Devotional 112: The Sanctification of the Lord's Day: Rest and Worship

The Confession Read

As it is the law of nature, that, in general, a due proportion of time be set apart for the worship of God; so, in his Word, by a positive, moral, and perpetual commandment, binding all men in all ages, he hath particularly appointed one day in seven, for a sabbath, to be kept holy unto him: which, from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, was the last day of the week; and, from the resurrection of Christ, was changed into the first day of the week, which, in Scripture, is called the Lord's day, and is to be continued to the end of the world, as the Christian sabbath.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21, Section 7

Introduction

The doors were shut, and for good reason. On the evening of the first day of the week, the friends of Jesus had locked themselves into an upper room in Jerusalem, afraid of the men who had taken their Master three days before and nailed Him to a cross. And then He was simply there, standing in their midst, speaking peace to their terror: "Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you" (John 20:19). One of their number had been absent, and would not believe the report of resurrection until he had seen for himself. So the Lord returned, deliberately, on the same day of the following week: "And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you" (John 20:26). Mark what is happening beneath the surface of these two quiet meetings. The risen Christ chose to meet His gathered church on the first day of the week, not once by chance but twice by appointment, and the second time precisely to confirm the pattern of the first. The old seventh day, the day on which He had lain in the tomb, was passing away. The new first day, the day on which He burst the grave, was being established as the day of His people's assembling. Out of that locked upper room, with its fear and its wonder and its wounded, doubting disciple, the Christian Lord's Day was born. And it has been kept unbroken from that hour to this. Now, we have come in our study of this chapter to the last and most controverted of its sections, the doctrine of the Sabbath. We have learned that God alone institutes His own worship, that it is offered to God alone through Christ alone, that prayer and the Word and psalm and sacrament are its appointed parts, and that God is to be worshipped in the family, in the closet, and in the assembly, in every place and not in any one holy shrine. But a question now presses upon us that every honest believer must sooner or later answer: has the God who appointed the parts of worship also appointed a time for it? Is there a day, of God's own choosing, set apart for His service? And if there is, which day is it, and by what authority was the day changed from the seventh to the first? The Divines answer with one of the most carefully balanced sentences in the entire Confession, a sentence that holds together a law of nature and a positive appointment, a moral commandment and a changeable circumstance, the old covenant and the new. Let us not pass over it hastily, for in it is folded the whole secret of the Christian's rest, both the rest of one day in seven that we may taste now, and the eternal rest of which that one day is the earnest and the foretaste.

