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What Is the Sabbath?
Longing for Rest
Everyone I know is longing for rest. The teenagers in my life are worn out with studying, extracurriculars, and relational drama. The moms and grandmas are juggling everyone’s schedules while squeezing their own tasks into the margins. My coworkers are putting in extra time and marking the days until the next paid holiday. Our alarms get us up early, our to-do lists keep us up late, and each week brings a fresh set of urgent responsibilities. We are tired. The psalmist didn’t have text messaging or video calls or car repairs, but he knew the same sense of weariness that we do. “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest,” he wrote, “eating the bread of anxious toil” (Ps. 127:2). The must-dos and have-tos of life in 900 BC were just as pressing as they are in our day. But, he continued, the Lord “gives to his beloved sleep” (Ps. 127:2).
In a lifetime of “anxious toil,” we need a regular reset. Day after day, the tasks just keep coming, and while the Bible affirms the goodness of work, it also acknowledges its frustrations. “In vain” you fold the laundry and do the dishes, only to face a new pile tomorrow. “In vain” you schedule appointments and meet deadlines, only to confront an overflowing inbox next week. We need rest. Thankfully, the psalmist knew where to find it. It’s a gift from “the Lord” (Ps. 127:1). And it’s a gift particularly to his people, “his beloved” (Ps. 127:2), the ones he has redeemed. As God’s people, we look to the Lord to establish our work and relationships (Ps. 127:1, 3–5), and we look to him to give us periods of rest (Ps. 127:2).
So where can we sign up for regular rest from the hand of our gracious God? Where do we receive this gift? We receive it in the Sabbath. Psalm 127 isn’t merely a song about the daily grind and our biological need for eight hours of sleep every night. That’s a tune our unbelieving neighbors could sing without regard for the Lord. Psalm 127 is a psalm of ascent, one of the songs Old Testament believers would sing together on their way to worship. These lines about yielding our labor to the Lord and looking to him for refreshment echo the pattern of the Sabbath. They’re about more than sleep for the body; they’re about respite for the soul.
Leave your anxious toil, beloved ones, and enjoy God’s Sabbath rest.
Sabbath Rest
Megan Hill, Winfree Brisley
This volume of TGC's Disciplines of Devotion series invites women to stir their affections for God by cultivating the biblical practice of Sabbath rest.
Sabbath’s Foundations
The word Sabbath may sound curiously old-fashioned. Maybe it’s a word you associate only with Moses’s Ten Commandments or with laws governing colonial New England. It may seem like a hopelessly dated idea or a harshly Pharisaical one. But Sabbath appears throughout both the Old and New Testaments, and Sabbath observance continues to be practiced by believers throughout the world today.
What’s more, the Bible consistently presents the Sabbath as the Lord’s gift to the weary.
Simply defined, the Sabbath is one day each week that God sets aside for his redeemed people to rest from their daily work in order to worship and enjoy him.
To understand the Sabbath and how the Lord would have us observe it, we need to turn to Scripture. In a brief survey of key passages in the Bible, we’ll see that the priority of the Sabbath stretches throughout the story of redemption, from the beginning of time all the way into our eternal future.
Creation (Gen. 2:1–3)
The Christian practice of Sabbath rest has foundations that were laid long before our days of smartphones and remote work. They were laid before the time of Christ and before the time of Moses. They were laid even before “thorns and thistles” sprang up to make our work in a fallen world more toilsome and less rewarding (Gen. 3:18). Sabbath rest has its foundations in creation. On the seventh day of creation, “God finished his work that he had done, and he rested . . . from all his work that he had done” (Gen. 2:2). Having created the world and everything in it, God rested. And he established that day of rest as a sacred day of blessing going forward: “God blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation” (Gen. 2:3). Beginning with the first Sabbath in the history of the world, God and all his creation enjoyed holy rest.
Manna (Ex. 16)
In the wilderness, too, God’s people observed the Sabbath. They looked to him to order their work, their worship, and their time. He graciously provided food for them—“bread from heaven”—that they only had to collect and eat (Ex. 16:4). But even the minimal labor of scooping bread into baskets had God-given boundaries of rest: “ ‘Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, which is a Sabbath, there will be none.’ . . . So the people rested on the seventh day” (Ex. 16:26, 30). After creation and even before the law of Moses, God gave his people “a day of solemn rest” (Ex. 16:23).
