Sabbath in Scripture
As a Church, we believe in the value of the Sabbath; a day set apart each week in which we abstain from work and make space for Jesus as we rest. By large, the concept of Sabbath is antithetical to the American culture of hustle and go-go-go. Unfortunately, the Church and Christ-followers, including us, have succumbed to this addiction to business. But the Hebrew scriptures, the life of Jesus, and the testimony of the early church bear witness to the value of practicing the Sabbath.
The Genesis poem tells us that the Creator of the Cosmos spent six days bringing order from chaos and shaping reality as we know it. On the seventh day, He rested from His work, observing the first Sabbath:
“[O]n the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.” – Genesis 2:2–3 (ESV)
This first day of divine rest set a precedent, echoed throughout scripture, that the people of God would set aside a day of the week for prayer and worship. After the Israelites are liberated by God from Egyptian captivity, God instructs the Israelites on how to observe the Sabbath;
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep 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, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” – Exodus 20:8–11 (ESV)
The Sabbath is mentioned no less than eighty times throughout the Hebrew Scriptures shaping the imagination, spirituality, and culture of first-century Israelites. In the first century Palestine that Jesus occupied, the Sabbath was an important practice differentiating the jews from their gentile counterparts. At sundown on Friday night until sundown on Saturday, the Jews ceased all work going as far as creating a robust tradition of regulations to govern their Sabbath. In their honest zeal to be faithful to the instructions of God, the Pharisees had failed to recognize the weight they placed on the back of their communities. In a brief confrontation over picking grain on the Sabbath (considered work), Jesus says to the Pharisees;
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath” –Mark 2:27–28 ESV
This is to say, that the Sabbath is a gift to humanity under the Lordship of Christ.
