I introduce this topic with some reservation because the meaning of the Sabbath varies among us here. Those raised as Seventh Day Adventists might see it as the correct day for worship, a distinguishing sign for God’s people, and something essential for salvation. This is not official doctrine, but Sabbath-keeping has long been considered a mark of piety among us.
Every religion and its followers cling to practices or beliefs they believe are unique and special in God’s eyes, distinguishing them from other religions and followers. No religion teaches that another possesses greater truth, is more right-thinking, or practices more effective rituals than itself. To its followers, the truth, the right, and the effectiveness of every religion is proven by their understanding of their scripture.
As I’ve grown older, the line between those who observe the Sabbath and those who do not has blurred. The realization that my religion might not be the only way to heaven, and that there are many sheep in the pen who are not of this fold, has made Sabbath keeping less compelling. I believe that God is the God of all mankind, that all people, all sheep everywhere are his flock, that he can be worshipped in a variety of ways and should be worshipped daily, continuously, and without ceasing.
Nevertheless, I believe the Bible from beginning to end contains a concept, a metaphor, an illustration for grace that is wrapped up in an understanding of the Sabbath. In this idea, we might find a new appreciation, a new way of understanding it, and more importantly, a new way to share it, just like we can share grace itself.
The first mention of the Sabbath comes from the book of Genesis:
And so the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their heavenly lights. By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. (Genesis 2:1-3)
Why does God need rest? Clearly, he is not subject to exhaustion. What does it mean that the day became sanctified? For whose benefit was it sanctified? Did this benefit God?
The clue is what took place the day before:
So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every animal of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. (Genesis 1:27-31)
Thus, we see here how God established the order of life and oneness in the Garden of Eden. Humankind—man and woman—were to be one with each other, one with the Earth and its creatures, and through the Sabbath, we see God establishing oneness with himself, resting with God when God rests. This oneness was, of course, shattered by the fall. Man and woman became ashamed of their nakedness and sought to cover themselves from one another and from God. Adam blamed Eve; Eve blamed the serpent. The oneness between themselves and with the rest of creation was broken, and their work and toil were multiplied immensely, as we know from the passage about the increase in pain with childbirth and the work that the man had to do (Genesis 3:16-24).
Fortunately for humankind, God had anticipated our fall and had provided the Sabbath as a way to restore this shattered oneness. The Sabbath, you see, is a metaphor for grace. The restfulness of the Sabbath contrasts with the toil of the other six days; it is the epitome of grace. It is a reminder of the creation time when there was oneness in the garden.
For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and everything that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; for that reason the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:11).
Similarly, the Sabbath serves as a perpetually eternal sign of our true relationship with God:
“Now as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, ‘You must keep My Sabbaths; for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, so that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you. Therefore you are to keep the Sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it must be put to death; for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people. For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a Sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the Sabbath day must be put to death. So the sons of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, to celebrate the Sabbath throughout their generations as a permanent covenant.’ It is a sign between Me and the sons of Israel forever; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day He ceased from labor, and was refreshed.” (Exodus 31:13-17)
The death penalty declared in this passage is not simply a punishment for breaking the Sabbath; it emphasizes the fatal nature of any religion based on works without grace.
In the Gospel, Jesus taught the real meaning of the Sabbath. For His contemporary Jews, the Sabbath was a great burden. He constantly sought to teach them its importance, and in the end, He was crucified largely because the Jews considered Him to be a Sabbath breaker:
For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. (John 5:18)
In His teachings, Jesus established three important principles of Sabbath keeping as a way of reestablishing oneness:
- It is a day for worship, for reestablishing oneness with God.
- It is a day for doing good works for others, for reestablishing oneness with our friends and neighbors.
- It is a day to set aside business as usual for introspection, to reestablish oneness with oneself.
It is notable that Jesus performed many of His good works, His healings, on the Sabbath, and He explained this by saying:
“The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.So the Son of Man is Lord, even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28)
The link between the Sabbath and grace was further captured by Paul in his letter to the Hebrews:
Consequently, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His. Therefore let’s make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following the same example of disobedience. (Hebrews 4:9-11).
