The Grace of the Sabbath

We have been talking about grace and obedience and our role in our own salvation. It seems that although we cannot save ourselves, we can shut out the grace, or fall from grace (as Paul says in the book of Galatians) by substituting our own law-keeping for God’s grace. 

Grace and free will seem, on the face of it, to be opposite concepts. We have seen—in the Bible—a God who is very interventional in Mankind’s decisions about God. Through the internal work of the Holy Spirit, and through the external affairs of life, God seeks to bring and to bend us back toward himself. He is not indifferent to our free will. He seeks to bend us back, literally toward himself. 

From Adam and Eve on down—through the patriarchs, the judges, the kings, the prophets, and the disciples—God is seen as an active and an interactive God, seeking, bending, plying, molding; never willing to leave us alone or to let us go, always eager to bring us back by whatever means possible.  

He brings back Jacob by wrestling with him, Moses with a burning bush, Balaam through a talking donkey, King David by the prophet Nathan, Jonah in a whale, Isaiah by a coal placed on his lips, Elijah by a still small voice, Job through a personal encounter with God, the prodigal son by an internal awakening, Peter by a crowing cock, Saul (who becomes Paul) through a dramatic encounter on the road to Damascus—a blinding light and a voice from heaven. 

God is not indifferent to our choices. Left to our own devices, he will hound us like the Hound of Heaven. And thank God for that, because that is grace. That is what the free gift is—the robe of righteousness, the restoration. But, you might say, what does God do for me? Where do I see grace in my life? 

I’m going to propose a new idea today that might challenge those of us who are Seventh Day Adventists, namely, that the Sabbath is a propositional and perpetual sign of God’s grace. Those of you who are not Adventists may be indifferent to this idea. It is based on this passage: 

 “Now as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, ‘You must keep My Sabbaths; for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, so that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you. (Exodus 31:13)

The Sabbath is a sign that God is the one who sanctifies us—which is really what grace is. The Sabbath, then, is a sign of God’s grace. When you encounter the Sabbath, you should not see it for what you do, or for what the Sabbath means to you, but should see it for what God does—in other words, his grace. 

The subject of the Sabbath and Sabbath grace recurs throughout the Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, from the creation of the earth until the creation of the new earth: 

 “For just as the new heavens and the new earth,
Which I make, will endure before Me,” declares the Lord,
“So will your descendants and your name endure.  
And it shall be from new moon to new moon
And from Sabbath to Sabbath,
All mankind will come to bow down before Me,” says the Lord. (Isaiah 66:22-23)

The emphasis throughout, but especially the emphasis placed on the Sabbath by Jesus, is not on the day of the Sabbath but on the meaning of the Sabbath. By making time sacred, instead of space, God forever removes Man’s control over the designation of what is sacred. Man can control space, but Man cannot control time. Like grace, Sabbath rest is a gift from God to all humankind. 

We cannot hasten the Sabbath, we cannot delay, manipulate, modify, move, control, contain, advance, retreat, or alter it in any way. All we can do is enter into it, like sacred rest. Like grace, it is everywhere. It is available to all, it is always for free, and it comes every seventh day, like a down payment on grace. 

To enter into it is to enter into God’s presence, to lay down one’s burdens and as the soul spiritual song says: “To study war no more.” Life is like a war—a continuous contention among and within ourselves, and even sometimes with God. It is to change our swords and our spirits for plowshares as Micah 4:3 says, and to turn them into pruning hooks:

 And He will judge between many peoples And render decisions for mighty, distant nations.
Then they will beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation will not lift a sword against nation,
And never again will they train for war. (Micah 4:3) 

Sabbath rest is not just physical. Primarily, Jesus told us, it is rest for the soul. It is a sign of grace. Also like grace, when we tend to want to control and use it for our own advantages, we cannot do that with the Sabbath or with grace, either one. We cannot possess grace, we cannot only let it possess us. 

When we place ourselves and what we do or do not do at the center of the Sabbath, instead of letting the Son of Man who is Lord of the Sabbath, as Mark puts it, then we are in danger of making the Sabbath into an idol and worshiping the Sabbath instead of worshiping God. The references Jesus makes to the Sabbath are about as frequent in the gospels as his references to grace. 

