Dennis Tuuri

according to a consideration of the final statement of our covenant document as a church and that is a pledge to keep God’s Sabbath but not doing our pleasure but his on it according to the scriptures. This can be a rather controversial topic as I suppose most of you are aware of.

There’s it’s interesting that in the reform movement itself there’s been some dissension and differences of opinion as to the Sabbath and the proper use of the Sabbath and its application in terms of the New Covenant Church.

That is interesting though in light of the fact that the standards that most reformed churches use are sabbatarian in nature. The Westminster Confession and Catechisms are definitely sabbatarian documents. They affirm a Christian Sabbath and a continuing obligation for the people of God to keep Sunday as the new Christian Sabbath, replacing the old Sabbath of the Old Covenant. The Heidelberg Catechism also affirms the obligation to Sabbathkeeping on the part of the believer.

So while there is some dissension and discussion within the reformed churches in general as to the applicability of the Sabbath laws to believers, yet the primary standards of most reformed churches affirm those positions. Perhaps one of the reasons why there is some dissension as to the applicability of the Sabbath is the position of John Calvin. John Calvin’s writings have been used variously to support or to deny the validity of the Sabbath.

And in fact, I have a copy of a thesis written by a man named Gaffin that attempts to make sense of all the different writings from Calvin on the Sabbath. Did he really believe in the Sabbath or didn’t he? This is kind of the question. And so there is some dissension. Additionally, in reconstructionist circles, there’s also dissension in terms of the proper observance of the Sabbath. Although most reconstructionists would affirm the Westminster standards for instance, yet there is some dissension still about the position of the Sabbath.

Specifically, Gary North has taken a far weaker position on the Sabbath and comes very close to saying that it does not have validity in the New Covenant today. We have by the way to remind those of you who don’t realize this we have a sermon that Dr. Greg Bahnsen gave here—well actually not here but two buildings back in the progress of our church—but gave to the members of Reformation Covenant Church at that time a sermon on the Sabbath and it’s an excellent tape and it’s a video tape that we have available.

I have a beta version as well as a VHS version and of course the audio tape. So if you want to look at the position of Dr. Bahnsen on this that’s an excellent tape. It’s a good one to begin your own personal studies as well. We will this morning attempt just to give an overview of the various things we’re going to address over the next number of weeks. I haven’t decided yet how many weeks totally but it could easily go two or three months.

I think that it’s important that we take it that slowly. I think it’s important that we move a step at a time on this very critical topic and we’ll see some of the reasons for that this morning as the material we will cover in the outline that you have this morning will show. But there are some other reasons to go slowly. One is that most of us in this church are fairly new to reformation doctrine and to the reformed faith. We come out of churches that do not keep any distinction of the Sabbath at all—to them the Lord’s day was the day that maybe you go to church in the morning and go grocery shopping in the afternoon and there was no contention seen there at all.

So most of us in terms of our background theologically are not familiar with the various teachings on the Sabbath throughout the scriptures because it was seen as not abiding. It wasn’t repeated in the New Covenant. It was no longer seen as valid under the presupposition that most of the churches we came out of had, which was that unless something is explicitly repeated in the New Testament, it’s no longer binding upon us as Christians.

Now most of us have changed that basic presupposition though and we say that unless the New Testament specifically alters a command of God in the Old Covenant, yet it is still a law that is good for us and should be kept by us. So our backgrounds necessitate a long slow approach toward a study of the Sabbath. I dare say that probably most of us have heard very few sermons on the Sabbath and probably not too much reading either.

The fact that the reformers were somewhat divided is another reason and again the reconstructionists’ some of their inconsistencies in terms of abiding by the standards that they affirm is another reason for going slow. A nice thing though about approaching this topic in the context of this group: I had a talk yesterday with a fellow who has become reformationist and reconstructionist in his doctrine and theology.

He pastors a church that does not hold many of those positions and he didn’t hold those positions a number of years ago either. But one of the discouragements for him is absolutely no sense of a common approach in approaching the scriptures themselves or some basic doctrines. One of the beauties about approaching a subject such as the Sabbath that we can go into is this presupposition: What we want to do is find out what the scriptures explicitly say.

And if we can find what the scriptures say about the Sabbath, where then are we willing—and we’ll actually rush to—bend the knee to what the scriptures say about the Sabbath. We have a position that if the scriptures say it, we do it. Now, a lot of churches affirm that. But this church, I think, is unusual in its quick approach to fall in line with what the scriptures plainly teach. And so, it’s a joy really to discuss the Sabbath.

