“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy: You are to labor six days and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. You must not do any work – you, your son or daughter, your male or female servant, your livestock, or the resident alien who is within your city gates. For the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything in them in six days; then he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Some of the fieriest conflicts Jesus had during His ministry were over the Sabbath. Throughout much of the history covered by the Old Testament, Israel didn’t really keep this command very well. After the Babylonian Exile, though, and by the time Jesus came onto the scene, they were positively radical about it. The weight of this command bore heavily on the shoulders of the people. We’ve talked before about the Sabbath when God first introduced it to the people back in chapter 16. Let’s reflect again here on what God was helping the people further understand.

The Sabbath was not about not working. That seems like an odd argument to make given what we see right here, but I stand pretty firmly by it. As we saw in its inception back in chapter 16, the Sabbath was all about giving the people an invitation to trust more fully in God’s character. It was an invitation into the practice of trusting more in His ability to provide for them than even their own ability to provide for themselves by their labor.

Still, what we see here seems to make it all about work…or rather not working. That, however, is precisely the trap the devil wanted the people to fall into in order that they might lose sight of what the command is really all about: placing their faith more fully in their God. By drawing the people’s attention to a narrow, legalistic grasp of the words here rather than the bigger picture they were intended to convey, he successfully got them to miss the point almost entirely.

By the time Jesus was doing His thing, this rigidly legalistic understanding of Sabbath had completely taken over the practice. It was Jesus’ attempt to help them see beyond their focus on not working to the heart of this command’s invitation into God’s eternal Sabbath rest that caused such intense conflicts. He was basically asking – demanding, really – the people give up their understanding of the Sabbath in exchange for what felt like a new one even though it was really an older one. He was asking them to take down all their guardrails they had so carefully built and lovingly strengthened into massive fortifications that kept the people in line. They weren’t terribly interested.

Okay, but why does God spend so much time here telling everyone not to work? Because He is just. Let me explain. God wanted the people to practice this radical trust in Him as a function of their entire culture. What He didn’t want, however, was for this not working thing to become something only the wealthy members of the society were allowed to do. You can perhaps imagine how easily that kind of a situation could have developed without this command.

Rather than focusing solely on the command to not work here, look a little bit deeper at specifically who God includes in this command to not work. It starts with you. That’s just to reinforce the point. You aren’t supposed to do any work on the Sabbath; you are instead to trust in me and my ability to provide for you. Fine. We already had that down. Who’s next? Your son or daughter. This rest should extend to your entire family. You can’t sit back and tell them to go do all the things you aren’t going to do. They are to be able to enjoy this rest as well. You aren’t going to sacrifice your dependence on yourselves only to substitute your dependence on me for a dependence on your kids. Everybody rests.

Who’s next? Your male or female servants. These would have been Hebrew servants, not foreign-born slaves. More on that in a second. Everybody rests and trusts in me. You aren’t going to stop working on the Sabbath and then make your servants pick up your slack. That’s not fair to them. They get to rest and learn to depend on me too. Then comes your livestock. The same principle applies here. You are to take good care of your animals. They can’t trust in me, no, but you aren’t going to work them into the ground as a substitute for trusting in me. You are going to be a good steward of creation through the animals you own.

One last group here. The resident alien who is within your city gates. Let’s say you really take up the spirit of this command and actually allow for all of the Israelites in the land to practice this radical, countercultural trust in me. That’s great. But it will not be okay for you to exploit the immigrants within your borders by making them do all your work on those days. They get to rest too.

This command was radically progressive for its day. And it wasn’t about not working. It was about creating a culture-wide dependence on God that extended to everyone in the culture. No one got left out. No one got exploited. No creatures got abused. None of that. Everyone and everything got to participate in God’s eternal Sabbath rest; a rest that is rooted in creation.

That’s actually where God lands this whole thing. He roots it in creation. He created the world and everything in it. We can talk another time about whether that happened in six 24-hour days or something longer than that (spoiler alert: I opt for the latter). The point is that God created everything. He created it all and then He sat back to enjoy it. The people were to work, yes. Work was (and is) a gift from God that accomplishes all kinds of good and noble things. But they were also to rest. They were to enjoy His creation. They were to enjoy the fruits of their labors that He enabled them to do. They were to join with Him in marveling at the goodness and beauty of creation, a goodness and beauty to which they contributed with their work.

This deeper spirit of Sabbath is what Jesus tried to get the people of His day to understand. It’s the part of the Sabbath that we as His followers today should still strive for in our own lives. We are not commanded to not work on a certain day. That command was fulfilled in Christ. It was part of the old covenant and was replaced by the new covenant Jesus introduced to the world. His invitation to us is to enjoy that same Sabbath rest, that same trust in Him and His ability to provide for us that is greater, far greater than our own. This is a rest that is rooted in creation and will extend on in to God’s eternal kingdom. It is a rest that does not preclude working, but rather redeems that work, removing the futility from it, so that we are actively continuing and contributing to the goodness and beauty of God’s creation to His glory and our joy. If you want to enjoy creation as it was designed, Sabbath is how you will do it.