Sabbath Rest, Part I. “The Sabbath Day and the Orientation of the Whole Created Order towards Worship of God”: DFK’s final chapter of “Creation & Change”
We are providing below the final chapter of the second edition of Dr. Kelly’s work, Creation and Change: Gen 1:1-2:4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms
The chapter is titled, “The Sabbath Day and the Orientation of the Whole Created Order towards Worship of God.”
We do so because of the absolute vital importance of our experience of the Sabbath, which as Jesus tells us, “was made for man.” And if we see ourselves as too busy, and our work too important, to allow us to take a full day of Sabbath rest (such that we reduce the “Lord’s Day” down to the “Lord’s half-day”…), then it may be good for us to witness the example of Dan Fountain, one of the “busiest” and most “important” medical missionaries of the 20th century.
Dr. Fountain came to realize only 10+ years into his seismic work in war-torn Congo the critical importance of Sabbath rest. And his work, we should add, influenced the WHO’s shift towards a decentralized system of primary healthcare, contained in the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration that is still referenced at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine today.
That is to say, when Dr. Fountain released control of 1/7th of his time to the Lord, the Lord magnified and exponentially increased the effect of his work in the remaining six days with a national, and even, global impact.
Now that is not to somehow make the Sabbath a means that will enable us greater effectiveness; but it, at the very least, drives us to ask the question of why the Lord has commanded us to rest?
And could it be that the reason why the Sabbath principle is encoded into the DNA of Israel through the Prophets is to point us beyond the frenetic work of our hands to the rest and flourishing (cf. Ps 92) that comes in waiting upon God.
Could this be why Jeremiah so bluntly says to us:
Cursed is the man who trusts in man
And makes flesh his strength,
Whose heart departs from the Lord.
For he shall be like a shrub in the desert,
And shall not see when good comes,
But shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness,
In a salt land which is not inhabited.
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
And whose hope is the Lord.
For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters,
Which spreads out its roots by the river,
And will not fear when heat comes;
But its leaf will be green,
And will not be anxious in the year of drought,
Nor will cease from yielding fruit (Jer 17:5-8)
But if this is so—if flourishing is actually dependant upon such trust—not in man, his techniques, his supposed ability, his power (i.e. Jer 17:5)—Why then don’t we make the Lord our trust?
The next verse:
The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked;
Who can know it? (17:9)
And the ensuing verses, which demonstrate to us that our practice of the Sabbath and our refusal reveal the state of our heart before JHWH:
Hear the word of the Lord, you kings of Judah, and all Judah, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, who enter by these gates. Thus says the Lord:
“Take heed to yourselves, and bear no burden on the Sabbath day, nor bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem; nor carry a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath day, nor do any work, but hallow the Sabbath day, as I commanded your fathers.
But they did not obey nor incline their ear, but made their neck stiff, that they might not hear nor receive instruction/correction/chastening (mûsār).
“And it shall be, if you heed Me carefully,” says the Lord, “to bring no burden through the gates of this city on the Sabbath day, but hallow the Sabbath day, to do no work in it, then shall enter the gates of this city kings and princes sitting on the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, they and their princes, accompanied by the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and this city shall remain forever.
And they shall come from the cities of Judah and from the places around Jerusalem, from the land of Benjamin and from the lowland, from the mountains and from the South, bringing burnt offerings and sacrifices, grain offerings and incense, bringing sacrifices of praise to the house of the Lord.
But if you will not hearken unto me to hallow the sabbath day, and not to bear a burden, even entering in at the gates of Jerusalem on the sabbath day; then will I kindle a fire in the gates thereof, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched (Jer 17:19-27).
And from the Prophet calling us back to the commandments, we turn to Dr. Kelly’s exposition of the Fourth Commandment and its outworking that will be for us life-giving, if we will but receive it by faith and put it into practice.
The Sabbath Day and the Orientation of the Whole Created Order towards Worship of God
FROM the summary statement of Genesis 2:1 we see that the entire work of creation was completed by the end of the sixth day, and then from verses 2 and 3, we learn that the whole sequence and rhythm of the first six days was consecrated by means of God’s rest on the seventh or Sabbath day:
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made (Gen. 2:1-3).
