Someone once said that the Sabbath itself has been given very little rest. Squabbling Christians, fighting over how to keep or not keep the day, have gained the Sabbath a black eye. Nothing names this disobedience better than Sabbath breaking.

This situation is all the more lamentable because the Sabbath ought to be something that provokes the world to jealousy. We have a God that gives good gifts to His people, and one of those gifts is a day marked by celebration, rest, and refreshment--“…that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the son of thy handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed” (Ex. 23:13).

Before getting into some of the things are we are supposed to do on the Sabbath, we should first mark what the Sabbath does for us. The fact that we think the Sabbath consists of a pile of religious works to check off reveals that we have it exactly backwards. In his numerous clashes with the Pharisees on this subject, Jesus continually emphasizes that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath (Mk. 2:27 ). God didn’t create in six days, modeling the work week for Adam, and then draw up a list of non-vocational works for Adam to attend to on the seventh. God rested. So we see that the fundamental orientation of the seventh day, and later the first day after Jesus recreated the heavens and the earth and rose from the dead, is that of rest. In the old covenant, anticipating by faith the advent of Christ, the saints looked forward to this day at the end of the week when they would meet in synagogues and the temple to worship Yahweh—“The LORD loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob” (Ps. 87:2). In the New Covenant, we begin every week with the Sabbath, and having met with God and rejoiced in His victory over the world, flesh and devil, we head out into the world, a salty people, to make disciples of all nations.

The people of God are supposed rest from their vocations just as God did (Gen. 2:2-3). Part of the reason for all the disagreement in the church is due to missing this point. We take the word “works” and apply it to all sorts of things—calorie counts, distances traveled, money spent, public activities like movies, secular music, whatever. Scripturally, Sabbath breaking is always defined vocationally. Jeremiah told people to stop transporting goods (Jer. 17:22 ) and Nehemiah shut the city gates because men had an oddly familiar 24/7 workweek where Mammon required his slaves to make a buck on the Sabbath. He still does.

One of the beauties and privileges of the fourth commandment comes in the opportunity to be like God. We get to rest, but we also get to give rest. "Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor they stranger that is within thy gates" (Ex. 20:9-10). The bulk of the word count here is devoted to detailing all the people and animals that get a day off. Heads of households, employers, principalities and powers are required to give their people rest. This means that husbands should be sure their wives get a delightful Sabbath. We know that priests profane the Sabbath by working on it and are blameless (Matt. 12:5), and that you ought to pull your ox out of the ditch if it falls in on the Sabbath (Lk. 14:15 ). The command to rest from vocation is always governed by love, a love that has man as its object. Jesus rebukes the Pharisees who were peeved with him for healing on the Sabbath day.  He points out that they would circumcise a man on the Sabbath day to keep the law, but they objected to his healing the lame man on the Sabbath.  Apparently if someone was born on Friday, the priests would circumcise him on the Sabbath (fulfilling the law by circumcising on the eighth day).  Although the Sabbath was supposed to be a rest day, here one law took precedence over another, fulfilling the summary of the law, love. The comparison between circumcising on the Sabbath and healing is somewhat cryptic.  Choosing circumcision over rest requires discerning a deeper right, obeying one law at the expense of another (and we have no indication that the Pharisees' choice to circumcise was a bad one).  So how is Jesus' healing a Sabbath-keeping choice?  He was keeping it by giving rest. How is healing a paralytic giving rest?  Ask the man who was paralyzed for 40 years.  Apparently it couldn't wait for the workweek.  Jesus' astonishing wisdom shows that the end of the law is love, and this one example of how loving God and your neighbor sums up and governs all law keeping. 

As a gift, the Sabbath should delight us. In Leviticus 23, God lays out six feasts that Israel was supposed to keep. This should tell us something about the law of God—unlike the code of Hammurabi, the living God commands us to feast. The first feast is the weekly Sabbath: “six days shall work be done: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of rest, an holy convocation…” (23:3). The people of God are warned against forsaking meeting together, and our meetings are marked by joy and love (Jude 12). Just as Jesus rose on the first day and appeared to the disciples on the first day, so the apostles and early church met on the first day of the week to worship (1 Cor. 16:2). This worship regularly occurred such that John writes in passing that he “was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day” (Rev. 1:10) and expects his readers to know which day he meant. While temple worship was meticulously regulated by the law which regulated how the offerings and Levitical worship had to be conducted, the worship that occurred throughout Israel in the synagogues was largely unregulated. We know that much of it was patterned off of temple worship, but sacrifice was only permitted in Jerusalem . The people of God got together to sing, pray, tithe, and celebrate the goodness and grace of God throughout their towns just as we do today.