventh day has special status in the church. The reason for the church’s shift to the first day is obvious: it celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, which took place on a Sunday. More profoundly, the commemoration of Jesus’s resurrection on Sunday anticipates the new creation of all things, the new heaven and earth, for which Jesus’s resurrection is the “first fruits.” Thus, as the Old Testament Sabbath looked back to the old creation, the Lord’s Day looks back to Jesus’s resurrection but also looks forward to the new creation.

Jesus gives a whole new meaning to work and a whole new meaning to rest.

He came into the world to finish the work of his Father (John 4:34), and

on the basis of that work, he is able to give rest to our souls (Matt. 11:29).

There is no need to strive for our salvation. All we need to do is rest in the finished work of Jesus Christ. David said, “My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him” (Ps. 62:1, NIV). The way for us to find this rest is by trusting in Christ alone for our salvation, depending on His work rather than our own. The Scripture assures us that in Christ, “There remains a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for the one who has entered His rest himself also rested from his works, as God did from His” (Heb. 4:9, 10). This is the primary fulfillment of the fourth commandment.

“The spiritual rest which God especially intends in this commandment is that we not only cease from our labor and trade but much more—that we let God alone work in us and that in all our powers we do nothing of our own.” — Martin Luther

Christ’s saving work has transformed the weekly Sabbath. It is no longer the seventh day of the week but the first, and it is no longer called the Sabbath but the Lord’s Day.

By the end of the first century, Ignatius was able to write that Christians “no longer observe the Sabbath, but direct their lives toward the Lord’s day, on which our life is refreshed by Him and by His death.”

From earliest times, God’s people assembled on the first day of the week to honor the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the principle of one day in seven still stands (Col. 2:16–17; Gal. 4:1–11; Rom. 14:1–15:7).

In short, basing the Sabbath in creation indicates that the principle of treating one day in seven as special has some validity for all humanity, even if certain particulars of the Sabbath are strictly for Israel and relate to Israel’s exodus. The church, in maintaining the one-day-in-seven rule but focusing on the new creation in Christ, is legitimately making use of the Sabbath principle. We should note that there is one other difference, however; Israel’s Sabbath is essentially a day of rest, while the Lord’s Day is essentially a day for gathering to worship.

In keeping the fourth commandment there is room for Christian freedom and the wise exercise of godly judgment. But when we start asking what we can and cannot do on the Lord’s day, it is usually because we want to know what we can get away with. We want to know how far we can go without actually breaking the fourth commandment. That’s a problem because if we are looking for a loophole in the Lord’s Day, then we are missing the whole point of that commandment. God is calling us away from our own business to transact the most important business of all, which is to glorify Him in our worship. And when we try to make as much room as we can for our own pleasures, then we miss the greatest pleasure of all, which is fellowship with the living God.

The more we learn to delight in God, the more willing we are to keep His day holy. And then we discover that we are able to answer the questions that once seemed so vexing: Can I take a job that will require me to work on Sundays? Is it okay to catch up on my work? Should we let our kids play Little League baseball on Sunday? Is it a good day for watching commercial television? Most of the practical applications are easy when we want to honor the Lord on His day. The strain and struggle come when we want to use it to do our own thing.

Dr. Robert Rayburn, a retired minister, once told the story of a man who was approached by a beggar on the street. The man reached into his pocket to see what he had. Finding seven dollars and feeling somewhat sorry for the beggar, he held out six bills and said, “Here you go.” Not only did the beggar take the six dollars, but with his other hand he struck his benefactor across the face and grabbed the seventh dollar too.

What do you think of the beggar? Don’t you think he was a scoundrel? Then what do you think of a sinner, saved by the grace of Jesus Christ, who insists on taking seven days a week—or even six and a half—for himself? The way to avoid this scandal is to remember the Lord’s Day by keeping it holy, set apart for Him.