Sabbath a Noun or Verb?

Is Sabbath a noun (day of the week) or a verb (something we do)?

In the Old Testament, God commanded his people to rest on the Sabbath Day. For Israel, the Sabbath Day was Saturday, the seventh day of the week.

In Exodus 20:8-11, God gave the Sabbath command because he had rested on the seventh day of creation. In Deuteronomy 5:12-15, God repeated the Sabbath command because the people of Israel had been rescued from slavery. The Exodus version happened at the beginning of Israel’s rescue from Egypt. The Deuteronomy version happened at the end of Israel’s 40 year wilderness wandering. The Sabbath was a day in the Jewish calendar and a command from God.

In the New Testament, Jesus’s ministry made Sabbath practice controversial. A cursory reading of the Gospels reveals that many of his healings happened on the Sabbath. Subsequently, the Pharisees challenged not only Jesus’ Sabbath practices.

The evangelical church today has a challenging relationship with the Sabbath. The New Testament was written predominantly to Gentiles who did not have the cultural significance of the Jewish Sabbath. Many early Christians were slaves with little control over what they did and when or how they worked. New Testament writers did not reiterate the Sabbath command for the church though it does not appear they dismissed it entirely.

Paul concluded that Jesus is the “substance” of the Sabbath commands in Colossians 2:17. The writer of Hebrews in chapter 4 described the future rest that was possible for believers in Christ.

To Sabbath (in a verb form) has reentered the evangelical conversation through popular author John Mark Comer in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and Practicing the Way. I found both books helpful even though they are more oriented toward Christian faith as something practiced than something fulfilled. Though I commend Comer’s books to you for consideration, remember that our primary emphasis in thinking about Sabbath can’t be like the Pharisees (prohibition and legalism) or practice (Comer). It’s possible to read Comer’s works and come away weighted down with prohibition and practice. In short, to practice Sabbath is about practicing rest and worship.

We need gospel balance when we think about practicing Sabbath. Jesus fulfilled the Law (Matthew 5:17). He is the “substance” of the Sabbath laws (Colossians 2:16-17). To properly apply my recommendations below or the recommendations from other authors, Christians must see Jesus as both the model and means of practicing rest and worship. Jesus is our model, yes. Comer is right to bring us back to this point. But Jesus is far more than our model; he is our means. Jesus is the fulfillment of the commands we are given. Any credit we ever get comes not from following Jesus as our model (though we should) but from experiencing Jesus as our means of salvation, forgiveness, and rest. The best Sabbath is a relationship with the rest that Jesus provides. He is the better promised land, and Jesus is available now (Hebrews 4).

Back to the question: is Sabbath a noun (day of the week) or a verb (something we do)?

Answer: Yes.

The Sabbath Day for Israel was a day. The early church chose Sunday as the day of worship because Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week. Sunday became the Lord’s Day. It is a day, but Sabbath is also something we can do. According to Jesus, Sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27). God gave the Sabbath Day to his people so they could rest and worship.

Below, I will recommend some reading on the Sabbath and share some quotes. One writer made the observation that Adam and Eve’s first full day alive was the day God rested. This means that Adam and Eve did not get a Sabbath day at the end of a long week of work, but that Adam and Eve were gifted a day of worship and rest before they worked. Bottom line: God’s best for us is himself not our work.

For believers to Sabbath means we should set aside a day for worship and rest. To build a weekly rhythm of worship and rest is not legalistic. After all, we don’t think obeying the other nine commandments is legalistic. Obviously, the Pharisees applied the Sabbath laws legalistically with a laundry list of prohibitions, and Jesus challenged the Pharisees’ legalism by regularly spending his Sabbath days healing, serving and loving.

Here are several ways we can think about practicing Sabbath:

  • Keep the Lord’s Day as a regular day of worship and rest. If God is not important enough to set aside a day on our weekly calendar to worship him, then I’m not sure we can say that he is Lord of our lives.
  • Pause normal working practices on the Lord’s Day. This takes on unique applications for those who work weekends or irregular schedules (pastors, doctors, firefighters, and so on). For example, my day of worship (Sunday) is also a normal workday for me so I rest on another day. Identify your normal work and accept God’s permission to worship and rest.
  • Do what brings life on the Lord’s Day. Rest and worship are positive, life-giving, practices. While doing what brings life suggests prohibition for things that drain (work, etc.), our emphasis should be doing the joyful and life-giving. What brings you life might not be what brings me life. Some practices to get us started might be. Take a nap. Go on a walk. Sit down for coffee and a conversation. Read a book. Play games. Do not normal weekly things like play games or things that help you and your family rest and worship.
  • Take a digital Sabbath. I need to do this regularly. Limit the blue lights of the screens that too often drive our lives. A digital Sabbath might break the control that our digitized, screen-filled world has over us. One of my favorite things about our student ministry is that we don’t allow students to bring/have their cell phones during summer camp. This decision forces students to interact with one another. Leaders on the trip make their numbers available to parents. You might say we enforce a digital Sabbath which is welcomed by our students. If our students can for a week, then we can for a day.

