“Thou Shalt Love God” (Exodus 20:1-11) | 5/14/23
Exodus 20:1-11 | 5/14/23 | Will DuVal
If you could write a “top 10” list of rules for governing human behavior, what would you include? Many have offered their suggestions:
Ted Turner’s list included a pledge of allegiance to the United Nations and a limit of 2 children per couple, to ration the planet’s resources. (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-04-vw-404-story.html ).
George Carlin reduced his list to just THREE commandments: “Thou shalt always be honest and faithful; Thou shalt try really HARD not to kill anyone; and Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself” (https://genius.com/George-carlin-the-ten-commandments-annotated).
But outspoken atheist Christopher Hitchens produced perhaps the most apropos list for our modern times; I’ll just summarize it:
“I: No racism
II: No slaves
III: No abuse
IV: Never harm a child.
V: No GUILT (“Do not condemn people for their inborn nature.”)
VI: Take care of the ENVIRONMENT.
VII: Don’t take advantage of others.
VIII: Turn off [your] cell phone.
IX: No religious extremism.
And finally, X: “Renounce any god… if any [of HIS] commandments should contradict the above.” (https://www.openculture.com/2015/04/christopher-hitchens-revises-the-10-commandments-for-the-21st-century.html )
Well, desire as we may to be the ones calling the shots, to be “a law unto ourselves”, the Bible - God’s word - asks us to consider, “Has the potter no right over the clay” (Rom 9:21). In other words, the Maker gets to make the RULES. And we should be grateful that OUR Maker has NOT left it up to us to try and determine the best laws for dictating morality, but instead, God has graciously revealed His Law TO us. You know them as the “10 Commandments”, from Exodus ch20.
And as you turn there in your Bibles, I invite you to consider how MASSIVELY, unspeakably IMPORTANT these commandments are - ETERNALLY important. As Philip Ryken, whose wonderful commentary I will be using extensively again this morning, notes: “The [Decalogue, or “10 words”] were written in stone because they would remain in effect for as long as time endured. When would it EVER be permissible to worship another god, misuse God’s name, to lie, murder or steal? NEVER, because these things are contrary to God’s very nature” (Ryken, Exodus, 528).
So God’s law reveals God’s character. God is LIFE, so he opposes murder. God is FAITHFUL, so he opposes adultery. God is TRUTH, so he opposes lying. And because God is eternal, so is His LAW. God didn’t invent them halfway through the Exodus story; He just codifies them here. But we’ve already seen God save Israel to serve Him alone (1st commandment); God judged Egypt for their IDOLATRY (2nd commandment); He taught Moses at the burning bush to honor his name (3rd commandment); God even taught them the Sabbath (4th commandment) in his rules for collecting the manna back in ch16. As Ryken points out: “At various points the exodus presupposed the existence of God’s law, even before the Israelites reached Mt. Sinai.”
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The Commandments are organized in 2 groups: the first FOUR that we’ll cover this morning - the “VERTICAL commandments” - govern our relationship with GOD, while the last SIX that we’ll examine NEXT week - the “Horizontal commandments” - regulate our relationships with ONE ANOTHER. This two-fold division was affirmed by Jesus HIMSELF, who famously summarized the 10 commandments THIS way: ““You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”” So I am officially re-titling this sermon on the first four - vertical - commandments: “Thou Shalt LOVE GOD”. That’s the basic message of these first 4 laws; God is going to teach us this morning how to LOVE Him. FOUR ways…
Let’s READ them together; would you STAND… Exodus 20:1-11:
“And God spoke all these words, saying,
2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
3 “You shall have no other gods before me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 “You shall not take the name of YHWH your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
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.”