Scripture Foundation

The Sabbath did not begin at Sinai. It began, before sin had ever entered the world, in the very act by which God finished His creating work. Moses records it in words of great stillness: "And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made" (Genesis 2:2-3). Every word here is weighty. The Hebrew root is shavat, to cease, to desist, to come to a stop, and from it is formed shabbat, the Sabbath. God ceased, not as a weary labourer sinks down at the close of day, for the Everlasting God neither faints nor is weary, but as a completed workman lays down his tools and beholds what He has made and calls it good. And then He did two things to the seventh day that He had done to no other day: He blessed it, and He sanctified it. To sanctify, qadash, is to set apart, to hallow, to reserve for a sacred use. Before there was a man to keep it, before there was a nation to command it, before there was a fall to mar the world, God set the seventh day apart as holy. The Sabbath is therefore older than Moses, older than the law of Sinai, older than sin itself. It is woven into the very fabric of creation, the first full day that Adam ever knew being a day of rest in the presence of his Maker. Long before the law was written on tables of stone, God taught His people this rhythm of rest in the wilderness. When the manna fell from heaven, it fell for six mornings only; on the sixth day there was a double portion, and on the seventh, none at all. "Six days ye shall gather it; but on the seventh day, which is the sabbath, in it there shall be none. And it came to pass, that there went out some of the people on the seventh day for to gather, and they found none" (Exodus 16:26-27). Here is the Sabbath given as grace before it was ever given as law, rehearsed in the wilderness long before the thunder and the trumpet of Sinai. God could have fed His people on all seven days; He withheld the manna on the seventh to teach them that rest is His gift, not their contrivance, and that the day of rest is to be received from His hand in trust, not seized by their own striving. The men who went out on the seventh day to gather found nothing, and their going out was itself an act of unbelief, a refusal to trust that what God had provided for six days would suffice for seven. Then, at Sinai, the Sabbath was written into the very heart of the moral law. "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates" (Exodus 20:8-10). And the reason given reaches back to Eden: "For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it" (Exodus 20:11). Note the first word of the commandment: Remember. God does not say, "Inaugurate the Sabbath," as though it were a new institution being set up for the first time. He says, "Remember it," because it already existed from creation, and Israel was being called back to a day that the world had forgotten in its sin. The Fourth Commandment stands in the midst of the Decalogue as a moral command binding all men in all ages, a command of the same table and the same authority as the prohibition of murder and adultery and theft. Nor is this all. The Sabbath was given to Israel as a sign, a covenant token. "Verily my sabbaths ye shall keep: for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the LORD that doth sanctify you" (Exodus 31:13). The day of rest pointed beyond itself to the God who sanctifies, the God who makes a people holy. And when Moses repeated the law on the plains of Moab, he grounded the Sabbath in creation and in redemption alike: "And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the LORD thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day" (Deuteronomy 5:15). Here are the two roots of the day, twined together: creation, for God rested; and redemption, for God delivered. The man who kept the Sabbath confessed in the same breath that God made him and that God saved him. But the Sabbath, like all the good things of God, had been twisted in the hands of men. By our Lord's day the Pharisees had hung so many petty regulations upon the day of rest that the day had become a burden, and it was against this distortion that Jesus spoke His two great words. "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath" (Mark 2:27-28). The Sabbath was made for man, for his good, for his rest, for his refreshment and his meeting with God; man was not made as a slave to serve the day. And yet, lest anyone should think the day thereby diminished, our Lord adds the staggering claim that He, the Son of man, is Lord of the Sabbath. He who was present when the seventh day was first sanctified now stands before them and declares Himself its master. The day belongs to Christ, and He who is Lord of it has authority to appoint it, to regulate it, and, as we shall see, to change it. For the New Testament quietly but unmistakably records the change. The resurrection occurred on the first day of the week: "In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre" (Matthew 28:1). It was on this first day that the risen Lord met His disciples, as we saw in the upper room, and again on the first day a week later. It was on this first day that the church was born at Pentecost, and on this first day that the church gathered to break bread: "And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them" (Acts 20:7). It was on this first day that the apostle ordered the churches to lay by their offerings: "Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him" (1 Corinthians 16:2). And in the last book of Scripture, the aged apostle John, exiled on Patmos, names the day by a title that has never left the church: "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day" (Revelation 1:10). The Greek is kyriakē hēmera, "the Lord's day," the day that belongs to the Lord, an adjective, kyriakos, formed directly from Kyrios, the Lord. The day of the week that had belonged to the Lord of creation by the first rest was now taken up and stamped afresh by the Lord of redemption by the resurrection. The seventh day had pointed backward to a finished creation; the first day points forward, and upward, to a finished redemption and a risen, reigning Christ. Finally, the writer to the Hebrews unites the whole matter in a single, luminous word. "There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his. Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief" (Hebrews 4:9-11). The Greek word rendered "rest" is not the usual katapausis, a resting-place, but sabbatismos, a keeping of a Sabbath, a Sabbath-rest. This word appears nowhere else in the New Testament, and its very form is a deliberate choice: the rest that remains for the people of God is a Sabbath-keeping, an unbroken, unending day of cessation from our own works in the presence of God. The weekly Sabbath of Israel was a type and an earnest of this; the Lord's Day of the new covenant is its present foretaste; and the eternal Sabbath of the world to come is its full and final reality. In one word, sabbatismos, the whole doctrine is gathered up: the day is not finally about a rule to be kept, but about a rest to be entered, a rest purchased by the risen Christ and opened to all who cease from their own works and trust in His.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines came to this section with a controversy burning around them, and the sentence they produced is a masterpiece of careful balance, designed to answer error on the right hand and on the left with equal precision. We do well to walk through its clauses slowly, for each one is a deliberate stroke against a particular adversary. The first clause establishes the natural foundation of the doctrine. "As it is the law of nature, that, in general, a due proportion of time be set apart for the worship of God." Here the Divines concede what no reasonable man could deny: that the setting apart of some portion of time for divine worship is written on the human heart. Every nation under heaven has had its holy days, its festivals, its seasons set aside for the gods, for the simple reason that man is a creature, and a creature owes his Maker the tribute of his time. This much, says the Confession, belongs to the law of nature, the same natural knowledge of God that we considered in the very first section of this chapter. The heathen knew it, and their sacred calendars bear witness to it. So far the Sabbath rests on ground that no one may reasonably dispute. But the second clause rises above nature to revelation. "So, in his Word, by a positive, moral, and perpetual commandment, binding all men in all ages, he hath particularly appointed one day in seven, for a sabbath, to be kept holy unto him." Here are three adjectives, and each one does a distinct work. Positive means that the appointment rests not on the dictates of nature but on the bare command and will of God: nature can tell us that some time must be given to worship, but only revelation can tell us that the proportion is one day in seven. Moral means that the command belongs to the moral law, to the Decalogue written by the finger of God, and therefore binds all men, and not Israel only, and not the ceremonial economy only. Perpetual means that it is not a shadow of things to come that vanished with the coming of the substance, but a command that endures to the end of the world. Against the Socinian and the antinomian, who would dissolve the Fourth Commandment into ceremony, the Divines plant the word moral. Against the mere deist, who would reduce it to a natural counsel, they plant the word positive. And against the enthusiast, who would have all days alike, they plant the word perpetual. Three words, three errors, three refutations. The third clause contains the delicate heart of the section, the change of the day. "Which, from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, was the last day of the week; and, from the resurrection of Christ, was changed into the first day of the week." Notice the hinge upon which the whole change turns: the resurrection of Christ. The Divines do not trace the change to any decree of the apostles, still less to any edict of emperor or pope or church council, but to the resurrection itself. When Christ rose, the old covenant of types and shadows reached its consummation, and the day that had looked back to the first creation gave way to the day that looks forward to the new. The moral substance remained untouched, one day in seven set apart for rest and worship, but the positive circumstance, the particular day, was changed by the authority of Him who is Lord of the Sabbath. What man could not have altered, and what no merely human authority ever presumed to alter on its own, the risen Christ altered by the very act of His rising. The fourth clause names the new day. "Which, in Scripture, is called the Lord's day." The phrase is drawn, as we saw, from John's exile on Patmos, and it carries the whole weight of the day's meaning: the day is the Lord's, His possession, His appointment, the day of His victory. It is not "the apostles' day," not "the church's day," not "the emperor's day," but the Lord's own day. And the final clause fastens the whole down against the end of time: "and is to be continued to the end of the world, as the Christian sabbath." The day is not a temporary accommodation, not a relic of Jewish superstition that the church will one day outgrow, but an ordinance that will stand until the Lord returns. And the name by which it stands is the Christian sabbath: Christian, because it is the day of the risen Christ; Sabbath, because it is the true continuation of that one day in seven which God appointed at the beginning and wrote into His moral law. The Divines were here steering a course between two rocks. On one side lay the error of those who would keep the seventh day literally, as though the change of the day had never occurred, refusing to see that the resurrection of Christ has altered the positive circumstance even while the moral substance stands. On the other side lay the error of those, present even within the Assembly itself, who followed the continental Reformers in treating the Fourth Commandment as largely ceremonial, and therefore regarded the Lord's Day as little more than an ecclesiastical custom, a useful convention of church order rather than a divine institution. Against the first, the Divines insisted that the day has changed; against the second, that the moral obligation has not. Robert Shaw, whose Exposition has guided us through this chapter, lays out the section in just this twofold fashion: first, the law of nature requiring some time for worship; second, the positive appointment fixing that time at one day in seven, with the change of the particular day effected by Christ and confirmed by the apostles' practice. It is a structure of rare exactness, and the church has been the poorer wherever she has lost it.

