Keep the Sabbath Holy

We're working on a series through the book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament, and we're nearing the end, which I hope you've been enjoying. I'll get us actually to open up to Nehemiah 13 now, and we'll read from that. You'll notice that we're reading a set passage. We're not reading the entire chapter because, as I mentioned last week when we started with chapter 13, the chapter itself is neatly divided into three separate incidents, and each of those incidents has a very particular meaning and intention to it. It teaches us, it teaches God's people something.

So we're going to be reading the second of the three events that happens in chapter 13. And there's one theme that you'll definitely pick up on, and that is a teaching on the Sabbath day. What it means to keep God's day holy or the Sabbath day holy. So let's jump in and we'll read Nehemiah chapter 13 from verses 15 to 22. This is Nehemiah saying, in those days, I saw men in Judah treading wine presses on the Sabbath and bringing in grain and loading it on donkeys, together with wines, grapes, figs, and all other kinds of loads.

And they were bringing all this into Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Therefore, I warned them against selling food on that day. Men from Tyre who lived in Jerusalem were bringing in fish and all kinds of merchandise and selling them in Jerusalem on the Sabbath to the people of Judah. I rebuked the nobles of Judah and said to them, what is this wicked thing you are doing desecrating the Sabbath day? Didn't your forefathers do the same things so that our God brought all this calamity upon us and upon this city?

Now you're stirring up more wrath against Israel by desecrating the Sabbath. When evening came, when evening shadows fell on the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I ordered the doors to be shut and not open until the Sabbath was over. I stationed some of my own men at the gates so that no load could be brought in on the Sabbath day. Once or twice, the merchants and sellers of all kinds of goods spent the night outside Jerusalem. But I warned them and said, why do you spend the night by the wall?

If you do this again, I will lay hands on you. From that time on, they no longer came on the Sabbath. Surprise, surprise. Then I commanded the Levites to go purify themselves and go and guard the gates in order to keep the Sabbath day holy. Remember me for this also, my God, and show mercy to me according to your great love.

So far, ending our reading. What we find in this passage is, again, we see Nehemiah having been away for a long time, for some say up to seven years, back in Persia after he had retired from his civic, political, religious duties as the governor of Jerusalem. Having built the wall, having restored Jerusalem, having done some amazing reformation of the spiritual life of the people of Jerusalem and the Jews in general, he goes away to Persia. He hears things aren't going too well back home, and he returns, and he sees it's a mess. People had regressed back into old habits.

We saw last week how Tobiah the Ammonite, the personal enemy of Nehemiah and general enemy of the Jews, was living in the temple building itself, in the storage rooms. To buy out the Ammonite, who God had said no Ammonite, no Moabite may enter into worship with the Israelites. He was living in the temple building itself. Religious tolerance had won the day. He was a family member of the high priest Eliashib, and Eliashib gave him the room to live in.

Against God's strict commandment and regarding the worship of Him, we see there's a downgrading of God's holiness. And this morning, we see another backslide from God's people. You might remember, we've dealt with this a few weeks ago in the past, that years before, when the people had been moved by Nehemiah's revolution, when the people had been so moved by this and were really close to God, they came together in a grand majestic praise and worship time. And they read God's law, they loved God's law, and it was like manna from heaven for their souls. And they covenanted together.

They promised together that on that day, they would worship God rightly. And among some of these promises, some of these covenants that were made, remember this one in chapter 10, verse 31. We can even turn there ourselves right now, a few pages back. Chapter 10, verse 31. This is what this great assembly of God's people promised towards one another and towards God in chapter 10, verse 31.

When the neighbouring peoples bring merchandise or grain to sell on the Sabbath, we will not buy from them on the Sabbath or any other holy day. They make this promise before God. They make this promise in God's temple, in response to God's command. But hang on a minute. What does Nehemiah see when he gets back?

Verse 15 says there's people bringing in heaps of grain. There's people treading wine, treading grapes to make wine, loading stuff onto donkeys, figs and all kinds of produce is being sold in Jerusalem. When? On the Sabbath day. Verse 16 says men from Tyre who had lived in Jerusalem were bringing in fish and all kinds of merchandise, selling them in Jerusalem on the Sabbath day to the people of Judah.