It’s a joy to spend a number of months on it. But I want to make sure that you have in your own minds a solid basis for the position of the Sabbath under the New Covenant today. And for that reason, we want to go slow and develop some of these points over some time and not just go through it very quickly. It also is true that we are fortunate in this group to have a textual understanding of how to apply the law of God.

As I said earlier, the presupposition of validity unless it’s been altered by God. And we also have a shared confessional statement whereby we all affirm the sovereignty of God. As we’ll talk about in a little bit, that is absolutely essential to an understanding of both the Old Covenant Sabbath and the New Covenant Sabbath—the sovereignty of God. And so, we don’t have to go back to that old ground as it were and try to lay that again.

We can build from there. And I think that as we approach the Sabbath, those things become very important as we go through the exegetical study of the various verses relating to aspects of the Sabbath. One final reason for going slow is that it will have ramifications for our life that could be quite large. While we may affirm a willingness to obey the scriptures, it’s not easy to do that much of the time. And we need encouragement and exhortation from each other to be faithful to those things the scriptures that God has commanded us to do.

And the Sabbath, a proper understanding of the Sabbath. Any discussion of the use of one’s time will have big implications for what we do in terms of all of our life really and not just what we do on Sunday. So for all these reasons, I think it’s real important to go slow and that’s what we’re going to try to do.

Having said that, this morning we’re going to go very fast. This morning we’re going to have an overview of all the various elements that we’ll be talking about just about all of them over the next month or two or three months, however long it takes.

So as you look at the outline before you, if you have one, it looks quite extensive and long. There’s not much place to write much in there. All the space is already used up with my own comments and verses. But don’t despair. That is basic. We’re going to go through all that material in summary fashion, but then we’ll go back to all these various points and go over them much slower in the weeks to come.

And so what I want to do this morning is give you an overview of what we will be doing for the next two or three months. Give you a context to put everything we’re going to be doing over the next couple of months into a framework as it were and to plan out the many considerations that are important to this topic and why we have to spend some time on it.

Having said that, let’s begin then a brief overview. And as I said, we’re not going to deal extensively with any of these topics this morning, but I want to give you an overview of these various concerns. And I chose Isaiah 56. It’s a beautiful passage about the Sabbath and the blessings to come under the New Covenant when Jesus’s salvation and righteousness has come forth to man in a fully manifested way.

Nobody that I know of would—perhaps there are some—but most people would agree that Isaiah 56 refers to New Covenant times. It talks about the gathering in of peoples that have been previously excluded under the Levitical or Jewish arrangement of the kingdom of God. Specifically, you’ll notice as we read through it that there’s exclusion of eunuchs, the exclusion of sons of strangers, and that these exclusions are seen done away with in this passage.

In the passage, the final verse we read talked about the Lord gathering the outcasts of Israel, saying, “Yet will I gather others to him besides those that are gathered unto him.” So, I think that these passages of scripture clearly refer to the ingathering of the Gentiles that would come after Jesus came and righteousness approached as it were to earth and became manifested.

And so, it’s a great encouragement to us as well in terms of the blessings that God has provided through redemption in Jesus Christ. And so, it’s a good passage of scripture and it is a good one too in giving us some basic perspectives on the Sabbath. And as your outline says, the three basic things we’ll be talking about are the Sabbath and blessing, the Sabbath and the law of God, and the Sabbath and the covenant.

We begin with the Sabbath and blessing. And we notice in point the first pointer to this subtopic that Sabbathkeeping leads to blessing. And I’m sure you probably caught this as we read through it, but I’ll read again a couple of the verses here. In verse 2: “Blessed is that man that doeth this, and the son of man that layeth hold on it, that keepeth the Sabbath from polluting it.” There’s a correlation between blessing and keeping the Sabbath.

Sabbathkeeping leads to blessing. Again, in verse 5: “Unto them I will give an everlasting name. Unto them I’ll give in mine house, within my walls, a place and a name better than that of sons or daughters. I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” And that’s conditioned, of course, upon those people that grab a hold of the Sabbath. So, there’s a blessing talked about here.

And then in verse 7, more blessings are talked about: “Even them will I bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar. For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” And certainly we see that under the New Covenant with the bringing in of the Gentiles and the completion of the work of the covenant mediator Jesus Christ. So now all nations are invited into the holy mountain of God and stream forth to it to worship him.

