“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Tell the Israelites: You must observe my Sabbaths, for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, so that you will know that I am the Lord who consecrates you. Observe the Sabbath, for it is holy to you. Whoever profanes it must be put to death. If anyone does work on it, that person must be cut off from his people. Work may be done for six days, but on the seventh day there must be a Sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord. Anyone who does work on the Sabbath day must be put to death. The Israelites must observe the Sabbath, celebrating it throughout their generations as a permanent covenant. It is a sign forever between me and the Israelites, for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, but on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever gotten so focused on doing something that you forgot why you were doing it in the first place? I am a pretty task-oriented person. When I take on a project, the only thing I want to do is to finish that project and to finish it well. I can easily lose sight of just about everything else except the project resulting in no small amount of completely understandable frustration for the people around me. God had finished giving Moses all the instructions Israel needed to build the tabernacle. It was time for them to get to work on it. Before they got started on it, though, He took a second to remind Moses not to let the people lose sight of what mattered most. Keep that in mind as we walk through this challenging passage.

One of the more frequent complaints God brought against the people of Israel throughout the Old Testament narrative is that they were getting so focused on doing the physical things of their religion that they were losing sight of the reason they were doing it in the first place. They got so focused on keeping the law that they forgot about actually honoring the one who gave the law in the first place.

Honestly, that’s a pretty understandable pattern to fall into. It certainly doesn’t mean we’re anymore justified when we do it, but it is understandable. We tend to let our lives be defined by what we can see. And again, that makes sense. We can see it. If we can’t see it, it’s a whole lot harder to believe or to let affect us in a day-to-day type of way. And yet, when we pause to look and think a bit deeper (and when we don’t artificially limit what we can see by the adoption of philosophical positions that a priori discount the existence of anything we can’t see), the evidence and activity of what we can’t see is all over the place.

Yet because we are so driven by what is right in front of us, one of the things God went to great lengths to build into Israel’s foundational operating code rhythms that would point them to this larger reality; that would point them toward giving Him attention and not simply obeying a set of rules. Historically speaking we know His efforts here didn’t always work very well, but it was not for a lack of effort and clarity on His part.

That’s all a bit of background for understanding what is going on in this passage that seems to come from out of nowhere. God has been talking about the tabernacle with Moses now for several chapters. He’s gone on and on and on about how it should look in exacting detail. And now, just before He’s going to send Him down the mountain to direct the people in building it (which, as we will see starting next week, didn’t happen right away because they were going to have to deal with the people’s radically breaking their covenant with God before the ink has even had a chance to dry on the paper), He switches gears to talking about the Sabbath again.

This whole section is chiastic in form. That just means it takes the form of a type of repetition intended to make the words more memorable. The pattern here is A B C B A. If you were going to summarize the three parts, they might come out something like this. A: The Sabbath is a permanent, creation-rooted sign between the people and God. B: The Sabbath needs to be kept…or else. C: The Sabbath is to be a period of rest one out of every six days. Those are the three ideas that we find here.

Let’s start with part A there. The Sabbath was to be one of the most significant signs of the relationship the people had with God. This relationship was to be built on their trusting Him to be their God. This trust was to be rooted in His character which He had powerfully demonstrated to them in the events of the Exodus from Egypt and since before inviting them into this trust-based relationship. Living in this kind of a relationship with a God they couldn’t see wasn’t a terribly concrete thing to be able to do. They needed help envisioning what this actually looked like.

God gave them this help in the form of the Sabbath. For a whole variety of cultural and technological factors, the idea of taking a day off in that day, let alone a whole weekend off, was unheard of. If you didn’t work on a particular day, you didn’t eat. It was that simple. God wanted the people to understand that He could provide for their needs whether they did any work or not. He wanted them to work because that was good for them, but He was big enough and powerful enough and good enough to take care of them with or without any input from them. So, He told them to take a day off. They were to take a regular day off from all the work they would normally have done on that day. They were to do this trusting that He would take care of them; trusting that He would bless their efforts on the other six days of the week and make them so productive and fruitful that they would have what they needed on that seventh day.