Theological Depth

It was John Owen, writing on the fourth chapter of Hebrews, who drew out the deepest vein of this doctrine, and we do well to sit under his exposition a while. Owen saw that the apostle's choice of the word sabbatismos was no accident but a theological argument in miniature. The rest that remains for the people of God is not the rest of the promised land, which Joshua gave and which was but a shadow; nor is it the mere rest of the seventh day, which was itself a type. It is a Sabbath-rest, an eternal cessation from our own works, and it is entered now in part, by faith, as the believer ceases from his own works of self-righteousness and rests in the finished work of Christ. Owen presses the searching conclusion: he that has not entered into this rest, that is to say, he that has not ceased from his own works as God did from His, has not yet learned what the Sabbath truly means. The man who keeps the day outwardly but rests never in Christ has kept a shadow and missed the substance; the man who rests in Christ will find the day itself sweet, for it is but the weekly rehearsal of the rest he already possesses and the rest he is yet to enter. Owen unites the two things that sloth would keep apart: the Lord's Day is at once a duty to be kept and a rest to be enjoyed, and it is the enjoyment, not the mere keeping, that is the point of it. Jonathan Edwards, in a sermon preached in 1740 under the title The Perpetuity and Change of the Sabbath, addressed the very question our Confession answers, and did so with an argument of great force. The moral law, Edwards reasoned, was given to all men and is unchangeable in its substance; the Fourth Commandment, standing among the ten words written on stone, partakes of that unchangeableness. Yet the particular day is not the substance but the circumstance, and the circumstance may change when the ground of it changes. The seventh day had been grounded in the rest of God after creation; when Christ rose and finished the new creation, the ground of the day shifted, and the first day, the day of the resurrection, took its place. Edwards was careful to add what the Divines also saw: that the apostles' practice (meeting on the first day, receiving the Lord's Supper on the first day, ordering the collection on the first day) was not their invention but their faithful recognition of what Christ had done, for they who had walked with the risen Lord, and had seen Him twice on the first day, could not doubt which day He had claimed as His own. The change, then, is not a human adjustment but a divine alteration, and the Lord's Day rests on as firm a footing as the seventh day ever did. For the historical lineage of this Puritan doctrine, we are indebted to Nicholas Bownd, a minister of Suffolk whose treatise The True Doctrine of the Sabbath, published in 1595, first set the English church alight with the question. Bownd argued that the Fourth Commandment is moral, not ceremonial, and that the Lord's Day is the Christian Sabbath, binding the conscience with the same authority as the commandment it continues. The book was suppressed for a time, so hotly was it contested, but its argument carried the day among the Puritans and passed into the mainstream of the reformed teaching that the Westminster Assembly inherited. The Assembly's own prolocutor, William Twisse, was among the strictest of Sabbatarians, and the doctrine of our section bears his stamp. It is worth our pausing to feel the force of this lineage: the doctrine we have before us was not spun in a quiet study but forged in controversy, tested against Scripture, and purchased at the cost of real contention among godly men. Thomas Watson, in his treatment of the Fourth Commandment, turns the doctrine from the head to the heart with a pastor's touch. He bids us consider that God, who might have reserved every day for His service, and who might have taken all seven days as His due, has yet asked of us but one, and given us the remaining six for our lawful callings. What ingratitude, Watson asks, to grudge God the one day in seven that He has reserved for Himself, when He has given us the other six for our own? And Watson, like Owen before him, insists that the true keeping of the day is not a bare idleness but a holy commerce: the day is kept when the soul is busied with God, in the public ordinances, in the reading of the Word, in prayer, in meditation, and in the works of mercy that adorn the gospel. The man who calls the Lord's Day a weariness, and says with the prophet's slothful worshippers "When will the sabbath be gone?" has not yet tasted the rest of which the day is the earnest. It would be wrong to pass over Calvin in silence, for his view, though it differs in emphasis from the stricter English school, sharpens our understanding. Calvin held the moral substance of one day in seven and honoured the Lord's Day as the church's established day of rest and worship; but he laid greater weight on the liberty of the gospel, warning that the day must never become an occasion of servile superstition, and insisting that the end of the day is the mortification of the old man and the gathering of the church for the Word, not the observation of a bare cessation. The English Puritans, followed by the Assembly, pressed the divine institution of the first day further than Calvin was willing to go; yet even their doctrine, rightly understood, preserves Calvin's great concern, for the Christian Sabbath is not a chain but a release, a day not of bondage but of blessed liberty, in which the soul is set free from the six days' labour to enjoy its God. Where the two schools agree is the thing that matters most: the day is God's gift, and to neglect it is to despise the Giver.