Their offerings of themselves as it were, whole burnt offerings that we commemorate every week in the giving of the tithes and offerings at the end of the preaching service, commemorating a dedication of ourselves as whole burnt offerings, as Romans 12 tells us to do—that we have to present ourselves as a living offering unto God. That offering is acceptable in Jesus Christ, our covenant mediator, and the thanksgiving sacrifices that we give through our prayers in our church are acceptable to God in the covenant mediator Jesus Christ. And so we have the great period of blessing in the New Covenant coming forth and prefigured in these verses in Isaiah 56.

And these blessings are contingent upon or a result of Sabbathkeeping on the part of the people that come forth to the mountain of God. Again, in Isaiah 58:14, this verse we’ve been reading for the last probably three or four months now to begin our Lord’s Day worship services here at Reformation Covenant Church. Isaiah 58:13 and 14.

Those of you who weren’t here for the last couple of years, prior to reading this verse on a regular basis, we read through every verse of the scriptures that had a reference to the Sabbath or a seventh day or an eighth day observance. And having done that, then we went back and settled on Isaiah 58:13 and 14 for three months, hoping, as I would, that it would sort of set the tone as we approach a study of the Sabbath, which we’re involved in now.

In any event, Isaiah 58:14 talks about those people that will turn away their foot from doing thy own pleasure and turn to a consideration of God and his word and delight themselves in his name on the Sabbath. Verse 14 then: “then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord, and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

The scriptures tell us that to do that—to observe God’s Sabbath, to turn away from our own considerations, and turn to a consideration of God and his truths and his person—is to yield forth blessings to us for the future. We ride upon the high places of the earth. We’re fed with the heritage of Jacob, our father. Great pictures of blessing here are given to us on the basis of Sabbathkeeping.

And then again, Leviticus 23:3, we work into some of the practical implications of how that blessing comes about. We won’t look at the verses now, but in Leviticus 23:3, it notes that there’s a holy convocation to the Lord on the Sabbath day. It was a day of gathering and of instruction in the synagogue. In 2 Kings 4:23, there’s a verse that indicates that the Sabbath, among other things, was a day to seek out godly men for consultation and to get advice and counsel from God as exposited through godly men. 2 Kings 4:23 is there on your outline as an indication of that.

And so there are practical reasons why the Sabbath leads to blessing. We come together on Sundays. We hear the word of God. We concentrate on the word of God. We see the application of the word of God then for the rest of our lives. And as we walk in obedience to that word of God, blessings come forth from God for having done so in the rest of the week. And so the Sabbath, the day of convocation and instruction in God’s word produces blessings in a practical sense.

But the scriptures say that the blessings that come forth from the Sabbath are not strictly limited to a practical working out of what we actually do on that particular day of rest. What I mean by that is that it tells us from Leviticus 25:20 and 21 there was a sabbatical year out of the Old Covenant as well. And so by the way, while we’re going through this and some of these statements in terms of correlation of Old Testament Sabbath and New Testament Lord’s Day value, we’ll work through all that stuff in a much slower fashion in the weeks to come, as I said. But for now just try to stay with it and get the pattern and the thrust of this thing and we’ll go back to get more details and answer your objections or questions in more detail in the months to come.

But in any event, what I want you to see here is that even if you relate these things to the Old Covenant right now in your own mind, that’s okay with me because the blessings were still there. Those Sabbaths still yielded forth a blessing. In Leviticus 25:20 and 21, there was a sabbatical year as well as a sabbatical day at the end of the week. Sabbatical year at the end of the seven years. The seventh year would also be a year of rest. And they were to do no work in that year. And God tells them that if they will obey that, if they’ll keep the sabbatical year, he will bless them with a double or triple harvest—but not after the land is grown, which is what you would expect in terms of agricultural productivity.

That would make sense, wouldn’t it, for the eighth year, as it were, to be one of great harvest. The land has regenerated itself as it were. God has regenerated it through his natural processes. But no, the blessing was to occur in the sixth year. In the sixth year, they would get a double or triple harvest that then would feed them for the seventh year.

You see, that’s out of sync with a practical working out in terms of the laws of nature—a blessing that is outside of the normal means established whereby we exercise dominion. God will contribute another portion of blessing upon it. There’ll be practical blessings in terms of the instruction of the word of God, in terms of rest for people. But then there’ll be a supernatural blessing as well added onto that if we put our hand to do what God has told us to do in terms of setting aside one day or, in the Old Covenant, the sabbatical year for him. God blesses that in a supernatural sort of sense.

In Psalm 127:2, the verse—well, let’s just turn into it. This is always the danger of an over here with a fellow like me—I mean I can easily get hung up at some of these points. We’ll try to keep moving through this and get through it all this morning. But that is one of the dangers is to settle on anything too often. But if there’s any point on this whole thing that I want to settle on this morning, it’s the idea of blessings.