The incomparable significance of the Sabbath day is shown in that this is the very first time the word ‘holy’ is used in the Bible (qiddesh – ‘hallowed it’: Gen. 2:3). The root meaning of ‘holy’ (qadosh) is believed to come from the verb ‘to cut off’ or ‘to separate’.
Cassuto explains that
‘The real meaning of qedhusa (“holiness”) is elevation and exaltation above the usual level; the seventh day was lifted up above the plane of the other days.’1
Grammatical considerations indicate that two things are implied by the clause: ‘He hallowed it’: on the one hand, He made it holy (the Piel stem of the verb here implies causation), and on the other hand, He declared it to be holy, or consecrated it (for this form of the verb also carries here a declarative sense).2
God’s causing the day to be holy is directly connected to His abstaining from work. This is translated in most English versions as ‘He rested’. This seems to imply an anthropomorphic reading back into God of human tiredness, as though the labor of the first six days had made Him weary. But the actual Hebrew text reads, ‘and He abstained from work’ (wayyisboth). Rather than conveying the idea of rest and refreshment, at this point – as Cassuto shows – ‘It has a negative connotation: “not to do work”.’3
Although the concept of God Himself actually resting is used elsewhere in Scripture (as in Exod. 20:11 and 31:17):
Nevertheless in this section, which avoids all possible use of anthropomorphic expressions in order to teach us, particularly in the account of creation, how great is the gulf between the Creator and the created, such notions would have been incongruous; hence the Bible uses only a term that signifies ‘abstention from work’.4
Where ‘rest’ or ‘refreshment’ is applied to God in other passages, it would seem to mean that while the heavenly Father could not have been literally weary (for ‘He fainteth not, neither is weary’ – Isa. 40:28), still ‘refreshment’ is properly attributed to Him in the sense of His receiving joy and delight in the contemplation of the beauty of what He had created.
We are told that a ‘fruit’ of the Holy Spirit (who bears the very attributes of the Father) is joy (Gal. 5: 22), and that the Son (who is the actual ‘character’ of the Father – cf. Heb. 1:3, ‘who being... the character of his person’) was ‘anointed with the oil of gladness above thy fellows’ (Heb. 1:9, drawing from Ps. 45:7). God, therefore, makes the day holy by abstaining from work during it, since His creative activity has now been completed by the end of the sixth day.
But Genesis 2:1 seems, at first glance, to contradict this completion of all work on the sixth day, when it states: ‘And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made...’ In order to get around this difficulty, some of the ancient versions of the Old Testament, such as the Samaritan Version, the Septuagint, the Peshitta and the Book of Jubilees amended the Hebrew text to read sixth instead of seventh day.5
Cassuto demonstrates, however, that the seventh day of the original Masoretic text is certainly the right reading. He explains the meaning of this otherwise curious usage (of ‘finished on the seventh day’) by examining similar sentences elsewhere in the Pentateuch, such as ‘And he finished talking with him, and God went up from Abraham’ (Gen. 17: 22). ‘The clause “And he finished talking with him” does not connote “And He spoke His concluding words to him,” for God’s final words were cited in the preceding verse; the meaning is: “Having finished talking with him, He went up from Abraham”... The [i.e. this and several other verses cited by Cassuto] clearly establish that the meaning of our verse is: “Since God was on the seventh day in the position of one who had already finished His work, consequently He abstained from work on the seventh day”.’6
God’s abstaining from work causes the seventh day to be holy. It is ‘cut off ’ or “elevated above” the previous six days. Thus, it is made to be different. Cassuto states that
‘the difference consists in the novel character of the seventh day; after a series of six days on each of which some work of creation was wrought, came a day on which God did not work or add anything to his creation; hence the remembrance of this abstinence from labor remained linked with the day on which this situation first arose.’7
