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Exodus 20:8-11

8 “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work. 10 But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.

Ten Laws, One Love

I’ve always been fascinated by the seven-day week. It’s something we take for granted, don’t question or even think about much, but it’s really quite strange. Here’s what I mean: A year is approximately the time it takes for the earth to complete one orbit around the sun. Ancient peoples who depended on the sun and the seasons for agriculture would have been very attuned to this. A month is approximately the time it takes for the moon to complete one orbit around the earth. Navigating by the light of the moon made observation of the lunar cycle very important to ancient peoples. A day is approximately the time it takes for the earth to complete one complete revolution as it spins on its axis. Pretty obvious why that would be important to measure. So years, months and days are all connected to movements of celestial bodies. But not weeks! There’s nothing in particular that a period of seven days measures, other than just…seven days. It seems pretty arbitrary, even though we’ve been counting that way for thousands of years.

Years, months, and days, in most modern calendars, all synchronize with each other. We start a new year on a new month and a new day. We adjust the number of days in a month in order to have exactly twelve months in a year, and we never start a new month in the middle of a day, or a new year in the middle of a month. And yet the beginning of a year, or a month, sometimes happens on a Thursday, sometimes on a Saturday, sometimes on a Monday…because the sequence of weeks continues regardless of year, month, or day. You might think there are a nice, even 52 weeks in every year, but that’s not true. It’s actually 52.143…again, because the seven-day week is completely disconnected from any other measure of time. It’s random.

Not all ancient cultures observed a seven-day week, either For the ancient Egyptians, the week was five days long. For the Romans, it was eight. Ancient Babylonians did observe a seven-day week, although they would periodically adjust it, with some shorter or longer weeks to line up with their months and years (kind of like we do with an occasional leap year).

But several centuries before the Babylonians, the very first documented use of the unrelenting, unchanging, unwavering seven-day measure of time… goes to the people of ancient Israel, alone in all the world. Why? If you asked them, they would probably say, “Because the Lord told us to. And because he did it first.” Verse 11 of our scripture passage today: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.”

Why are there seven days in a week? Because God set a clear example for us—six days of work, and one day of rest. I believe that counting those days, and that keeping that rhythm, is STILL far more important than any other measure of time we could count—minutes, hours, days, months, years and decades. And today we’re going to talk about why.

The fourth commandment is Remember the Sabbath Day and Keep it Holy.” All the commandments before this one talk about how we should treat God: We should have no other gods, we should not make any idols, and we should not carry God’s name lightly. All the commandments after this talk about how we should treat other people: Honor your father and mother, don’t murder anyone, don’t steal from anyone, don’t commit adultery, don’t lie about your neighbor, and don’t covet your neighbor’s things.

But this commandment—Remember the Sabbath Day and Keep it Holy—is transitional. It’s the LAST commandment that tells us how we are to treat God—setting aside one special day each week to worship and revere him. It’s the ONLY commandment that tells us how we should treat ourselves—following God’s example, we give ourselves a break on a weekly basis. And it’s the first commandment that tells us how we should treat others—if we are in a position to do so, we should give those around us a break, too. Your children, your animals, the people who work for you or serve you in restaurants and stores, even the stranger in town—give them all a break, help relieve them from the hardship and struggle they have endured the other six days.

So remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy is about finding time in our lives to practice reverence, rest, and relief.

Let’s focus first on “rest.” What does that mean? The Bible explains it this way in verse 10: “Don’t work.” That may be hard for some of us to actually do, but it’s not hard to understand. Just don’t work. Ok, so what is work? Does that mean I don’t have to mow my yard on the Sabbath? Or do dishes? The Hebrew word for work is מְלָאכָה (melakah). It’s a word that almost always relates to business, occupation, vocation, or purpose. So if you’re a professional lawn-mower, you don’t have to mow lawns on the Sabbath. If you’re a professional dish-washer, you don’t have to wash dishes on the Sabbath. In my scholarly opinion, if you’re a professional stay-at-home dad or mom six days a week as your primary vocation, you also shouldn’t have to do dishes or mow the lawn on the Sabbath. Everyone else, you’re not off the hook. But don’t do the thing you do for a living on your Sabbath. Like the Creator of the Universe, you need at least one day to get away from that.

Next let’s look at “reverence,” or what we owe to God on the Sabbath day. The commandment says to remember the Sabbath and keep it HOLY. The Hebrew word for holy here is קָדַשׁ (qadash). In the Old Testament, there are two criteria for making something qadash, or holy: First, it has to be set apart, separated, differentiated from other things, and second, it must in some way touch or come into contact with the divine, with God. For the ancient Israelites, the place where a person might come into God’s presence was in the temple in Jerusalem, or later, in the local synagogue. For Christians, even though we believe that God is everywhere at all times, it is specifically when we are gathered together in God’s name that he says he promises to be there among us. That’s what we do on Sunday mornings when we sing, pray, and worship God together. We’re making the day (and ourselves) holy, in a way that pleases and shows reverence to God.

Rest, Reverence, and finally we come to Relief. In the fourth commandment, this is what we owe to our neighbor, to those around us. This is the second half of verse 10: “you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.” In other words, you have an obligation to the ones around you. Don’t create work for them on the Sabbath, and if it you have the ability to help relieve them from work, toil, suffering, or hardship…do it. This is exactly how Jesus interpreted the fourth commandment in the gospel of Matthew when he encountered a man with a withered hand. It was the Sabbath, and the Pharisees were watching him… after all, healing is working, and Jesus was a professional healer. One of them asked him, slyly, “Is it… lawful… to cure on the Sabbath?” It was a trap. And Jesus said, “Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? 12 How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and it was restored, as sound as the other.

let me answer a very controversial—and in my opinion, completely irrelevant—question. Which day of the week is the Sabbath?

Sabbath, in Hebrew, simply means seventh. So I suppose it depends on which day of the week you start with. If you live in Europe or China, the first day of the week is Monday, which would make Sunday the Seventh day of the week. If you live in North America or South Asia, Sunday is usually considered the first day of the week, making Saturday the Seventh day. If you live in the Middle East or Northern Africa, Saturday is the first day of the week, making Friday the seventh day. Do you see the problem? Modern Jews (regardless of where they live) consider Saturday the Sabbath, while most Christians (but not Seventh Day Adventists) consider the Sabbath to be Sunday. If you’re a pastor, a priest, a Rabbi, you can worship God with the congregation on your Sabbath, but you can’t exactly rest, because it’s a work day for you. If you’re a first responder or a medical professional, and you’re on call on the Sabbath, you can provide relief to others, but you can’t exactly worship God with your congregation, and you’re probably not resting, either. By the way, if Sunday is your Golf day, you may be resting—but don’t try to pretend that you are providing relief to others (after all you’re making people at the golf course work!) and you are not worshipping God in the congregation with other believers, the way God instructs us to!

Look, the truth is, we live in a pretty complicated world, and sometimes its hard to

• Sabbath Day: Balance between rest, reverence, and relief.
• For Jews, traditionally the seventh day of the week.
• For Christians, traditionally the 1st day of the week.
• What’s important is one out of seven.