Make no mistake about this: Our reverence for the Sabbath does not make us special in God’s eyes. He is the God of all mankind. If God wanted uniformity of worship or correctness of doctrine, he would have spelled it out more clearly in the details of how we are to relate to him.

But herein lie two pitfalls. First, the more that God lays down the rules about what to do on the Sabbath, the more we place emphasis on our own work on the Sabbath. God knows that since we ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have been wired to seek discrimination of our work. And second, if God gave the rules to only one group, that group would use the rules to suppress everyone else. Even now, every religion and every sect and every denomination claims to speak for God and seeks to subject everyone, everywhere, to their view of his rules. 

Like grace, the gift of Sabbath must not be hoarded. It must be shared, but not like a doctrine that has to be justified or proven. It must be shared as a gift of grace, just as it was given to us. To disconnect from our daily pace and to connect with God and enter into physical, emotional, and spiritual rest is a very special opportunity, one to be cherished and shared. 

Like grace, the Sabbath is both predictable and eternal. Both require us to rest and not to work. Both are about God and what he does, and not about us and what we do. Just as it is fatal to fail to embrace God’s everlasting grace, a Sabbath rest predicated on my work is also fatal, as it was for the man who was stoned for breaking it during the Exodus (the story is told in Numbers 15). 

Isaiah stressed the importance of this gift of grace:

 “If, because of the Sabbath, you restrain your foot From doing as you wish on My holy day,
And call the Sabbath a pleasure, and the holy day of the Lord honorable,
And honor it, desisting from your own ways,
From seeking your own pleasure
And speaking your own word,  

Then you will take delight in the Lord,
And I will make you ride on the heights of the earth;
And I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father,
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”  (Isaiah 58:13-14)

Isaiah goes on to say, in the language of grace:

 I will rejoice greatly in the Lord, My soul will be joyful in my God;
For He has clothed me with garments of salvation,
He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness,
As a groom puts on a turban, And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
For as the earth produces its sprouts,
And as a garden causes the things sown in it to spring up,
So the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
To spring up before all the nations. (Isaiah 61:10-11)

I think in these passages that doing your own pleasure does not just mean doing the things that you want to do and shunning the things you ought to do on the Sabbath. Doing your own pleasure means making yourself the focal point of the Sabbath, putting yourself at the center of it rather than God at the center, and emphasizing what you do or don’t do on the Sabbath. We should rather, as Isaiah says, take delight in the Lord and delight in the results that come from being wrapped in the garments of salvation in the robe of righteousness. This is the eternal, abiding condition of grace. We know now that the heritage of Jacob is nothing less than a new name signifying God’s investment of grace in Jacob and the forgiveness of his sins. 

What does it mean to keep something holy? It simply means to be completely devoted to something, to exalt something, to hold it in the highest esteem. Make no mistake: We cannot make something holy ourselves. Only God can do that. The Lord of the Sabbath makes the Sabbath holy because the day is a sign of what he does for us, He gives us grace. It is not for what we do for him. 

It is not surprising—given that the Sabbath is a sign of grace—that Jesus would say and teach so little about how the Sabbath should be kept by humankind. Because when we emphasize how it should be kept by humankind, we make the Sabbath about us. To enter into grace is to enter into rest, freedom from the work that we are so easily and naturally drawn into.

By example, Jesus teaches three principles of entering into a graceful Sabbath rest:

1: The Sabbath is a day to worship God. By worshiping God, we bring ourselves into oneness with God and restore what was lost in the Garden of Eden. 

2. The Sabbath is a day to do good for our fellow Wo/Man. This brings us into oneness with one another, brings us into oneness with with our friends and our neighbors. 

3. The Sabbath is to set aside business as usual, which is another way of bringing us into oneness with ourselves as we center ourselves on God. 

That is what God does. He points the way to himself and points away from us. The Sabbath centers ourself on God. 

For centuries, there have been discussions and even arguments about what day to keep, that centers things on us and not on God. It is the very opposite of grace. I personally like the Sabbath and I keep it because it is a perpetual reminder of God’s grace. But it is not the only way of God expressing his grace. 

God has other sheep of other folds, who know his voice and are exposed to his grace in the myriad ways God uses to reveal his grace. When I was a boy, it was commonly held that only Sabbath keepers would go to heaven. This was not an official position of the church but it was commonly believed. Once we began allowing into heaven others who did not keep the Sabbath, all of our theology of the Sabbath got messed up. 