This is the word of God…
The most important part of the 10 Commandments isn’t a commandment at all; it’s the preamble, in vv1 & 2, where God provides the rationale and the motivation for His Law in the first place: it is Because of who God IS, and because of what He has DONE for us, (vv1-2), that we obey Him. There are LOTS of other “top 10 lists” out there; the reason we pay attention to THIS one is because of who God IS - “I am the Lord your God” - and because of what He’s DONE - I “brought you… out of the house of slavery.” That was true of Israel physically - God led them out of bondage in EGYPT - and it’s true of us today spiritually, if Jesus has freed you from slavery to SIN by his death and resurrection. THAT’s why we obey Him. It is yet another reminder this morning, right up front, that GRACE always comes before the LAW. God doesn’t say, “Obey me… then I’ll save you”; NO! God rescues His people - from Egypt, from sin… - and THEN we obey Him in RESPONSE. Out of gratitude.
Two other quick but important points on the preamble:
First, the reason God’s Law is BINDING is because of who God is. Commands are only as authoritative as they're COMMANDER. If I demanded that you value me above everything else in your life”, you’d think I was a total narcissist. And you’d laugh in my FACE; cuz I have absolutely no right to demand that of you! If I commanded you to take an entire day off, every single WEEK, and devote it simply to worshiping me”, you’d say, “He’s LOST it! What an egomaniac!” And you’d be right! But God not only CAN command that of us, it is morally RIGHT for him to do so, because God is objectively the most glorious thing in the universe. So God OUGHT to be obsessed with His glory, and so should WE
Second point: I think it’s significant that the “you” / “your” pronouns in v2 are SINGULAR, in the Hebrew. God isn’t just reminding Israel, collectively, as a nation, or the CHURCH, collectively, as His NT people, of who He is and what He’s done; God is saying, “It’s gotta be PERSONAL for you! I’ve gotta be YOUR God; you’ve gotta be freed from bondage PERSONALLY, or don’t even bother trying to obey my commandments. You only obey as a grateful, LOVING response.”
And what IS that response? If Yahweh is MY God, once I realize that He has set ME free?
#1 - I will… We MUST… TREASURE Him. (v3)
“You shall have no other gods before me.”
That doesn’t mean as long as you put God first you can worship whatever other gods you like. As Ryken notes (559): “The words “before me” mean “before my face”... or “in my presence”... Since God is everywhere, it really forbids us from worshiping false gods anywhere. Any time we serve another god, we are doing it in the presence of God.”
And “This command… was without precedent [in the ancient world]. None of the other nations prohibited the worship of other gods. They simply assumed [polytheism].” THAT’s the CONTEXT here. Ryken goes on (558): “The Israelites had just come out of Egypt, one of the most polytheistic cultures ever. Polytheism is simply the worship of many gods, and in this the Egyptians were unsurpassed. They worshiped the gods of fields and rivers, light and darkness, sun and storm… The Israelites worshiped these gods too. Over the long centuries of their captivity, they had gradually given in to the temptation to worship [these] gods.” Later, in Ezekiel 20:7, God reflects back on the Exodus story and recalls: “I said to them, ‘…do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.’”
“When it comes to worshiping God, it is all or nothing… Religious pluralism is not a recent development. There have always been plenty of other gods clamoring for our attention, and God has always demanded our exclusive loyalty” (Ryken, 560).
In Isaiah 42:8, God declares, “I am the LORD …I will not give my glory to another.
Hosea 13:4 - “You shall acknowledge no God but me; there is no Savior besides me”.”
In other words, “I WILL be your one and only, or don’t even bother worshiping me at all.” God REFUSES to be just one deity alongside a whole host of others.
And friends, when we come to see Him for who He truly IS, and we come to understand all that He’s done FOR us, we will TREASURE Him above everything else.
Now, you may think, “I guess the first commandment makes sense for a bunch of POLYTHEISTS, but I’m not exactly tempted to worship Osiris or Baal or Asherah…” No, but you ARE tempted to worship MAMMON, the god of MONEY. You ARE tempted to worship Uncle Sam, the god of country. Or Mother Earth, the god of environmentalism.
