“He Himself is our peace.” (Eph 2:14)

“For this reason the Jews persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill Him, because He had done these things on the Sabbath.” (John 5:16)

There is a lot more to the Sabbath law than observance of the fourth commandment, which instructed the Jews to “Remember the Sabbath Day, and keep it holy.” Just as Jesus’s “work” on the Sabbath was emblematic to the Jews of His disrespect for the whole of the Old Covenant law, the sabbath itself looks forward to the New Covenant in His blood that sets us free from condemnation under the Law and into the peace of His Sabbath rest.

The Bible tells us: “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” (Genesis 2:2-3) The new testament adds another layer to the Creation account: the specific involvement of Jesus in the work of creation.

“For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.” (Col 1:16) “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.” (John 1:3) God rested from his work on the Sabbath, or the seventh day, so the Sabbath was instituted. But it wasn’t only the Father who rested: the Son rested too.

A way of life, not just an observance
God rested when the work of creation was finished. And He rested again when the work of the new creation was finished on the cross. When God blessed the sabbath day and sanctified it under the old covenant, He was looking forward to the time when, in Jesus, His rest would be a way of life, not just an observance. But in the era of the Old Covenant also, God’s rest extended beyond the seventh day. The writer to the Hebrews says:  “To whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who did not obey?” (Heb 3:18) For the rebellious Hebrews, who “did not enter because of unbelief,” (Heb. 3:19) entering God’s rest equated to entering the Promised Land, where they would find rest from the toil of slavery.

Just as Canaan represented God’s rest for the Israelites, we enter our rest in Christ when we believe in His promises to us, or as Hebrews 3:14 puts it, “if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end.” The Greek word used for God’s rest is “katapausis,” which means “a calming of the winds.” Katapausis Is the spiritual atmosphere of Heaven. Jesus tells us “My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:7), and when we walk in His peace we walk in the atmosphere of Heaven and find “rest for our souls.” (Matt. 11:29). All the winds are calm, because – as Jesus physically demonstrated – it is He who calms the storm.  As every Christian knows, He famously said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27). God gave us the Sabbath to enshrine in His Law that we need to enter His rest, not that we need to stop working every seven days.

Finished – but still working
Two notions that seem to be at odds with each other are that “God finished His work” on the seventh day, and the words of Jesus to the Pharisees when they confronted Him over healing the man at the pool: “My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.” (John 4:17) What is the difference between the work that the Father and the Son finished on the seventh day, and the work that they were – and still are – continuing to do?

I think the answer lies in the fact that creation was perfected on the seventh day, so all of God’s dealings with Man – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – from then on were from His place of rest. Whether it was Christ’s miracles of healing and deliverance, God’s victories in the reign of David and many other heroes, or His repeated call to His errant people through His prophets to return to Him, the focus of God’s work has always been to restore His people to their Sabbath state of wholeness and relationship with Him. The lame man was healed on the Sabbath so the he could walk in the wholeness that the Sabbath represents. Just as the first creation was finished on the Sabbath day, so the new creation was perfected when Jesus cried out from the cross “It is finished!” And so the writer to the Hebrews says: “We who have believed into that rest.” (Hebrews 4:3) Through faith in the redeeming blood of Jesus that was shed on the Cross, we become “the righteousness of God in Him,” (2 Cor 5:21) and enter into the perfection of God’s rest.

“True righteousness and holiness.”
This perfect state is the condition of the new man, “which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.”  (Eph 4:24) Peter exhorts us to  “be diligent to be found by Him in peace, without spot and blameless,” (2 Pe 3: 13) while Hebrews 4:9-11 says “There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience.” The peace of His sabbath rest is the gift of God’s grace through Jesus, yet two new testament writers exhort us to be diligent to “enter” that gift. So while we cannot earn God’s peace by our religious works, we need to “work” at keeping a short account of sin in our lives (“without spot and blameless”) and “work” at remembering who we are in Christ, what He has purchased for us, and that “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you.” So rest does not come without some effort (Romans 8:11), but if we are diligent to keep these truths foremost in our thinking we will walk away from the paralysis of religion and into God’s rest.

Only in that place we can really access everything that is our promised inheritance in Christ.

(The topic of “entering into God’s rest” is also explored in “Walking in Newness of Life.”)