This suggests, of course, that there is both a physical Sabbath, a mental and psychological Sabbath, and a spiritual Sabbath. Paul continues:
And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him to whom we must answer.
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let’s hold firmly to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things just as we are, yet without sin. Therefore let’s approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace for help at the time of our need. (Hebrews 4:13-16).
From Adam and Eve, through the patriarchs, judges, kings, prophets, and the disciples, God is seen as an active and interactive God, constantly seeking, bending, plying, and molding us—never willing to leave us alone or to let us go. He is always eager to bring us back by whatever means possible. He brings Jacob back by wrestling with him, Moses through a burning bush, Balaam through a talking donkey, King David by the prophet Nathan, Jonah in a whale, Isaiah by a coal placed upon his lips, Elijah by a still small voice, Job through a personal encounter with God, the prodigal son by an internal awakening, Peter by a crowing cock, and Saul, who becomes Paul, through a dramatic encounter on the road to Damascus—a blinding light and a voice from heaven. God, you see, is not indifferent to our choices. He does not leave us to our own devices, He will hound us, like the Hound of Heaven. And thank God for that, because that is what grace is. That is what the free gift is—the robe of righteousness, the restoration.
But you might say, “What does God do for me? Where do I see grace in my life?” We’re proposing today a new idea that might challenge those of us who are skeptical of the evidence: namely, that the Sabbath is a propositional and perpetual sign of God’s grace. Those of you who are not convinced may be indifferent to this concept. It is based on the passage we read earlier:
“Now as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, ‘You must keep My Sabbaths; for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, so that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.’” (Exodus 31:13).
The Sabbath is a sign that God is the one who sanctifies us, which is really what grace is. When you encounter the Sabbath, you should not see it for what you do, or for what the Sabbath means to you, but you should see it for what God does—in other words, His grace.
The subject of the Sabbath and Sabbath grace recurs throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, from the creation of the earth until the creation of the new earth. Isaiah 66 states, “’From one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before me,’ says the Lord.”
The emphasis, particularly by Jesus, is on the meaning of the Sabbath—by making time sacred instead of space, God forever removes man’s control over the designation of what is sacred. Man can control space, but he cannot control time. Sabbath rest is a gift from God to all humankind. It is a fact that we have no influence upon the Sabbath; we cannot hasten it, delay it, manipulate it, modify it, move it, control it, contain it, advance it, or retreat it. We cannot alter the Sabbath in any way. All we can do is enter into it like a sacred rest, by grace. It is everywhere, available to all, always for free, and it comes every seventh day like a down payment upon grace.
To enter into it is to enter into God’s presence, to lay down one’s burdens and, as the spiritual song says, “to study war no more.” Life is like a war. It is a continuous contention among ourselves, with others, and sometimes even with God. To enter the Sabbath is to change our swords and spears for plowshares and pruning hooks, as Micah says:
And He will judge between many peoples
And render decisions for mighty, distant nations.
Then they will beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation will not lift a sword against nation,
And never again will they train for war. (Micah 4:3)
Sabbath is rest, not just physical. Primarily, Jesus told us, it is rest for the soul. It is a sign of grace, and like grace, often when we try to control it, we want to use it for our own advantage. We cannot do that with the Sabbath, and we cannot do that with grace either. We cannot possess grace, we cannot possess the Sabbath; we can only let them possess us.
Is the day itself important? I myself choose to rest when God rests, but since this is about grace, it cannot be about me and my rituals. When we place ourselves and what we do, or what we do not do, at the center of the Sabbath, instead of letting the Son of Man, who is the Lord of the Sabbath, be the center, then we are at risk of making the Sabbath into an idol and worshiping the Sabbath instead of worshiping God. Make no mistake about this: our reverence for the Sabbath does not make us special in God’s eyes. He is the God of all mankind.
If God wanted uniformity of worship or correctness of doctrine, He would have spelled it out more clearly in the details of how we are to relate to Him. But herein lie two pitfalls. First, the more that God lays down the rules about what to do on the Sabbath, the more emphasis we place on our own work in following those rules. God knows that since we ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we have been wired to seek validation for our own work. Second, if God gave the rules to only one group, that group would use the rules to suppress everyone else. Even now, every religion, sect, and denomination claims to speak for God and seeks to establish their viewpoint on everyone else, compelling everyone to follow their rules.
