Devotional 113: The Sabbath Principle: A Creation Ordinance for All

The Confession Read

This Sabbath is then kept holy unto the Lord, when men, after a due preparing of their hearts, and ordering of their common affairs beforehand, do not only observe an holy rest, all the day, from their own works, words, and thoughts about their worldly employments and recreations, but also are taken up, the whole time, in the public and private exercises of his worship, and in the duties of necessity and mercy.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21, Section 8

Introduction

The Sabbath does not begin on the Lord's Day morning. It begins on the evening before, in the quiet hour when a believing household sets its house in order, and a believing heart prepares itself to meet with God. The old covenant people knew this so well that they gave the day before the Sabbath a name of its own: the preparation. On that day they did the work of the sixth day so that the seventh might lie open and uncluttered before the Lord. The question before us now is not which day to keep, nor whether a day remains to be kept at all. Those questions we answered in the last section, when we watched the risen Christ meet His church on the first day and saw the day pass from the seventh to the first upon the hinge of the resurrection. What remains is the more searching question, the one that follows every honest man home from the sermon and sits down with him at his own table: how, in fact, is this day to be kept? What does a day look like when it has truly been hallowed unto the Lord, not in the letter only, not in the outward form, but in the works of the hands, the words of the mouth, and the thoughts of the heart, from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same? This is the question our Confession answers, and it answers it with a sentence of concentrated practical wisdom. Notice the shape of the sentence before we enter it. It does not say that the day is kept by a mere cessation from labour, as though a man could hallow the Lord's Day by sleeping through it. Nor does it say that the day is kept by crowding it with activity, as though busyness were godliness. The sentence rests upon a double pillar: first, a holy rest from the world, and second, a holy employment in the things of God. The rest is not the end; the rest is the preparation for the employment, as a room is emptied of its clutter before it is filled with a feast. And this double duty, rest and employment, is itself to be approached through a double preparation, of the heart within and of the common affairs without. Let us then take up the sentence clause by clause, for in it is folded the whole secret of a day kept holy unto the Lord.