In addition to making it holy, God also specifically declares this ‘different’ day to be ‘holy’. He declares it to be such for the benefit of mankind, His image-bearers, in order ‘to promote a special relationship to God and to His service.’8
Therefore, this special day will always carry a divinely-declared blessing with it for those who are the crown of the entire created order. Although the ‘seventh day’ (later termed ‘the Sabbath’) bears a special relationship to Israel, the covenant people of God (as in Exod. 20:8 and Deut. 5:12-14), by which they honor God and are caused ‘to ride upon the high places of the earth’ (Isa. 58:13, 14), in the context of Genesis 2, it clearly has a universal application to all of God’s image bearers, Cassuto correctly argues:
Every seventh day, without intermission since the days of creation, serves as a memorial to the idea of the creation of the world by the word of God, and we must refrain from work thereon so that we may follow the Creator’s example and cleave to His ways. Scripture wishes to emphasize that the sanctity of the Sabbath is older than Israel, and rests upon all mankind. The fact that the name ‘Elohim’ [‘God’] which was current also among the Gentile nations, and not the name ‘YHWH’ [E.V. ‘LORD’], which was used by the Israelites only, occurs here not without significance; the latter designation will be found in connection with the commandments concerning the proper observance of the Sabbath, which devolves only upon Israel. Thus in the Ten Commandments it is said, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, not ‘know that there is a Sabbath in the world’; that was already known.9
Part of the blessing conveyed by Sabbath observance can be understood from the numerical combination of six days of work and one day of rest, providing the number used in Scripture to denote wholeness, completeness and perfection (and thus, rest): seven. This number seems ‘writ large’ in the natural order as well as in Scripture. Cardinal Ratzinger comments:
The number that governs the whole is seven; in the scheme of seven days it permeates the whole in a way that cannot be overlooked. This is the number of a phase of the moon, and thus we are told throughout this account that the rhythm of our heavenly neighbor is also the rhythm of our human life. It becomes clear that we human beings are not bounded by the limits of our own little ‘I’ but that we are part of the rhythm of the universe, that we too, so to speak, assimilate the heavenly rhythm and movement in our own bodies and thus, thanks to this interlinking, are fitted into the logic of the universe.
In the Bible this thought goes still further. It lets us know that the rhythm of the heavenly bodies is, more profoundly, a way of expressing the rhythm of the heart and the rhythm of God’s love, which manifests itself there.10
The late Rev. William Still, well-known senior minister of Aberdeen (Scotland), has with penetrating insight explored the implications of the Sabbath rhythm for spiritual, emotional, physical and vocational health, in his Rhythms of Rest and Work.11 It is no difficult task to demonstrate empirically the physical and emotional value of six days’ work and one day’s rest to the human race, (even apart from primary spiritual concerns).
The atheistic French Revolution, for example, in order to abolish every vestige of Christianity from the land, forbade Sabbath observance by making the work week longer [10 days, in fact, according to the “science” of the metric system]. But the well-being of the population suffered to such a degree, that the radical revolutionaries had to reinstate the Sabbath. And our own frenetic generation, which in most of the industrialized world has ignored the Sabbath since at least the 1960s, not surprisingly now finds itself unable to rest.12
It would be interesting to know how many heart attacks, strokes and emotional breakdowns could be prevented by following the creational rhythm of six days of work and one day of rest. The reason for this is that the Creator made us to exist as creatures who need to rest one day out of seven. To go against our creaturely limits tends to cause disintegration in both personality and body (and relationships).
To transgress this basic rhythm which is built both into the universe and into the human soul and body is to transgress a kindly bestowed blessing of God, and is to ask for increasing personal stress and disturbance, if not breakdown.