As they honored this command, the goal was that they would have a regular reminder of His character and commitment to them as a part of their weekly rhythm. Each week they would stop working, they would nonetheless have everything they needed, and they would know that He was the reason for it. This knowledge would deepen and strengthen their trust in Him in a self-reinforcing cycle. It would be the gateway to their growing commitment to live out this trust in other areas of their lives as well. And, it would be a signal to the nations around them of the kind of God they had. It would not be just a signal; it would be an invitation. In many ways, their keeping the Sabbath was a core part of their relationship with Him. An argument can be made that it was essential to the identity He was building into them.

But again, we operate by what we can see. It’s hard to sustain trust when we can’t see the person we are trusting while we can see the work that we do with our own hands and the results of that work. Because of this, Israel faced a constant temptation to grow lax in their commitment to keeping the Sabbath. And God knew they would. He also knew, though, that their keeping the Sabbath was essential to their relationship with Him. As a result, He put some fences around it. Some strong fences. Some strong, high fences topped with razor wire and which were also electrified. That is what we find in part B of our chiasm.

God set the penalty for breaking the Sabbath at death. Or at least, He seems to do that. He says twice that Sabbath violators must be put to death. In between those bookends, though, He says merely that they should be cut off from their people. So, which is it? And why such a strong penalty?

The answer to the first question is that the death penalty was likely in view. We know this was carried out at least once because of a story in Numbers 15 where a Sabbath violator was indeed sentenced to death. Besides, being cut off from your people in that culture was effectively a death sentence. No one could survive without a tribe to support them. The idea of the lone survivor going off and bravely living off the land was farcical delusion then.

That brings us back to the second question: why such a strong penalty? Because this was important. We don’t necessarily have to understand exactly why it was important to grasp this point. God thought this was really, really important and we’ve already talked some about why. He wanted them to take Sabbath keeping seriously. Very seriously. So, He put guardrails around it that were designed to help the people learn to take it as seriously as He did. We do the same kind of thing today with matters we consider of the utmost of seriousness. The penalty for speeding is a relatively small ticket. The penalty for raping and murdering another person, on the other hand, is at least life in prison without the possibility of parole, and in some places is the death penalty. We don’t want people to speed, but we really don’t want them to murder. As a result, we set the consequences accordingly. Most people don’t think twice about speeding because even if they get caught, the penalty is rather minor. Murder, on the other hand, is a happily much rarer thing. And, yes, of course, there are other factors contributing to that difference in frequency, but if we didn’t punish murder at all, or punished it on about the same level as we do speeding, I suspect that difference would shrink a bit.

The third part of the chiasm, sitting right in the middle of the passage, points us to the fact that Sabbath keeping was not just about not working on a particular day. It was about setting a pattern of work and rest that was rooted in creation itself. This may seem like a small point for them, but for us it is much bigger. Because God set Sabbath keeping in creation rather than merely the law, that means His intentions for it are not somehow tied to the old covenant. Instead, this is a trust-rooted pattern that God still invites us to live by today. This doesn’t mean that we need to worry ourselves with the various Sabbath laws God gave Israel (and much less the penalties for breaking those laws). Jesus fulfilled those and helped us to understand God’s bigger goal for Sabbath keeping.

For followers of Jesus today, Sabbath keeping involves resting in Christ rather than striving constantly to provide everything for ourselves. It has little to do with taking a day off once a week (after all, we usually take two). It has everything to do with accepting God’s invitation into His eternal rest that He has been enjoying since creation was completed. We still aim for a heathy pattern of work and rest in our lives, but we do all of that from within God’s creational Sabbath. In that place we are able to trust Him to meet all of our needs. We can turn from all our anxieties and burdens. We can give up striving for more and receive gladly and grateful all that He has to give us. We can share generously and even sacrificially because we know that His resources are unlimited. Our enjoyment of His Sabbath is greater and freer than Israel’s was able to be because of what Jesus did.

So, don’t worry about the parts of this passage that are hard and uncomfortable. God was operating differently with Israel than He does with us. Instead, accept His invitation into a rest from all the things that make life hard and burdensome. Accept His invitation into a relationship rooted in justified trust. Accept His invitation into abundant living. You will be glad that you did.