Scripture Foundation

The burden of this section is best felt in a scene, and Scripture gives us one vivid enough to carry it. It is the days of Nehemiah, after the return from Babylon, when the walls of Jerusalem had been rebuilt and the people had sworn upon the book of the law to walk in God's ways. Yet when the governor walked among them, he found the Sabbath trodden under foot. "In those days saw I in Judah some treading wine presses on the sabbath, and bringing in sheaves, and lading asses; as also wine, grapes, and figs, and all manner of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the sabbath day: and I testified against them in the day wherein they sold victuals. There dwelt men of Tyre also therein, which brought fish, and all manner of ware, and sold on the sabbath unto the children of Judah, and in Jerusalem" (Nehemiah 13:15-16). Here is the day of rest turned into a day of commerce, the market buzzing where worship should have been. And mark how Nehemiah answered, for his remedy is the very pattern of what our Confession teaches. He contended with the nobles, and then he did something decisive: "And it came to pass, that when the gates of Jerusalem began to be dark before the sabbath, I commanded that the gates should be shut, and charged that they should not be opened till after the sabbath: and some of my servants set I at the gates, that there should no burden be brought in on the sabbath day" (Nehemiah 13:19). The merchants came and lodged outside the walls, and Nehemiah warned them that if they came again he would lay hands on them, "and I commanded the Levites that they should cleanse themselves, and that they should come and keep the gates, to sanctify the sabbath day" (Nehemiah 13:22). The gates were shut at the dusk before the day, and the day was guarded as holy. What Nehemiah did with the gates of a city, the believer is called to do with the gates of his own heart and the doors of his own house: to shut them against the traffic of the world before the day begins, and to set a watch that no worldly burden may be brought in upon the day of God. But the holy rest of the day does not fall upon the soul unawares. It is prepared for, and the preparation is as old as the manna in the wilderness. Before the law was given at Sinai, God taught His people to make ready for the seventh day: "And it came to pass, that on the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for one man: and all the rulers of the congregation came and told Moses. And he said unto them, This is that which the LORD hath said, To morrow is the rest of the holy sabbath unto the LORD: bake that which ye will bake to day, and seethe that ye will seethe; and that which remaineth over lay up for you to be kept until the morning" (Exodus 16:22-23). The word of the Lord is explicit: bake today, seethe today. The cooking that belonged to the sixth day was to be done on the sixth day, so that the seventh day might be free for rest and worship. Here is the divine warrant for what our Confession calls "the ordering of their common affairs beforehand." God, who is not the author of confusion, does not expect His people to spend the holy day in a scramble of unfinished labour; He bids them finish the labour while it is lawful, that the day of rest may be rest indeed. The man who makes his bread on the sixth day and lays it by is a picture of faith: he trusts that the God who gave six days for toil will honour the seventh that is given back to Him. The third great text carries us from the preparation to the day itself, and to its central act. "Six days shall work be done: but the seventh day is the sabbath of rest, an holy convocation; ye shall do no work therein: it is the sabbath of the LORD in all your dwellings" (Leviticus 23:3). The phrase to be seized and held is an holy convocation. The Hebrew is miqra qodesh, a sacred assembly, a gathering that is itself holy because it has been summoned together by God. The day is not a private idleness, each man resting in his own corner; it is a convocation, a calling together of the people of God into His presence. The rest of the day is not the goal; it is the porch through which the worshipper passes into the assembly of the saints. And lest anyone think the convocation a burden, the prophet holds out its blessedness: "Blessed is the man that doeth this, and the son of man that layeth hold on it; that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and keepeth his hand from doing any evil" (Isaiah 56:2). The day is a blessing to be laid hold of, and the one who keeps it from pollution finds that he has laid hold of joy. God does not bid His people shut the gates of the city to leave them staring at bare walls; He shuts the gates against the world that He may open to them the gates of His own house. We come now to the hardest and tenderest part of the section, the exceptions that the day itself acknowledges. The same Lord who sanctified the seventh day at the creation also taught, in His days upon the earth, that the day has room within it for works of necessity and of mercy. "At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath day" (Matthew 12:1-2). The answer our Lord gave is the charter of the Christian Sabbath's liberty: "But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day" (Matthew 12:7-8). And then, to make the matter unmistakable, He healed a man with a withered hand in the synagogue, and asked, "What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out? How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days" (Matthew 12:11-12). The Greek of "I will have mercy" is eleos, the word for covenant tenderness, the mercy that stoops to the miserable. The Sabbath was never meant to forbid this mercy, but to make room for it; the day is hallowed, not violated, when a man pulls a neighbour's ox out of a pit or carries a cup of cold water to the sick. And our Lord set the pattern again in the synagogue, when a woman bowed together for eighteen years was loosed from her infirmity on the Sabbath day: "And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?" (Luke 13:16). These are the duties of necessity and of mercy, and they are not the enemies of the day but its true adornment, for the Sabbath was made for man, and its Lord is the Lord of compassion.