The remarkable Jewish Christian intellectual, Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy discusses perceptively the twentieth century industrial world’s changing of the weekly ‘holy-day’ (or ‘holiday’) from a communal celebration to an individualistic spending of ‘leisure time’.13 Noting that: ‘Leisure is secular because it divides us; we are dragged eccentrically in this or that direction. On her holidays, the soul becomes whole’,14 he calls this turning of a holy-day into leisure ‘a decay’.15
Tragic results follow the decay of the societal ‘holy-day’ or Sabbath as regards professional life:
Fifty years ago [he was writing in the 1940s], a doctor or minister or lawyer would practice fifty years with little or no time off. Now they break down after a decade, and they experiment with their daily routine nearly incessantly. Telephone, car, plane, mail have enabled them to do as much, in mere quantity, within ten years as formerly in a lifetime. No wonder that they have to cease to exist every decade. They must retire every ten years as though it was to the grave, and start a new life simply because they have crammed a whole life into a much shorter time span.16
He even suggests that the ‘nervous breakdown’ is ‘the most eloquent argument’ for a return to community Sabbath observance. However, within traditional, non-secularized Christianity (insofar as it is actually practiced), ‘... the sublime reason why Sunday is the first day of the week, instead of the last’ is that within it ‘... we anticipate the future Kingdom of God, ahead of the week-days which carry on the patterns of organized work inherited from the past.’17
With poetic insight, Rosenstock-Huessy adds: ‘In this way, the inspiration of Sunday slowly melts the frozen forms of week-day routine.’18 Without denying the far-reaching benefits of ‘remembering the Sabbath day to keep it holy’ on mankind’s physical and emotional life, the creation account seems to reach a great crescendo on the seventh day, showing that the entire creation is directed towards the Sabbath, so that something far greater than physical or even societal well-being is intended here.
Ratzinger is probably right in perceiving that
‘the rhythm of the seven and its cosmic significance...is itself at the service of a still deeper meaning: Creation is oriented to the sabbath, which is the sign of the covenant between God and humankind.... Creation is designed in such a way that it is oriented to worship. It fulfills its purpose and assumes its significance when it is lived, ever new, with a view to worship. Creation exists for the sake of worship.... The true center, the power that moves and shapes from within in the rhythm of the stars and of our lives, is worship. Our life’s rhythm moves in proper measure when it is caught up in this.19
The Westminster Confession of Faith, although written in London in the 1640s, still speaks a fresh and wholesome word to guide God’s image bearers in keeping the Sabbath day:
The Sabbath is kept holy unto the Lord, when men: prepare their hearts for it; arrange for their daily affairs to be taken care of beforehand; rest the whole day from their own works and words, and from thoughts about their worldly activities and recreations; and take up the whole time in public and private worship and in the duties of necessity and mercy (Ch. 21, par. 8).20
As Ratzinger has proposed, the very structure of the creation week orients the entire created order to the Sabbath, and thus to the remembrance of God our Creator, and His relationship to us and purposes of blessing for us. This in itself means that the Sabbath, (remembering that seven is the number of final perfection), bears a profound orientation towards the future; to that final, perfect consummation of all the purposes of God in and through His creation, which has been washed clean through the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 5:9), for whose pleasure ‘all things are and were created’ (Rev. 4:11).
Robert Murray M’Cheyne, an eminent Church of Scotland saint of the early nineteenth century, expressed with truly devotional beauty, the God-ordained future orientation of every properly observed Sabbath day. It is fitting that his words should conclude these studies on the divine creation, which ultimately points our gaze and all our activities to a higher world, where we shall by and by enjoy endless fellowship with our Creator and Redeemer, as we enter into rest (Heb. 4:3) through belief in that One who ‘made the worlds’ (Heb. 1:2) and then redeemed them from sin and death (Heb. 1:3):
It is a type of heaven when a believer lays aside his pen or loom, brushes aside his worldly cares, leaving them behind him with his weekday clothes, and comes up to the house of God. It is like the morning of the resurrection, the day when we shall come out of great tribulation into the presence of God and the Lamb, when the believer sits under the preached Word and hears the voice of the Shepherd leading and feeding his soul.
It reminds him of the day when the Lamb that is in the midst of the Throne shall feed him, and lead him to living fountains of water. When he joins in the psalm of praise, it reminds him of the day when his hands shall strike the harp of God, ‘where congregations ne’er break up and Sabbaths have no end.’
When he retires and meets with God in secret in his closet, or like Isaac in some favourite spot near his dwelling, it reminds him of the day when he shall be a pillar in the house of our God and go out no more.