Mosaic Law (Ex. 20:8–11; 31:12–17; Deut. 5:12–15)
At Sinai, when God wrote his law in stone, one of his commandments concerned rest and worship on the Sabbath: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Ex. 20:8; cf. Deut. 5:12–15). This commandment has both positive and negative aspects. The people were to “remember” and “keep” the day, doing “all [their] work” on the other days, and they were to “not do any work” and require no work from others on the Sabbath (Deut. 5:8–10). Later, the Lord expanded on his Sabbath command and called it “a covenant forever” for his people to observe “throughout their generations” (Ex. 31:16). Because of the pattern of the Lord’s own day of rest at creation (Ex. 20:11), God’s people rest individually and corporately on the Sabbath from their daily work. As Christopher Watkin explains, “God’s rest [at creation] makes it clear that work is not all there is for God, and we know from Exodus 20 that he doesn’t want it to be all there is for us either.”1
Prophets (Isa. 58:13–14)
The prophets regularly speak about the Sabbath, and Isaiah has one of the most beautiful pictures of the Sabbath in all Scripture. Writing to a people snared by sin and threatened by their enemies, he offered them the joy of God’s rest:
If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath,
from doing your pleasure on my holy day,
and call the Sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth. (Isa. 58:13–14)
Sabbath rest is ordained by God (“my holy day”), directed by God (“not going your own ways”), and blessed by God (“you shall take delight”). When God’s people honor him on this day, he refreshes their souls, making them “ride on the heights of the earth.”
Jesus (Matt. 12:1–14; Mark 2:23–3:6; Luke 14:1–6; John 5:1–17)
Sabbath rest isn’t just an Old Testament practice. In his earthly ministry, Jesus honored the Sabbath day, resting from his daily work and prioritizing corporate worship (Luke 4:16), and his disciples did too (Luke 23:56). He did God’s will on the Sabbath, healing and feeding people and ministering to their souls (Matt. 12:1–14; Mark 2:23–3:6; John 5:1–17). He affirmed the Sabbath’s goodness (Mark 2:27). Additionally, he declared his identity as God by calling himself “lord of the Sabbath” (Matt. 12:8). Jesus’s practice of the Sabbath was perfect, and we honor and imitate him when we delight in the day he made for us.
Sabbath rest is part of our weekly life now, and it will characterize our life in eternity too.
New Testament Church (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10)
With Christ’s resurrection on the first day of the week, the Sabbath experienced a shift. Old Testament believers set apart the seventh day, shaping their week in light of creation; New Testament believers set apart the first day, shaping their week in light of the resurrection. “The first day of every week” (1 Cor. 16:2; cf. Acts 20:7) became the day of fellowship and worship—the Christian Sabbath—for God’s new covenant people. Even the apostle John, exiled on the island of Patmos, observed the Sabbath. He received his vision of the things to come when he set aside his ordinary tasks and was “in the Spirit on the Lord’s day” (Rev. 1:10). As God’s people celebrate Christ’s resurrection and honor his day, we receive his presence and blessing.
Sabbath’s Future
Sabbath rest is part of our weekly life now, and it will characterize our life in eternity too. In fact, our practice of Sabbath on this earth anticipates and prepares for the Sabbath to come. The author of Hebrews connects the Old Testament Sabbath with our Sabbath observance today and then points ultimately to the Sabbath rest of heaven (Heb. 4:1–13). In the new heavens and earth, believers “rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!” (Rev. 14:13).
The trajectory of Scripture is not that the Sabbath becomes less important through redemptive history. Rather, it becomes increasingly more important until eventually it becomes all there is—that great, eternal Sabbath rest when God’s people will gather in their Lord’s near presence, cease all their earthly work, and worship him forever (Rev. 7:9–12).
Notes:
- Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 79.
This article is adapted from Sabbath Rest by Megan Hill.
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