What the Divines Meant

The sentence before us is the practical outworking of everything the Assembly taught about the day in the section before it, and we must feel how deliberately each clause has been weighed. The little word "then" with which the section opens is doing quiet work: this Sabbath, the day whose appointment and whose change we have already established, is then kept holy, when the manner of its keeping matches the authority of its institution. A day appointed by God cannot be kept by the wit of man; the Lord who fixed the day has also fixed the way, and the Confession proceeds to unfold that way in its two great halves, the negative and the positive, each approached through a preparation. First comes the preparation, and mark that it is double, because the man who keeps the day is double, soul and body. "After a due preparing of their hearts." The heart is named first, and the heart is where all true keeping of the day begins. No man ever kept a Sabbath holy whose heart was not first brought into some fitness for the presence of God, for the day is a meeting with God, and a heart full of the world is no more fit for that meeting than a vessel full of mud is fit to hold clear water. The Divines do not prescribe the exact acts of this preparation; they had seen too much of Rome's minute regulations to bind the conscience where Scripture has left it free, but they insist that a preparation there must be, a gathering of the affections, a searching of the soul, a laying aside of sin, a lifting of the eyes to the God with whom the day is to be spent. The day that is not prepared for is profaned before it begins. Then, "and ordering of their common affairs beforehand." The outward answers to the inward. If the heart must be prepared within, the business of the six days must be settled without, so that the seventh day may not be invaded by what should have been finished before it. The Greek church borrowed from the old covenant the very word we noted at the outset, paraskeuē, the preparation, for the day before the Sabbath; and the godly household has always kept a kind of paraskeuē of its own, doing what can be done on the sixth day so that the seventh may be given wholly to God. The Divines are not asking for a scrupulous perfectionism, as though a man might never be interrupted; they are asking for the honest, ordinary foresight that treats the day as holy enough to be worth preparing for. A man who makes no provision for the Lord's Day, who lets his affairs run into it by carelessness, has already confessed by his neglect that the day is not worth his forethought, and no profession of honouring it can stand against that confession. Now the first pillar of the day's keeping: "do not only observe an holy rest, all the day, from their own works, words, and thoughts about their worldly employments and recreations." Every word here is a guard. It is a rest, a genuine cessation, not a change of occupation. It is an holy rest, a cessation for God's sake, not the rest of the sluggard or the sportsman. It is a rest observed all the day, not an hour snatched at the beginning before the world reclaims the remainder. And it is a rest from works, words, and thoughts: the hands are to cease, but so are the tongue and the mind, for a man may lie idle with his body and yet travel the world with his thoughts, and trade in it with his speech, and so keep no Sabbath at all. The reach of the commandment is total because the man is total; the whole man is to rest, or the man has not rested. Then the clause that has stirred more controversy than any other in the section: the rest is from "their worldly employments and recreations." The Divines knew very well what they were writing, and against whom. King James had published and King Charles had reissued the Book of Sports, licensing dancing, archery, and may-games upon the Lord's Day, and the Puritans had answered that the day was God's, not the king's to dispose of. The Assembly here plants the word recreations in the text to cut the error off at the root: the day is not a holiday to be filled with play. The amusement that is lawful on the six days becomes unlawful on the seventh, not because play is evil in itself, but because the day is holy, and what may be done in the common days may not be done in the day that is the Lord's. The Divines are not ascetics despising the body's refreshment; they are jealous for the day's holiness, and they will not suffer the world to creep back into the day by the back door of innocent pastime. If the day is to be kept holy, the man's sport must stand aside before the presence of God as surely as his trade. And yet the section does not end in the negative, for a rest that ended there would be a hollow thing, a bare vacancy. "But also are taken up, the whole time, in the public and private exercises of his worship." Here is the positive pillar, and it is what makes the rest meaningful. The day is not kept by what is left out of it but by what is put into it. The believer is to be taken up, occupied, filled, in the worship of God: in the public exercises, the convocation of the saints, the preaching of the Word, the prayers of the church, the singing of psalms, the sacraments; and in the private exercises, the worship of the family gathered around the open Scriptures, and the worship of the closet where the soul is alone with its God. The "whole time" is a strong phrase, and the Divines meant it: the day is not God's for an hour in the morning and the world's for the rest, but is to be given to God throughout, the worship of the sanctuary and of the home and of the heart filling the hours that the rest has emptied of the world. Last of all, the two gates through which necessity and compassion may enter without profaning the day: "and in the duties of necessity and mercy." The Confession does not define these exhaustively, and its wisdom is in the restraint. The works of necessity are those which the day itself requires and which cannot be deferred: the feeding of the body, the care of the sick, the relief that cannot wait until the morrow. The works of mercy are those which love to God and man calls forth: the visiting of the afflicted, the relieving of the poor, the speaking of a word in season to the weary. These the Lord of the Sabbath Himself performed and defended, and what He honoured we may not forbid. Against the Pharisee, who would have condemned the guiltless for plucking an ear of corn, the Confession opens the day to necessity and mercy; against the profane man, who would use mercy as a cloak for every worldly indulgence, it keeps the rest inviolate. The day, so kept, is neither a prison nor a playground, but a holy day indeed, a day in which the soul rests from the world and rests in God.