Troublesome Topic: A Weekly Sabbath Day Taught Faith and Trust

Everyone with a brain cell knows that a person can produce more product working seven days a week (365 days per year) than working only six days a week (313 days per year), right? Well, apparently God chooses to disagree with us. He does not have our kind of brain, and we must trust Him when He says that six days of work, and one day dedicated to rest, family and drawing closer to God, will be more productive than seven days of work.

It takes trust to refrain from doing income-producing activity for one full day of the week. God did not simply tell them to trust Him; He put them in situations where trust was required.

It is unfortunate that modern American Christianity offers two common approaches to viewing the biblical teaching about Sabbath, and neither one is helpful. Modern American Christianity either turns the Sabbath into a set of rules that can be used to beat others over the head, or it ignores the Sabbath as if it were not mentioned in the Bible at all. It is unfortunate that this pattern of thinking and acting has spread to many other parts of the world as well.

In reality God makes a big deal of the Sabbath day; it was a very important aspect of God’s requirements for His people and it is mentioned many times in the Bible. The violation of the Sabbath was one of the reasons God sent the Israelites into captivity, so it must be a very big deal to God. The writing prophets brought up the Sabbath a total of 32 times either to tell the people to observe the Sabbaths, or to tell them they were being punished for desecrating the Sabbath.

The Seven Suggestions

Today many Christians choose to ignore the Sabbath even though it is one of the Ten Commandments. The approach of many modern-day Christians is to hold the Ten Commandments in high regard and look with disdain on the rest of the Law. But in reality, we don’t even obey the Ten Commandments; we pick and choose what we want to obey and what we want to ignore. So we shouldn’t call them The Ten Commandments; we should call them The Nine Commandments. Or is it Eight? Or Seven or Six? How many do we actually follow? 

That is not how a covenant works! We are in a covenant relationship with God, but we are not treating it like one.

What Did the Sabbath Day Teach?

The Sabbath day was a practical and effective way for God to teach His people The Jewish Understanding of How the Universe Functionsto trust in Him and obey him. God wants to use it as a tool in our lives to teach us the same principles.

I offer an entire study series on rest and Sabbath call You Need Rest. It is an interesting topic and not at all what most Christians think it is. I think you would benefit much by going through that study and I highly recommend it. Here is a link to the introduction – How This Study on Rest Is Organized.

For the short version of this series on covenants, the next lesson is: The Jewish Understanding of How the Universe Functions.

For the medium and full length versions of this series, the next lesson is: What did the Sabbath Year teach?

The next lesson in Why Is That in the Bible? is: What did the Sabbath Year teach?