By grace, the gift of the Sabbath must not be hoarded; it must be shared, but not like a doctrine that has to be justified or proven. It must be shared as the gift of grace just as it was given to us—to disconnect from our daily pace and to connect with God, and to enter into physical, emotional, and spiritual rest. It is a very special opportunity, one to be cherished and shared. Like grace, the Sabbath is both predictable and eternal. Both require us to rest and not to work. Both are about God and what He does, not about us and what we do.
Just as it is fatal to fail to embrace God’s everlasting grace, Sabbath or grace predicated on my work is also fatal, as it was for the man who was stoned in Numbers 15. Isaiah stressed the importance of this gift of grace:
“If, because of the Sabbath, you restrain your foot
From doing as you wish on My holy day,
And call the Sabbath a pleasure, and the holy day of the Lord honorable,
And honor it, desisting from your own ways,
From seeking your own pleasure
And speaking your own word,
Then you will take delight in the Lord,
And I will make you ride on the heights of the earth;
And I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father,
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (Isaiah 58:13-14).
Isaiah goes on to say, in the language of grace:
I will rejoice greatly in the Lord,
My soul will be joyful in my God;
For He has clothed me with garments of salvation,
He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness,
As a groom puts on a turban,
And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
For as the earth produces its sprouts,
And as a garden causes the things sown in it to spring up,
So the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
To spring up before all the nations. (Isaiah 61:10-11)
I think that in these passages, doing your own pleasure does not just mean refraining from things you want to do and doing the things you ought to do on the Sabbath. Doing your own pleasure means making yourself the focal point of the Sabbath, putting yourselves at the center rather than God. Instead, as Isaiah says, we should take delight in the Lord and delight in the results that come from being wrapped in the garments of righteousness and the robes of salvation. This is the eternal, abiding condition of grace. We know that the heritage of Jacob is nothing less than a new name signifying God’s investment of grace in Jacob and the forgiveness of his sins.
What does it mean to keep something holy? It simply means to be completely devoted to something, to exalt something, to hold it in the highest esteem. But make no mistake about this: we cannot make something holy ourselves; only God can do that. The Lord of the Sabbath makes the Sabbath holy because the day is a sign of what He does for us—He gives us His grace. It is not a sign of what we do for Him.
It is not surprising, given that the Sabbath is a sign of grace, that Jesus would say and teach so little about how the Sabbath should be kept by mankind. Because when we emphasize how it should be kept, we make the Sabbath about us. To enter into grace is to enter into rest, freedom from the work to which we are so easily and naturally drawn.
To re-emphasize what I said earlier, Jesus teaches us three principles for returning to oneness with a graceful Sabbath rest:
- The Sabbath is a day to worship God. By worshiping God, we bring ourselves into oneness with God and restore what was lost in the Garden.
- The Sabbath is a day to do good to our fellow men. This brings us into oneness with one another, with our friends and neighbors.
- The Sabbath is a day to set aside business as usual, which is another way of bringing us into oneness with ourselves as we center ourselves upon God.
When God points the way to Himself and away from us, the Sabbath centers us upon God. For centuries, there have been discussions, even arguments, about what is the right day to keep, which centers things upon us and not upon God. It is the very opposite of grace.
I personally like the Sabbath, and I keep it because it is a perpetual reminder to me of God’s grace. But it is not the only way God expresses His grace. God has other sheep not of this fold who know His voice and are exposed to grace in a myriad of ways that God uses to reveal His grace.
When I was a boy, it was commonly held that Sabbath keepers would be the only ones who went to heaven. This was not an official position of the church, but it was a commonly believed notion. Once we began to accept into heaven others who did not keep the Sabbath, our theology of the Sabbath became quite confused. We need a new theology of the Sabbath. It is ironic that the very thing that God gives us as a sign of His grace should be viewed with such exclusivity and limitation, and should be centered on our behavior. The ultimate irony is that Jesus Himself, the Lord of the Sabbath, was crucified over being a Sabbath breaker. We need a new theology of the Sabbath, one centered on sharing the Sabbath as a wonderful gift of grace. As Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Another way of saying this is that grace was made for man, not man for grace.
