Sermon Notes: Exodus 31:12-18 - Sabbath
One of the many truths I have learned in recovery from my mental and emotional breakdown a few years ago was that God has spoken about body, soul, and spirit and how to control myself with the mind of Christ given to me to rule my mind and the powerful fruit of the Spirit, self-control.
The problem was not God’s means to manage myself. The problem was my failure to integrate what I was reading in the Bible into practice. My naturalistic defaults and my pop Christian subculture theological presuppositions kept me from understanding and integrating God’s word into my practice of discipleship. I had to repent and heal God’s way.
I allowed the warning signs of me swimming against the current of God’s way of how to live to go unheeded, and eventually it caught up to me. God has designed his creation to flow a certain way. When we live against God’s created wiring, it results in less-than-optimal circumstances for God’s people.
NOTE: That does not mean that suffering and hardship are avoided by doing things God’s way. Quite the opposite may be our experience. We are in a cosmic battle that manifests itself in our physical existence in a multitude of ways. Sometimes we do things God’s way, and God designs or allows hard providences for us in spite of doing everything right so that grow in ways we didn’t know we needed to grow. In that growth God shows us more of his glory, and he equips us to live more in the flow of his kingdom, equips us to make war on evil, and he prepares us receive all of the good kingdom success of living in that flow without denying him like we might have done had we not been trained by hardship.
Yet even those hard things are designed for our good and are only found in living God’s way, living in the flow of the wiring he has designed.
Have you ever wondered why we don’t have an epidemic of people being injured from trying to use their arms to fly like birds by diving off branches of trees or climbing towers and trying to soar on our arm’s non-aerodynamic contours like the birds? We learned early somehow the physical law of gravity, and several laws of human anatomy that work against us flying like birds. It wasn’t a class or special workshop. We just learned it and understood. Therefore, most humans typically don’t attempt to break those laws the Lord put in place in creation. God didn’t even have to have those laws inspired to be written in his word. They were pretty evident.
Stupid Human Confession: Because of First Blood in 1982 (ripe and wise age of 10), I did climb a big tree and jumped out to grab branches to see if I could stop my fall like Rambo did when he jumped from the face of that rock wall. That was not a good decision. I wasn’t trying to fly but learned a hard lesson from God’s law of gravity.
God has given us his word, and he has given us creation, and by these laws, these truths, we learn to operate in the flow of God’s way for human flourishing. And in the flow of God’s design, things work together for good in God’s good time and God’s good way.
When we neglect the full counsel of God’s word or we work cross ways of God’s wiring in creation, things don’t work right. In those instances, we often we find ourselves out of sorts and being instructed by consequences or the direct Fatherly hand of the Lord’s gracious discipline.
Listen to Haggai 1:4-11 (ESV) 4 “Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins? 5 Now, therefore, thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider your ways. 6 You have sown much and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes. 7 “Thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider your ways. 8 Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the LORD. 9 You looked for much, and behold, it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why? declares the LORD of hosts. Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house. 10 Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce. 11 And I have called for a drought on the land and the hills, on the grain, the new wine, the oil, on what the ground brings forth, on man and beast, and on all their labors.”
The temple was the permanent structure of the Tabernacle that we have been studying. Israel’s disobedience over time led to the exile of the northern kingdom, then finally the southern kingdom.
God being rich in mercy and faithful to keep his word according to his covenant has heard their cries for help. So, God stirred Darius to release his people, and mobilized Ezra, Nehemiah, and a host of exiles back to the land to rebuild his temple. God was at work because there was gospel preparation to do for the appointed time when the eternal Son of God would tabernacle among them to show them the Father’s glory, die in their place for their sin, be buried, rise, ascend back to the Father, and send Holy Spirit to build his church, his holy temple, his kingdom of priests, among all nations and bring about the restoration of all things.
God’s people received the good grace of return and rebuild, but they have abandoned the work of rebuilding the temple, so they are reaping the results of not doing things God’s way. Their efforts in life are not working out because their work is being gently opposed by God.
He’s blowing the fruit of their work away.
