Man's first full day

The Sabbath, as a sign of the creation of the world, can have meaning for us only if it is first of all a sign of our "new creation." It then becomes an acknowledgment of our redemption and of God's sovereign power over us.

Sakae Kubo, Ph.D., is president of Newbold College, Bracknell, Berkshire, England.
What does the Sabbath have to do with justification? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Just as every other commandment has nothing to do with justification. That is, keeping the Sabbath will not justify you any more than will keeping any other commandment. Therefore no one should or can keep the Sabbath in order to be saved. The Sabbath was not given that through it we might find salvation. The Sabbath was given as a gift, a day of rest and worship. And it can be meaningfully appreciated only by those who are already saved. It is God's invitation to join in fellowship with Him.

Before sin entered the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve celebrated the Sabbath with God. It was the seventh day that was celebrated as the Sabbath. It could have been no other day, because no human had previously existed to celebrate any other day as the Sabbath. Since God created man on the sixth day, the Sabbath was the first day for him. Adam and Eve did not rest because they were tired and exhausted from a week's labor; they rested because God rested. That is, they observed the Sabbath in order to fellowship with God and to enjoy His creation. The Sabbath is the seventh day of Creation, but humanity's first day. Before we begin any activity of our own, we need to meet with God. We need to have our values and priorities, our spirit and vision, adjusted to God's. That is why we need to hallow that first full day of human life, which is the seventh day of the week.

As Abraham Heschel so aptly puts it: "The Sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one's lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. 'Last in creation, first in intention,' the Sabbath is 'the end of the creation of heaven and earth.'

"The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living." —The Sabbath, p. 14.

When we forsake God, the Sabbath can hold no meaning for us. The Sabbath is meaningless to one who does not ac knowledge God as his Lord. It is of interest to note, therefore, that in Deuteronomy 5:12-15 the Sabbath commandment is connected with Israel's deliverance from Egypt: "' "You shall remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out thence with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day" ' " (verse 15).* In Exodus 20 the Decalogue is prefaced with the statement " 'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage' " (verse 2).

In these passages the Sabbath, while still connected with Creation, is more immediately connected with the children of Israel's deliverance from Egypt. And these two activities of God are not unconnected. As with the Israelites, the person who finds deliverance from bondage and affliction feels instinctively that the Deliverer must be a transcendent being who can subdue world powers, who uses the forces of nature for the accomplishment of His own purposes. This means that He is a cosmic power, and such a being is inevitably conceived as Creator. In other words, the person of the Deliverer and the per son of the Creator are identified.

It is not difficult to understand, there fore, that the Creation and the deliverance from Egypt are both given as reasons for their keeping of the Sabbath. The Sabbath, then, is conceived of not only as a sign of Creation but also as a sign of deliverance, a sign of freedom from bondage and oppression. But be cause only the one who is delivered can understand God as Deliverer and Creator, this means that the Sabbath is not an instrument of salvation but purely and simply a gift. In the context of our sinful world the Sabbath can be properly ob served only by one who has been delivered or redeemed.

The New Testament closely connects Christ's redeeming activity with His creative activity. Hebrews 1:1-3 de scribes Him as the one "through whom also he [God] created the world" (verse 2) and the one who upholds "the universe by his word of power" (verse 3). But immediately after this it also describes Him as the one who "made purification for sins" (verse 3). In Colossians 1:15-20 we see this same connection: "All things were created through him and for him" (verse 16), and through Him God reconciles all things to Him self, "whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross" (verse 20). And 2 Corinthians 5:17 calls the Christian "a new creation." Redemption is truly a creative act.

Redemption from the bondage of sin is a cosmic act, an act like the deliverance of Israel from the bondage of slavery. Therefore, it is inevitable that the New Testament should connect the ideas of redemption and creation. It is inevitable that it should also consider Christ as Redeemer and Creator, for one who can redeem must himself be the Creator.

Therefore, if Christ can redeem us, can deliver us from this present evil age (Gal. 1:4), can forgive sins (Matt. 9:2), can release us from the law of sin and death (Rom. 8:2), can make us qualified to share in the inheritance of the saints in light (Col. 1:12), can deliver us from the dominion of darkness and transfer us to the kingdom of light (verse 13), can destroy him who has the power of death—that is, the devil—and can deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage (Heb. 2:14, 15), then redemption indeed has cosmic implications.