One of the best things we can do is wrestle with the biblical principles, commands, and paradigms defining the Sabbath day. Too many Christians don’t take the fourth commandment seriously enough. Jesus fulfilled the fourth commandment along with all the others, but that doesn’t mean we can simply ignore it. Here are some quotes on Sabbath and rest for to consider. I commend these books to you.

“In a culture where busyness is a fetish and stillness is laziness, rest is sloth. But without rest, we miss the rest of God: the rest he invites us to enter more fully so that we might know him more deeply. “Be still, and know that I am God.” Some knowing is never pursued, only received. And for that, you need to be still. Sabbath is both a day and an attitude to nurture such stillness. It is both time on a calendar and a disposition of the heart. It is a day we enter, but just as much a way we see. Sabbath imparts the rest of God—actual physical, mental, spiritual rest, but also the rest of God— the things of God’s nature and presence we miss in our busyness.”
– Mark Buchanan The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath

“Neglected Sabbaths collect compound interest after the age of forty.”
– Wayne Clark quoted by Quoted by Aijith Fernando, Deuteronomy: Loving Obedience to a Loving God, 192.

“The clutter in our minds is like a mental hoarder, landlocked in his or her bedroom in a self-constructed prison.”
– John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, 133.

“Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might be reborn… If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.”
– Andrew Sullivan quoted by John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, 140-141.

“People who keep sabbath live all seven lives differently.”
– Walter Brueggeman quoted by John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, 150.

For this upcoming Lord’s Day, commit to gather for worship and rest. Pause some things. Do what brings life. Rest in Jesus Christ.

Technology, Critical Theories, and the Gospel: Reading Response

Earlier this year, Wilkesboro Baptist Church gave me a sabbatical for rest, reading, and writing. During that season, I was able to complete three books that intersect in seriously important ways: To Change All Worlds by Carl Trueman, The Devil Reads Nietzsche by Michael McEwen, and Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth.

I’ve read several books by Trueman over the years. His work, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self addressed how it was possible for the LGBTQA+ revolution to shape contemporary practices regarding gender and identity. Trueman’s books are well-researched and insightful. In To Change All Worlds, Trueman explains the origins of “critical theories” that have shaped the “revolutionary” changes and trajectories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In The Devil Reads Nietzsche, Michael McEwen addresses how Nietzsche’s theories have influenced and shaped the critical process of contemporary thought. Nietzsche is famous for his observation, “God is dead, and we have killed him.” Nietzsche rejected the Christian worldview and its answers, suggesting as an alternative a world devoid of God. Nietzsche rejected much of the traditional Enlightenment ideologies as well as Christianity. Nietzsche suggested that we (he) had torn down the world and rebuilt it with a “will to power” and an “ubermensh” or “superman.” In his own mind and ideology, Nietzsche was that superman who had torn down traditional ideologies.

I discovered Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by happenstance on my local library app for kindle. Kingsnorth began his adult life as left-leaning environmentalist but now has reconnected with Christianity. The primary claim of his book is that the unmaking of humanity is caused by the “machine” (technology) viewpoint dominating progressive Western culture. For Kingsnorth, the tearing down of humanity by critical and revolutionary theories came from the progress of technological dominance. He connects the AI revolution we are witnessing today with the remaking of the world and the unmaking of humanity.

Broadly speaking, these three books intersect in important ways regarding critical theory and remaking the world. More to the point, these books have helped me think concertedly about the world we are living in today and how we as Christians should perceive, evaluate, and respond.

Critical theories in general were not primarily about offering alternative perspectives but rather about tearing down traditional perspectives. Trueman explains how Willhelm Reich (critical theory author ofThe Sexual Revolution) attempted to reshape ideas of marriage and sexuality:

For Reich, the very institutions of marriage and the family, both their social reality and the ideological rationale which they embody, cultivate, and perpetuate, need to be dismantled wholesale. As with later iterations of critical theory–whether of gender or race–the goal is not the reform of the system but the replacement of the system with something wholly different, for the current system only really exists for the purpose of maintaining specific forms of injustice.
– Trueman, To Change All Worlds, 165.