This is the reason why we love the Lord’s Day. This is the reason why we call the Sabbath a delight. A well spent Sabbath we feel to be a day of heaven upon earth. For this reason we wish our Sabbaths to be wholly given to God. We love to spend the whole time in the public and private exercises of God’s worship except so much as is taken up in works of necessity and mercy. We love to rise early on that morning and to sit up late, that we may have a long day with God.21
CONCLUDING WORD
The goal of these studies has been to turn our thoughts towards the true end of our lives, the glory of God, our Creator and Redeemer, for ‘this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent’ (John 17:3).
I have sought to argue that if we will allow our minds to fall under the compulsion of reality as it is conveyed to us in the Holy Scriptures, we shall be in a position to study, learn and in some measure articulate all the better the coherence and significance of the structures and events of the created order. Or, in the words of Sir Francis Bacon, we seek to read together and aright God’s ‘two books’ of Scripture and Nature.
Throughout this volume, I have engaged in a running debate with the secularism of our times and its evolutionary ‘paradigm’, which, I believe, keeps us from understanding either Scripture or reality. Thus, it tragically turns the gaze of our culture from both God, our Creator, Redeemer and Goal (which is our very salvation), and from a realistic assessment and development of the created realm (which is part and parcel of our ‘dominion mandate’).
The bitter harvest of this willful blindness is being reaped with increasing swiftness in our deteriorating Western society. There is only one way for massive intellectual, moral and cultural healing to occur, and it entails a revolutionary ‘paradigm shift’ from mythological evolution to a Scripturally revealed and scientifically realistic paradigm of special, divine creation.
The teachings of Genesis 1 and 2 are sufficiently clear to give us our general orientation in this requisite paradigm shift, and a growing chorus of voices from operational science confirm the latter, even as they deny the former (as I have attempted to show in this volume). As our intellectual framework is once again brought into accordance with Scriptural truth, the Psalmist promises that ‘in thy light, shall we see light’ (Ps. 36:9), and a world of new discoveries, interconnections and surprising meaning will open before us scientifically and culturally.
Perhaps this delightful advance will be something like the beautiful bursting forth of renewed moral and cultural life, when the moribund existence of millions who lived within the decaying secularism of the late Roman Empire, was liberated in a wave of resurrection power. The spiritual, moral and cultural resurrection wrought by lifting men’s eyes from blind and exclusive immersion in the secular order to the true purposes of the Creator and Redeemer has been traced by Charles Norris Cochrane in his Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action From Augustus to Augustine.22
As something like this takes place again, not only will Sabbath days be a time of meditation and delight in God, but every day will more and more fulfill its ordained function for God’s renewed image bearers. For, says Calvin,
This is, indeed, the proper business of the whole life, in which men should daily exercise themselves to consider the infinite goodness, justice, power, and wisdom of God, in this magnificent theatre of heaven and earth.’23
TECHNICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
NOTES FOR CHAPTER TWELVE
The Christian Sabbath: A Change of Day, Not Principle
Since the fourth century ad Constantinian settlement making Chris-tianity the established religion of the Roman Empire, most of the Western world has observed Sunday (the first day of the week), rather than Saturday (the last day of the week), as their official Sabbath day of rest and worship. While the historical details of this change are rather complex to trace,24 the basic reason is clearly pointed out by the seventeenth-century Westminster Confession of Faith, which, after stating the perpetual obligation of observing ‘one day in seven for a sabbath’, adds that the Sabbath ‘... from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, was the last day of the week; and, from the resurrection of Christ, was changed into the first day of the week, which in Scripture is called the Lord’s Day, and is to be continued to the end of the world, as the Christian Sabbath’ (Ch. XXI.vii).
A Change of Day
Within the New Testament itself, there are already evidences of this change of day from the last day of the week to the first. Brief descriptions of early Christian worship indicate that the believers were meeting on the first day of the week to worship the risen Lord. The instructions of the Apostle Paul to the church at Corinth concerning taking up a regular collection for needy saints shows that they gathered to worship on Sunday: ‘Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I have given order to the churches of Galatia, even so do ye. Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I come’ (1 Cor. 16:1, 2).
