The Fourth Commandment

Morning, we're continuing our series on the ten commandments. We are up to the fourth commandment, and I will read that briefly. I'll get us open to Exodus 20, one of two places where we find the ten commandments. The other one we also will refer to a little bit later in Deuteronomy five, but Exodus 20, and we're going to read from verse eight. The Lord said, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

Six days you shall labour 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 the heavens and the 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. So far our reading, may the Lord bless it to us.

The word Sabbath, if you haven't done a word study yet, is derived from the Hebrew verb Shabbat, which means to stop. I, for some reason, always thought it meant seven because I guess it sounds Sabbath, seventh, sounds sort of similar maybe. But it means to cease or to keep, to stop. But in order for us to get a really good understanding of what is going on here in the fourth commandment, why God wants to give this to His people or gave it to the Israelites, we have to understand Genesis one and two, the very beginnings, the foundations of humanity. And we get a little bit of an indication of that, don't we, when we look at verse 11.

For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day. So this command is couched within the creation story. And so for us to get a proper understanding of what's going on there, we have to look at Genesis one and two. And when we do, when we read Genesis one, the creation of everything, the whole world in six days. And then we come to Genesis two, a significant moment, and we want to read from verse two of Genesis two.

If you have your Bibles with you, we'll flick to that. On the seventh day, let's start with verse one. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them, verse one says. Then verse two, and on the seventh day God finished His work that He had done and He rested on the seventh day from all that work that He had done. We find in the ten commandments a throwback to this event.

We see Genesis one and two, the unfolding story of creation, but here in Genesis two God blesses the seventh day. God did a lot of work. He did a lot of stuff in the first six days, but this day is the beginning of a new chapter and something special is going on here. God blesses this day and therefore it is significant. And what is significant about this day is that it is important to God.

By making it holy it means it is being set apart. It is special this day. It is important this day. But what I want us to understand as we look at God's law this morning is that, you know, we may have been a Christian for a while and we may have grown up in church. We may understand how people take their Sundays different to the other days.

Some people don't do their shopping on the Sunday. Some people don't like driving on the Sunday. We come to church on the Sunday to worship God. But we know these things, but do we really understand why? Why God blessed a day in the week and made it special?

Six days God took to create the world, and the seventh is taken off. Six days on, one day off. This is drawn from the passage on creation itself. What is not obvious from this creation account that Exodus 20, the fourth commandment is drawing from, is what was happening here with Adam and Eve and God. Mankind was created on the sixth day.

Do you remember that? Sixth day. The pinnacle of creation really is the creation of mankind. And this was the last bit of activity in God's creation work. Humanity is made last, and there is significant theological importance being brought about here. It is the pinnacle of God's creation, but also mankind being created on the sixth day means that the very next day where they relate and meet God is in His rest.

They meet God on the seventh day in His rest. God's very nature is revealed to humanity for the first time where He's not at work, where He is having His rest day. And this has led theologians like Karl Barth and Old Testament commentators like Klaus Westermann to conclude that creation's purpose and the purpose of mankind is to participate with God in His rest. That's significant. Creation and the purpose of mankind is to participate with God in His Sabbath rest.

Westermann writes this: God's blessing bestows on this special day, holy and powerful as it is, God's blessing is given to it to make it fruitful for human existence. God's blessing gives the day, which is a day of rest, the power to stimulate, to animate, to enrich, and to give fullness to life. He says it is not the day in itself that is blessed, but rather the day in its significance to the community, to humanity that is blessed. So what we see is a rhythm in life that is being created, that is being put forward as the ideal. God decrees this at the beginning of creation to be the pattern by which humanity will live its best.

And on this very first Sabbath of the world we see humanity communing with God. And we see humanity also communing with the rest of creation. Adam explores the world for the first time on this day. It's as if this picture is being presented to us of a giant playground, of a restful, peaceful dad watching on as his kids play. And from this moment scripture goes about trying to fiercely protect this significant rhythm all throughout scripture.

The Sabbath, guys, remember the Sabbath. Set aside this time of rest. This rhythm of life says that human living is meant to include something more than work, something more than labour. It's something more than the industrious struggle to master the world. It is in essence this day to delight in God and His creation.

So we see from scripture that there is a time dedicated to rest. One day out of seven, that's one thing we see. The second thing we see is that there is time dedicated to work, and that work is important. Work is essential.

I find it interesting that the ratio of time spent in work outweighs the time spent in rest, six to one. But the weight of importance lies on this day of rest, which is blessed specifically and sanctified by God. In other words, work is really, really good because God does it Himself. Work is really, really good, but rest is special. Now friends, is the pattern I want to ask you this morning of your work and your rest something that you think about often enough.