Or the god of STUFF... (Amazon)
The gods of Entertainment… (Netflix)
Popularity… (FB)
Sex… (bunny)
Politics… (elephant/donkey)
Family… (stock photo)
We worship all KINDS of false gods!
What are YOUR “functional gods”? Ryken (564-5) proposes two tests for determining our gods: the “LOVE test” and the “TRUTH test”; he asks, “What do you love… desire? When your mind is free to roam, what do you think about? How do you spend your money? What do you get excited about? A false god can be any good thing we focus on to the exclusion of God… Another test is the TRUTH test: What do you trust? Where do you turn in times of trouble? Martin Luther said, “Whatever thy heart clings to and relies upon, that is properly thy God.” …Some people trust their addictions. When they are lonely or discouraged they count on drugs and alcohol or sex or shopping… to pull them through. Other people… trust their jobs, their insurance policies, or their pension plans for their security. Some put their faith in the government and its control of the economy. Some trust their families or their social position. Some people trust science and medicine… Behind all these lesser idols we serve is the god or goddess of SELF, the supreme deity of these postmodern times.”
Ryken argues (565): “The only thing that can tear our hearts away from all our other affections is true love for GOD. And the only thing that can replace all the other things we trust is a total faith commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ.” That’s what we need, and that’s what He DESERVES: to be treasured above EVERYTHING else in our lives.
One last important thing to note here: if the MONOTHEISM of Commandment #1 was unprecedented in the ancient world, so too was its INTIMACY. Historian Umberto Cassuto points out that “All the other legal codes in antiquity governed outward sins (external behavior) like stealing. But [this] commandment does not address an action but an affection… Only Israel’s God presumed to rule a person’s thoughts and actions” (in Ryken, 548).
As 1 Samuel 16:7 puts it, “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” THAT’S what God is REALLY after, in ALL these commandments; He wants our HEARTS! “Thou shalt LOVE me”!
#2 - Because of who God is and what He’s done… We WORSHIP Him. (vv4-6)
If the first commandment told us WHO to worship, the second commandment tells us HOW to worship. If the first commandment warned against the worship of false gods, the second commandment warns against false worship of the true God” (Skip Heitzig, “Exodus 20”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cADruS2b2M )
To help differentiate between the two, consider an example: the OT King Jehu. He is first praised in 2 Kings 10, v28 for eliminating the worship of Baal - the Canaanite god - from Israel. But the very next verse indicts Jehu for “the sins of Jeroboam” because he FAILED to remove the “golden calves” that had been erected in Bethel and Dan… for the purpose of worshiping YAHWEH! Right God… WRONG worship! (see Ryken, 568)
Specifically, what the second commandment forbids here is making any “carved image” or “any likeness” of anything in heaven, on earth, or under the earth… It is a prohibition against “representing God in the form of anything in creation” (Ryken, 569).
God doesn’t want us confusing our CREATOR with His creation. Ryken explains (573-4): “This is the problem with idolatry: It creates a false image of God that is inadequate to his deity and unworthy of his majesty. God is infinite and invisible. He is omnipotent and omnipresent. He is a living spirit. Therefore, to carve him into a piece of wood or stone is to deny his attributes, the essential characteristics of his divine being. An idol makes the infinite God finite, the invisible God visible, the omnipotent God impotent, the all-present God local, the living God dead, and the spiritual God material. In short, it makes him the exact OPPOSITE of who he actually is.” We might THINK we’re just making God more “relatable”, but what we’re REALLY doing is stripping Him of His GOD-ness. Making Him more like US!
See, we hear “Thou shalt not make for yourself a carved image” and we think, “Whew - I haven’t carved any statues AT ALL lately, much less any that I BOW DOWN to, so I think I’m good on commandment #2…”, but as Ryken (575) explains: “We make an idol whenever we turn God into something that we can manipulate. This was the whole point of pagan idolatry. The Egyptians [thought] that idols gave them a kind of spiritual contact that would enable them to control their gods. So much of contemporary spirituality tries to do the same thing. People are always looking for a more user-friendly god who can be adapted to suit their purposes.”