Why? They have abandoned his way. They are working cross ways of his way.
God has given his word, and he has wired all of creation to work a certain way. If they wanted to ride on the rails of God’s good way, they needed to get after the work putting that temple back together for God’s glory and preparation for the coming of the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Ancient of Days.
They needed to be working like God instructed them all the way back in Exodus 31:1-11, and that would result in them continuing to receive the fruit of doing things God’s way. Here is a little principle we can glean for God’s people. This is a good and Fatherly reality of being sons and daughters of God: Do things God’s way and receive the supernatural help of God. Work against God’s way and receive the supernatural opposition and discipline of God.
One of God’s revealed and created hard-wired ways to successfully navigate life as his children on mission that is soaked in good news truth is the Sabbath. Let’s read about it in our text today: Exodus 31:12-18.
Last week we looked at the first half of this chapter and unpacked the gospel facet of work, today we look at the other half of the chapter and the gospel facet of Sabbath.
It is clear in the New Testament that after Jesus’ resurrection the church gathered on Sunday for worship, and there is good evidence they called that “the Lord’s day” (1 Corinthians 16:2; Acts 20:7; Revelation 1:10). Therefore, it is good and solid and biblically founded Christian tradition that Christians gather for worship on Sunday, the first day of the week and theologically “day 8”, to worship rather than the traditional Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, which is day 7.
And there is no evidence that the Sabbath and its implications ceased to exist. I know there are different opinions about this within orthodox Christianity. The gospel does not necessitate the abolition of Sabbath for us to gather to celebrate the resurrection and worship the Lord on Sunday. We are not operating with the presupposition that the Sabbath is irrelevant. We are operating in belief that Jesus has fulfilled righteousness for us in his work on the cross for our entrance into the Sabbath rest of salvation not having to earn God’s favor but having that favor given to us based on the merit of Jesus’ righteousness applied to us through faith.
That truth will lead us into our observations and our applications.
1) The Sabbath leads us to Jesus so that we will find rest from the impossible task of pleasing God for saving righteousness and receive the gift of Jesus’ righteousness for us that pleases God.
Remember, the good news gift of Jesus’ righteousness for us in the great exchange is God the Father’s love for us. God so loved the world! Hebrews 4:1-13 is a glorious bit of gospel goodness who’s argument begins in 3:1, but we will simply draw your attention to 4:9-10: Hebrews 4:9-10 (ESV) 9 So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, 10 for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.
The writer of Hebrew’s argument begins by exalting Jesus as greater than Moses and moves to exalting Jesus as the way we enter ultimate Sabbath rest.
Neither Moses nor Joshua achieved rest for the people of God. So, when God spoke of entering the rest of Canaan, he had in mind something more glorious than entering the Promised Land. He was using the Sabbath in all its multi-faceted practice to point us to the good news.
So, in Sabbath, we see the good news truth of the cross. Jesus provides the freedom to stop striving to please the Father for righteousness, and he pleases the Father forever for us by his righteousness. So, we no longer have to strive to please God for salvation, we just receive the gift of Jesus providing that Sabbath stopping, rest.
2) The Sabbath serves to sanctify God’s people. V. 12-13
All the Sabbaths (rooted in the Sabbath the Lord took in creation) is to serve as a sign between God’s people and him that he is sanctifying them.
Stopping from the multitudes of work weekly, monthly, yearly, and generationally, was a physical token for them to hold on to that they belonged to Jesus and in those Sabbaths he was rooting sin out and replacing that sin with faith to trust him more.
By stopping from work they had to trust that God would make up for what they didn’t do, and in so doing God provided and was sanctifying them by rooting out self-saving and replacing that with the action of faith that rested in God’s loving provision for them.
3) The Sabbath is a practice of holiness. V. 14-15
God calls his people to holiness. To imitate him. To act like him.
Sabbath is so important that violation of it was to result in capital punishment. You will see in a moment the reason but suffice it to say that to violate God’s word and creation wiring of Sabbath was to deny God’s gospel work to save them. It was to walk over his provision for their rescue in favor of what they could produce.