People are working on the Sabbath day, the very thing that they said they would stop doing. And so, again, what do we see Nehemiah doing? Nehemiah gets angry. He gets so angry and he rebukes them.

He tells them how displeasing this is to God, how displeasing and disrespectful it is to the Holy One who had brought them back from the land of slavery, from exile rather. And secondly, he makes plans. He starts immediately by shutting the gates on the Sabbath day. He makes plans and he says, well, if you guys aren't willing to do this, I'm going to make orders for people not to be able to come into the city to sell.

Why is this such a big deal to Nehemiah? Why is he so angry at people working on the Sabbath? And the question perhaps we need to ask ourselves this morning is, as Christians, do we need to keep the Sabbath holy? Do we need to be protective like Nehemiah was of that day? It's useful for us, therefore, to stop a little bit today and to reflect on the scriptures and on how we ought to see, theologically at least, the Sabbath day.

So allow me to paint a little bigger picture of what is happening here in Nehemiah 13. In order for us to understand what God's intended purpose was, we have to go back to Genesis one and two. This is where God creates humanity, He creates the cosmos, and we get a glimpse of the original intent for what God calls the Sabbath day. And so if we quickly flick to Genesis one and two, we'll have a good understanding of what's going on here. We see in Genesis one, if you skim through it, that God in six days creates the heavens and the earth.

God creates the heavens and the earth and all that is in it. On the last day, that sixth day, God creates mankind. It is the very last thing that God creates, mankind. And then Genesis two says, verse one, the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day, God had finished the work He had been doing, and so on the seventh day He rested from all His work.

And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it He rested from all the work of creating that He had done. We then find in Exodus, the next book of the Bible, in Exodus chapter 20 where the 10 commandments are given to God's people that we, as God's people, are to rest on the Sabbath day. It says in Exodus 20, verse 8, for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, all that is in them, but He rested on the Sabbath day. The command to rest on the Sabbath day, therefore, we see, is grounded in the example of God in His creation work at the beginning of the world. And so we see in Genesis two that God blesses this day and He makes it holy.

So immediately that is telling God's people something. It is telling us that there's something special going on here, that this is something significant. And what is significant about this is that this day is important to God. By making it holy, He makes it set apart. It is important to God.

Now if you've been a Christian for a while, you may have heard this before. You may have heard that there is a day in a week that we are to rest, where we are to come aside from our work weeks and where we are to draw close to God and His people. Now you have heard this before and you may be perfectly aware of God's pattern being made clear here, but what is not so obvious is the fact that Adam and Eve created on the very last day of God's work. So not only on the last day, on the sixth day, but they are the last created being according to Genesis one. Day six is finished with humanity.

And the very next moment, humanity meets God is on the seventh day. Do you realise that? The very first instance where Adam and Eve meet God is when God is resting from His work. God's very nature revealed to humanity personally for that first time was on the day of rest. It wasn't on a workday.

It wasn't during God's week. And now this has led theologians like Karl Barth and Old Testament scholars like Klaus Westermann to conclude that creation's purpose, creation's purpose, including the purpose of mankind, is to participate with God in His rest. You see, God didn't rest at the start of the week and then go about working. His work was done so that He may enjoy His rest spent with His creation. Westermann writes this.

He says, God's blessing bestows on this special holy solemn day a power which makes it fruitful for human existence. The blessing gives the day, this special day, this seventh day, which is a day of rest according to God's command, the power to stimulate, to animate, to enrich, and to give fullness to life. It is not the day in itself that is blessed, but rather the day in its significance for mankind. It is not the day itself that is blessed, but rather the day in its significance for mankind. What we see in Genesis therefore is the institution of a rhythm of life that God decreed for His creation to be of significant importance.

On the very first Sabbath, see what? We see humanity communing with God. We see humanity understanding and exploring God's created world, communing with the rest of creation. We see in this beautiful image, it's like the whole of creation becoming God's playground after He set it up, and the day is spent with everyone having a chance to play together. That's the image we get.

And God says in Exodus 20, this is special. This is significant. This is holy. It is set apart from the other things. This is why the Bible, this is why the scriptures so fiercely go and protect this day.

