Today’s
Scripture Reading (June 19, 2012): Exodus 31
Growing up, if there was one commandment that I came to resent, it was
the fourth commandment. The fourth commandment is the commandment that says
that the Sabbath day must be kept holy. The idea is that there is six days to
get all of the stuff done, but the Sabbath is to be set apart – it is supposed
to be a different kind of day. But my
problem with the day was the way that the leaders of the church seemed to
define it. To them, this commandment seemed to mean that you could not do
anything fun on Sunday. When I went to church camps, sports were forbidden on
Sunday because it needed to be kept holy and set apart. And as a kid it just
seemed to be a boring day. As I grew up, I began to realize that most of what people
telling me what it was that I could do on Sunday were misunderstanding the
fourth commandment. And I discovered a couple things.
One of the things that I discovered was that the original Sabbath was
Saturday (and that is the reason why the old style calendars start with Sunday
and end with Saturday. I have calendars that start with Monday and end with
Sunday but, to be honest, they just succeed in confusing me.) So the first
question that people misunderstood was the day that we called the Sabbath. And
they missed the reason that the Christian Church changed the day. The reason
why Christians started to meet on Sunday was because Jesus rose from death to
life on Sunday. And in the age of Christ and of grace, it is not just the
Sabbath that was holy – every day was holy.
A second misunderstanding that I
discovered about the Sabbath was that Jesus did not agree with the religious
leaders of his day on what the Sabbath was all about (and I was pretty sure
that he did not agree with the religious leaders of my day either.) In fact,
the fourth commandment is the only commandment that Jesus never restated in his
teaching. And what they had misunderstood and what we still misunderstand is
the purpose of the Sabbath. The Sabbath recognizes that God is God and that he
is in control. And while it is so tempting to think, even today, that we need
to work seven days a week to survive, God says “trust me, let me show you that
you are in my hands and that I am still in control.” The Sabbath was a day that
we could pause and recognize that God was still the one that was in control.
But a second purpose of the Sabbath was that we were made for the Sabbath. We
have proven that to really live healthy lives, we all need a day off, a day
when we do not work and just pause to enjoy everything around us that God has
created.
We are still a people in need of the Sabbath. And my prayer is that we
will experience the kind of Sabbath that honors God and yet still revives us –
his creation.
Tomorrow’s
Scripture Reading: Exodus 32
No comments:
Post a Comment