Deuteronomy 5:12-15
“‘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.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. What is Sabbath? It's a difficult question. Actually. It's a question that lots of people ask. And I think many people make mistakes about what is the Sabbath. Reading from the Old Testament is just a snippet of God's law. We have a couple of different places where Moses repeats the 10 commandments, one in Mount Sinai, and one here in Deuteronomy. And our reading just gives us those few verses that are all about Sabbath regulations, which means that no matter how little I want to preach on the Sabbath, I have to today, so we're gonna go for it. What is Sabbath? Before we dive into that, it's good to back out and take a look at the concepts of Sabbath. And the Old Testament. The first time we see it is in Genesis with the creation, and God creates the world in six days. And then he rests on the Sabbath. And that day, becomes the Sabbath, a day of rest, a day a holy day for the Lord, as we see it in Exodus, chapter 20, where God says, again, Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. And it's tied to creation, again, six days of labor, one day of rest. Once again, we see it here, in Deuteronomy, this time, it's not tied to creation. Instead, it's tied to the salvation that God provided in ancient Israel. At the very end of all of the rules that he gives, He says, 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. So it is something marked by both God's pattern of creation in Genesis, and Exodus, and then again, redemption, the salvation that happened in Egypt, when he brought them out of slavery, and took them on this journey all the way through the wilderness, to where they are now in Deuteronomy at the edge of the promised land. But Sabbath is not only commanded every every week, God had some pretty interesting rules for Sabbath. Beyond that. Leviticus 25 gives us some Sabbath rules that God commanded every seven years. The land was supposed to get a Sabbath rest, which meant the farmers were not allowed to farm. The rules were very simple. No sowing your fields no tending your grape vines. The land would just do what it wants. Can you imagine a farming society built on the grain harvest in the vineyards and you go and you tell your farmers every seven years, just take a break for a year. Eat whatever the land produces all on its own. That's a little bit more than a day set aside not to work right. The funny thing is little vague. Leviticus also gives an answer to the question you're thinking about. out, quote, you may ask, What will we eat in the seventh year? If we do not plant or harvest our crops, I will send you such a blessing in the sixth year that the land will yield enough for three years. While you plant during the eighth year, you will eat from the old crop and will continue to eat from it until the harvest of the ninth year comes in. It's kind of cool, right? How much you want to bet Israel never did the Sabbath year. Right? Yeah, I take that bet. Now, that wasn't the only year, every 50 years, there was a Sabbath of Sabbath's called the Jubilee Year, when they wiped out all debts freed all slaves. Everybody who bought property in those years would return to their family estate, all the everything would reset in all of Israelite society. If you thought the Sabbath year was unlikely, unless you want to bet they never did that. Right. Can you imagine what it'd be like if you bought property. Without understanding that 20 years from now, it would go back to its original owner, and you'd have to go all the way back to where you were born. It's very different thing, right? The Sabbath or rest wasn't just a day or a schedule or a year, sometimes it was a concept to the Promised Land was supposed to be a kind of rest a kind of Sabbath for God's people. God gave them this land as a way of giving them provision for their future providing for all their needs, and rest from their enemies. The food they would get from God and the protection they would get from him as well. And so when Joshua goes to the promised land, he is supposed to be a way of conquering the land and receiving rest from God. And when David and Solomon finally had peace, after years and years and decades of war, the Bible says that He gave David rest from their enemies, the rest is more than just a day, more than just a schedule. It is resting in God's provision, and waiting for God to take care of you. And so we can see that again, in the ideas that the Psalms sometimes give us, as Psalm 46 says, Be still and know that I am God. It is you rest and wait for God to take care of you. Whereas Psalm 27 says, wait for the Lord, be strong and let your heart take courage and wait for the Lord. The Sabbath day, this Sabbath rest was a way to force all of Israel to do that is to say, my work and my behavior, my actions, my life, my activity that does not provide God provides. And we would see that all the more securely, and the Sabbath year and the Jubilee. And you all reacted exactly the way I thought you would write to those things. No way. How would people survive like that was the point, wasn't it? We trust God in ancient Israel did not. So we asked the question then for us with all of this ideas in mind with Sabbath of ancient Israel. What is Sabbath for us? Because that's really what's important. Like it's not all the regulations and rules about what that God gave ancient Israel, that was a people in a country many 1000s of years ago. Now that Christ has come, what is Sabbath? For us? The most common answer that I hear is that Sabbath is Sunday. We gather for worship on the Sabbath day, fulfilling God's command to keep the Sabbath. And our Small Catechism kind of says something like that. And when we look at the third commandment, the explanation is, we should fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and his word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it. So this connection to the commandment
is all about preaching and God's word. So many times, I have heard and I bet you have heard that we Christians now observe the Sabbath day, we keep the Sabbath day by going to church on Sunday, and sanctifying that day, taking that day as a day of remembrance. Another way of thinking about that is that we took the observances of what St. Jesus did on the Sabbath. Our reading, in the Gospel talks about Jesus going to the synagogue, as was his custom on the Sabbath day, where they would read from the scriptures often have something that sounds a whole lot like a sermon, and then go about their Sabbath rest. But the problem is, what that does, is that ignores what the Sabbath actually was in ancient Israel. It was Friday to Saturday. When do we worship on Sunday, which means that if we want to keep the commandment, the Sabbath as Sabbath, we would have to do it yesterday. Wait a second. That means either we are doing something wrong, or the Sabbath command no longer applies to us, right? At least not in this way. One of the problems is that many people simply assume that somehow the Sabbath just magically got moved, without any passage of scripture or command of God. And if you look up, what day is the Sabbath on our favorite search engine, you will find plenty of articles that will say things like that. Oh, yeah, Sabbath is now Sunday. And they have zero evidence for it. This was a huge conflict between Lutherans when we came to America and the Calvinists who are already here. You see the Calvinists? They said, well, well, Whoa, you're not supposed to do any work on Sunday. And all you're supposed to do is read your Bibles and pray. If you remember, Little House on the Prairie, that's what they had to do, right? And the Germans who got here were like, What are you talking about? We can go out and have a picnic. It's a great day to do that. Was a lot of fighting. A lot of theological division, when we got here. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that when we talk about Sunday as the Sabbath, and keeping the Sabbath, we are doing exactly the same thing. The Pharisees did. We are making Sabbath a list of rules and regulations that we are doing to make God happy. You have to go back into the Old Testament and parse out all of that stuff and figure out exactly what God wants you to do on this day, to please him. Which turns Sabbath into the same kind of burden and law that the Pharisees did. See, Sabbath is not for God. It's for us. And we gather on Sundays, not because God has commanded a particular day, because but because it's the day Jesus rose from the dead. And I think his resurrection is pretty cool. Right? Like if we're going to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, why don't we do it on the day he did it. That's it, right. And we gather here not because we want to fulfill some law of God, but because we need grace that was enabled and empowered by that resurrection. And we need the forgiveness of sins, we need to hear his word, we need the Holy Spirit delivered to us. And it's not because God has given us a checkbox in his law, and told us, this is what you must do to make me happy. That's Old Testament thinking. That's the law. That's the Pharisees. We're here, because we desire God's grace, and his love given to us through His words, and Sakhalin. Sunday is not the Sabbath day, it's the day of the resurrection the day of the new creation. And when we gather here, we live in that for just a little bit. Now, one of the other ways that I hear the word Sabbath used, is that Sabbath is a day where you're supposed to take a break from working. And usually when I hear this, it's at pastors conferences, and some kind of health expert stands up in front of the pastors and says, Hey, guys, you need to take a break a Sabbath, because we're really worried about burnout. And I bet you've heard Sabbath us that way, as well. Everybody should take a Sabbath a day off, where you're supposed to rest and recover and not work. There's even a little bit of that, in our Old Testament reading, where it tells the people who owned servants or own slaves or hired servants, that you're not allowed to take a break on the Sabbath and make them work. That's not what Sabbath is about. Sabbath and the Old Testament was resting in God's provision, not just taking a day off. Well, I think it's a good idea to recover if you need it. Well, I think it's a great idea for pastors to take their days off, just like it is for you. That's not really the command of God. God did not come down from on high to say, you should have a weekend. Right? The Sabbath was given to Israel, not for that reason. But because it was the pattern in creation, and a way to rest in from God's rest in His grace, and His provision. And so we shouldn't use that word Sabbath, to talk about taking a day off either, because it simply takes the word rest and misapplies it theologically. So what is Sabbath? For Christians? I've given you two wrong answers. What's the right one? Well, our kollect of the day gave away the game before I could get to it. Jesus is our Sabbath rest. You see, because rest in the Old Testament was all about resting in the grace of God, and His protection, whether it was resting from your labors as provision, or taking care of your future, by your work, resting from the enemies who are around you by resting in God's protection. We rest in Christ, because he has accomplished it all. And the place where we see that perfect rest is in the life of Jesus himself. You see, because Jesus went to the cross and He died there on a Friday that was sacrificed for us. And his faithful followers took his body down and placed him in the tomb. And it was there that he rested. And I can't imagine a more perfect or a better way to rest in trust in God's grace. Right Jesus knew exactly what would happen to him. He knew he would go to Jerusalem die on a cross be placed in a tomb. And after three days rise, and what did he do? He allowed himself to be killed and placed in a tomb, and he rested for the Sabbath day. He trusted, that his father would raise him from the dead, and give him life again. That's, that's what I call trust, right?
That's fulfilling the true Sabbath, that is waiting for the Lord, let your heart take courage, wait for the Lord. Jesus accomplished that perfect Sabbath rest, He fulfilled the command for us, so that when he rose to new life, he could give us his righteousness and purity. Jesus is our Sabbath rest. That's what Hebrews chapter four tells us to is that the rest of the Old Testament could not be accomplished by the work of those ancient people, not by Joshua, not by all the Sabbath that they did not keep, or by the broken regulations. It says, So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For whoever is entered, God's rest has also rested from His works as God did from his. And we rest in the grace and peace of Christ. He is what causes us to rest from the need to please God by our works, from the fear of our enemies, sin, death, and the power of the devil. We rest knowing that Christ provides for us by his own death, and resurrection. We know that Christ is all the promises of God, as it says in Second Corinthians chapter one, for all the promises of God find their yes in him. So that means that Sabbath is actually a gift, not a burden, or a law or something that we have to do to make God happy. And it's a gift of grace in Christ. So what it means is you don't have to figure out what all the rules and regulations are for Saturday or Sunday. Sabbath is Christ for you, and giving you grace, protecting us from our sin, and the power of death. It's not something that you have to study or plan for accomplish. It is simply receiving the word and Sacraments. It's not a duty given from God to you as a law that you have to carry, but a gift in Christ, we don't have to impress our God. In Christ, we don't have to fight off all of sin, death and the power of the devil in Christ. We can even rest in our graves as we wait for the day that he returns. Because that's what Christ did for us. The Sabbath is the gift that God gives to you through His Son, Jesus Christ. In his name, amen.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai