Why the Sabbath Is Like a Car Door Slamming

I still remember the sound of my dad closing the door of his navy Toyota hatchback. I heard that sound almost every evening when I was a kid. It meant that my father was home. My dad was the kind of dad kids want, even if they don’t know it. My brothers, sister, and I could not wait to hear him come home each evening. We would make our way from our rooms or the backyard to the driveway and begin to pester Dad about whatever activity or need was on our minds.

Most days, we came to him asking for his attention. Things needed fixing, arguments needed settling, and we needed advice. Some days, we asked him–especially when we were young–to play games and join in make-believe adventures. We always asked him to give us himself. We wanted to be with him.

Dad worked hard and he had a long drive home. Now that I am grown and have my own children, I understand that Dad’s behavior when he arrived home was important. He was genuinely happy to see us at the end of his long day. Through years of greeting us and giving of himself to us after long days at work, Dad taught us something about why he worked.

He did it for us.

The navy Toyota Corolla and the half-dozen other clunkers he drove throughout my childhood were never a portal to escape from his family. It got him to a job where he worked hard to provide for my mom, my siblings, and me. When he came home, he reveled in the family for whom he had been working. In doing so, he enjoyed the fruit of his labor.

Years after I stopped listening for the sound of my dad coming home in the evenings, I started working through a question I had about Genesis, specifically the end of the story of the creation of the heavens and the earth in Genesis 2:1–3. These verses tell of God’s rest on the seventh day of creation. This seems strange. God does not grow tired even after creating the cosmos. Why, then, does he rest?

This question is especially important because God’s rest on the seventh day is not just an issue in Genesis. When God gives his people the command to “remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy” in Exodus 20, he roots the reason for keeping the Sabbath in God’s resting after creating the heavens and the earth.

So, if we want to keep the Sabbath–or even consider keeping it–we need to understand why God rests in Genesis 2.

Genesis tells us that God rests after he finishes creating the heavens and the earth (2:1). It is after the completion of this work that God rests. He does not rest because he is tired or because he has grown weary or bored in his work. He has finished creating and so now he rests in his creation thus enjoying His finished work. This orients our understanding of the purpose of the Sabbath.

Why We Need The Sabbath

Our society seems torn between the extremes of rest and work. In one sense, we focus on productivity and work like never before. Technology allows us to take our work anywhere and do it at any time. The flexibility of work in the technological age is often considered a tremendous benefit, and sometimes it is. Technology has also created a world where our work can easily follow us home, invading living rooms, dinner tables, and bedrooms. Many, if not most, people know the experience of answering a work email during a family dinner or submitting a class assignment between visits to the beach on a vacation.

These new technologies bring many blessings to those who desire to do good work. They also lead to a world that seems devoid of rest. We can work anywhere, anytime. Like any opportunity in a sin-soaked world, this can lead to destructive patterns rather than good and fulfilling work. We need real rest, real enjoyment, real rejuvenation. We need the Sabbath.

Our world is full of potential for overwork and burnout, as well as distraction and laziness. We carry devices in our pockets that open the door to more content of any genre than an individual could consume in a lifetime. Streaming services, social media, and video clips devour our spare time.

Add to the ease of access to entertainment the growing automation of work that was previously performed only by human labor. While technology breaks down the boundaries of where and when we work, it also creates more disposable time than we have had at any point in human history.

Yet, in a world marked by access to “free time” we do not feel free. Our devices entertain us to the point of insomnia. We find it ever easier to pour our lives into empty and vain pursuits. Whatever leisure time we have gained seems to add to our angst rather than move us toward peace. We need real rest, real purpose, real meaning. We need the Sabbath.

The perils of the technological age demonstrate our need to return to Genesis and remind us that God, who is not distracted, not overworked, and free from any sinful inclination to slave or sloth away time, rested. Our current context shows us a particular need for the Sabbath, but every culture at every point in history possessed an equal need for Sabbath rest.

God rests in his creation because he has finished his work and now enjoys the fruit of that work. He bestows upon creation the greatest gift imaginable–his presence! Sabbath rest is not about rescuing ourselves from the extremes of work and laziness in the modern world. Sabbath is about enjoying the presence of our Creator who, through his power, by his grace, made all creation to rest in him.

You can’t reduce Sabbath to a mere “life hack” or self-care solution that addresses the needs of 21st-century Christians. Instead, keeping the Sabbath allows us to be who we are truly meant to be, creatures who find their greatest pleasure and purpose resting in the presence of their Creator.

God made us so that we could rest in Him. We need the Sabbath because we need to deliverance from our busyness and we need the Sabbath because we need the redemption of our leisure time. But, ultimately, these needs are consequences of our greatest need. Simply put, we need the Sabbath because we need God.

School Bells and Car Doors

I remember being in high school and waiting for the bell to ring at the end of the day. My last class always seemed the longest. I remember waiting for the bell to ring and tell me that I was saved from the grave drudgery of Trigonometry and could escape from the parking lot in my beat-up Ford Ranger, assuming it cranked. I wanted to escape from what I did not enjoy and go enjoy my favorite things–dirt roads, deer hunting, and my Granny’s dinner table. The school bell was a call to retreat from what I detested.

The Sabbath is not a school bell.

The Sabbath is a car door slamming at the end of a day. It heralds the arrival of our Father who has completed his work and awaits us to run to Him to enjoy His presence. The Sabbath is based on an astounding truth–that despite all of the problems and petty things we bring to God, He enjoys our presence as well. He made us for this, when we rest in Him we fulfill our destiny!