Are you looking for a sign of grace in your life? God gives you the Sabbath. Do you want a graceful expression that you can recognize in your life? It may not be like other expressions of grace that we’ve talked about before, but you might try the Sabbath as a new expression of God’s grace. Sabbath rest is not just physical; primarily, Jesus told us, it is a rest for the soul:
“Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is comfortable, and My burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)
Like grace, while we tend to want to control it and use it to our own selfish advantage, we cannot in fact do this; we cannot possess the Sabbath, it can only possess us. When we place ourselves and what we do or do not do at the center of the Sabbath instead of letting the Son of Man, who is Lord of the Sabbath, be the center, then we are in danger of making the Sabbath into an idol and worshiping the Sabbath instead of worshiping God.
I believe that God has revealed elements of truth to people everywhere, that every great faith and every great denomination has some identifiable insight into an element of truth, which they then rightly emphasize. For us, one of those elements is the Sabbath. When we talk, teach, and share, we all have something to contribute to a discussion about what it is that God would have us see in Him. By grace, the gift of the Sabbath must not be hoarded; it must be shared, but not as a doctrine to be justified or proven. It must be shared as a gift, as it was given to us—to disconnect from our daily pace and connect with God, and to enter into physical, emotional, and spiritual rest. It is a very special opportunity to be cherished and shared. It is a method of bringing back the oneness that was lost in the Garden.
David: I wonder about the notion of the Sabbath as a social activity. As Don has shown in his Biblical quotes this morning, the Sabbath is rightly about rest rather than activity, and about worshiping God. You can define worship in many ways; to me, it’s simply being in conscious communion with God.
Eastern faith traditions don’t have a Sabbath per se, but they do have meditation, and it occurred to me, as Don was talking, that this is a form of Sabbath. Meditation is an inactivity; it is restful, inactive, and relatively individual rather than social. People may get together in meditation groups, but the Western tradition is more actively social—you attend church services and pray communal prayers and sing songs of worship and take part in charitable activities, being actively good to your fellow human beings. Isn’t that, in a sense, a form of work?
I’m drawn to the Eastern traditions and I personally like the idea of an individual meditative, restful period of being alone in communion with God as a form of Sabbath. Maybe there’s room for both a social form and an individual form.
C-J: As you spoke, Dr. Weaver, I had two thoughts. First, it was a sideways way of saying that your time in recovery from being so sick gave you lots of time in this state of grace and Sabbath rest, trusting God for every day, every breath, every kindness. Life didn’t have to be done by you; your job was to rest in God and recover.
As you continued to talk, I thought about the war between Israel and Palestine, and its rippling effect. If they could just find this Sabbath that is resident in each culture, to think about future generations and not be so caught up in, ‘I’m right, this belongs to me,’ and to understand that in the Sabbath, that grace would be sufficient, more than sufficient for multiple generations going forward and preserve what is necessary for life to thrive. If you worship God, you will desire peace, you will trust God in all things, and you will do good works towards humanity.
You will set aside your business, your personal agenda—whether it’s to gain wealth, to be with your family, to have public honor and recognition—whatever your personal agenda is, to set it aside and be stripped completely there and allow God to do the work. And that the new clothing, put on, represents honoring God, which is peace and prosperity, and all those promises that were given to us through the Ten Commandments that Kiran really brought to a beautiful light. So that was my takeaway from what you said.
Donald: Regarding the relationship between the idea of Sabbath and grace, there are three things I think we need to clarify.
- Is Sabbath a concept or a specific day? The dictionary will probably give you both definitions. But for us to have this conversation, are we discussing a specific day or the concept of a day, or a moment in time, that should be established between us and God?
- Is Sabbath a metaphor? If Sabbath is a metaphor, then that actually might answer the question about a specific day.
- What’s the association between Sabbath and relationships? Is Sabbath really about relationships? And if so is about doing good work with others, and/or about worship for oneness, and/or about worship for ourselves?
