Protestant Ethics Today: The Fourth Commandment
Be sure to check out part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 of this series on Protestant Ethics Today.
Christians taking Sunday as a day of rest from their normal work was once common in America. While there may not have been agreement on much else between Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and others, on this one point there was a basic consensus, though not everyone was as strict as the Presbyterians (and their Puritan forefathers). In the past, it was also the case that many non-essential businesses were closed on Sunday (sometimes by law, sometimes simply by custom). As Herman Bavinck wrote around 1884–85: “As in England, so in America, there is strict Sunday observance; the state still strongly upholds Sunday rest” (Reformed Ethics, Volume 2, p. 245).
Many Christians instinctively rested from their normal work on Sunday, though others did so explicitly on account of the teaching of the fourth commandment (Exod 20:8–11):
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
This form of the Sabbath command grounds the command for rest in God’s own example of working for six days to form and fashion the world and then resting upon his completion of it (Gen 2:1–3). The form of the fourth commandment in Deuteronomy 5:12–15 adds God’s work of redemption in the Exodus as an additional rationale for Sabbath-keeping:
Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
There are two reasons, then, to rest: God’s example and God’s salvation. God obviously didn’t need physical rest. His own creative work could not tire him, since he is the all-sufficient and all-powerful God. His resting is an example for us (even before the Fall introduced painful difficulties into our work).
That the Old Covenant saints were physically to rest on the seventh day is undisputed. What is far from undisputed is that New Covenant saints are to do the same. Many in church history have seen the specific imperative to cease from one’s normal labors on the Sabbath as a “ceremonial” aspect of Old Testament law that has been abrogated with Christ’s coming. One of the main reasons some have argued this way has to do with Jesus’ own actions and teaching on the Sabbath. For example, in Mark 2:23–28 we read of Christ’s disciples being criticized by the Pharisees for violating the Old Testament laws requiring Sabbath keeping. A few things, however, can be noted about this text. First, the accusation of Sabbath-breaking comes from Jesus’ hardened enemies. It is the Pharisees who claim that Jesus’ disciples are doing what is “not lawful on the Sabbath.” We would be wise not to assume they are correct. Although developing Jewish tradition was creating elaborate gradations for what might constitute work on the Sabbath, nothing in the Old Testament law actually forbids plucking grain for personal sustenance on the Sabbath. Jesus does not indicate that he accepts the charge of Sabbath-breaking, nor does he attempt to justify his disciples’ action on the basis of a legal dispute about how close you can get to work without violating God’s commandment. Instead, he refers to the Old Testament story of a time when David and his men ate of the showbread that was reserved for priests (1 Sam 21:1–6). There are admittedly difficult matters of interpretation regarding this passage, but what is clear is that Jesus does not accept the accusation of the Pharisees at face value. Instead, he uses this moment to instruct his hearers on the true purpose of the Sabbath: it was made for man, not man for it. In other words, the Sabbath is a gift to man from God, not the other way around. God doesn’t need our rest, but we do need spiritual and physical rest. Hence the Sabbath.
In the next story in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 3:1–6), we read of a time in which the Pharisees try to catch Jesus in what they think will be an obvious instance of Sabbath-breaking. They are with Jesus in a synagogue on the Sabbath, in which was a man with a crippled hand. The Pharisees observe carefully to see if Jesus “would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him” (Mark 3:2). Jesus, therefore, deliberately heals the man on the Sabbath in order to confront the Pharisees in their misunderstanding, asking whether it was right to do good on the Sabbath. Jesus, angered at the Pharisees’ hardness of heart, heals the man, which sends the Pharisees into a murderous rage. The point of the story is similar to that in Mark 2: Sabbath resting is not man’s way to earn his way into God’s presence, but rather a sign of God’s saving work on behalf of his people. What could be more fitting, then, than to heal someone on the Sabbath? The Sabbath is a day of blessing and receiving goodness from the Lord, but the Pharisees, in their obsession with layer upon layer of “fencing”—in order to avoid even coming near to Sabbath-breaking—had turned it into something else entirely. The Sabbath, again, is for man, not man for the Sabbath. It is a gift from God to his people for their own good.
In Colossians 2:16–17 the apostle Paul writes: “[t]herefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.” Many have taken this as even more explicit proof that the Sabbath command to rest is no longer binding on Christians. Paul, however, clearly has in view here the system of Old Testament festivals, not the weekly Sabbath required in the fourth commandment (see 1 Chron 23:31; 2 Chron 2:4; 3:18; Neh 10:33; Ezek 45:17; Hos 2:11).
Positively, we can see in the New Testament that a day of rest remains thoroughly fitting for the people of God. In Hebrews 3:7–4:13 the church is compared to Israel in its wilderness wanderings. Israel, because of its unbelief, did not enter the land of promise. The author of Hebrews, under divine inspiration, recognizes that this is a typological picture of eternal salvation. The church in this age has not yet entered into its eternal, heavenly rest and therefore must be vigilant to continue to trust Christ and follow him until that day (Heb 4:1, 6, 8–10), which is summed up in Heb 4:11: “Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.” The day of worship has been moved to the first day of the week in commemoration of Christ’s resurrection (Matt 28:1; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor 16:2; etc.) and will remain until that day when the church enters into its final rest, once and for all: “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God” (Heb 4:9). It is thoroughly fitting that believers continue to rest from their normal labors on that day, since we have not yet entered the fullness of our eschatological rest.
As I have written elsewhere, the Sabbath was upheld by law for most of America’s history. It had, therefore, not a merely individual or private significance, but a decidedly communal and political one as well. In fact, the legal and political enforcement of the Sabbath was so important that, “should” the state, Charles Hodge once wrote,
on the ground that it had nothing to do with religion, disregard that day, and direct that the custom-houses, the courts of law, and the legislative halls should be open on the Lord’s Day, and public business be transacted as on other days, it would be an act of tyranny, which would justify rebellion.
Hodge took such a strong view of this because he recognized that anything short of it would mean that “no Christian can hold office. We should thus have not a religious, but an anti-religious test-act” for political office, thus disenfranchising all faithful Christians.
The point of Sabbath rest is not primarily that we stop doing things. Cessation from normal labors is necessary, but mainly so that we can attend to the blessing that God intends for us on that day. We stop our normal work so that we can be filled with the good things of God’s work on our behalf in the Lord Jesus Christ as we worship him privately, and even more importantly, together as a gathered church.
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