Previously: The Sabbath and Adam
The Sabbath is a creation ordinance, and therefore abides as long as creation does. However, particular applications of it are given to Israel as a political entity. This doesn’t mean the Sabbath (1 day a week for God) is limited to Israel. The civc and ceremonial applications of the Sabbath command are, but not the moral law to keep the Sabbath holy.
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
—Exodus 20:8-11
“‘Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
—Deuteronomy 5:12-15
Israel, as image bearers, had the same goal as Adam, the work of “expansion.” Obviously it won’t look the same, because man was banished from the Garden-temple of Eden. So the spreading of the Garden can’t happen. But people are still made in God’s image, and must image God. God’s people are still accountable to multiply and rule. The prophet-priest-kingly roles are still there. It may not be the ideal Garden-temple, but God in his grace still meets with his image bearers. This time, he “tabernacles” among them. There is still a place of worship: the Tabernacle. And the worship of God is still to be spread throughout the whole earth. The mandate remains. Israel is corporately “God’s son.”
Covenant
God makes a covenant with his people, Israel. This is yet another expansion of the one covenant of grace. Yet, it’s unique from all the others. At this point in Redemptive History, God chose to expound His Law. There is exceptionally more clarity in the abiding requirement of the Covenant of Works. God’s moral law is summarized in the “Ten Words”, or decalogue: the Ten Commandments. The terms of the Mosaic Covenant, written by the very finger of God on two tablets of stone. They do not change.
One of the Ten Words, making a reappearance from the Garden of Eden, is the Sabbath. God bases the commandment on the prefall Sabbath ordinance. Creation is the root of the Sabbath being set apart. Contextualized to God’s people, for this point in Redemptive History, that one day of ceasing labor for rest and worship is the 7th day, with explicit application spelled out.
Covenant Sign
The Sabbath is the covenant sign of the Mosaic covenant.
“You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, ‘Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you. You shall keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you. Everyone who profanes it shall be put to death. Whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people. Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death. Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a covenant forever. It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.’”
—Exodus 31:13-17
Hodge says of this:
(7.) As the observance of the Sabbath had died out among the nations, it was solemnly reenacted under the Mosaic dispensation to be a sign of the covenant between God and the children of Israel. They were to be distinguished as the Sabbath-keeping people among all the nations of the earth, and as such were to be the recipients of God’s special blessings. . . . And in Ezekiel xx. 12, it is said, “Moreover, also, I gave them my Sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify them.”
—Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 “Soteriology” pg. 322
God not only grounds the Sabbath in creation, but also (in Deuteronomy) in his redeeming his people from Egypt, therefore Sabbath-keeping distinguished God’s people from all other nations. The Sabbath is unique to a covenant people delivered from bondage. Sabbath-keeping is covenantal.
Eschatological Sign
Sabbath is the goal of their labor, an eschatological sign.
For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on.
—Hebrews 4:8
There was a future hope. The people entering the promised land did not fulfill the full promise of Sabbath rest. It was only pointing forward to a greater reality.
As the Tree of Life was a sign and seal of the covenant of works, holding out eternal life for obedience, so the Sabbath was the sign of the Mosaic Covenant, remembering God’s creation and his redeeming his people, pointing forward to eternal rest.
According to R. Scott Clark,
Sabbath was also gospel. Isaiah made that abundantly clear: the Sabbath was about more than our “doing” or “not doing.” Yahweh reminded his people that his throne is heaven and “the earth is my footstool” and “the place of my rest” (Isa. 66:1). Yahweh did not enter into a covenant with Israel because of her sanctity, but he describes the consummate state, drawing upon imagery from the typology. The promise of the new heavens and earth is cast in terms of the Israelite Sabbath (“From new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath”), but the promise is universalized: “all flesh” shall worship Yahweh (Isa. 66:23). The prophet Zechariah depicts the consummate state as an eternal day, a “unique day” (ESV) in which the creational pattern of morning and evening is transcended by unending light mirroring the unending seventh day of creation (Zech. 14:7).
—R. Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession loc. 4985-4991
Theoretically, if they perfectly obeyed the covenant, they would enter the rest. But they could not because of sin. Like Adam they broke the covenant. Israel was not faithful, either.
Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways. ’
As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.
—Hebrews 3:7-11
Were they believers, saved by grace through faith, who then fell away? No.
Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. As it is said,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
—Hebrews 3:12-19
This is divine commentary on those who did not enter. Unbelief is the reason.
Israel (God’s son) also did not enter
Like each before them, Adam, Noah, Abraham, they too fell short. Hebrews specifically says that many who were delivered from Egypt were not true believers at all! There are always apostates in the visible covenant people of God. “For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened” (4:2).
God’s people under the Mosaic covenant too could only enter the Sabbath by the labors of Another.
So what?
All this is a nice story about the Sabbath’s significance, but it doesn’t apply to us, right? Christ fulfilled the Sabbath (fulfilling the civil and ceremonial laws), and so Jesus is our “Sabbath.” We’re merely resting in him. Christians, after Christ, are under no obligation to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. That’s an Old Testament, Israelite thing, right?
Ever heard that? Perhaps it is what you believe.
There’s a very common assumption that the Sabbath, the 4th Commandment, is abrogated (repealed or done away with).
Is it?