As a Seventh Day Adventist I will always be challenged when we get to the point of whether it’s a day in combination with these concepts, or it’s just a concept and the specific day is not that specific. It’s interesting that it’s part of the Ten Commandments. It’s interesting that it’s specified by a number.
David: To me, the beauty of Don’s analysis is that in some ways it leaves the Bible open to interpretation. It doesn’t close it, nor limit it to the Seventh Day Adventist perspective on the Sabbath (or on anything else). There’s nothing wrong with the SDA perspective; there’s nothing invalid about it. It is a Bible-based, spiritual perspective, so God bless it.
That said, to me, there is no reason to think that one’s perspective is threatened by other perspectives, and that’s the problem that I think Connie was referring to. It’s OK not to share other’s perspectives, but it is not okay to judge people based on their perspectives. I don’t share the Adventist perspective on the Sabbath being a specific day, but I don’t think it matters that you do. If it helps Adventists in their association with God, I am all for it—for them.
C-J: I think that rigid religion and politics, which are often tied to economics, create a space of when and how business—both economic and political—is done in terms of institutions. And so, Seventh Day Adventists, happen to pick Saturday on the calendar we use in the United States. I agree that it’s really not about the day of the week. It’s about what you do with that time. It could be Wednesday for you, like if you have to work weekends and Wednesday is your day off, that’s going to be your Sabbath. You haven’t been sacrilegious or disrespected the tenets or the rules of the road.
I really think it’s about mindfulness and setting priorities for your internal life. That would be expressed in how you interact with other people and other systems, other institutions. I don’t think God thought, metaphorically, that the day when he separated the heavens and the earth was going to be a Monday. There wasn’t even a name for it. I don’t think it’s necessary to do that, but as humans, we want to put things in categories. We want to be able to organize and build off that scaffolding. But I don’t think God is like that at all.
Donald: Many religions have a tithe, often 10% of income, but sometimes negotiable. But it’s a number. So, is the Sabbath really just every seventh day? Just a number, too? It wasn’t just “Separate yourself once in a while.” So perhaps it can be Wednesday, but is it important to be every seven days? Is the number important? Is important to have a numbered portion of your wealth contributed back to goodness (the tithe)?
When we were young we dressed up for the Sabbath, which was very structured. As young adults we came to understand that what was right to do on the Sabbath was anything that was slow. You could not ski but you could swim, or at least wade. You just have to throttle back, as we tried to get these rules stamped. We couldn’t even ride our bikes. Today, the habits of a Seventh-Day Adventist Sabbath seem to have changed radically. I wonder at my grandchildren. The concept has changed—maybe it’s conforming itself around really what your remarks this morning are about. It’s about relationships. It’s a time, every Sabbath.
Don: I keep the Sabbath because that’s what God asked me to do. But it’s not about me. It’s about grace and about what God does for me. To me, the day is important, but it’s not important to God. He has sheep of other folds, and they may have a completely different view of how oneness with God is reestablished. But that’s not their prerogative, either. It’s God’s prerogative. I think it’s a beautiful thing to be able to share a Sabbath rest with friends, but if they don’t see it the same way as I do, it’s not a cause for their destruction.
Reinhard: The fourth commandment says, “Remember the Sabbath day.” Perhaps the word “remember” isn’t quite what the Jews had been practicing, especially in the old days. But “seventh day” is just an indicator that the world or the universe was created on the seventh day. To me, you rest on the seventh day, you are affirming that God is the Creator. It’s nothing more than that. The seventh day was made for rest, after God created everything in six days.
In the Old Testament, punishment for those who violated the Sabbath was very harsh, even to the point of death. Jesus showed a different way of practicing the Sabbath. Many of his healings were performed on the Sabbath, including the man who was crippled for 38 years, which led to the accusations that Jesus violated this very sacred day. His accusers were so focused on the Sabbath day according to the law, they forgot that the Sabbath is a day of blessing for God’s people.
On the Sabbath, I try to rest. No matter how busy I am, the Sabbath is a blessing, physically and spiritually. I believe that God gave us this blessing in the new covenant. Some people, of course, consider Sunday to be their Sabbath. That is their conviction. I think Paul once mentioned that some people consider other days to worship. Paul was known for being all things to all people.
