The Rest of God
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy Exodus 20:8
Remember – The sin of insult. That’s what’s at stake here.
You finally get the perfect job. It not only fulfills your heart’s desire, it also provides you with advancement, accolades and creativity. The head of the organization recognized your uniqueness and designed the job specifically for you. A week on the job and you know it is the ideal place to be. You love it!
On Friday you get an invitation to a special celebration at the house of the owner. You notice that this is a party for your benefit put on by the boss. Everyone that matters is invited. But you decide that you have other things to do. You not only do not go to the party, you don’t even send your regrets. You just skip out.
What do you think will happen on the following Monday?
You and I would never consider such insulting behavior when it comes to career paths, but we are more than ready to treat the Creator in such despicable manner. We simply don’t care. Our lives are more important than His request to remember who we are and why we are here. The world’s gross insult to its Creator is no more obvious than the total disregard the world has for God’s deliberate design of our temporal commitments. Zakar, the Hebrew verb for “remember” asks us to consider, contemplate and recall by use of symbolic tokens the very act of creation. We are not masters of our universe. We are here by an act of grace. To systematically insult the One who allows our very existence is incredible stupidity and immeasurable audacity. God might just as well say to us, “Who do you think that you are?”
Before your replies begin forming, remember this: The Sabbath was made for Man. God is not obligating you to attend church, spend the day in prayer and Bible reading, turn off the game and avoid the malls simply because He prefers it that way. God doesn’t need your worship. But you need the Sabbath. You need it because God built rest into the proper order of creation and He wishes you to have that rest in order to be all that He designed you to be. When we disregard the Sabbath, we are saying to God that we know better than He does. We will be our own energizing gods, living according to our own clocks.
“Work to enter into that rest,” says the author of Hebrews. And it takes work. The world’s way is the easy way. Just ignore the celebration. Stay home and plod on. Make burnout your goal and you will certainly achieve it.