These actions by Christ cannot be done by just anyone. As the Jews so well recognized, it was blasphemy for anyone but God to claim the power to forgive sins. The power to forgive implies one's transcendence over the law, which further implies Christ's authority over the earth and His status as Creator.

To accept Christ as Creator and Redeemer has great meaning for our personal lives. For one thing it means that He has "the whole wide world in His hands," and we can rest secure in His sovereignty over the universe. He is in control. The chaos can never overcome us. The irrational forces of nature have limits that they cannot transcend. It means also that life has meaning and goal. We have not only to do with an almighty Creator but a loving Redeemer. "The hand that sustains the worlds in space, the hand that holds in their orderly arrangement and tireless activity all things throughout the universe of God, is the hand that was nailed to the cross for us." —Education, p. 132.

The Christian therefore can face the world with all its attendant evils and mysteries, history with its ambiguities, convinced, nevertheless, that at the heart of the universe is a power con trolled by love. To know a powerful Creator is not enough; it may be terrifying. But Jesus Christ revealed that the Creator is directed by the power of love. The ground of all existence reveals its inmost nature to be love. The goodness, the meaning, the goal, and now the relation of creation itself are to be under stood only through the revelation of God that we have in the gospel of Christ.

Evil, then, is seen as an extraneous, intruding force, since God created all things good. Suffering becomes bear able, since there is a final and ultimate meaning in life created by a beneficent God.

As the Israelites in the Old Testament were motivated to keep the Sabbath be cause of their deliverance from Egypt, the immediate motivation for the Christian to keep the Sabbath should be his deliverance and redemption from the powers of evil. The Sabbath becomes a symbol of freedom from bondage, a sign that he is a "new creation." As God's creative power is seen in the Sabbath as a sign of His original creation of the earth, that same power must be manifested in the Christian as a "new creation." For us the Sabbath has no meaning at all unless there is a conjunction of God's creative power and its accomplished result in the life of the one who keeps the Sabbath. Holiness of time must be matched by holiness of being.

If this is true, then Sabbathkeeping can never become a legalistic or nominal act. Truly the symbol participates in the reality of that for which it stands. The Sabbath does not become an abstract entity, a mere external sign for the Christian, for he participates by the keeping of the Sabbath with the reality of the "new creation" that it symbolizes. The Sabbath as a sign of the creation of the world can become meaningful only if the Sabbath is first of all a sign of our "new creation." But if it is that, it becomes an acknowledgment of our redemption and of our creaturely dependence on God and God's sovereign power over us.

The Sabbath, then, is an island of time where God's sovereignty is openly pro claimed amid the apparent power and dominance of evil and chaos. The Christian proclaims his freedom from the dominance of evil when he keeps the Sabbath. He confesses that Christ is the Creator-Redeemer and thus also witnesses to the fact that at the heart of the universe is a God of love, who leads all life to a meaningful goal.

The Sabbath is a universal sign, since it deals with holiness of time and holiness of being, rather than of place. God does not call us to worship in some special holy mountain or sanctuary. He calls us to worship in spirit and truth. " 'God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth' " (John 4:24). This means that men everywhere can worship Him without making any pilgrimages.

Not only does the Sabbath point to spiritual worship without sanctuary or holy mountain, it points also to spiritual worship without material symbols or idols. It is time that is set aside for worship. And because the Sabbath calls for worship in time, in specific time, it breaks the succession of time in which man is involved with the material things, spatial things, and calls him forth ever and again to the things of the Spirit, to the things that are eternal. We can be come so preoccupied with the things of space, with the things we touch and see, that we lose sight of the things of the Spirit. As Paul says, "We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal" (2 Cor. 4:18). The Sabbath calls us away from material things to spiritual things.