And I’ll go into that a little more in a little bit. Psalm 127:2: “It is vain for you to rise up early to sit up late to eat the bread of sorrow. For so he gives of his beloved sleep.” Now, Moffatt’s translation, which many would say more correctly captures the true thrust of this verse, the Moffatt translation says that God’s gifts come to his loved ones as they sleep.

God’s gifts come to his loved ones as they sleep. As they rest in God, the assurance that he’s the sovereign controller of all things, and acknowledge him by keeping the Sabbath, he brings his blessings upon them in an added measure in addition to the practical blessings that will come from Sabbath observance.

So Sabbathkeeping first of all—this Isaiah 56 teaches, and many more scriptures we’ll look at in the future teach—yields blessings to us in the future. The second point is that Sabbathkeeping is itself a blessing to us.

We’ll be talking in future weeks about the basic need of people to rest one day out of seven. There’s a human need experienced throughout the history of man that has led people to seek a day of rest. Not necessarily basing it upon the scriptures but basing it upon an obvious need felt for a day of rest. It’s interesting that various attempts by people to do away with days of rest throughout the history of man in terms of revolting against God himself have never worked out because man cannot be productive unless he’s given a day of rest.

There’s a human need for that rest itself. So the Sabbath day itself, Sabbathkeeping itself is a blessing in and apart from the blessings it yields forth for the future. Our Lord in a verse that we’ll be spending probably at least one week on, a passage of scripture—well, several passages in the Gospels where our Lord deals with the Sabbath specifically, having been confronted with Sabbath breaking by the Pharisees.

But remember our Lord said that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. What does he mean there? He means the Sabbath reflects a provision for a need that God fills with the Sabbath. The Sabbath is made for us. It’s good for us in and of itself apart from the blessings it yields.

By the way, when he says—of course, we’ll talk about this more later—when he says the Sabbath was made for man, that is a very interesting statement because he uses “man” in a generic sense there. He doesn’t say it was made for the Jews. He says it was made for humankind because humankind has a felt need for a day of rest, a sabbatical rest. And Jesus said God had provided that with the Sabbath.

It’s interesting that throughout history, several critical points of church development and application of the Sabbath in terms of culture—that was always a drawing point, an evangelistic point for the church in nations where the people were trying to be worked six, seven, or seven days a week. For the Christian to affirm that God wants the masters who come under the instruction of God’s word to give his slaves, to give his employees, one day off among seven was a very popular thing amongst the working class—of course, who were being at that time worked continuously seven days a week just to make a living.

Now, the scriptures, we’ll talk more about this again in the future, but the scriptures—we talked about this last week in terms of the master-slave relationship. And the master was to treat his slave justly and equitably, fairly, from God. There is a principle called the just wage and I imagine that verse is where that just wage came from. In other words, if you’re going to have a servant, an employee, a slave—whatever you want to call them in today’s workplace—who works for you, to give him not enough to subsist on would not be just. And the master is commanded by God’s word to be just toward his servant.

Now the master could give him a subsistence wage and then spread the work out over seven days, but God says no. That’s not just either. You have to, as a master, give your slave a seventh day of rest. It is needful for him. You have to provide it for him. And when Christians implement that in society, then there’s great blessings. And the sound itself is again seen as a blessing in and of itself for the working class.

In Exodus 23:12: “Six days thou shalt do thy work and on the seventh day thou shalt rest that thine ox and thine ass may rest and the son of thy handmaid and the stranger may be refreshed.” The Sabbath should be a day of refreshment for us. And so in and of itself, it’s a blessing.

Now, Deuteronomy 5:14 is a verse we’ll look at in the future. But the point I want to make here, and this is a very important critical point at the conclusion of this portion—saying the Sabbath is a benefit to us, is a blessing in and of itself. We have to understand the Sabbath was, as we’ll talk about a little bit, a creation ordinance.

What I’m trying to get at here is that the blessings that God gives us in the Sabbath were prefigured by him. He knew about our need prior to the need. He didn’t see the need and then provide the Sabbath. We have the need as people because he has set the pattern for time by resting the seventh day.

Okay? We don’t start with man, on consideration from the creator, and say, “Well, man has a need. Therefore, God meets the need by giving us the Sabbath.” It’s the other way around. Humankind has a need for a day of rest, a day of refreshing, a day of blessing because God set the pattern with the creation itself—six days and then a rest and an evaluation of that work that he had done.

