Sabbath: For Such a Time as This

As someone who is vocationally tasked with teaching the Bible to middle and high school students at a local Christian school, the current Coronavirus pandemic has certainly been a challenge. While teachers across the nation would concur that moving seated and in-person classes to an online format has been anything but easy, this global phenomenon has been especially heavy for myself and my fellow Bible-teaching colleagues. In the midst of the chaotic confusion, students, parents, and fellow faculty are thirsting for answers to the all-important question, “Why?” While I am thankful that such people are seeking answers that are fundamentally spiritual and theological in nature, it has been complicated to respond with pastoral care and scriptural clarity to the question, “What do you think God is trying to teach us during this time?” However, as I’ve wrestled through an adequate reply to these questions and concerns, one overarching theme has colored my answers: Sabbath. This pandemic presents an opportunity for God’s people to rediscover the meaning of Sabbath rest. 

“Sabbath?,” my interlocutors puzzlingly wonder, “isn’t the Sabbath only for Jews who follow the Law of Moses?” Well, yes and no. To be sure, the observance of a weekly Sabbath day is a law given to the Israelites from Yahweh through Moses at Mount Sinai (see Exodus 20:8-11) and reiterated in the two books of Law in the Pentateuch (see Leviticus 23:3 and Deuteronomy 5:12-15). However, even these explicit commands to abide by this day as a required rule originate from a more comprehensive source: God’s creation of the cosmos in the opening chapters of Genesis. In fact, each time the Sabbath is given as an obligatory day of observance in the Jewish Law, God’s rest on and consecration of the seventh day in Genesis 2:2-3 is the explicit reason given as to why the people of Israel are to abide by the divine instruction to rest on the holy Sabbath day. 

Hence, this more all-encompassing establishment of the act of partaking in Sabbath rest in Genesis 2, I believe, is what leads Jesus to declare that “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27) and the author of Hebrews to write that “there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9). All of that said, then, what connection is there between the act of Sabbath rest and the current COVID-19 situation? Well, I believe the connection between these is twofold: 1) The sacramental importance of rest and 2) The posture of divine reliance that the act of Sabbath rest engenders. 

First, participating in the act of Sabbath rest does possess a certain sacramental element to it. By “sacramental” I mean a human practice or act that, through divine participation and communion, becomes, as the 16th century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker put it, a visible sign of invisible grace. Just as God completed all of His work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh day, so too do the people of this God get to participate in this divine act by resting themselves. Let it not be forgotten that it is God Himself who first makes the Sabbath day holy by consecrating it and, in turn, God’s people are to also keep the Sabbath holy by consecrating it! Thus, in a mysterious and sacramental way, participating in the act of Sabbath rest is a meeting place between the God who first instituted it and the human creatures whom He instituted it for.

Secondly, however, this act of Sabbath rest produces a distinct posture of divine reliance. As an agrarian society whose literal livelihood rose and fell with the amount of work that its community did, the nation of Israel was put into a compromising situation by being commanded by their God to rest for an entire 24-hour period. By resting and not working for an entire day, the Israelites were forced to trust that their essential needs would be provided for by the God who was commanding them to rest. Especially for later generations of Jews, the Sabbath day also became a day to remember that their ancestors had been provided for in their wilderness wanderings with bread from heaven (see Exodus 16:1-36) and water from a rock (see Exodus 17:1-7). Thus, God’s people were to be continually reminded of the character of their Lord as written about in Psalm 145:16: “You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.”

In tying these seemingly loose ends together, then, why is it the case that God is perhaps using this time to teach His people to Sabbath? According to a 2014 Gallup poll, Americans now work 47 hours a week on average. Moreover, according to a 2019 study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employed people worked an average of 5.4 hours on a weekend day. Study after study and poll after poll seem to unwaveringly point to the fact that people in the Western Hemisphere, especially Americans, are profoundly overworked and overwhelmingly underrested. Could it be, then, that God is using a situation in which most of us are forced to remain at home and largely engage in leisurely activities to teach us how to participate in the sacramental act of Sabbath rest? 

Even more, could it be that God is using a situation in which stores are running low on essential goods to teach us how to enter into a posture of divine reliance? Perhaps it’s just me but the words that our Lord has taught us that we are, as the liturgy says, “bold to pray” are radically applicable in our current situation: “Give us this day our daily bread.” In praying this, should our minds not automatically go back to our ancestors in the faith whose hunger was satiated and whose thirst was quenched in a dry and uncertain wilderness? The truth is, this pandemic has taught us (or, at least, should teach us) an extremely simple but deeply difficult truth: God is God and we are not. And who knows but that our Lord is teaching us to be still and know that He is God for such a time as this?