A Day of Rest

 DEVOTION

GENESIS

 A DAY OF REST

Gen 2:1-3

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. 2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3 And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

NIV

We will go through a more thorough account of the creation but first, we must stop and rest. Interestingly, God chose one day to be holy, when every day in his presence should be holy. However, what man has done to this one holy day may be more than what God intended it to be. Of course, we know from the account in Exodus the Lord gave those Ten Commandments, one of them regarding the Sabbath. They were instructed to work six days but to do no work on the Sabbath, to keep that one day as a Holy Day. Man has really played havoc with that command over the years. What the Pharisees and the rest of the leadership of Israel did to this Sabbath day was a travesty. However, what have we done to what we would call the Sabbath? We have changed it from the seventh day to the first day because that is the day the Lord was resurrected. So, by rights, we cannot call Sunday the Sabbath day. We have changed that one of the Ten Commandments yet many still believe they should hold or abide by them. How can we change one but want to hold to the rest? Then when Jesus expanded some of them, especially the one about murder, by including hatred as the same as murder, we really get into trouble. It is not that we think everyone really hates another believer but isn’t gossip a form of hate speech? However, it is what we have done with our form of the Sabbath is where we wonder if we have just left it behind. In the world we live in and in our country where we have become a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week society, where some believers must work on Sunday because of the requirements of their profession, or occupation. How then do we deal with keeping the Sabbath holy? Then again, we see some people who only work a four-day or five-day week and have two Sabbaths or days of rest, yet those days are filled with chores which the Pharisees certainly would not approve of. Our lives have become so complicated it is difficult to find time for God, and then there are those believers who labor so diligently, driven by the “Good works” doctrine for the Lord they cannot stop for one day of true rest. So, how do we deal with the Sabbath, the one day we are supposed to keep holy? Maybe, if we are wanting to be a person of faith, we should simply keep the Sabbath or our Sunday holy, a day of rest, rather than just an hour in church.