This rhythm of life says that human living is meant to include something more than labour, something more than work, something more than the industrious struggle for the mastery over this day is to delight in creation and in God. And so in forming a good theology of the Sabbath, we see there is a quantitative dimension of rest, a certain pattern that dictates how much we must work and how much we must rest. And this is also then held intention by a qualitative dimension, a certain quality of life that God has instituted which gives motivation to why we must work and rest. Now let me explain it to you in other words. We see that there is a time to rest.

There's six days, one day off. Six days on, one day off. There's a time to rest, but then we also see there is a reason to rest. Out of seven days, God spent the majority of His time working, but He rested on that last day. And so we see, on the one hand, the sheer weight of time spent in work outweighs the time of rest, but we also see the weight of importance that lies with this final day of rest, which is especially blessed, which is especially sanctified.

Work is good, but rest is special. Let me ask us this: as we see Nehemiah and his frustration, as we hear from God's word about this institution of this rhythm, how do you view your Sabbath? How do you view this Sabbath? Do you place significant importance on it?

Do you think about it? Or do you simply say, well, it's just so happened to work out very nicely today that it happens to be the time when God's people might come together. It so happens to be that I'm not busy today. And now I will rest. Now I will enter into this thing that God has set out for me.

We see in Nehemiah that he doesn't enter into a Sabbath understanding in this way. He plans for the Sabbath. He plans beforehand. The night before the Sabbath, he closes the gates. He says, it's not going to happen, guys.

We're not going to work today. He plans to have his rest. If it means that he hasn't done his grocery shopping or whatever, and we'll get to some of these things later, he doesn't create an environment where he may fall into that. Do we place significance on the Sabbath or do we take it as it comes? And secondly, do we view our Sabbath day as being of importance to the worship of God, to the communion with God.

If the pinnacle of God's week of creation, if God's week of creation and the pinnacle of it was the Sabbath day, where He could spend time with Adam and Eve, the rest of creation, does that not give us the motivation to spend our Sabbath with Him? And so on the Sabbath, the time of rest, we see it being blessed, and we see that it was given the mandate to be fruitful and life giving, communion to provide fellowship with God and His people and with the rest of creation. But then we see the next chapter, my NIV Bible says, the fall of man. Sin enters. Genesis three happens and we see in this story the same thing that would haunt the rest of us for the next however long.

We choose to love ourselves over God. We choose pride over humility and we think we will do it our way. From that moment, we struggle with the effects of sin and the corruption it has in our lives. And it starts corrupting work immediately. We find out that God tells Adam, work is going to become hard for you, Adam.

Before working in the garden would have been a joy. Now God calls it toil. It will become hard for you. Currently, our church council, our elders are working through drawing up position descriptions and interviews and all that sort of stuff for part-time workers in our church. We spent ages writing position description, Jason and I.

We should have just deleted all those paragraphs and written toil down. What will I be doing? You'll be toiling. How long? Well, you'll be toiling.

It would have saved me a lot of hours, a lot of time, I'm sure. The result of sin is that work becomes harder than it was meant to be. It's less fun. It's less wholesome, and it makes the Sabbath rest, therefore, more important. We also see another effect of sin and that is the corruption of self-love, and that is particularly damaging when we come to talk about the Sabbath day.

Believe it or not, the purpose of rest lies in the heart of mankind, not in our body so much or our bodies needing rest. The Sabbath is a matter of the heart. There's an internal focus to this rest that's built into us. We do not rest because it feels good necessarily in itself. We rest because it gives us a refreshment of heart and mind.

And why we allow ourselves to rest comes from a self-love which is good. We allow ourselves to rest because we care about ourselves and that is good. That is not bad in itself. Scripture says that there is indeed a thing called self-love that is healthy. Jesus, in Matthew 22, verse 39, says that we are to love our neighbour as we love ourself.

And the assumption is we already do that and that it is reasonable to love ourself. Low self-esteem, low self-regard is unhealthy. It is not God intended. So there is this thing called self-love which is healthy and good. It is reasonable and fitting for us to do it.

However, there is a self-love or a corruption of that that is manifested in selfishness and pride which we as Christians are to avoid. Galatians five, verse 26 and Philippians two, verse three talks about these things. These sins of excessive self-love corrupt so many things in our life. It corrupts our relationships. It corrupts our marriages.

It treats other people, and it includes a corruption of this Sabbath rest. God's intended purpose for Sabbath rest is what theologians call autotelic. That is, the rest is an end in itself. We sin when we make rest and recreation a means to an end. Instead of being masters of rest, and I'll explain this a little bit more, instead of being able to choose when and how we participate in it, mankind becomes slaves to it.