The revolutionary trajectories of critical theorists, Nietzsche in particular, were aimed at destroying traditional theories. Observing Nietzsche in particular, Michael McEwan writes:

The spirit of Nietzsche is alive and well within Western culture. More importantly the Geist of Nietzsche has enlivened Western culture with its efforts to liberate itself form “static” essences, natures, and laws to pursue freely the innumerable horizons of possibility–especially the boundless possibilities of human identity, sexuality, and technology. If God is dead, so is the imago Dei. If the imago Dei is dead, then the human being is not a human being (in any Christian sense) but an endless possibility of human becomings.
– McEwan, The Devil Reads Nietzsche, 75.

In tearing down traditional (Christian) ideology and philosophy, critical theories leave open “boundless possibilities” for anything different. This is why so many different ideological trajectories are visible in culture today. This is also why so many of those ideologies make little sense when contrasted with traditional views.

Paul Kingsnorth observed similar tendencies as he connected them to the technological advancement that built upon the critical theories of the Enlightenment:

The new values are predicated on the pursuit of liberation: a one-word descriptor of the essence of the Western programme since 1789. Our aim, stated or unstated, is to liberate ourselves from nature in all regards, so that we may conquer the stars, conquer death, and become as gods, knowing good and evil.
– Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.

Since at least the 1960s our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years the last remaining monuments have been—often literally—torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead, we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

Kingsnorth contends that denial of what existed rose from our dependence on technology. As I see it, the greatest problem with critical theories especially as they interact with the pace of technological advance is their inability to propose something helpful for society. Trueman observed that critical theory can tell us “ . . . what is wrong with society – pretty much everything – but it lacks the ability to articulate in clear terms what should replace it. It ultimately offers no vision of what it means to be human, whether because (as with the Hegelian Marxists) human nature has yet to be realized or, with the more postmodern critical theorists, it is ultimately a meaningless question.” (Trueman, To Change All Worlds, 14).

The world we find ourselves in today is a world in ideological revolution. The critical theories proposed in the Enlightenment Era and throughout Modernism formed the foundation for a world in chaos. Nietzsche and other critical theorists argued for tearing down and destroying the framing perspectives of their age. For Nietzsche in particular, this meant the destruction of Christianity. The challenge of critical theories is that they don’t supply what should arise in place of the system they destroyed. These critical theories leave a vacuum.

Today, the vacuum is filled with all sorts of claims regarding gender and sexuality, political discord, and upside down morality. Instead of stabilizing views, technological advancements have been rewiring our very brains through screens and smartphones and social media (see Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation). Now, our technological progress is being shaped by the AI revolution. Whatever one thinks of the benefits or detriments that AI will bring, we simply don’t know how far it will go or how much of our lives will be disrupted. What we ought to properly fear is that so many of the AI developers have worldviews framed by critical theories. The AI revolution is advancing because it can, with little consideration about whether it should. Developers and theorists have not adequately counted the cost the AI revolution will bring.

What do we do?

I’m not suggesting that we need to become Luddites or leave society at large. But in each of the books, a common theme stood out. Whether critical theories or AI, the propositions advanced by secular, progressive, and technological proponents cannot solve the human dilemma. Humans will always need truth, community, and meaning. When at its best as organized by God, the church of Jesus Christ is the wellspring of truth, community, and meaning. I believe the best and most effective response to critical theories, ideological deficiencies, technological shortfalls, and cultural rot is the Bible-believing church of Jesus Christ.

  • The church is to declare the gospel that invites us into a relationship with the God who transcends all things, but came to earth to be known by his creation.
  • The church is the body of Christ with members who together invest in genuine community with one another.
  • The church is the harbinger of meaning and blessing for those who gather for worship and community.

When the church speaks prophetically with a voice of truth and the gospel, she will confront the broken, false, and problematic worldviews that permeate society. When the church worships humbly, she provides meaning and connection to the transcendent God that humans were made for. When the church creates a community of love and truth, she becomes a place of belonging and hope to the many who have been broken and devastated by false worldviews and their unfulfilled promises.

If you want to understand more about critical theories, these books are helpful. If you want to be a part of the solution to the flaws and worldview gaps made by these theories, then join a Bible-believing church, build community with others, and worship the transcendent God of the universe who makes truth known.