Sabbath
The Seventh Day
The seventh day is the first thing in all of Scripture that God calls holy. God finishes all the creating from the other days, and then He stops. The first six days each end the same way, with evening and morning. The seventh day has no ending. The text leaves it open.
The rest of the Sabbath day is not only for God. It is commanded to be for you, your son and daughter, your servants, the foreigner living in your town, and even your animals (Exodus 20:10). In a world where people toiled and ate from the sweat of their brow, God wrote a law that stopped everyone’s striving on the same day, including those at the bottom.
Let’s march forward several thousand years. Jesus, the Son of God, lies in a tomb on the Sabbath (a Saturday in Judaism), the day God had set apart and called holy.
The Untouchable, the Immortal ruler of all creation, had not only been killed, but killed in a humiliating fashion. Beaten, mocked, stripped naked, pierced by nails and spear, and buried. He was in the tomb, and it was finally over, on the holy day, of all days.
Consider that day from the enemy’s side. We are told that Satan entered Judas before the betrayal (Luke 22:3). We are also told that the rulers of this age did not understand what they were doing, because if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:8). The victory lasted less than a day and a half, and cost satan everything.
Killing Jesus did not make us think less of Him. What looked like a symbol of weakness became a symbol of the greatest courage. Our Creator came down into His broken world, and allowed Himself to be at the mercy of His world’s broken inhabitants. He suffered as His creation has suffered, and He suffered worse than most ever will. That is why Hebrews says we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). He drank from the cup that no one else could. Only the death and resurrection of the Creator could redeem the creation.
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Whatever the enemy was hoping to accomplish, he only tightened our bond with the Lord. He was like us, yet not like us. Mortal, yet perfect. He bore the agonies of the very worst sinner, yet was sinless. There is no part of our suffering that is foreign to Him.
He changed everything, including the Sabbath.
He did not abolish it and He did not simply keep it. He kept stepping over the fence people had built around it. He healed on it, He let His disciples pick grain on it, and when they called Him out for it He said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27). Then He said that the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:8). Matthew sets that scene immediately after Jesus says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). The invitation tells where the source of rest actually lives.
Paul says it plainly. The Sabbath is a shadow of the things to come, and the substance belongs to Christ (Colossians 2:16–17). The day was but a symbol for the real person. And Hebrews says there still remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, and that whoever enters His rest has also rested from his own works (Hebrews 4:9–10).
St. Augustine noticed the same open ending we started with, sixteen hundred years ago. He closed his Confessions praying for what he called the peace of the Sabbath, “which has no evening,” because everything else in creation was given a morning and an evening and will pass away. Later, in City of God, he wrote that our seventh day will not be closed by an evening at all, but will open into the Lord’s day as an eighth and eternal day, made so by the resurrection of Christ.
So the day was never the point. That day was a rehearsal for an eternal rest we can now walk in at any time. Jesus did not shrink the Sabbath down to a rule or throw it out as an old covenant relic. He became it, and He made it infinite. That peace is always open. And only in Him can we find it.
Meditation: Sabbath
May you have His peace.
Augustine, Confessions, Book XIII, ch. 35–36.
Augustine, City of God, Book XXII, ch. 30.