Okay, we have that built into our being to respond to God also by observing a Sabbath day rest. Because it’s built into our being, then we have a need. Okay? I want to make sure we get that correct here. We’re always trying to understand what God reveals about himself and then what it teaches us about ourselves.

The day Sabbath is a day of blessing because it was intended to be that by God. To fail to keep the Sabbath produces a strong need on the part of the people who fail to, for whatever reason, come under obedience to the sabbatical pattern that God has set.

The Sabbath is a blessing. Third, the Sabbath teaches deliverance, victory, and rest. And that of course is an aspect of this blessedness and a further delineation of what that blessing consists of. The Sabbath teaches rest. Of course, the Sabbath is a creation ordinance. It’s tied back to the fact God created the world in six days. Seventh day he rested. The Sabbath teaches us a rest then in the finished work of God in terms of the creation.

The Christian Sabbath teaches us a resting rather in the finished work of Jesus Christ in recreation and redemption. Okay? We’re to rest in the sovereign and omnipotent God who controls all things and who was given to us the created order in creation, who has recreated man in his image in Jesus Christ and provided redemption through the work of the covenant keeper Jesus Christ. And so we rest today on Sunday in the finished work of God, recognizing that all our works can’t bring forth salvation for us.

Our salvation is accomplished fully and finally in Jesus Christ. And we rest on the Christian Sabbath in relationship to that. The Sabbath teaches deliverance, therefore, doesn’t it? Teaches deliverance from sin. Of course, the other—there were well, shouldn’t say “of course”—there were two main reasons attached to the fourth commandment of Sabbathkeeping in the various places we’ll look at in the future.

One was this creation mandate of rest. The other was God said: “You shall keep the Sabbath because you were a slave in Egypt and have been delivered.” And so Sabbathkeeping itself under the Old Covenant was tied back to the original creation in one part or in one section or recounting of the Ten Commandments and in another it was tied back to God’s deliverance of the people from Egypt. And of course, it began with the Passover itself.

That was a Sabbath. And God said, “You remember that because on the Sabbath, I passed over you and gave you deliverance from the Egyptians.” So the Sabbath points back to those two great events of the Old Covenant. Now, we know that both those great events in the Old Covenant pointed forward to the completed work of Jesus Christ to establish the New Covenant community.

Okay? The Christian Sabbath looks back at the creation of God, looks back at deliverance, but then looks forward to what those things pointed to, which was the recreation of the created order in Jesus Christ and the redemption of all things in Jesus Christ. And so the Christian Sabbath is a day of blessing because it teaches rest. It teaches deliverance. And finally, it teaches victory.

And so the Christian Sabbath occurs not on the day that the Passover was held, not on the day when Jesus Christ died and provided satisfaction for the covenant God’s wrath against his covenant breakers. The Christian Sabbath occurs on the day that Jesus Christ rose and established the third pattern of this Sabbathkeeping pattern which is victory.

Now, we’ll talk about this a little bit in the future. I’ll mention it now. We’re going to talk about how the Old Covenant prefigured and eighth day or Sunday observance of the Sabbath coming in the New Covenant. Well, there’s one indication: the day that the people left Egypt was the day after the Passover.

Okay, the Passover occurred. God killed the firstborn of the Egyptians. He passed over the Israelites. And the next day, Pharaoh said, “Get them out of here.” That points to the victory of the people then in terms of release and deliverance being accomplished and being brought into the promised land. And it points to the coming of Jesus Christ who would on the eighth day rather be resurrected and provide this moment of victory to the entire sabbatical process as well.

The Sabbath teaches rest, deliverance, and it teaches victory. In verses 5 and 7 of the passage before us, we read that the blessings that occur to or come to the keepers of the covenant and the keepers of the Sabbath that are spoken about here, the ones that have been excluded previously to this time: in verse 5, “Even unto them shall I give in mine house, within my walls, a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters. I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”

And again in verse 7: “Even them shall I bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar. For mine house shall be called house of prayer for all people.” The idea of these blessings is that these people who are once excluded—and I think that probably these two specific exclusions of the stranger and of the eunuch are typological of all exclusions under the Old Covenant.

We mentioned, I think Mr. Z. mentioned several weeks ago, the exclusion of bastards for instance—all the various groups that were excluded under the Old Covenant regulations relating to Israel. This passage teaches that the coming of the New Covenant, those excluded groups will now be brought into the house of God. The picture of one that are out there isolated by themselves, not having a family, not having a household, not being within the household of God—excluded.