We want a “Vending Machine” god, don’t we? I press “D11”, I get a Twix. I pray, God grants my wishes. I attend church faithfully, He gives me health, wealth and happiness. If I try my hardest to be a good person and play by His rules, He’s supposed to rain down blessing upon blessing. We want a god who works for US, on OUR terms.
“But God will not be manipulated. When he commands us not to make idols [hear], he is saying he ‘will not be captured, contained, assigned or managed by anyone or anything, for any purpose.’” (575) Ryken points out, “When people say, ‘I like to think of God as…’ they are usually remaking God in THEIR image.” (Ryken, 576)
It’s the Ricky Bobby prayer, from Talladega Nights: “Dear Lord Baby Jesus… I like the Christmas Jesus best…” Well, “I like to picture Jesus in a Tuxedo T-shirt, 'cause it says, like, 'I wanna be formal, but I'm here to party, too.' I like to party, so I like my Jesus to party....”
That’s what idolatry is: it’s making God in OUR image. Instead of the other way AROUND! That’s one of the BIGGEST reasons we’re not supposed to make images for God: cuz He’s already DONE so… it’s US! We don’t need to CARVE images, just BE them! Just look in the mirror and see our OWN reflection and remember our calling to reflect God’s glory in all the earth (Ryken 576).
So that’s the RULE - “no images” - but what’s the REASON behind it? V5: “...for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” → Ryken explains (569): “Jealousy doesn't get much positive publicity these days… However, when something really does belong to you, there are times when it needs to be protected… No husband who truly loves his wife could possibly endure seeing her in the arms of another man. God feels the same way about his people. His commitment to us is total. His love is exclusive, passionate… jealous… [It] is not an insecure, insane, possessive human jealousy… Rather, it is an intensely caring devotion to the objects of His love, like a mother’s jealous protection of her children.”
God is protecting us against false worship… AND its consequences, namely, v5: His “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me”. Again, Ryken exposits (571): “People who struggle with the fairness of this commandment usually assume that although the father is guilty, his children are innocent. [They] overlook… how the threat ends [here]: God says he will punish three or four generations “of those who HATE me”... God never condemns the innocent, but only the guilty… The children [here] hate God as much as their father did… Therefore, it is fair and just for God to punish them for their OWN sin (cf. Ezek 18:20a).”
And yet, “God’s blessing triumphs over His curse” (571); v6: “but [I will] show steadfast love to thousands[c] of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
Could WE be guilty, today, of trying to re-make God in OUR image, so we can manipulate, control, MANAGE Him? For our OWN purposes?
If your God never CONFRONTS you; if He’s always confronting OTHERS but always AFFIRMING you, then you’re really just worshiping an idol of your own fashioning.
If your God abhors your LGBTQ neighbor, but He turns a blind eye to YOUR sexual sin, you’re worshiping an idol.
If your God condemns the other political party, but He endorses every single POINT of YOUR party’s platform, you’re worshiping an idol.
You’ve made God into YOUR image. Let us put away our idols, and worship God as He truly IS, as He has REVEALED Himself to us, in His WORD.
#3 - Because of who God is and what He’s done… We HONOR Him. (v7)
““You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”
Now God shifts and refers to himself in the third person to “call attention to his special covenant name YAHWEH” (Ryken 578), the name He revealed to Moses back at the burning bush in ch3. Ryken explains: “YHWH is much more than a name. It is God’s identity… For us, a name is a label; it is something we have, not something we are. But for the Hebrews the name was inseparable from the person… When we use the name of God, therefore, we are referring to the [very] essence of his divine being… The literary term for this manner of speech, in which one part stands for the whole, is synecdoche.” (For example, “nice set of WHEELS”, in place of “car”; “he asked for her HAND in marriage”.) “Similarly, God’s name represents his whole identity.” (Ryken 578)
So we are to HONOR God by honoring His NAME, not taking it “in vain”, not using it in a vain, empty, careless, thoughtless, or flippant manner. (579) God’s name is WEIGHTY, because GOD is weighty, He is serious, important. So we APPROACH Him earnestly, and we SPEAK OF Him reverently.