Other New Testament texts bear witness to this change of day (e.g. Acts 20:7). The apostles certainly continued to worship in the Jewish synagogue on the traditional Sabbath, especially for evangelistic purposes, for that is when God’s people were gathered to hear the Scriptures expounded, and often the apostles were invited to preach to them. This gave them the opportunity to explain how Christ was truly their Messiah (as we see in sermons preached by Paul and Peter in the synagogues, both in Israel and in Gentile lands).25 Apparently after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ad and especially after the Rebellion of Bar Kochba in 135 ad, the split between synagogue and church became complete.
After this profound division, it appears that the Christians no longer visited the synagogue, and presumably worshipped exclusively on the first day of the week.
No Change of Principle
The early Christians thought of themselves as ‘the new Israel’, the ‘Israel of God’ (cf. Gal. 6:16). They understood Christ to be the fulfillment of the Old Testament, not its destruction,26 and the God of Israel to be their God. B. B. Warfield noted how the New Testament writers did not think that their doctrine of God was alien in any way to the Old Testament:
... its writers felt no incongruity whatever between their doctrine of the Trinity and the Old Testament conception of God. The New Testament writers certainly were not conscious of being ‘setters forth of strange gods’. To their own apprehension they worshipped and proclaimed just the God of Israel and they laid no less stress than the Old Testament itself upon His unity (John 18:3; 1 Cor. 8:4; 1 Tim. 2:5)....
Without apparent misgiving they take over Old Testament passages and apply them to Father, Son, and Spirit indifferently. Obviously they understand themselves, and wish to be understood, as setting forth in the Father, Son and Spirit just the one God that the God of the Old Testament revelation is...27
Granted that they saw themselves as worshipping the same God and expounding the same Torah as the Jews, we would not expect to find them denying or ignoring a basic creation ordinance such as Sabbath worship and rest. And a careful reading of the New Testament text shows this, in fact, to be the case.
While, following their Lord, they did reject the burdensome ‘works’ righteousness’ interpretation placed on the Sabbath by the Pharisaic party of their day,28 nevertheless, they invited believers in Christ as Messiah to enter with them into the true Sabbath rest won by the risen Christ for them (see Heb. 4:1-11, which along with Heb. 3:7-19 constitute a meditation and explication of the real meaning of the Sabbath through Ps. 95).
After careful study of numerous relevant New Testament texts, B. B. Warfield writes:
The Sabbath came out of Christ’s hands, we see then, not despoiled of any of its authority or robbed of any of its glory, but rather enhanced in both authority and glory. Like the other commandments it was cleansed of all that was local or temporary in the modes in which it had hitherto been commended to God’s people in their isolation as a nation, and stood forth in its universal ethical content. Among the changes in its external form which it thus underwent was a change in the day of its observance. No injury was thus done the Sabbath as it was commended to the Jews; rather a new greatness was brought to it.29
Warfield shows that although:
... we have no record of a commandment of our Lord’s requiring a change in the day of the observance of the Sabbath .... By their actions, nevertheless, both our Lord and his apostles appear to commend the first day of the week to us as the Christian Sabbath. It is not merely that our Lord rose from the dead on that day. A certain emphasis seems to be placed precisely upon the fact that it was on the first day of the week that he rose. This is true of all the accounts of his rising.30
After discussing various resurrection appearance texts in the Gospel of John (which occurred on successive first days of the week), Warfield concludes:
The appearance is strong that our Lord, having crowded the day of his rising with manifestations, disappeared for a whole week to appear again only on the next Sabbath. George Zabriskie Gray seems justified, therefore, in suggesting that the full effect of our Lord’s sanction of the first day of the week as the appointed day of his meeting with his disciples can be fitly appreciated only by considering with his manifestations also his disappearances. ‘For six whole days between the rising day and its octave he was absent.’ Is it possible to exaggerate the effect of this blank space of time, in fixing and defining the impressions received through his visits?31
There are three passages in the writings of the Apostle Paul which some have interpreted to mean an actual change of principle, thereby loosing Christians from any obligation to observe one day out of seven as a day of rest (Rom. 14: 5-6; Gal. 4: 9-11; Col. 2: 16-17).
