In a modern world where time is money,
businesses operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, personal worth
is defined as net or gross, happiness is bought and sold in the form of pills
and worship is a phenomenon studied in anthropology classes, the concept of
taking a Sabbath rest is foreign.
What is in a day? What is the purpose of
stopping our money-making and pausing to reflect, when lost time equals lost
money? What does it do for us physically and psychologically? Why should we
bother with it? Why does God bother with it? These are the questions we will be
trying to answer. The Sabbath, instituted at creation and carefully preserved
over six thousand years through the Jewish faith, has all but died out in our
modern society. Is it possible to get back to the original beauty of the Sabbath?
Does it even fit into our modern world?
The Sabbath has long been associated with
legalism and the stern observance of archaic laws. Modern Christians discredit
the idea of one day being holy over another. People brush aside the idea of
taking an entire day for God, not just an hour or so to go to church. In our
money and work-driven society, the Sabbath seems to be more of an inconvenience
than anything else. A morning at church seems ample when we compare it to
everything we need to keep up with.
We, as modern people, have several issues with
the Sabbath. The first is the length of it. Twenty-four hours just seems absurd
in this day of 22-minute sitcoms and five minute news breaks. Too much can
happen in twenty-four hours! People need to reach you! Your boss might need you
to drop in! Deals can fall apart! Sales can be lost! When your time off is limited,
shopping time, precious errand-running minutes, mustn’t be lost! Life is way
too full of exclamation marks!!
The second issue is that of boredom. What on
earth are we supposed to do with twenty-four solid hours with no TV, no work,
no shopping, no worry? About three hours of that is used up in church, if we go
for Sabbath school, etc. But then what? What are we supposed to do with
ourselves? We are programmed to expect flashing colors, 22-minute story lines and
fast-paced commercials. We expect constant entertainment. From background TV
noise to the radio in the car and the DVD player in the back seat for the kids,
we expect to be entertained every waking hour. The thought of twenty-four hours
with none of the pulsing stimulus is daunting.
The third issue we take is that of authority. We’ve
never liked authority. We don’t like it now. Someone tells us we have to do
something and it puts a sour taste in our mouths. We have quite enough of that,
thank you! All day long at work there is your boss giving you instructions and
expectations. The government has their own mandates about taxes and other such
legalities. Driving, we must follow the rules, obviously, but speed limits can
grate on your last nerve. So can speeding tickets! Everywhere we turn in life,
someone is telling us what to do. On our weekends, can’t we just be left alone?
Can’t we just relax and do what we please for a change? The last thing we want
to do is conform to another set of rules for a full twenty-four hours! The
Sabbath, it would seem, does not fit into our modern mindset. It seems to fall
under the category of archaic absurdity along with horse-drawn carriages and
corsets—somewhat pretty, quaint for a tourist, and entirely impractical and
outdated. It is all too easy to rationalize our way out of it and move on. But
are we missing something in our hurry to swipe the Sabbath aside?
When we take a closer look at the Sabbath… a
closer, quieter look at the day that God made holy, we get a much different
view. The Sabbath becomes something beautiful… something to be envied! Yes, it
is ancient, established over six thousand years ago. The first record we have
of it is at the creation of our world, but considering that it will continue in
Heaven, according to Isaiah
66:23, it stands to reason that it existed out into the stretches of
eternity. Something that old, begun by God Himself, must have some wisdom and
value. When we begin to glimpse that value, we realize that the way we’ve
always seen it has missed the essence of the Sabbath entirely.
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