The third commandment, then, isn’t really about CUSSING. Using “swear words”. Nor is it primarily about “swearing” - swearing OATHS (“Hand to GOD…”). No, the scope is this commandment is far GREATER than that. As God’s children, we now BEAR His name - we represent the Lord - in everything we say… everything we DO… in ALL of life! In the same way that my son - Elijah - now bears MY name, our family name - DuVal - as a result of his adoption, all who have been adopted into God’s family by grace through faith now bear His NAME, publicly AND privately. When we call ourselves “Christians”, we are taking unto ourselves the name of “Christ”, the name that is above EVERY name; we are literally self-identifying as “little Christs”. Do we realize the WEIGHT of that? 2 Corinthians 5:20 calls us “ambassadors for Christ” - I don’t care HOW important your “day job” is, that you get paid for; NO job, no calling, no title, “identity” comes CLOSE to the weight of that one: you are a “heavenly diplomat”. And the third commandment is a call to bear God’s name WELL, in ALL our words and actions, lest we be found guilty of telling the world a LIE about who our FATHER is, and bring DIS-honor upon the family name.
When I told the story last week about getting grounded for my first “B” ever on a report card, some of you thought my father was too harsh, to say, “We don’t GET “B”s in this family”. DuVals don’t get “B”s; don’t dishonor the family name like that. But the reality is that God’s law is MUCH stricter; His standards are MUCH higher. God calls us to be “holy, as I am holy.” Here’s how JESUS interpreted the OT Law: “You must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” God is perfect, so any sin at ALL - anything short of perfection - is a misrepresentation of our new identity in Christ, it distorts and dishonors WHO we now are, because of WHOSE we now are: we belong to JESUS! We’ve been set FREE from sin to serve HIM. The time for living like slaves in our past has sufficed; now it’s time to live like the sons and daughters that He DIED to make us!
As the apostle Paul puts it in Colossians 3:17- “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
Or as Jesus Himself put it, our prayer ought to be that we “hallow” God’s name (Matt 6:9b). God’s name IS holy; may OUR lives reflect that truth. It means, as Psalm 29:2 puts it, we “Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name” (Ps 29:2a; 96:8a). It means, Deut 28:58, we “revere this glorious and awesome name - YHWH, our God”.
I like the analogy Gary North offers: “One way for a modern American to begin to understand this commandment is to treat God’s name as a trademarked property. In order to gain widespread distribution for His copyrighted repair manual - the Bible - and also to capture greater market share for His authorized franchise - the Church - God has graciously licensed the use of His name to anyone who will use it according to His written instructions… God’s name has NOT been released into the public domain. God retains legal control over His name and threatens serious penalties against the unauthorized misuse of this supremely valuable property” (quoted in Ryken, 581). Don’t MISUSE it, take it LIGHTLY.
Ryken contends that (586): “The subtlest and perhaps most common way we break the third commandment is by being careless in our worship. As we look at the church today, [we might] wonder whatever happened to God. There seems to be so little reverence and awe, so little trembling before his majesty. Instead we take God lightly. [It is] the ‘weightlessness of God’... the “trivialization of God”... We do not recognize his true glory when we come into his presence for worship. Our thoughts wander when we pray. Our eyes [thoughtlessly skim] over the pages of Scripture… And when we sing, our hearts are not in tune with our voices… Our worship is casual, careless, and insincere, and in this way we dishonor God’s name.”