The eunuch is a great picture of this and it says presumably the eunuch says no longer will he say I’m a dry tree. No longer will that be the case. The eunuch being a dry tree refers to him not having children of his own, barren as it were in terms of childbearing. And God says that person will also be brought into the household of God and he’ll have a name better than sons or daughters.

The whole idea here is that natural privilege is being spoken against. The final adoption to take place in the coming of Jesus Christ and the fulfillment of the New Covenant community is what’s being prefigured here. And so the blessings talked about are community blessings. You get together and you have a community of faith based not upon natural privilege but based upon adoption and faith in Jesus Christ and covenant inclusion that is a legal act by God. And that’s what’s being spoken of here.

The blessings are a community blessing as well. As I said before, in Leviticus 23:3, it talks about a holy convocation of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was to be a day of gathering from people who the rest of the week may have been isolated in their various farms doing their various work.

It’s interesting. Rosenstock-Huessy talks about this aspect of the Sabbath, the communal blessings as it were, the covenant community blessings in his book God of Revolution. And I’ll quote just a little bit of this. He’s talking here about the fact that the Russians as well as the French of course tried to get rid of the Christian Sabbath in their time schedule. Apparently, still are making that effort.

But in any event, he’s talking about the calendar: “Then how far is the Russian labor calendar the practice of Western man already? How far is it not? With the Russians, work is made into a public function of the people united. Leisure is a private business. Formally, this calendar contradicts our tradition in which each individual is toiling, bent on his work during the week, and comes into the common fellowship on Sundays only.

However, the Russian shift in family and religious tradition—its making work into a public function and rest into a private one—crystallized a movement that was in progress throughout the industrial world. For even in Anglo-Saxon countries, the common day of rest was slowly losing its importance for more and more millions of people. Maids, waiters, clerks in drugstores, people working in the pleasure industries, taxi drivers, telephone operators are required to take off not Sunday but some other day picked at random.

This allows production to continue more or less undiminished. And in this change in calendar, this abolition of Sunday for parts of the population is implicit an emphasis upon the community of labor. The difference between the practice, not the theory, of Western man and that of the Russian labor calendar is one of degree. Leisure is becoming more and more a private affair. Production is coming to the front as a common destiny.

In America, some great manufacturing plants have rejected the twelve-month calendar and apply a thirteen-month calendar, each month containing twenty-eight days. This thirteen-month calendar enables a plant to check more conveniently the amount of production per month. It glorifies production and goods that are produced. It no longer cares for the holidays of the whole community. It stands halfway then between a calendar which united people for worship only and a calendar which unites the people who are working in shifts together.”

Is he shifting? What Rosenstock-Huessy is talking about is that the biblical pattern was that people would work. They’d carry out what God gives them to do throughout the week. And on the Sabbath day in the Old Covenant on Saturday, the holy convocation of the New Covenant on Sunday, the day of our Lord’s resurrection, that would be a day of communal ingathering, communal blessing, and the community would be based upon that.

But now the modern work day does just the reverse. The Russians are the ones who got a lot of this going. But what he’s saying was that there’s not more than a hair’s breadth the difference between the Russian attempt to totally eliminate the seventh day calendar and the modern industrialized world’s attempts to make production a public affair and leisure a private affair and to make production and the factory the place of community.

Well, the Sabbath blessings are community blessings and the scriptures are clear in that. We’ll talk more about that in the future as well.

The implication of all this then, the end result of the blessings talked about in the scriptures in relationship to the Sabbath is that the Sabbath should be marked by joy. Now this is an important point and that’s what I said earlier I wanted to spend the bulk of this morning talking about this particular aspect—this first half of these three points—and that is the Sabbath should be marked by joy.

Now throughout the history of the church we’ve seen various discussions of the Sabbath as a time of not joy but a time of burdens, a time of burdens in the sense of people not being able to do certain things and a stress on prohibition as opposed to a stress on what the Sabbath actually teaches. Now, that is as contrary to the biblical teaching on the Sabbath as you can get.

There were elements at the time of Charles the First, for instance, that held that ringing the bell more than once to call people to church on Sunday was should be treated as a capital crime because it was work. I remember the story, I don’t remember where I read it now, but the Puritan pastor who in New England, I believe, to get to church there was a lot of snow and he couldn’t get there on his horse and he had to ski instead to get to church that day.

When he got there, the elder said, “Well, I guess it was okay for him to ski as long as he didn’t enjoy it on the way.” Well, that unfortunately is the tenor. When most of us, I think for myself anyway, I think a lot of us when we think of the Sabbath, we think of some dull, dreary day of obligation and duty. But the verses we’ve just looked at, and there’s many more besides this, of course, teach us that the Sabbath should be a time of great joy.