The last one, for instance, states:
‘Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.’
Robert L. Dabney, nineteenth-century American Southern Pres-byterian theologian, discusses these texts in careful detail.32 As regards Colossians 2:16, for example, Dabney demonstrates that the Christian Sabbath or ‘Lord’s Day’ was not intended in ‘the sabbath days’ alluded to here by Paul:
The word [Sabbath] was also a common name for all the Jewish festivals, including even the whole sabbatical year, with new-moons, passovers, and such like holy days.... Hence the apostle’s mention of ‘sabbath days’ does not certainly prove that he alluded to the seventh day particularly... we know that he did not intend the Lord’s day, because the early writers never apply that name to it.33
As to why the perpetual Sabbath did not ‘...pass away with the pass-over and the other types’, he adds:
...The Jewish Sabbath was a sign, and also something else. Its witnessing use has passed away for Jews, so far as it was to them a sign of their exodus, their peculiar theocratic covenant and their title to the land of Canaan. But its other uses, as a means of grace and sign of heaven, remain for them and for all.... It was in full force before the typical ceremonies of Moses.
It was enjoined on Gentiles, who had no business with those ceremonies. It had its permanent, moral and spiritual use before Moses came. God then placed an additional significance on it for a particular purpose. When the typical dispensation passed away, then this temporary use of the Sabbath fell off, and the original institution remains. God’s day is now to us just what it was to Adam, Abel, Enoch, Noah and Abraham.34
Warfield says much the same concerning the indifference of Colo-ssians 2:16 to Jewish ceremonial usages as ‘the shadow of the things to come’ (or that of Galatians 4:10 to the observance of ‘days and months and seasons and years’):
In thus emancipating his readers from the shadow-ordinances of the Old Dispensation, Paul has no intention whatever, however, of impairing for them the obligations of the moral law, summarily comprehended in the Ten Commandments.... He knew, to be sure, how to separate the eternal substance of these precepts from the particular form in which they were published to Israel....
Paul would be dealing with the Fourth Commandment precisely as he deals with the Fifth [i.e. ‘Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right’ – Eph. 6:2], if he treated the shadow-Sabbath as a matter of indifference and brought the whole obligation of the commandment to bear upon keeping holy to the Lord the new Lord’s Day, the monument of the second and better creation.
That this was precisely what he did, and with him the whole Apostolic Church, there seems no room to question. And the meaning of that is that the Lord’s Day is placed in our hands, by the authority of the Apostles of Christ, under the undiminished sanction of the eternal law of God.’35
Francis N. Lee traces the post-apostolic history of the Christian Sabbath in the Patristic, Medieval, and Reformed Church. The interested reader is referred to his volume for the details.36
QUESTIONS FOR STUDY
1. When is the word ‘holy’ first used in the Bible?
2. How do you understand God’s ‘resting’?
3. Did the Sabbath pertain only to the Jews or to others? Why or why not?
4. What is the value of rhythms of rest and work for human life?
5. How does Rosenstock-Huessy illustrate the value of Sabbath rhythm for
professional life?
6. How does Sabbath orient us to the future?
7. How could a renewal of faith in creation and in the Creator bring positive
changes in the entire culture?
Foot notes
1. Cassuto, op. cit., 65
2. Leupold, op. cit., 103.
3. Cassuto, op. cit., 63.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid, 61.
6. Ibid., 62.
7. Ibid., 64.
8. Aalders, op. cit., 76.
9. Cassuto, op. cit., 64.
10. Ratzinger, op. cit., 26, 27.
11. William Still, Rhythms of Rest and Work (Didasko Press: Aberdeen, 1985).
12. A lead article in Time magazine (December 17, 1990) charted the widespread inability of many people to sleep and relax, under the title ‘Too much to do, Too little rest.’ It gave five suggestions to deal with stress and lack of ability to rest, but among them did not mention the one that would have been the most helpful in restoring the God-ordained balance or rhythm for human work and rest: keeping the Sabbath day holy.