But our worship is just the tip of the iceberg. If we bear God’s name in EVERY area of life, then there’s a very real sense in which the third commandment is a kind of CATCH-ALL law that rules out every KIND of sin:
*We take God’s name lightly when we are more SELF-centered than SPOUSE-centered; Ephesians 5 says marriage is supposed to point people to the GOSPEL, the relationship between CHRIST and His CHURCH. So when I care more for MYSELF than for POLLY, I’m misrepresenting Christ’s name and telling a LIE about the One who came not to BE served, but to SERVE, and lay down His LIFE as a RANSOM for many.
*We take God’s name lightly when we care more about what OTHERS think of us than what GOD thinks. When we DO that, we’re essentially looking somewhere ELSE for our identity, as if our identity in Christ wasn’t infinitely MORE than enough to satisfy us. We may come to church singing “I am who YOU say I am, God”, but if on the car ride HOME from church we get too easily offended by our spouse, what we’re really saying is: “Yeahhhh, but I need to know who my WIFE says I am too. THEN I can be truly at peace, confident, secure.” If we turn around Monday morning and ask, “...But who do YOU say I am, Boss?”, we’re taking God’s name LIGHTLY.
*We take His name lightly when we shirk back from our responsibility to bear it ALTOGETHER. Some of us feel the weight of his name SO heavily that we’d rather not assume it for ourselves AT ALL. Sure, MOST of the time we downplay our identity in Christ, it is for people-pleasing purposes. We care more about what THEY think. But it’s also possible to be SO concerned for the purity of God’s name, that you distance yourself from Him: “I know I’m a sinner, I’m a hypocrite; I don’t practice what I preach perfectly, so I’ll just keep my faith PRIVATE. I don’t want that to be - I don’t want ME to be - someone’s perception of what Christianity, what JESUS, is all about.” It sounds like a noble sentiment. Except that Jesus COMMANDS us to “be His witnesses to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8)! “You WILL be my ambassadors”, he said. Yes, it’s a heavy calling. But that makes it all the more IMPORTANT. The Church is Christ’s “plan A” for transforming the world, and there isn’t a plan B.
In all the ways, in EVERY way, our sin misrepresents and dishonors God’s holy name. This is one of the primary PURPOSES of the Law, by the way; Romans 7:7 says the Law is like a MIRROR, that SHOWS us our sin. But here’s the problem: the Law’s not very good at REMOVING our sin. You can look in the mirror and notice all the spinach stuck in your teeth, but I don’t advise ripping the mirror off the WALL and trying to use it to REMOVE the spinach! No, the Law’s just a mirror; we need a TOOTHBRUSH, to DEAL with our spinach problem (I feel like “spinach” is a good metaphor for sin…), we needed something GREATER than the mirror, that could deal with our sin problem conclusively.
And friends, that’s exactly what Jesus Christ did, when He took on flesh and lived the perfect, holy life that you and I FAILED to live, but that God rightly desires for and demands of us; Jesus “fulfilled the righteous requirement of the Law” FOR us (Rom 8:4). And on the cross, he then TRADED his righteousness for all of OUR UN-righteousness, bearing our sin in His body on the tree. And when he rose from the dead on the third day, defeating sin and death once and for all, the Bible says He not only died to conquer the PENALTY of our sin, but He now lives to give us victory over the very POWER of sin. “Without faith, it’s impossible to please God,” to measure up to His holy Law. But now WITH Christ, if I am IN Christ, “I can do ALL things through Christ who strengthens me.” “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to[c] his own glory” (2 Pet 1:3). In other words, we’ve been freed to FOLLOW Him. Saved to SERVE Him. But the Law MUST come AFTER grace.
And our most important response of ALL to God’s grace, in light of who God is and what He’s done… is that #4 - We REST IN Him. (vv8-11)
The word “Sabbath” comes from the Hebrew word for “cease” or “rest”. And if we had more time, there’s a LOT of interesting stuff we could get into on commandment #4:
*We could dig into the historical context, and all the extra rules the Jews heaped on TOP of the Sabbath that made it more WORK to “keep the Sabbath” than it was about REST.