We should be joyous to come into the presence of God. I have a fountain, a little pool at our home. And you know, this place we moved a couple months ago needs a lot of work. And we’re still uncovering stepstones, by the way, for those of you who remember that story. We found more this last week or two. But in any event, there’s a pond there. And it’s supposed to be fed from this pump out of the creek, but that hasn’t been working.

I’m on the verge of getting it working. But we put a hose up there in the meantime. So, the first time this pump’s been operative, a little trickle coming down from the stream down to this pond area. And you know, we hooked that up one day. I thought, gosh, what a neat picture that is. I just looked at that for a while. And here you have this dusty rocky ground, this water kind of bubbling up out of it magically almost, coming down this rock making this babbling sound and going into this pond.

Now, I told Chris W. that the reason we enjoy that aesthetically—and this is probably going to sound strange to you as it sounds strange to her—I think the reason we enjoy that is that it teaches us things about God. What a picture of salvation. Dry rocky ground. God bringing forth water, life out of dry ground, bringing forth life into our lives who are dead in their sins and dry rocky ground as it were. It’s a picture of salvation.

The sound of water. The scriptures describe the sound of God’s voice. The sound of many waters. I think that’s why the sound of water running is pleasing to us. Now, I don’t think we think about those things normally. I don’t think God says you should think about those things necessarily. I think there are many things that we enjoy that we never realize quite the tiebacks to what the scriptures teach.

But here’s the point I was trying to make to Chris and I’ll try to make now: If we’re creatures, if God has created us, if we’re coming forth from his hand as it were, and for his purposes, what will we joy in? What will we? We joy in God and a revelation of God to us, in understanding the person of God and its implications for our world. And those aspects that we enjoy in life with true joy are mysteries—that teach us something about the person of God.

I’m just convinced of that. How could it be otherwise? What else is behind the joy that we have for a fountain or a stream or a pond? It has to be an understanding of the person of God, a revelation of him through these various pictures. What am I saying is too strong a word? A picture of what he has done for us in terms of salvation and many other things.

Why do I bring that up about Sunday? Well, I bring it up about Sunday because that’s the picture—the same kind, well, a related picture to that—is what the scriptures talk about in terms of days of holy convocation. In Psalm 42:1 and 2, we read: “As the heart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, oh God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?”

See, David—the psalmist here has an understanding of coming into the presence of God in terms of it being a day of great joy. Coming to God as it were for water, as if you’re thirsty and your soul is thirsty. That’s a picture I think of Sabbath joy and blessing. And that should certainly be a picture. If it was only true in the Old Covenant, then what about the New Covenant times of holy convocation where we come together in a special way, attend to the teaching of God’s word and in a special communal sense sing forth the praises of God and together as a group praying in one mind and spirit to God, entering into his presence as it were, being in the Spirit like John talks about in his revelation on the Lord’s day—won’t that be a day of great joy for us?

To turn aside our thoughts from the normal work-a-day world to God, it should be a day of great joy. And that’s what all these blessings are talked about. If nothing else occurs over the next two or three months than for you to get a picture of the joy of Sabbathkeeping and a picture of what the joy of Sabbathkeeping meant in the Old Covenant and then if you agree with the scriptures I lay out for you in the next few months to draw a correlation to the Lord’s day in the New Covenant, I will have done my job.

I am, I just—I think this is such an important point to consider, the joy that God has for the Sabbath and we’re going to spend some time on it in the future. I just think that what I really want out of the Sabbath day is for us to leave Sunday as it were at the close of the day blessing God for that day and having that day really set the pattern for the rest of our week in terms of rejoicing before God.

Now, when you consider things like that fountain I talked about earlier, you don’t just look at it, say, “Oh, that’s nice,” walk away and think through some of the implications. But if you stop, if you pause, if you meditate upon what you’re enjoying about a particular aspect of what you see in a pond, for instance, then some of these things come forward and verses come back to you, such as this one about David and the heart panting after water and us panting after God.

What I’m saying is that Sunday is that kind of day for us. It’s a day to conflate things of God and how those things of God interact with our world and how they make joy for us and blessing as we act in obedience to them. That’s what Sunday is all about—a consideration of the joys that God has for us in his rest, in his deliverance, and in his victory.

Now, there are aspects of law to that. However, we’ll go to the second point now: The Sabbath and the law.