One of the biggest hurdles, one of the biggest constraints to church and church existence is busyness, is this interrelation between rest and work? Do we place significant importance on it? Do we simply say, well, it's worked out really nicely that today I'm not working. It just so happened that I'm not, I've got the day off. Is the idea of rest something you protect?

Is it something you consider holy, set apart for God? Or is it a nice to have? In a world that is on all the time, a world where our technology sends us through emails, we've got push notifications on our smartphones, it pops up, and I'm definitely guilty here of sort of one eye being on the person I'm talking to, the one eye looking down at my phone. A world that is on all the time, does rest just accidentally fall into our lap? Or do we build our life and our pattern for living around what God has ordained?

And secondly, do we view our Sabbath day as being of importance in how we relate to God? If the pinnacle of God's week of creation was His Sabbath day, where He would spend it with Adam and Eve, does that not give us reason to pause and think about how we relate to God on this one day in our week? First point: the Sabbath was intended originally from Genesis one and two to have a pattern of rest and work, but also this communion with God. But there's a reason we don't always spend our Sabbath well. There's a reason we don't rest well, and it goes right back also to the heart of things.

In Genesis chapter three, the Sabbath day, the time of rest blessed by God, given a mandate to make humanity fruitful, to make humanity joyful and rested, to be life giving, to promote communion with one another and fellowship with God, but we see Genesis three happens straight after Genesis two. We find Adam and Eve choosing to love themselves, to equate themselves with God, to choose pride over humility, and we find them and us by extension doing things our way. And from that moment the struggle of sin, the corruption and the chaos of it enters life, and immediately it starts corrupting the first thing God created mankind to do, which is work. Remember that response that God gives when God finds out what Adam and Eve had done?

What does He say? He says the result of this disobedience will mean that work becomes hard. Work just incidentally was not a curse. Work is not a bad thing. God created Adam to work.

But the bad thing, the curse of sin is that work becomes hard. They will have to leave God's Sabbath rest in His presence, and then they lose out on God's presence and communion, but now they will toil, the Bible says. Work will be hard. They will struggle with thorns and thistles as Adam prepares the soil and works the soil to produce food for himself. The Bible calls work now toil.

I don't know if you've ever had to sign a contract. The job description should just say toil. Just one word, toil. That's what you'll be doing. You'll be toiling.

According to Genesis three, the result of sin is that work becomes harder than it was meant to be. And so you'd think that humanity then thinks, well then, my Sabbath rest is really important. I really need to protect this. But what do we find? We find people ignoring the Sabbath rest.

Why does God have to put it in the ten commandments? Because we don't do it. We don't do it. We see another aspect of sin's corruption taking place and that is this weird self love that is so destructive. Believe it or not, but the purpose of Sabbath rest lies at the heart of mankind.

Not so much in the body and the body needing rest, which it does. The Sabbath is a matter of the spirit. The Sabbath is a matter of the soul and the heart, and of course the body needs a time off from time to time, but there's an internal focus of this rest, and it's built into us. We rest. As humans, whether you're Christian or not, we rest because it feels good.

And when something feels good, it is more than physical. So when we choose to rest, we do so because we care for how we feel. We do it because we love ourselves. We care about ourselves, and that is not bad. That self love is not bad.

Indeed, scripture says that there is such a thing as a healthy self love. Jesus Himself, remember when He said, love your neighbour as you love yourself. When Jesus gives that command in Matthew 22 verse 39, He says the underlying assumption here is that you will love yourself. Love your neighbour as you love yourself. We do love ourselves, but Jesus affirms that there is a self love, a self care which is fitting, which is reasonable.

However, as we know, there is so much in scripture that says that there is another form of self love or an extreme of this self love manifested in selfishness, manifested in pride which Christians are to be careful to avoid. These sins, this corruption of self love includes this Sabbath rest rhythm. God intended the purpose for Sabbath to be autotelic in nature. What that means is that in itself is the end. It is an end in itself.

Through this selfishness of sin we can make rest in creation a means to an end. We can make it an idol that we are warned against in the second commandment, remember, and don't create idols in the form of anything in heaven or on earth or in the sea under the earth, and rest can become a master instead of a servant. Being unable to choose when we participate in it, mankind can become slaves to it and it can happen in so many ways, this obsession with rest. We can work so hard and build our lives completely on work with this idea of one day resting. We earn and earn and earn.

