“They gathered it every morning. Each gathered as much as he needed to eat, but when the sun grew hot, it melted. On the sixth day they gathered twice as much food, four quarts apiece, and all the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. He told them, ‘This is what the Lord has said: “Tomorrow is a day of complete rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you want to bake, and boil what you want to boil, and set aside everything left over to be kept until morning.”‘” (CSB – Read the chapter)

There are some traditions and phrases whose origin nobody knows anymore. One is the existence of “Blue Laws.” We know what these are, of course. They are laws designed to restrict the things people can do on Sundays. Why exactly they are called “Blue Laws,” though, nobody seems to know. We have some guesses, but none of them are very confident. The reason they exist, though, is because followers of Jesus from our nation’s colonial past wanted to encourage (that is, force) people to honor the Sabbath as they understood it should be honored. Speaking of the Sabbath, while we know where that came from, there is lots of debate about what exactly it is and what we should do about it today. We’ll be spending a lot more time talking about it in the weeks ahead of us, but let’s get started on that conversation today.

Up to this point in our journey, the idea of the Sabbath hasn’t been mentioned. In fact, up to this point in the Scriptures, the idea has only been mentioned once, and then not by name. At the very beginning of Genesis 2, before Moses tells the zoomed-in version of how God created the world and everything in it (but especially us in chapter 2), he offers a little summary of the end of the creation process. On the seventh day, Moses tells us, God rested. What exactly Moses meant there by “on the seventh day” is a whole other debate into whose waters we are not going to swim today. Suffice to say for now that there is a creational precedent for the seventh day’s (which, for the Israelites, would have been considered Saturday) being a day of rest.

That theme, though, hasn’t been mentioned since then until right here. When God responded to the people’s complaints for food by providing what they called manna, this provision came with instructions. They were to go out each morning and gather as much as they needed to eat. They were to take all they wanted, but they were also to eat all they took. If they tried to save any for the next day, it was going to spoil and be nasty. The whole point of this exercise was to help the people learn to trust in God’s ability and willingness to provide for them on a daily basis. It was about growing their relationship with Him.

And the people responded to this about like you would have expected them to respond. On the first night, several of them saved their leftovers anyway just in case God didn’t come through. In the morning, when the leftovers were all nasty, Moses gave them the what for, and they started actually following God’s instructions. On the sixth day, though, everybody was supposed to gather twice as much as the other days. On that day, they were actually supposed to save their leftovers to be eaten on Saturday. And on Saturday, they weren’t supposed to do any cooking or any other working of any kind. Instead, they were to cook it all however they wanted to eat it on Friday, and it would stay good through Saturday evening. This actually underscores the fundamentally miraculous nature of God’s provision of manna for the people, but more importantly, it gave the people an additional chance to trust in Him.

They were supposed to trust Him for their daily bread, but now they were to trust Him for two days’ worth of bread. This was all in line with what God had told Moses back at the beginning of the chapter in v. 4: “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. This way I will test them to see whether or not they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.”

Here as the leaders of Israel come back to Moses to make sure the people are really doing the right thing, Moses gives a bit more perspective on His conversation with God. The seventh day was to be “a holy Sabbath to the Lord.” That’s the first time this phrase is used in the Scriptures. We give a lot of attention to the fourth commandment in Exodus 20 as being the foundation point for the Sabbath, but this is the place we are first introduced to the idea after the end of creation. Often, if you want to understand what something really is, the best way to do that is to go back to its foundational point and see what it was intended to be then.

So then, what is going on here and how does this inform our understanding of the Sabbath? And let me add this to the conversation. What God commands the people to do here comes before the Law. This means that the understanding of the Sabbath we see here should have more of an impact on our understanding of what it is for and thus how we should honor it than what we find in Exodus 20. The Sabbath command there came as part of the old covenant that Jesus fulfilled and replaced. This pre-covenantal command about the Sabbath was not something that was fulfilled and replaced. And, if you think I’m being selective in my reasoning here, this is the same kind of theological reasoning the apostle Paul uses when he points back to God’s covenant with Abraham as having more relevance for our understanding of salvation than the Mosaic covenant.

In any event, what God wanted the people to do here was to trust in Him and to do what He told them to do. The Sabbath was about rest, yes, but it wasn’t about simply not doing work. It was about resting in God’s abundant provision for our needs. It was to be a rest from striving to grab what we can get for ourselves, and to instead trust in God’s ability and willingness to make sure we have all that we need. Before anything else God said about it, the Sabbath was introduced to the people of Israel and the world as an invitation to abide in His unchanging character.

This is something of which we should take note in our lives today. We are not called to keep the Sabbath as the Israelites would soon be. Sabbath-keeping was not something guys like Paul or Peter or John talked about because they didn’t keep it the way the Jews did. They gathered for worship on Sunday morning because that was the day of the week that Jesus rose from the dead. They understood that the Sabbath commands had been fulfilled by Christ and didn’t apply to them any longer. And yet, Jesus still invites us into His Sabbath rest. This Sabbath rest, though, is not about our doing or not doing anything in particular. It is about what we see God calling the people into right here. It is about trusting in Him as our Lord and our God. It is still about trusting in both His ability and His willingness to provide for us. It is about our understanding of His character, and our willingness to accept Him for who He is.

If you want to honor the Sabbath in your life today, don’t worry about things like Blue Laws. In fact, the few of those that are remaining on the books should probably be repealed because that kind of law not only doesn’t work in terms of encouraging people to honor the Sabbath, it has the unintended effective of convincing people who don’t follow Jesus that Christians are just a bunch of busybodies who are more interested in telling them what they can and can’t do than anything particularly positive for the world. Instead, if you want to truly honor the Sabbath, look for opportunities in your daily rhythm to place your trust more and more fully in the God who alone deserves it. Enjoy the rest that only He can provide.