Episode Details

Prayer

Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word and we thank you for the rhythms and rest of life and the work that you give us to do. We pray as we give our attention to the seventh day, the day of rest, that you would please enlighten our minds, renew our understanding and help us, Lord, to conform to your will and design. We pray that your will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

Reading

Gen 2:1-3.

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”

Meditation

The Sabbath is about God’s plan, the end goal, that he has for his creation. A plan to dwell with his creation, to rule over his creation, and as we participate in God’s rest, we anticipate that final rest that will be ours when we dwell with the Lord and rejoice in his reign in the new creation. And this all brings us to one final thing that we need to think about on this topic of sabbath rest. As God set the sabbath pattern for us in creation on the seventh day, he now calls us sabbath by sabbath to set aside one day in seven, week by week, to dwell in his presence, to recognise his rule, to rest in Christ, and to worship God as we find in Psalm 92 – the Sabbath Psalm. As we follow the sabbath pattern in our own lives, God calls us to set aside one day in seven as dedicated to him.

Now as reformed believers our confessions teach this, that we must still set aside the Lord’s Day as a sabbath rest. In the Heidelberg Catechism (Q&A 103) we read: “Q. 103. What does God require in the fourth Commandment? A. In the first place, God wills that the ministry of the Gospel and schools be maintained, and that I, especially on the day of rest, diligently attend church, to learn the Word of God, to use the Holy Sacraments, to call publicly upon the Lord, and to give Christian alms. In the second place, that all the days of my life I rest from my evil works, allow the Lord to work in me by His Spirit, and thus begin in this life the everlasting Sabbath.” For many Christians, however (and maybe you’re one of them), you either disagree with that or perhaps you’ve never even really thought about it. I’d like to take a moment now to think a little bit about this. What did it mean to keep the actual sabbath day holy? And why does the catechism teach us that God still calls us to recognise the day of worship?

Be ye doers of the word…

Firstly, what does it mean to keep the sabbath holy? Let’s go back to Genesis 2:3 and read again: “So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.” To start with, God called the day holy. What does that actually mean? That word “holy” literally means to separate, or set apart. Now in the supreme sense, God alone is holy. He alone is set apart from creation, being over it and above it. This is why the cherubim cry out in the heavenly throne room: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty.” He is holy, exalted above all things.

Now God is holy, but on occasion God also declares something in his creation to be holy. In declaring that a thing is holy, God is not saying that it’s holy in the sense that he himself is holy. What he is saying is that the holy thing is to be dedicated to him. That’s what holiness means, it means a person or thing is set apart exclusively to be dedicated to God. In 2 Corinthians 6, for example, the Apostle Paul teaches us that we as his people have been set apart to be holy. The tribe of Levi in Moses’ day was set apart as holy, they were separated and dedicated to God in a special way. And so, when God m