We make sure we buy all the toys, the cars, the boats, the houses, the beach getaway apartments, so that one day we can really rest instead of a six days, one day off rest. On the other hand, we can idolise it by having too much rest and becoming lazy. We spend too much time in rest thinking that we find our purpose and our meaning and our fulfilment in rest. Meanwhile, forgetting that God created us to work, that there is something in us that is fulfilled in this pattern of working. Six and one, or the majority and some.

With the effect of sin's self love, we do as little as possible, therefore, to get by and we might even depend on others to maintain our lifestyle. I'm talking perhaps maybe to the millennials, of which I'm one, a little bit. But God gives the Sabbath rest commandment to protect us from an idolatry of both work and rest. Both of which can cause us to completely destroy our lives. We know maybe a little bit about that and how workaholics can destroy their life, their family's life.

But, and I've mentioned this example before, but a very current phenomenon and something that I wrestled with as a young guy as well, online gaming. An article I read some time ago about a game which is not so popular I don't think now, called World of Warcraft, which was an absolute global phenomenon, shows the example of a game, alright, intended to give rest and recreation, something other than work, was so obsessively used by individuals that there were instances of people murdering one another over this game. There were instances of suicide when they lost. There was a baby who was neglected by a mum who starved to death because of this game. Can we see the idolatry of rest?

Something intended to produce rest from work, and it becomes a master instead of a servant, and it destroys lives. And like I said, in the West we have this really, really complicated, intricate problem where we either have work all around us all the time pushing in on our lives, or we have too much rest because we are so rich. We have such a good welfare system. We have such a good society. We have such great structures in place to protect us.

And tragically through both we destroy ourselves. We destroy our families. We destroy our health and our well-being, which God sought to protect. So as Christians we now understand the dangers of this breaking of this command. The fact that we can't take things for granted is really important for God.

We need to think about it often. And so we should and we are reminded again to watch over our lives, to be reminded to think about our work and rest patterns. But now finally, the question is: is our Sunday the Sabbath? According to Jewish tradition, we know the seventh day of the week was the Saturday.

And as Christians today we make Sunday our special day. We make Sunday the day that we come to church. We worship just like the Jews did communally, worshiping God, spending time with God, spending time with our fellow believers. Is there a problem that we're not worshiping on a Saturday? Is there a problem we don't call the Sunday necessarily our Sabbath?

Well, in short, there isn't a problem with that. We see that the Christian church, very early on, moved from the Sabbath Saturday. And they moved it from the Sabbath, the Saturday, to the Sunday for very important reasons. Firstly, to distinguish themselves from the Jewish faith. They were for many, many years, generations even, still considered to be Jewish, still considered to be simply a sect from the Jews.

This moving away from the Jewish traditions was a severe contrast. It was a revolutionary moment which said we don't adhere to the ten commandments as our ways of salvation anymore. Adhering to the fourth commandment to be good enough to warrant God's love of us. There is someone else who saves us. The ten commandments do not save us.

Jesus Christ has saved us. But secondly, we see that the church chose Sunday because this is the day that Christ rose from the dead. It was the Sunday that Jesus rose again. It was the third day. From very early on, therefore, they called it the Lord's Day.

The Lord's Day was a Sunday. And they celebrated Christ's resurrection on that day every week. Very influentially, the second point here is Jesus continued appearing to His disciples for the few weeks that He was around on this particular day, again on a Sunday. John 20 verse 28, He appears to Thomas on that day. Guess what day the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples at Pentecost?

It was on Sunday. When we get the final seal of approval in a revelation from Jesus Himself, it seals it for me. Revelation 1 verse 10 says that the apostle John is worshiping God on the Lord's Day, it says. And Jesus comes to John on that day, and He gives him this revelation of what is going to happen. And so there's no surprise then that according to Acts 20 verse 7 and 1 Corinthians 16 verse 2, the church from the earliest time worshiped God on Sunday and set it aside as their day of rest.

So the question again: can we say that the Sunday is our true Sabbath? Sort of. Yes and no. Sunday is not the true Sabbath, but neither is Saturday. Sunday is not the true Sabbath, but neither is Saturday.

Sunday is a good day for us to have a Sabbath like rest. In fact, Sunday is a great day for us to have a Sabbath rest, but it is not morally superior to Saturday. And for our Seventh-day Adventist friends, Saturday is not morally more superior than the Sunday. There is no literal physical day that is capable of getting what the Sabbath rest of God in Genesis one and two was intending to be. There's no day that can get us there.