There are several Christian memorials or symbols that help us to understand the meaning of the Christian life. The first of these is baptism. It is a symbol of purification and entrance into a new life in Christ. Paul connected baptism with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ (Romans 6). Baptism, however, is not viewed as a symbol of what Christ did. That is presupposed. Baptism instead is a symbol of what happened to us. It is our death, burial, and resurrection that is symbolized. As in the case of Christ, so in our case it is a once-and-for-all event.

The service of the Lord's Supper is a memorial of the death of Christ. The bread and the wine represent His broken body and spilled blood. As we partake of the Lord's Supper, we confess and appropriate anew Christ's benefits for us. Some churches observe this weekly and others quarterly.

So the Sabbath, too, is a memorial. It memorializes the creation of the world and the "new creation" of human lives. The Sabbath as a memorial of Creation is significant to us only after we see it as a memorial of our "new creation." We can see God as Creator of the world only if we have first acknowledged Him as Creator of our new life in Christ.

The Sabbath for the Christian be comes a sign of what God has done in him. As the Creation is the completed activity that the Sabbath memorializes, so the new creation is the finished redemptive activity of Christ that the Sabbath now also memorializes. The Christian as he celebrates the Sabbath rejoices not only in God's natural creation but also in God's spiritual creation. He celebrates God's creative activity in his life for making him a new creation. The Sabbath then recalls to his mind the time when this re-creation took place that is, baptism, which memorializes this once-and-for-all event. The Sabbath is a weekly reminder of the once-and-for-all, completed Creation event. It is also a weekly reminder of the once-and-for-all, completed new creation.

Many feel that Christians should celebrate the Sabbath on the weekly day of Christ's resurrection, the first day of the week, or Sunday. Is not the day of the resurrection a fitting day for the celebration of our new creation? When Christ died on the cross on Friday, the sixth day of the week, He cried out, "It is finished," and the veil of the Temple was rent in two, signifying that the veil, the barrier between God and the fallen human race, was removed in the reconciling act of Christ. The work of redemption was completed finished. The resurrection, then, is not part of the sacrificial activity of Christ. It is, rather, the result of that activity. Christ rises to apply the results of His redemption to human beings. The effectiveness of Christ's act of redemption on the cross leads to our resurrection in Him. There fore, as Christ rested on the Sabbath day after having completed His creative activity at Creation, He also rested on the Sabbath day after having completed His redemptive activity for us on the cross. This resting becomes for us a sign of our own redemption, of our re-creation. What Christ did for all and what happens to us as individuals are memorialized by the Sabbath. Therefore, the Sabbath as a memorial does not deal merely with the subjective matter of our redemption but also with the redemptive activity of Christ Himself.

The Sabbath commandment not only commands the keeping of the Sabbath, it also specifies what day this should be. The seventh day is not connected with any natural phenomena in the heavens or on the earth. It is not a natural day of worship connected with sowing or reaping, or with the revolution of the moon around the earth or the earth around the sun. It can be understood Biblically only as the day that memorializes Creation. In this sense it is an arbitrarily chosen day. But it was God who did the choosing. In this it is seen that ultimately the keeping of the Sabbath on the seventh day is an act of obedient faith through our recognition of God's sovereignty over us.

The Sabbath truly kept has many blessings for God's people. Understood rightly, it maintains the infinite distinction between Creator and creature, thus keeping us from false, idolatrous worship. And in recognizing the Creator also as Redeemer, we are kept from viewing the world as purposeless and accidental. Evolutionary views are set aside. If we truly see Christ as Creator and Redeemer, as the Sabbath teaches us, we can never come to see Christ as a mere human being. He remains for us Messiah, Son of God, Saviour, and Redeemer.

The Sabbath truly kept and under stood as a sign of redemption will have real meaning only as we have been re deemed. The true Christian enters into the Sabbath as a sign of his accomplished redemption. Understood in this way, it will preserve us from legalism. And because the Sabbath is our confession of God's sovereignty and because faith is manifested in loving obedience, it will also preserve us against the erroneous idea that grace allows lawless behavior.

 

* All Bible texts in this article are taken from the Revised Standard Version.

From Acquitted! Message From the Cross (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1975), pp. 40-48. Used by permission.


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Sakae Kubo, Ph.D., is president of Newbold College, Bracknell, Berkshire, England.

November 1980

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