Most of my family members believe Sunday is the Sabbath day. I think historically the Sabbath shifted to Sunday when the Roman Emperor declared Sunday to be a day of rest from work, so people used the free time for Sunday worship.
For me, the Sabbath is a rest day, a blessing day. It was not the practice of the Jews, especially during Jesus’ time, to prosecute people for Sabbath infractions but they made an exception for Jesus. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
The key is in the relationships built during the Sabbath. The worship of God has a special meaning to every individual. So, if we practice Sabbath on the seventh day, and others practice it on other days, the key for each individual lies in how they worship God.
C-J: God gave us the Sabbath, which is grace. Humanity wants to put us in bondage, but God wants to liberate us. When I’m taking a walk to the post office, it’s my quiet time. I reflect; I talk to God. I notice the birds, I notice the traffic. That’s a time of rest for me. I’m not thinking about what I’ll do when I get home. I’m really in that moment.
Humankind imposes bondage on itself through rituals, through institutions, through politics, war—we put ourselves in bondage. God is constantly talking about sackcloth and ashes, about humility. That’s not dressing up, but it puts you fully in the presence of God. It’s not about the rings on your fingers, it’s not how much you put in the offering, it’s not about who you know in religious or political institutions, or what family you were born into. With God, it’s grace. It’s always been grace. Unmerited, full of love, patient and kind, bearing good fruit, loving and forgiving.
Kiran: A Sabbath focus on oneness with the self is a new revelation to me, especially given that it has to be physical, mental, and spiritual. That’s a hard task. We’ve just witnessed a solar eclipse. None of us could change it. We only had 99.4% of the total solar eclipse in eastern Michigan, but in Toledo it was 100%. I wish it had been 100% here but nothing I could do would make that happen. All we could do was to enjoy it as it was happening. I think everybody had a similar experience, so it was undying in a sense. They didn’t produce the eclipse; it just happened on its own for three minutes. And all they could do was just stay there, look up, and enjoy. Even if they didn’t look up, they would experience the darkness during the eclipse and then the light. It even united the animals because they felt eerie. We could tell by looking at some animals how they felt, how they were experiencing it. Humans had a better understanding of what was happening, of course.
So, in a way, this whole thing makes so much sense for me. Sabbath is like a weekly celestial event that is happening, or a weekly spiritual event, whatever you want to call it, that we don’t have any control over. It’s a weekly reminder of a cosmic event initiated by God. All we can do is just enjoy it as both an individual and a communal experience.
Donald: I’ve lived my whole life conforming to a particular way, so it’s disruptive to think about the Sabbath in different forms, but it’s also liberating. But are we discussing the Sabbath with a small ‘s’ rather than a big ‘S’? I think Adventists make Sabbath with a capital ’S’, but perhaps our conversation today has been about small-s sabbath.
Michael: Don has often remarked that the Sabbath is like “a downpayment on grace.” I don’t think I ever fully understood that. Does it mean that every day we get a portion of grace, but on the Sabbath, we get to double dip?
Don: No, what I mean is that on a regular recurring basis, we’re called to think about the gracefulness that God gives us. God’s grace is good every day, 24/7. There’s no limitation to His grace. But by making the Sabbath a down payment, it’s a reminder, an event that brings us to focus on God’s grace. So that’s what I mean by a down payment. It might not be the best choice of words.
Michael: The Israelites collected a day’s worth of manna in the exodus—any more would rot, but they could collect an extra day’s worth for consumption on the Sabbath.
Anonymous: It has a different meaning to me. When somebody puts a down payment on a house, they then claim it as theirs. So when God puts a downpayment on the Sabbath, as you put it, that means “You’re Mine, because you acknowledged Me on My day. I paid to guarantee that you’re going to be in My possession during the week. So from Saturday to next Saturday, I’ve already paid for that. You’re Mine, you’re Mine, you’re Mine, week after week!” And that’s great, of course!
Don: Next week, we’ll discuss Paul’s writings about the Sabbath, Donald’s question of whether we are talking about Sabbath with a capital ‘S’ or a small ’s’, and whether the day itself is important at all.
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