That blissful, that joyful, that complete dwelling with the presence of God. In and of ourselves, because of Genesis three, we are incapable of approaching and interacting and relating to God in that sort of way. Like a hungry beggar looking through a window into a pastry shop, we can only imagine what Genesis two was like. But God gives this commandment, this fourth commandment for a reason. And that is to help us in our waiting.

It is to curb in a little sense our suffering while we desire to dwell with Him in that lost paradise. We see it even more clearly in Deuteronomy 5, the second version or the repetition of the ten commandments. Deuteronomy 5, remember, Deuteronomy is a sermon that Moses gives just before the Israelites go into the promised land, his final words. And in Deuteronomy 5 Moses says, guys, remember the ten commandments, and he gives it to them again. And on the fourth commandment, Moses adds this very, very interestingly.

It doesn't occur in the Exodus 20 account. Moses says this to them: You shall remember, after he said remember the Sabbath day, you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. And the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day holy. Why?

Why does God remind Israel that they were rescued from slavery in Egypt as a reason to honour the Sabbath day. I think we find the pattern and the reason for the Sabbath day here: because God saved His people. Because God saved His people. Israel hopelessly lost in their slavery, incapable of finding release. But God in His mercy rescued them and set them free.

Free now to rest. Israel physically were worked to death as slaves. Seven out of seven days they were working. Israel sought God, cried out to God, but they could not find God. God had to come to them.

He had to take them out of Egypt to learn who He was. And God says, now as released captives, as slaves who are free, honour the Sabbath day and keep it holy, resting in His finished work. This rescue we now know, of course, is also alluding to a promise that was to come. Matthew 11 verse 28, Jesus looks at the crowd and He says to them, come to me, you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. I will give you rest.

And the book of Hebrews, which is that magnificent sermon explaining how the Old Testament is fulfilled in Jesus, in Hebrews chapter 4 says that by accepting Jesus as our source of forgiveness, as accepting Jesus as our saviour, the one who saved us from our enslavement, from our slavery. If we accept Him and are washed from our sin, that brokenness which took us away from the Garden of Eden is restored, is fixed, is healed. And the author of the book of Hebrews says in chapter 4 we now have the opportunity to receive the real Sabbath rest. This is the promise. This is the joy that as a Christian we may grasp.

That when we remember and we think about our lives and the rhythm our lives take and the good natural rhythms that God is reminding us to have, Hebrews 4 verse 9 says this: there remains still a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For anyone who enters this rest through Jesus Christ also rests from their work just as God did from His. But let us make every effort to enter that rest, he says. And we enter that rest by belief in Jesus Christ and His work for me on that cross. And so friend, if you know that you've not obeyed and you've not really had that pattern in your life, don't leave it unchanged.

Don't leave it unchanged. Go and make plans. Is it necessary for you to earn time and a half or double time on a Sunday? If you're a student and you feel like you have to work on Sunday, your job is to be a student. Your job is to study first.

It is not to earn an income and to be able to afford living. Your parents are meant to look after that, and I'm serious about that. You do not have to work double time. Your job is to be a student. You do not have to change or compromise.

Now I understand nurses have to be nurses. People have to have their lives saved on Sundays. Doctors have to, police officers have to work. But how much are we thinking about this, and how much are we letting the world dictate to us? How much are we able to change and stand firm on things that need to be firm?

But ultimately we also believe that if we fail and have failed, there is a glorious peace that is available to all of us. A peace achieved by Jesus Christ Himself who paid the price, who did the work, and He brought us a salvation that will ultimately give us the Sabbath rest. Eternity in the presence of God, paradise regained. That is the ultimate rest we look forward to. And while we long for that day we should continue to look after ourselves.

We should look after our family time. We commune with God. We make sure that we are coming to church and meeting with His people. That we rest enough and that we work enough. But we also know that the true Sabbath is still coming.

But it's been given to us. It's been assured for us. We will have access to that one day. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for your love.

I thank you for your grace. I thank you, Lord, that above all you have forgiven us, that we are able to live as freed people, as freed slaves in light of your finished work. God, just as you saved your people Israel, just as you reminded them of a glorious, restful, peaceful life under your lordship and reign. So it is with us. Your burden is not heavy.

Your yoke is easy on our shoulders. Lord, you want to give us life. You want to give us freedom. You have set us free, and now you ask us to live free. And so, Father, as we think about these things, as we reflect on them in this coming week, I pray that we will have the courage to speak up when we need to.

I pray that we will have the humility to see how we work and what we do in light of what you want of us, what you desire our lives to be. Lord, and I pray that we will also have humility with one another as we work these things out. In Jesus name. Amen.