Fourth Commandment

A SHORT EXPLANATION OF THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT
Like many other Bible topics, the Sabbath is so deep and complicated that we hardly know where to begin exploring the mystery of it. Since we must begin somewhere, we will begin with the summary before we explain how we came to understand it. So we give you these four bullet points as references for what will follow:

  • It is not about the seventh day of the week in its natual sense. Rather, the seventh day is a symbolic representation of the status of being in a New Covenant relationship with God.
  • Nor is it about a day of ceasing from occupational labors for one day of the week.
  • When God says “rest” he means ending religious works that lead to death.
  • It is about ceasing our attempts to satisfy all of the requirements of the Mosaic Law, or any other religious laws, which we feel obliged to follow in order to achieve righteousness in the eyes of God or in the eyes of people.

In these four points we see that the Fourth Commandment is not about a literal day of literal rest from occupational labors.

With that critical understanding in place, we must next proceed to unwrap the hidden and extremely important truth about the Sabbath and its relationship to the Promised Land.

Having read Promised Land, you are now ready to entertain a different view of the Sabbath. You are ready to remove your eyes from what is seen (i.e. sabbath is the seventh day of the week) and fix your eyes on what is unseen (i.e. on the spiritual meaning of the seventh day).

Even before he gave the Ten Commandments to Moses, God establishes the spiritual model for the Sabbath in the creation story.

 Genesis 2:2-3  And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation.

We see in this story that the Sabbath has always been a holy day. God blessed it because it was the day on which he rested from all his creative work. In saying “remember the Sabbath to keep it holy,” God reminded his people that he rested on the seventh day after six days of creative works.

This is where the explanation of the fourth commandment begins to get controversial. The Bible literalists argue that creation occurred in seven literal days. There are many problems with this argument, but we will begin with the question about the status of the eighth day and every day following. If God singled out the seventh day of creation as holy, we are compelled to inquire about the status of every calendar day since creation by pondering the following issues:

  • Was it only the seventh day of creation that God declared as holy? Obviously not because every seventh day after creation has the potential to be holy because, in the fourth commandment, God reminds us to keep those calendar days holy. Thus, references to the Seventh Day are not to a particular seventh day but to an eternal spiritual condition where people (i.e. New Covenant disciples) rest from their creative religious works
  • If every seventh day of the calendar week has the potential to be holy, how should we think about the first through sixth days of every week since creation? Are they unholy or do they also have the potential to be holy. Obviously they are not unholy because God has been actively involved in the world every day since creation and everything he does is holy. Therefore, the first through the sixth days of every week since creation are also holy
  • Since the fourth commandment is framed in terms of remembering how God regarded the seventh day, we must also adopt his attitude about every day of every calendar week since creation as being holy.

These arguments are valid, of course, only if we hold to the belief that creation was not a singular unique event in time as we argue in Creation. They are valid only if the creation story is considered to be a prophetic picture of God’s ongoing creative (i.e. re-creative)  spiritual work in addition to his original work of creating the physical universe.

When this attitude is adopted it is then possible to conclude that every day of the natural, calendar week, year in and year out is holy. And having come to that understanding, it is also possible to conclude that the fourth commandment does not refer to one special day of the calendar week. That means the Bible literalists are wrong about creation and that religious sects such as the Jews, Seventh Day Adventists and Messianic Christians are wrong about strict observance of the seventh day as a day of rest from physical work. It also means that Christians who maintain that observance of the seventh day commandment has been amended to apply to the first day of the week are also wrong in singling out one day of the calendar week for rest.

If the fourth commandment is not about ceasing from physical labors on one calendar day of each week, we then need to try to understand what it is about. And we need to also understand what is it that we should or should not do that contributes to holiness. Now we have an opening in which we can consider the claim we have made that it is about ceasing from religious works every day — not just one day a week.

The commandment, therefore, is to do as God did in resting from our creative works. But our creative works are not the same as God’s creative works. The work that God wants us to rest from are our religious works in which we try to become like God in our own eyes and in the eyes of others.

To fully understand this issue of being like God, we must go back to the Creation story. But even before looking at the Creation story we must take a fresh look at God.

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