We need a new theology of the Sabbath. It is ironic that the very thing God gives as a sign of his grace should be viewed with such exclusivity and with limitation, and should be centered on our behavior. The ultimate irony is that Jesus himself, the Lord of the Sabbath, would be crucified for being a Sabbath breaker. We need a new theology of the Sabbath created on sharing the Sabbath as a wonderful gift of grace. As Jesus said, the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:24). Another way of saying it might be that grace was made for man and not man for grace.

Are you looking for a sign of grace in your life? God gives you the Sabbath. Do you want a graceful expression that you can recognize in your life? It may not be like the other expressions of grace that that we have talked about before, but you might try the Sabbath as an expression of God’s grace. 

Donald: You and I are of a similar generation so we share a mindset about the Sabbath, though certainly our ideas about Sabbath have evolved. I have been a Seventh Day Adventist my whole life, and my mother made sure that I was well aware of what the Sabbath was. It was pretty well defined what a Seventh Day Adventist could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath. As a young person back then, I’m not sure we were anxiously looking forward to the day. We would look at our watches to see when it would be over. 

Certainly, I appreciate my mother’s concern. She wanted what was best for us in the context of our community. But I think we have become more healthy as Seventh Day Adventists. I don’t think we ever really believed that people who did not worship the Sabbath were not going to heaven. 

As an adult I feel like the Sabbath has become a real gift. Without it, retirement would son grow monotonous! The Sabbath breaks things up. It is a very, very good thing. God knew what was best for us. But we would wear ourselves right out. 

Learning spiritually and building relationships to me are important things to be doing on a Sabbath. We always got together with people (of like kind). I don’t know how much good we were doing. We were doing good for ourselves in some ways, or separating ourselves. 

For us, I think, the Sabbath, as I look back on it, was kind of a cultural thing. It provided routine, and you could go from one church to another church and the routine would be what you were used to. 

David: But it’s almost as though you have to follow the Sabbath rules only just on the one day, and the rest of the week you can go back to your normal behavior—not worshipping God, not doing good things for your fellow human beings, and so on. But everything will be okay because the Sabbath is coming up and you can get back to normal with God then. 

That does not sound right to me. Why shouldn’t every day be the Sabbath?

C-J: To Pentecostals, every day is the Sabbath, a day to make good choices, to be in fellowship, to walk side by side consciously with God. Many religions have frequent rituals—festivals and high days and mandates to service.

Islam mandates the giving of substantial sums of money to the mosque, which disperses it to the community, to those in need, and to other mosques. It mandates five-times-daily prayer. Sermons are synced by phone with those of an Imam in Saudi Arabia. Worshippers face Mecca and recite their prayers and listen to the lesson. Children run free but are expected to recognize authority, and males and females are separated in terms of duties and expectations. 

Moslems must engage with other people according to their position in the community, their gender, their age, whether they are mothers or not. It seems regimented and exhausting. 

Reinhard: I became an Adventist after my high school, along with some others in my family. We still make fun of our cousins who eat pork and don’t go to church on Saturday. But they find us odd too! To me, the Sabbath is a perpetual reminder of God’s creation. It is important for his people to honor him. 

The 10 commandments prohibit this and prohibit that, but the Sabbath is singled out as a day to remember. I think this is very important, because from Genesis to Revelation the Sabbath is often mentioned. I also believe there will be Sabbath worship in heaven.

Other than to remind us about the creation and the creative power of God, the Sabbath is also there for fellowship with God and with fellow human beings. There is no question that we need to be close with God every day, but the Sabbath, to me, is still special. We put everything aside and concentrate on worship and doing things that enhance our belief, our faith in God. We can review our lives over the past six days—maybe we need some correction for the days to come. Sabbath is a blessing, a tremendous encouragement, and part of the grace that God gives us.

Anonymous: Since the Sabbath is a sign that God is our sanctifier, and is a symbol of grace—which has the power to resurrect, I believe keeping the Sabbath, or seeing it as grace to us, re-creates us in God’s image. So now we are not only doing good and relating to God and to our fellow human beings on the Sabbath, but it becomes a lifestyle for every day. That is the new birth we experience through God’s grace. It is not that we need to be different on the Sabbath and revert to our natural behavior during the week. It’s not like that. 

