3 Days of Prayer and Fasting (2022/09)

8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 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. 11 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.”

12 “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

Exodus 20:11 teaches us that we should rest because the LORD worked for six days and rested on the seventh day. Though God Himself needs no rest (Isa. 40:28), he set this pattern for our benefit, because we need rest. No matter how important our work is, if the Creator and Sustainer of the universe can rest, we, too, can rest. The Sabbath principle humbles us and reminds us of or dependence and dispensability.

A parallel passage in Deuteronomy 5:15 gives us another reason for rest: “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.” We are no longer slaves! Earlier in Exodus 5:1-5, when the LORD commanded Pharaoh to “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness,” Pharaoh refused and said to Moses and Aaron, “why do you take the people away from their work? Get back to your burdens … Behold, the people of the land are now many, and you make them rest from their burdens!” The Hebrew verb for “rest“ is related to the Hebrew noun, “Sabbath.” The king of Egypt was a tyrant, a slave-driver who demanded that the Israelites make bricks without straw, who refused to let Israel cease from their “work” and “rest,” but YHWH is a gracious King who commands His servants to cease from their work and keep the Sabbath. We are no longer servants of Pharaoh, but servants of YHWH, the rest-giving God!

This Sabbath rest is not only for us, but also for others under our charge or in our care. So it says verse 10, “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…” God doesn’t want us to find a way around the Sabbath, by using other people or animals to keep the work going while we are resting. The idea is not to find other people to do our work while we are resting, but to cease from work altogether as a way of trusting in God’s provision for us. In this way, the Sabbath has a social and humanitarian function. We are meant to rest ourselves, but also give rest to others (Exod. 23:12). This is necessary, because if we’re working, other people under our charge have to work too.

Exodus 20:10 command Israelites to give rest even to “the sojourner who is within your gates.” Even the foreigner, the Gentile, was granted rest under the Sabbath provision, and this looks ahead to the time when Jew and Gentile, slave and free, would all find salvation and rest in Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:28).