We either idolise rest and we view it as something that we need to work for, and therefore I will work crazy hours to earn enough money to have a beautiful holiday sometime in the future. We idolise that Kardashian holiday and we earn and we work and we work and we work in order to get that and we idolise work. We idolise that rest. Or we idolise rest by having too much of it and becoming lazy. We spend too much time in rest thinking we will find purpose and health and fulfilment somehow in it and forgetting at the same time that work is meant to take up more of our time than rest.

Forgetting that in this abuse of self-love, we will do as little as possible to get by and sometimes even depend on others to help us maintain that lifestyle. And that can do all sorts of stuff. We can talk about dull. We can talk about cycles of dependency in that way, is an idolising of that rest. So when the idolatry of rest comes to rule over an individual, it loses its God-intended purpose and it can drive an individual, ironically, to restlessness.

That pursuit of rest can make us restless. It can cause self-harm because we have this wrong idea of self-love. And this is just as an example, there's a hundred different examples that I could use, but take for example this idea, this phenomenon of online games. Right? And as again, as a young Gen Y sort of guy, I have friends that struggle with this and have struggled with this in the past.

I read an article some time ago about a game called World of Warcraft. You may have heard about that. Here is a classic example of a game intended for rest and recreation, where there have been instances of murder, of suicide, in one case of a baby starving to death as a result of individuals obsessively gaming, obsessively participating in this. Something intended to produce rest from work, a rest found in this Sabbath rhythm of scripture. It becomes a master instead of a servant, and it destroys life.

And then in the West, we have this unique problem that we either work too much in order to be rich or we rest too much because we are rich. And through both, ironically, we destroy our families, we destroy our friendships, we destroy our health and our well-being. And then when we rest, we rest without resting with God. We rest without God. We rest without God's people.

Our understanding of the Sabbath rest is so skewed that we will rather be on a jet ski on the broad water than on our knees before God. We'd rather sleep in till 10am than enjoy God's people whom God delights in. So how are we to overcome this problem of unhealthy self-love which plagues our Sabbath rest? Well, we've seen Nehemiah some very practical good examples perhaps to follow. Firstly, Nehemiah remembers the seriousness of the command.

Nehemiah remembers the seriousness of the command to keep the Sabbath day holy. He tells everybody in verse 18, he tells everyone, you are bringing wrath upon yourselves. Didn't your forefathers do the same thing so that God brought all this calamity upon us and upon His city? Now you are stirring up more wrath against Israel by desecrating the Sabbath. The first thing Nehemiah did was to be mindful that the Sabbath day rhythm exists.

And some of us needs to be mindful of that as well. We need to remember that it is still holy. Nothing has changed. It is still significant. It is still special.

That rhythm still exists for life-giving and life-affirming existence. Some of us may experience God's judgment even on our bad habits regarding the Sabbath. You may work harder. You may try and earn more money. You may earn more money, but you may see that your expenses just get higher and higher and higher.

The judgment of God is that you never reach that Kardashian holiday because you may be forced to rest with bad health. You may be forced to lie in a bed because of a heart attack. Maybe that is God's grace rather than God's judgment or God's disciplining. Nehemiah remembers that God takes the Sabbath rest seriously and so should we. Secondly, we see that Nehemiah makes plans, and we've already touched on that.

Nehemiah sets in motion things so that they are prepared for the Sabbath. He shuts the doors to the city. He made sure that the people of Jerusalem were going to rest whether they thought they needed it or not. So we need to start preparing. We need to start planning.

Whether that be for our Sunday worship the night before, it means that we don't go out till 2am on the Saturday night and then feel too sleepy the next day. If you're tired and you need sleep because you are busy, maybe don't let it roll over to a Sunday. Have that nap on the Saturday. If you're inclined to think that buying groceries on a Sunday is disobedience to the Sabbath principle, buy your groceries in the week leading up to Sunday.

In other words, make intentional plans on how you will spend or enter into that Sabbath rest. Now, I have to be very careful here. We can't be religious. We can't be legalistic about how much buying on a Sunday or on the Sabbath, whatever you choose to make your Sabbath. You know what that means, what that looks like. I think Jesus Christ in the book of Mark showed that He healed the person on the Sabbath.

