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 5:15, ESV
At church this past Sunday, I noticed something that had previously never dawned on me. Every Sunday for years, our minister would read one of three passages before calling us to confess our sins. He rotates between the Ten Commandments as given in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 and Christ’s two-fold summary of the Law. I have literally heard these passages hundreds of times each, so it is with a mixture of shame and awe that I finally saw something so obvious.
If we look back at the Ten Commandments as given in Exodus 20, God explains the law of the Sabbath using the creation of the universe. God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, thereby blessing and making it holy (Exodus 20:11). But in the second giving of the Law, God does something different, rooting the necessity of the Sabbath in His accomplishing salvation for His people. The Sabbath in the original Mosaic conception had a redemptive-historical aspect that I had been missing: the people were to use this day, every week, to remember the salvation of their God. In Exodus, the Sabbath command points to the God enjoyed with and for man’s sake (Mark 2:27). In Deuteronomy, the Sabbath command given to Moses points back to the rest God had won in rescuing them from Egypt. But there is something that is further revealed a short time later. It also prefigured what we see in both Joshua 21:44 and 1 Kings 5:4: God had given the people rest on every side. The Mosaic Sabbath given at Sinai was pointing forward to the rest that remained.
The book of Hebrews makes this forward-looking aspect even more clear and pushes it out even further. Hebrews 3:7-4:11 makes some fascinating connections with our salvation. In Hebrews 4:8-9, we are told that Joshua had not actually given the promised rest, but that it still remained and further exhorts us to strive to enter that rest. The “rest” the Israelites were enjoying, resulting from the defeat of the Canaanites, was not consummate rest, but a foretaste of it. Verse 1 also holds out to us this promise of consummate rest in Christ, saying, “Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.” From this promise of consummate rest, we can see that the purpose of the Sabbath remains for us as well. We are pilgrims on the way to the new heavens and new earth. Rephrasing Deuteronomy 5, “You shall remember that you were a slave to sin, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a pierced side and outstretched arms. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”
It seems to me from the Bible both that, (1) as the Sabbath was made for man, so the Sabbath was made for the church, and that (2) the Lord’s Day (first day of the week) is not the Sabbath.
I will not defend the second claim at present, defensible as I think it is, but here suggest that as the seventh day rest had extensions (if that is the right word) beyond its mere weekly self, such as noted above in the post or what the Israelites were expected to do for their land every seventh year, so there may be a sense of Sabbath application intended under the new covenant, a sense of rest, which is comprised of an extension from or beyond physical rest, one as you say related to salvation.
Do we not derive some sense that may be called “rest” in corporate Lord’s Day worship or more narrowly in celebration of the Eucharist? Some foretaste of the rest that is yet to come?
Perhaps a difficulty with the above is that the physical body still needs physical rest, though that may be achieved other ways too.
Lastly by none of the above do I wish to cast aspersions on Sabbath practices of those who see a “Sabbath equals Lord’s Day” equation, at least where the celebration is “as unto the Lord.”
The eschatological aspect of the “rest” in worship is at the center of my concern. And certainly, all of the OT sabbaths (weekly, yearly, the seventh year, the year of jubilee) had this same aim of both offering a comfort of the past salvation of God and a hope for the future. The key is in understanding that the substance of the entire Bible is Christ. Christ is what was offered to Israel in the OT (though in types and shadows) – see Luke 24:27. The OT sabbath was about offering Christ. Bodily rest, while part of the concept of sabbath, was never the central focus. We are getting a taste of heaven.