This truth should take us to the good news truth that if we bypass the good news of Jesus’ provision of resting from having to please God for salvation, the resulting consequence is an eternal death sentence.
This truth should also take us to the reality that practicing Sabbath teaches us to act like God when we act like God we grow in holiness. We learn more holiness.
As God provides in their rest, they would be drawn deeper into their love of God and his love for them.
4) The Sabbath is an echo in creation of the very nature of God who created all things.
The Sabbath is written as one of the 10 commandments that are to shape people and nations. Thus the Sabbath is hard-wired into creation, not to be practiced for salvation, but to be practiced for mankind’s refreshment. V. 16-18 We learn in verses 16-18 that Sabbath is not merely something tacked on for good measure. Sabbath is rooted in the nature of God, and thus a rooted facet of the good news as we have tried to show.
God worked, and then he stopped work to do something else. Sabbath means to stop. To cease. Because Sabbath is rooted in God’s nature, it is a gospel reality, and thus to ignore it is a death sentence spiritually and for flourishing life.
Sabbath is for humans to be refreshed. We can’t reflect on to God our broken tendencies. It’s hard to imagine what refreshment for God looks like. Listen to Isaiah 40:28 (ESV) 28 Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.
God doesn’t get tired like we get tired so that he has to recover from exertion. God’s refreshment is not recovery from exertion like for us, rather it is his transition from creating to his sustaining creation by continually speaking his word that creation be sustained (Hebrews 1:3).
There is a lesson here in Sabbath for us. Jesus said: Mark 2:27-28 (ESV) 27 And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 28 So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” The Lord created and shifted to sustaining, and thus he Sabbathed. In this, the Lord was refreshed. Just like that sometimes when we take a break from one work and engage in another work, we are likewise refreshed. Sabbath might not always look like sitting in the chair with our feet up, although it should look like that many times, but it might look like stopping one work to engage in another work that requires more faith from me and less fretting.
Sabbath is sometimes not doing nothing but doing something different.
Sabbath is almost unintelligible to us, and that is not God’s fault. It’s the result of the continual battle of ideas that we are continually bombarded with and have succumbed to. Sabbath is contrary to everything we know and believe about success as we have been taught success.
For us in the church, I suggest “Liberating Ministry From the Success Syndrome” by Kent Hughes for a refreshing definition of success for us in the church that is a refreshing practice of Sabbath. How are we going to apply this?
Application
1) Sabbath rest continually points us to our rest in Christ. Hebrews 4:9
As we practice Sabbath, remember Jesus’ work in the good news to bring us into the Promised Land of the Father’s favor. In Christ, we rest from having to please God for salvation and receive his pleasure in us. NOTE: This does not mean we are to stop living in ways to please God relationally as we grow up in our relationship with God. We seek to please God not to earn favor, we already have that. We seek to please God because we love him and enjoy bringing him joy.
That is what the gift of 1 John 1:9 confession is for. It’s how we acknowledge our sin that brings God sadness as our fault and repair the relational breach we created and enjoy again our fellowship with God.
2) Refreshing comes in obeying the Sabbath. V. 17
When we believe the good news, we get the refreshing of the Holy Spirit, the well of water springing up for eternal life. And, since we don’t have to earn God’s favor, we get to grow in holiness and learn that God is trustworthy as we can Sabbath, stop, according to God’s word and receive his supernatural help. We learn we can trust God as we watch him supply. When we learn we can trust God, we are refreshed.
Sabbath is not optional for optimal Christian living. Sabbath is central as a facet of the gospel. Sabbath is a resistance against the world system that sows death by never stopping. Does the call to Sabbath create a central nervous system pop of threat? Why does the gospel facet of work empowered by the Spirit and the gospel facet of Sabbath create emotional dysregulation in us?
3) What is the Holy Spirit saying to us if work empowered by the Spirit and rest from work as a promise of renewal and provision create conflict inside of us rather than a joyful pursuit of holiness?
4) Pray: Increase us / Holy / Send us / Honor / Contrition / Prayer