The religious people said that will be work. How dare He do that? And Jesus said, is it better for a man to be healed on the Sabbath or to sit and do nothing? Jesus healed the man. And He said to them, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

So we have to remember this: that God created and gave us the Sabbath for us to enjoy. It is not to be a master over us, but we have to be mindful of how to enter into this important thing called the Sabbath rest. And then lastly, Nehemiah calls the people to repentance. Verse 22 says that he made the Levites go and purify themselves and then to guard the gates of the city in order to keep the Sabbath day holy. Now the Levites were in on this too.

The Levites were the selected holy men of God. They were to look after the temple. They were to facilitate the worship of God, and they had been involved in this as well. And Nehemiah says, guys, what are you doing? Go and make yourself right with God.

Purify yourselves and now come back and serve God and serve God's people. Protect the gates. Make sure that they're closed on a Sabbath and facilitate the worship of God on the Sabbath day. Friends, if you know that you have not obeyed God's intention regarding this, if you feel the prick of the Holy Spirit working in your life, don't leave it unchanged. Make adjustments to your life.

You will be better off because of it. You will find wholeness in that. Take seriously the beauty of resting in God, with God, with His people. Find beauty in pursuing that significant precious thing that God gave us as a gift. But if you know that you have failed in this, take the example of Nehemiah and purify yourself.

Purify yourself. Get rid of it. Repent of it. Change. But then the truth is as well, God, we guys, we serve a God who is so gracious.

And in 1 John one, verse 4, this is our promise that if we do confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Cleanse. Purify us. And so this morning, if you are moved to acknowledge this as a sin in your life, as a stumbling block, as a weakness in your life, come to the one who provides cleansing. Come to the one who wants to commune with you.

Come to the one who wants to give you rest. Come to me, Jesus said, all of you who are weary and burdened. And I will give you what? I will give you rest. The book of Hebrews so amazingly and powerfully sums up this scripture. And so you see the Sabbath theme all throughout scripture.

And I said before, the people of God, the scriptures hold this powerfully and take it seriously all throughout scripture. But then we come to the book of Hebrews in the New Testament, and it wraps it up and it says, guys, in Jesus Christ, you have received the perfect Sabbath rest. He invites all of us to enter into this new state of existence. This is the promise. This is the joy that you may grasp, that you may strive to remember when you think about your rhythms of life.

How you worship, how you plan, and how you rest. Hebrews 4, verse 9 says this: there remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For anyone who enters God's rest through Jesus Christ also rests from their work, just as God did from His. Let us therefore, he says, make every effort to enter that rest. Let us make every effort to enter that rest.

The great hope is that rest is available. The great promise is that we will find rest, if only we will enter it. Find that rest. Prioritise it. Cast off the sin of self-love that might seek to corrupt it, that might seek to corrupt that rest, and find it in Jesus Christ and the beauty of who He is. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for special occasions when we may come together and be edified and strengthened in understanding our relationship with You, in understanding the perspective of our eternal life. That we may be comforted, that we may be excited, that we may rejoice, that we may be thankful for what has been done for us once and for all in Jesus Christ. It gives us strength, Lord. We so need it. And so we are so much poorer, Lord, if we do not reflect on that often enough, if we do not set aside for these moments often enough, as we don't rest often enough.

And we know, Lord, those thoughts and that tiredness and that weakness come and it robs, comes and it destroys, comes and it takes our mind off what is already ours in Jesus. And so, Father, we pray for Your strength by Your Spirit that we will be reminded that this is a sacred thing, an important thing. We know that it is, that it is important to You, that it is important for us to pursue. But Father, help us also to have the wisdom, to have the understanding, to have the courage to make plans, to tell our bosses that we need that break, to switch off our emails and our phones. Help us to rest.

Help us to be disciplined in that. But then Father also, let us fully enter into the rest that this pursuit of Sabbath rest is not a work now. It is not something that should drive us to guilt or to shame, Father, but that this Sabbath rest has been made available and is available freely and completely because of Jesus. That our weakness and our failings to do this properly has been dealt with, that there is no condemnation for us for having failed it. And Father, let us enter into that rest wholly, freely, joyfully.

We ask it in Jesus' powerful name. Amen.