Day One
A Day to Enter Into
Firstly, let’s look at some observations. God affirms work. He tells us that six days you should labor. He likes it. In later Scripture He says that He hates laziness. In one place it actually tells us not to feed lazy people. The Hebrew people worked six twelve hour days. He likes work. Work was not a part of the curse. God had jobs for Adam to do even inside perfection; meaningful work. If you look at the work God gave Adam to do, it was quite daunting. To name all the animals sounds easy now, but thirty minutes into that I’d have run out of ideas. I’d be saying to some poor four legged animal, ‘I don’t know what to call you!!’ I mean, who thought of platypus? We take all these things for granted. The first person to do anything is brave. Who was the first person to eat an oyster? Who did that first? Whoever did that was very brave - either that or they were starving to death. Can you imagine the scene? Joe and Bill were walking on the beach. ‘Hey Bill, you see that rock? I dare you to break it open and eat whatever is inside it’. Who was the first person to let someone put a laser in their eyeball?
In Hebrew the word Sabbath is the word Shabbat, which means to cease work, or to rest. The command is essentially to do what God did – to have one day that’s different from everything else. Over time, people have evolved Sabbath into a list of things you don’t do, but in the essence of the command Sabbath wasn’t something you don’t do, Sabbath was something you did. It was something you entered into.
To understand what God is creating, we have to understand time and space. We use time to create space. Space is just stuff. So we use time to create stuff. For example, we work 40 hours a week to create a paycheck. That’s stuff. We go to class to produce an education. We fellowship to produce a relationship. We measure a day by the rising and setting of the sun. We measure a month by the moon. We measure a year by the rotation of the earth around the sun, therefore, we measure time by planets, planets are made of space, so we use time to create space and then we use space to measure time. They are coinciding with each other. Sabbath is a day that is not bound by time or space; it’s a day that’s set apart as holy to the Lord. You’re not using that time to create stuff. It’s the only day of the week that we don’t use our time to create space. And thus it makes it different. It helps us to fulfill our purpose in living like God. Sabbath is a day where we are free of those bounds. Let’s live the best life that we can, and the way to do that is living God’s way.