The Sabbath is first of all a creation ordinance. And you say, “Well, that’s interesting. I thought we were talking about the law.” Well, this is an essential element. We’ll be talking about in the future in terms of dismissing some of the objections to Christian Sabbathkeeping. The Sabbath was not newly instituted by Moses and it’s not a Levitical ordinance.

Ultimately, it is a creation ordinance. We’ve talked a little bit about some of those verses. Exodus 16, Exodus 20, Genesis 2:3 of course tells us that God rested on the seventh day. But he sanctified it, set it apart for us. And on the basis of that then in the fourth commandment, it tells us to hallow the Sabbath day as well. So it draws us back not in that case to the deliverance of the covenant people, got to look at it that way, in terms of the nation of Israel from Egypt.

That’s one aspect of it. But this aspect draws us back to something far earlier than that—to the creation itself. The Sabbath is a creation ordinance and it’s part of creation law, then, if you will. The law of the Sabbath, Sabbathkeeping in law, relates back to the creation of God, the creation of the world itself by God.

Secondly, the Sabbath summarizes the first tablet of the law. And the scriptures we hear in Isaiah 56, I believe that what he’s doing in these verses talking about the people that will be blessed, he sums up the first and second tablets of the law in verse 2: “Blessed is that man that doeth this, the son of man that layeth hold on it, that keepeth the Sabbath from polluting it, and keeps his hand from doing any evil.”

Keep with the Sabbath, keep your hand from doing any evil. In verse 1, he says: “Thus sayeth the Lord, keep your judgment and do justice.” And the implication of those words in terms of judgment and justice is as you relate to your fellow man. Okay, that’s how you have judgment and justice is as you relate to your fellow man, having to do with the second tablet.

And verse 2 then says: “The person who grabs hold of the covenant of God is the one who keeps both tablets of the law.” And so the Sabbath is summarized here as the first tablet of the law—the proper way to approach God in worship. And the person who is blessed by God is one who is not involved in worshiping as he will, what people would call will worship or his own desires in terms of how he wants to approach God.

The one who is blessed by God is the one who keeps the first tablet by asking how does God, what does God require of me in terms of worshiping him? And the Sabbath then symbolizes the worship of God by the one who is being blessed.

The Sabbath summarizes the first tablet of the law. I believe, by the way, that this is why, and we’ll talk more about this in the future as well—I say that a lot this morning, but it’s true. This is why I think that whenever you have a great revolutionary period such as the French Revolution, there’s an attempt to get rid of the Sabbath. It is clearly a creation ordinance, and it summarizes the obligation of the creature in terms of his obligations to his creator.

And so, the French Revolution attempted to get rid of a seven-day week. They attempted to establish a ten-day week. The decimal system, you know, goes back to the French Revolution and the emphasis upon, you know, man and not any kind of divinely ordained calendars or divinely ordained periods of time. But instead, man will now decide. The rational approach to our time and the rational approach is the decimal system. So we’re going to have ten days and they actually did that, you know, in France at the time of the revolution.

They actually do that also in the Russian revolution. And again, Rosenstock-Huessy talks about that. Part of that quote that I just read, he talks about the Russian revolution and their attempts also to get rid of the seven-day week. I’m quoting out of Rushdoony’s Salvation and Godly Rule.

“In September 1929, the central government of Russia, after the revolution, decided to try to abolish Christianity by abolishing the Sabbath. A five-day week was decreed and factories were kept working continuously day and night. Workers were divided into five colors or labor calendars. At any given time of the day or night, four color groups would be working and the fifth resting. Unless a man and wife were in the same labor calendar or color, they could not enjoy a common day of rest. Both family ties and religious worship were thus disrupted.

In 1932, the color system was dropped. The work week lengthened to six days and the common day of rest readmitted. More calendar changes came in 1936. Now quoting Rosenstock-Huessy: ‘Whereas the year of 365 days remains divided into twelve months, two parallel weeks have been introduced, one of seven, the other of six days. Labor, industry, and rest are to be regulated by the shorter. Government and international intercourse by the longer. The rest days of the labor week fall on the sixth, twelfth, eighteenth, twenty-fourth, and thirtieth day of each month with March 1st taking the place of the fifth rest day of February.’”

So, the Russian Revolution has successfully, for the point of the time being anyway, replaced the God-given Christian calendar of a seven-day week with a sabbatic rest at the end of it or in our case the beginning of the week in the New Covenant, have replaced that with their own forms of work weeks. And I think this is one reason why all rebellion is rebellion, ultimately, against the person of God. And so in an attempt to rebel against God, they have to throw out the central aspect that teaches the creature’s obligations to the creator, which is the Sabbath observance.