A Pattern for Our Days

Imagine if I asked you, which is the sixth commandment? Unless you happen to have learned the catechism, you might have to go back to the beginning and count them out on your fingers. But there are one or two commandments many of us know just by their number, and the fourth commandment is one of them. It’s the commandment about the Sabbath day. And maybe of all the commandments, it’s the one that gets some Christians hot under the collar. No stealing, no adultery, no bearing false witness, no coveting—we get these. We never dream of openly ignoring them. But keeping the Sabbath, we certainly could take the whole week on this commandment, couldn’t we? Explaining it, discussing it, trying to clarify what it says and also what it doesn’t say. And I don’t plan to do that, but let me say just a couple of things that I hope might be helpful.

The first is this: it’s a mistake to think that the Sabbath commandment is either only about one day in the week or all about one day in the week. If you think about it, the truth is, it’s really about every day of the week: six days you shall labor and do all your work, and one day rest from that labor.

I sometimes think that what this law means is that God is giving us a kind of time and motion tool for balancing our lives. So, if you were to ask me, “Is it OK to do this on Sunday?” unless it’s clearly unbiblical, I would respond, “Well, tell me why are you thinking of doing that on Sunday?” And often the question is answered, “I don’t have time in the rest of the week.” And that’s the problem, because what the commandment is teaching us is if that’s our answer, then it’s not just that we may be misusing the Sabbath, it’s that we are misusing the whole week. So, the Sabbath commandment is not just about keeping or guarding the Sabbath, it’s about living a healthy, balanced life all week long.

And here’s a second thing to remember: the commandment implies that we’ve been given the six-plus-one pattern because we’ve been created as the image of God. The Sabbath commandment reminds us of this because it’s grounded in the pattern by which God created the world—six days of divine activity and one day to rest, admire, and enjoy it. And when we follow that pattern, we are really just being what we were made to be: the children of God made as His image and likeness, patterning our lives after His activity. So, this is a commandment that reminds us of our dignity and destiny as men and women. We’ve been created as the miniature image and likeness of the Creator, and so we live after His pattern.

And here’s something else I think is quite interesting. The first Sabbath day was not Adam’s seventh day. It was God’s seventh day, but it was Adam’s first full day. It was as though God was saying to him, “I want your existence to begin with a time to admire everything I have made, and then you can go on from there and imitate Me.”

What a gift the Sabbath is, and what a marvelous safeguard of our lives. I hope you feel it really is a gift to you, and I hope you find it really does safeguard the way you live the whole week.