*We might note v9, that included in God’s invitation to rest for one day is an exhortation to WORK for SIX days. Work isn’t a result of the FALL, the CURSE, in Genesis 3; God put Adam in the Garden of Eden to WORK it; work is part of God’s good, Creation-design for us as image bearers; we work because HE works. And “we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph 2:10). Quick plug for Austin Gooch’s summer Sunday school class on “Faith and Work” - “what does Sunday morning have to do with my Monday-thru-Friday?”; you’re gonna want to check that out.
*We could celebrate God’s GRACE in asking for just ONE day of the week, carved out for worshiping Him. God would have been WELL within his right, to demand that we spend SIX days worshiping Him, and squeeze all of our work - the job, the house, the chores, the kids - into just ONE day. God would have STILL been generous to allow us to keep a “tithe”, 10% of our paycheck for ourselves, and demand that HE gets 90% of it; but God is SO gracious, that He only asks for 10% for Himself, just one day a week, carved out for Him.
*We could highlight the TRUST, and HUMILITY it requires of us, to keep the Sabbath; do we trust GOD to be GOD - that if we take a day off, He won’t, and the world is gonna keep spinning? Do we have enough humility to recognize that our work, important though it may be, is only temporal and interruptible.
*We could note v10, that God’s invitation to rest is for EVERYONE - “you, your son, your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, even your livestock, the sojourner” - Ryken notes, “Some commentators have described the fourth commandment as the world’s first workers’ bill of rights… Here is a new social order, in which work and leisure are not divided along class lines. Everyone should work, and everyone should rest, because everyone should be free to worship God.” (Ryken 593)
*We could kick around all KINDS of debates related to the Sabbath: should Christians observe it on SATURDAY, or on SUNDAY? Should Christians observe it AT ALL? Romans 14:5 says, “One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind”. Pretty vague. IF we’re supposed to observe the Sabbath, HOW should we do so? What CAN and CAN’T I do? Should I let my kids play sports, play in leagues, with games on Sundays? Is that work or worship? Can I WATCH sports, on TV? If you’re interested in going deeper on the Sabbath, shout out for our midweek “Ask the Pastors” PODCAST - submit your question about it, and we’ll tackle it next week.
But since I’m out of time, here’s how I want to end: with what’s most important of ALL to recognize ABOUT the Sabbath: it’s about RESTING in God, in who He is, and what He’s done. Ryken says it this way (594): “There is one further reason for keeping a day of rest… mentioned in Deuteronomy, where the Ten Commandments are repeated… ‘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.’ (Dt. 5:15)... The Sabbath looked back not only to creation but also to redemption. It reminded God’s people that they had been delivered from slavery [and] now they didn’t have to work all the time… The Sabbath wasn’t a form of bondage but a day of freedom… a day to celebrate their liberation by giving glory to God.”
So maybe the better question for us to ask this morning - instead of “Do we HAVE to keep the Sabbath?” - is “Do we still GET to keep it? Is God’s REST still AVAILABLE to us?”
And God’s ANSWER to THAT question, is clear, in Hebrews 4:9-10 “there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, 10 for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works.” Friends, that means resting from our SPIRITUAL “work”, trying to earn God’s favor - some of you have been trying to rest in the LAW this morning, and it’s no WONDER you are spiritually EXHAUSTED! You can’t REST in the Law; it’s a mirror, not a bed. God gave us the Law to expose our SIN and thus our need for a SAVIOR. So you can rest from your religious striving this morning and simply trust that CHRIST’S finished work on your BEHALF was MORE than sufficient!
Do you TRUST Him? Are you RESTING in Him, this morning? You can. That is Jesus’ invitation to you, today: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”” (Matt 11:28-30).