But there is also a very important point: Without obeying God, completely and freely and with all our heart, we will not experience re-birth. But God’s grace keeps working on us. It might take years before we come to a conviction that we need to give up our will. Whether we understand the situation or not, we should just follow God—just be obedient—and eventually we get to a point where we begin to see the fruit of grace in our life. 

The first fruit is the desire to do God’s will—the desire to be obedient. There is joy in following God’s word, in communicating with him, in doing exactly what he wants, whatever it pleases him. You grow willing to give up everything for the great joy that keeps driving you towards him, day after day. 

So the Sabbath is a memorial of creation and also a celebration of re-creation. We start finding our life being re-created in heavenly ways. That is experienced over time—it does not happen overnight. I was baptized into the Seventh Day Adventist Church without believing in the Sabbath.

I was formerly Catholic, and the Sabbath never entered my mind. I agreed to be baptized in order to marry the man I loved. It was only much later that I experienced rich blessings in life as I accepted, little by little, the idea of the Sabbath. It never went deep into my heart until about 10 years ago. That was a turning point for me. It was an experience I’ll never forget.

I used to think it was OK to attend church and afterwards do whatever I wanted. If I felt like working, I would work. If I feel like shopping, I would shop. But after my turning point experience, I came to the conviction that this was not enough and I saw, by God’s grace, how deficient I was, and how much blessing I lacked because of that mentality. 

So I started to keep the Sabbath. And even before I kept it with all my heart, believing and understanding the dimensions of it, I came to a mental understanding that it is a sign of grace. Probably when I got to that point, to that understanding, I wasn’t keeping the Sabbath with all my heart, but it seems like God was preparing me over the years to come to a point where I would see it clearly. Now, I don’t have to fight with myself. I just don’t want to do anything! I really enjoy taking a rest. 

As for coming to God every day, not only on the Sabbath: Sometimes I’m closer to God, more deeply connected, during everyday worship in the morning, than in church on the Sabbath. So it is not a matter of going to church or not; it is a matter of communion with God—wherever and whenever, during the day, during the week, during the month, during life. It is the constant communication, constant interaction, with God. 

This is how we come to understand more about grace. God interferes through many circumstances in life, good and bad, in order for him to get the message through to us, that “I love you. You’re the subject of my grace, I’ll never forget you and never forsake you.” And you end up coming back to the experience of the garden of Eden, you come back to the experience of oneness with God. 

It all starts with obedience. Just do it! Whether you understand it or not, if God says do it, then do it, because he knows what that route will lead you to. “Be obedient, and leave the rest to me,” God seems to be saying,

Donald: As a child, I was taught what Sabbath was by keeping the Sabbath: “You do this, you don’t do that.” I’m not sure that the concept of the Sabbath was clearly understood. But as you mature, then you begin to question the concept of the Sabbath. What does “keeping the Sabbath” mean? We are told to keep the Sabbath, so there’s something unique about that period of time. The blessings of Sabbath I didn’t think about at all, as a child. Maybe blessings become more prominent as you mature. 

There are many dimensions to the Sabbath. As a child, going to church and being ready for the Sabbath was probably the focus. The routines of the Sabbath are good things to be taught—they are not merely cultural; but I also recognize that it is not life or death whether my shoes are shined or not. I think the pattern is very important. Certainly you don’t let go of your grace relationship with God throughout the week. But there’s a different focus on the Sabbath.

Robin: I feel blessed so much by hearing these different vocalizations of thoughts about the Sabbath. It brings to the forefront so many opportunities to learn. If you go back to Genesis, to the garden experience, God gave the Sabbath as a special sacred time. It wasn’t to be the only time to communicate, but he asks for one day out of seven, and he said to remember. 

After the fall, he knew the whole world was going to change and Man’s focus was going to be on those weeds—on difficulties in relationships. Today, it’s work, home maintenance, the children, your car broke down,… so many things to distract you from being able to have a day of rest and peace, a day of communing and community with God and with others. I think God loves a party, because he certainly prescribed a lot of them. 

In the decalogue, the fourth commandment is the longest one. It has got the most description. Nobody wants to change “Thou shalt not murder” or “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” It is a dangerous thing to throw out the Sabbath. Adam, and Eve were Sabbath keepers. Abraham was a Sabbath keeper. Jesus was a Sabbath keeper, and so were his disciples. 

In the book of Revelation, God says “My Sabbath” like it was prescribed for a reason. And so the devil takes that pendulum and he makes it swing way over to extremes by legalism, by making the Sabbath a burden and an impossibility; and on the other end of the pendulum is the thought that “Just do what you want. It’s not really important. That’s all just old fashioned malarkey.”

When God spells it out specifically, then it is our joy and our blessing. It is also our duty. “Duty” has a strange connotation. But he knows that it is a special time to draw specifically near to him, near to serving our families, near to serving others—all in his name and for his glory. 

So let’s not let the devil take that pendulum and put it either of the extremes.

Anonymous: I don’t see how people look at the 10 commandments as rules, and don’t want to live by rules. They want to be free. Because God gave us free will. And we can do anything we want. I see them as conditions for happiness. We cannot be happy if we don’t follow God’s recipe for happiness. And the 10 commandments are broad brush strokes of ways for happiness. They are not against our will; they are for our good. So why would we think we can do better than God if we draw a new way for ourselves to live by?

Don: I would argue that the Sabbath is a sign of grace. It is not necessarily a sign that I’m on the right track; rather, it is a sign that God is on the right track as it relates to me. We so quickly and so easily and so repeatedly put ourselves at the center of the Sabbath, meaning what we do, what we don’t do, this is how we should keep it, this is what is expected from us in terms of our behavior. But it seems to me that what the Scriptures are teaching, what Jesus is teaching, and what the passage that prompted my thoughts on this says, is that the Sabbath is a reminder about what God is and what he does, and how he interacts with mankind. It is all about his grace. 

God can demonstrate his grace in whatever way he wishes. We see throughout the Scriptures that God intervenes with people in various ways at various times using various means, sometimes predictable, often not. We heard some weeks ago about what I call David’s Damascus Road experience; we see Saul in a very dramatic experience. 

God seeks to reveal himself to people and one of the ways he does that is through the Sabbath, it seems to me. He gives it as a downpayment of grace on a weekly basis, and for those for whom it is meaningful it is a very important time. But I don’t know that it is the only way God reveals himself and gives us his grace. He gives it through a variety of other means, and I think that in our theology and our understanding, what we have to do is make the Sabbath on appealing gift of grace, not something that we can demand people to embrace like we do simply because we can make an argument that this is what God said, this is what truth is. We do believe in our truth but it is not something that comes as gracefully as I think it needs to come, because God gives it as an extreme view of his grace, an extreme illustration and sign of his grace. We must be careful how we use it, because we need to use it like God uses it as well, it seems to me.

Reinhard: I don’t think God withholds grace from churches that worship on Sunday. Before I became an Adventist, Sunday was part worship but also I played sports, studied for my high school exams, and sometimes even skipped church altogether. When I became an Adventist, I quit all of that on the Sabbath. I know now it was not good for my health to work seven days a week. 

We Adventists like to think of ourselves as “peculiar people” superior to other Christians. We should not hold that condescending position. God loves everybody, even people who never heard of the Gospel. As in Romans 1, God will have some kind of calculation with them. But we know in our heart to do the right thing, and I think that is what we tend to practice. We know what we need to do, in terms of our relationship with God and what God needs. 

The commandment of God is the fundamental authority. We need to follow God’s law. We might be excused small transgressions on the Sabbath, but we must focus our heart and mind on worship, on communion with God. 

Don: David is not an Adventist: What advice do you give us in terms of understanding the relationship between grace and the Sabbath? 

David: As you have said, God has a million different ways of getting through to people and the last thing I would want to do is interfere with something that’s working for other people. If, for Adventists, the way you practice the Sabbath is working in cementing your relationship with God then that’s a wonderful thing and I can have no objection to it.  

As a Daoist and a process theologist (I think the two are closely linked) I try to keep God in mind all the time, partly in the way I live life and partly to remember to say the Lord’s Prayer in my head every day. It serves as a little reminder of God. That’s my way of Sabbath and it works for me. 

C-J: Everybody’s relationship with God is unique. I was taught the word Sabbath means rest, and can also be translated to grace. It is a very personal experience, but you don’t have to look very far, inwardly or outwardly, to see it active. It is always evolving. It always brings peace, it always brings growth. Humans seem to need ritual and community, but I think literally the word Sabbath is very personal. 

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