13. See Chapter VIII, ‘The Rhythm of Peace or Our ‘Today’ in The Christian Future: Or The Modern Mind Outrun (Harper Torchbook: New York, 1966), 198-243.
14. Ibid., 202. He immediately adds: ‘She [the soul] accepts her many weekday conflicts or trends because she no longer has to fear them as curses but may accept them as her wealth. She may do so because she proves to herself, on the holiday, her ultimate freedom from every one of them, by communion, by fellowship. Holidays are the mortar of society.’
15. Ibid., 199.
16. Ibid., 205.
17. Ibid., 204, 205.
18. Ibid., 205.
19. Ratzinger, op. cit., 27, 28.
20. The Westminster Confession of Faith: An Authentic Modern Version (Summertown Texts: Signal Mountain, TN, 1992 reprint), 62.
21. Rev. A. A. Bonar, Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray M’Cheyne, 539.
22. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action From Augustus to Augustine (Oxford University Press: London, 1974). In his Preface, Professor Cochrane noted the Christians’ opposition to the classical Graeco-Roman worship of the state as the final value and ultimate for human life. This classical exaltation (or deification) of the secular state, was considered by the Christians to be ‘the grossest of superstitions’. According to Cochrane: ‘The Christians traced this superstition to the acceptance of a defective logic, the logic of classical “naturalism”, to which they ascribed the characteristic vitia of the classical world. In this connection it is important to notice that their revolt was not from nature; it was from the picture of nature constructed by classical scientia, together with its implications for practical life.
And what they demanded was a radical revision of first principles as the presupposition to an adequate cosmology and anthropology. The basis for such a revision they held to lie in the logos of Christ, conceived as a revelation, not of “new” truth, but of truth which was as old as the hills and as everlasting. This they accepted as an answer to the promise of illumination and power extended to mankind and, thus, the basis for a new physics, a new ethic and above all, a new logic, the logic of human progress. In Christ, therefore, they claimed to possess a principle of understanding superior to anything existing in the classical world’ (vi).
23. Calvin, Commentary Upon Genesis, Ch. 2, vs. 3 (105, 106).
24. Perhaps the most exhaustive discussion of this change is found in Francis Nigel Lee, The Covenantal Sabbath: The Weekly Sabbath Scripturally and Historically Considered (The Lord’s Day Observance Society: London, 1969). See especially Chapter VII, ‘The New Covenant Sabbath’, pp.191-266.
25. See, for instance, such texts as Acts 13:14, 42; 14:1; 16:13; 17:2, 10; 18:4-11; 19:8-10.
26. See Christ’s own words in Matthew 5:17-20.
27. B. B. Warfield, Biblical Foundations, p. 88.
28. See e.g. Matthew 12:1-9; Luke 13:10-17.
29. B. B. Warfield, ‘The Foundations of the Sabbath in the Word of God’, chapter 35 of Selected Shorter Writings, Vol. I (John E. Meeter, Ed., Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1980), 318, 319.
30. Ibid., 319.
31. Ibid., 320.
32. Robert L. Dabney, ‘The Christian Sabbath: Its Nature, Design and Proper Observance’, in
Discussions: Evangelical and Theological, Vol. I (496-550).
33. Ibid., 527, 528.
34. Ibid., 528, 529.
35. Warfield, op. cit., 321, 323, 324.
36. Lee, op. cit., 239-266. Also Dr Joseph A. Pipa of Westminster Theological Seminary in California has written a comprehensive defence of the Lord’s Day being the Christian Sabbath in his book The Lord’s Day (Christian Focus Publications, 1997). Dr Pipa considers what the Old and New Testaments teach regarding the permanence of the Sabbath, before surveying the views of theologians throughout church history. In addition, he uses several chapters to give guidelines for implementing the biblical requirements of Sabbath-keeping in the modern world.