Puritan Application

First, then, receive the day as a gift before you regard it as a duty. There is a world of difference between the man who keeps the Lord's Day because he dreads the commandment and the man who keeps it because he loves the rest it brings. Our Lord settled the matter once for all: the Sabbath was made for man. The day is not a tax laid upon your leisure but a kindness shown to your soul. God, who knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, has carved one day out of every seven and handed it back to us as a day of rest, of worship, of unhurried communion with Him. If you have been carrying the Lord's Day as a burden, lay that burden down this very week and take up the day as a gift. Ask yourself honestly: when Sunday draws near, does your heart lean toward it or shrink from it? The answer will tell you more about the state of your soul than a thousand professions of faith. Second, guard the day as holy, and prepare for it beforehand. The Fourth Commandment begins with the word Remember, and remembrance requires preparation. A day cannot be kept holy by accident; the soul must be brought to it, as the heart is prepared for a feast. The evening before is the threshold of the Sabbath: lay aside what remains of the week's cares, set the house in order, and, as much as in you lies, settle the business of six days so that the seventh may be given wholly to God. The Puritans spoke of "sanctifying the Sabbath" as a work that begins the night before, and there is great wisdom in it. Let the world's claims be quieted, and the day will open upon you as a morning of light rather than a scramble of unfinished labour. And when the day has come, let no lawful calling, no idle errand, no worldly amusement steal away what belongs to God, excepting only the works of necessity and of mercy, which the Lord of the Sabbath Himself honoured. Third, let the day be filled with the means of grace, and especially the public assembly. The Lord's Day is not a day of mere cessation but of holy employment. The God who appointed the day appointed also the means by which He meets His people in it: the preaching of the Word, the prayers of the church, the singing of psalms, the administration of the sacraments. It is in the gathered assembly, which we considered in the last section, that the day finds its center and its crown. Do not satisfy yourself with a private devotion and then keep away from the assembly, for the Lord has promised His peculiar presence where two or three are gathered in His name, and the neglect of the assembly is the first step toward the neglect of the day, and the neglect of the day is the first step toward the neglect of God. If the risen Christ made it His practice to meet His disciples on the first day, let not the members of His body make it their practice to be elsewhere. Fourth, call the sabbath a delight, and let the day be a foretaste of heaven. The prophet sets before us the promise that attends the true keeping of the day: "If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the LORD, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: then shalt thou delight thyself in the LORD" (Isaiah 58:13-14). Mark the promise: not merely that God will bless the keeper of the day, but that the keeper will delight in the Lord. The day is a weekly sabbath, and the weekly sabbath is the type of the eternal sabbath, that sabbatismos which remains for the people of God. Every Lord's Day we keep is a rehearsal of heaven, a taste of the rest that is yet to be entered. Let the day therefore be not grim but glad, not a day of gloomy restraint but of holy joy, for we are practising, in time, the rest we shall enjoy in eternity. "This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it" (Psalm 118:24). Fifth, and last, rest in Christ, or your keeping of the day will profit you nothing. Here is the searching word of Hebrews 4 laid upon the conscience. The rest that remains is entered by faith, and only by faith. The man who observes the day with scrupulous exactness but has never ceased from his own works, never cast away his self-righteousness, never rested his soul upon the finished work of the risen Christ, has kept a shadow while the substance stands outside his reach. The Sabbath, in the end, is a sign that points to Christ, who is our rest. He who is Lord of the Sabbath is Himself the Sabbath of the soul, and to come to Him is to enter into rest. Let this day, and every day, find you trusting not in your own observance but in His obedience, not in your own works but in His finished work. Then the Lord's Day will be to you what it was meant to be from the beginning: a weekly return to the rest of God, a weekly reminder of the resurrection of Christ, and a weekly foretaste of the eternal Sabbath that awaits the people of God.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who didst finish the work of creation and rest upon the seventh day, and who didst crown the work of redemption by raising Thy Son from the dead upon the first day, we bless Thee for the holy Sabbath which Thou hast appointed in Thy Word, and for the change of the day by which Thou hast turned our eyes from the finished creation to the finished redemption. We confess that we have too often called the day a weariness, and have suffered the cares of six days to creep over the seventh, and have kept the day with our bodies while our hearts went after the world. Forgive us, we beseech Thee, for the glory of Him who is Lord of the Sabbath. Teach us, O Lord, to remember the day and to keep it holy. Give us grace to prepare for it in the quiet of the evening before, to lay aside the world's clamour, and to come to Thy house with gladness, as those who love the habitation of Thy presence and the place where Thine honour dwelleth. Make the preaching of Thy Word sweet to us, and the prayers of Thy people profitable, and the table of Thy Son a feast of assurance, that the first day of every week may be to our souls a returning of the resurrection, a strengthening of our faith, and a real foretaste of the rest that remaineth for Thy people. And grant, O Lord, that we may cease from our own works, even as Thou didst from Thine, and rest wholly upon the finished work of Christ, in whom alone our souls find Sabbath. Hasten the day of His appearing, and bring us at last into that eternal rest which Thou hast prepared for them that love Thee, where we shall keep an everlasting sabbath in Thy presence, world without end. In the name of Jesus Christ our risen Lord, who ever liveth to make intercession for us, Amen.