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of this section has a literature of its own, and none of it is better fitted to our text than Thomas Shepard's Theses Sabbaticae, the New England pastor's great treatise on the sanctification of the day. Shepard takes up exactly the question our section answers (how the Sabbath is to be sanctified) and he lays it out with a precision that rewards a careful reader. The day, he argues, is sanctified by two things answering to the two halves of our text: by a rest, and by a holy spending of the time. The rest is not a bodily laziness but a spiritual cessation, a stopping of the soul from its own works that it may attend upon God; and the spending of the time is not a matter of a few solemn hours but of the whole day, given over to the public worship of the congregation, the private worship of the family, and the secret worship of the closet. Shepard presses the same point our Confession presses, that the rest is the servant of the worship and not its substitute; a man who rests from his labour and yet spends the day in idleness or vanity has kept a heathen's holiday, not a Christian's Sabbath. And Shepard, like the Divines, makes the preparation of the heart the threshold of the whole, for the day is a meeting with God, and the heart that would meet Him must be made ready for the meeting. It is a searching book, and it searches us still. Beside Shepard we may set John Willison, the Scottish minister whose Treatise Concerning the Sanctification of the Lord's Day carried this very doctrine into the homes of ordinary believers. Willison is the more pastoral of the two, and his great theme is the preparation. He bids the believer to make ready for the Lord's Day as a man makes ready for a journey or a feast: the business of the week is to be finished and cleared away, the mind is to be composed, sin confessed, the heart lifted to God, and the whole household drawn into the holy frame of the day before it arrives. Willison knew, as every pastor knows, that the Lord's Day is lost or won on the evening before; the man who goes to his bed on Saturday with his affairs in a tangle and his heart unexamined will rise to a day already half-profaned. And he urged upon his people what he called the sweetness of the day, that a Sabbath rightly prepared for is not a burden but a refreshment, a day on which the soul is watered and the Christian drawn nearer to his God than all the six days together could bring him. The preparation, in Willison's hands, becomes not a duty grudgingly done but a love eagerly exercised. For the structure of the section itself, Robert Shaw's Exposition remains the surest guide, and he divides it exactly as we have done: the preparation, the rest, and the holy employment, with the works of necessity and mercy annexed as the day's own lawful exceptions. Shaw is careful to hold the balance where lesser writers have tipped it. The rest, he insists, is not to be understood as a bare cessation from labour, for then the beast of the field and the stone of the wall would keep the day as well as the saint; the rest is unto the Lord, a cessation with a sacred end, and it is kept only when the time is filled with the worship of God. And on the other side he will not suffer the exceptions to eat up the rule: the works of necessity and mercy are exceptions precisely because they are exceptions, and the man who enlarges them to cover every indulgence has emptied the day of its holiness while still professing to keep it. Shaw's counsel is the counsel of the whole Reformed tradition at its best: keep the day wholly, rest from the world wholly, and yet hold the heart open to mercy, for the God of the day is the God who delights in mercy. Two further voices may be allowed to speak briefly, for they touch the two ends of the day, its preparation and its employment. Thomas Boston, whose works have been our companions more than once in this chapter, taught that the Christian should enter the Lord's Day as into a market-day for the soul, the one day in seven in which the believer comes to buy of God what he cannot gather on any other: pardon, grace, strength, communion, the bread that endures to everlasting life. And the man who comes to the market must come early and stay late and bring his basket, or he will go away empty while the day slips through his fingers. Matthew Henry, commenting on the gates of Nehemiah, draws the practical lesson home with his usual warmth: that it is the care of the godly to keep the day when it is come, and to keep it from being broken, shutting the gates of the heart and the house against the encroaching world, and setting a watch, as Nehemiah did his servants, that no burden of worldly business be brought in upon the day of God. Between Boston at the beginning of the day and Henry at its close, the whole counsel of this section is gathered up: prepare the heart, shut the gates, buy of God, and let the day be holy.

Puritan Application

First, then, prepare your heart before you prepare your house. The Confession names the heart first, and there is a reason. It is an easy thing to clear a calendar and a hard thing to clear a conscience, yet the day is kept by the second and not the first. The evening before the Lord's Day is the divinely appointed threshold, and the believer should use it as the old covenant people used their preparation: to search the soul, to confess the sins of the week, to lay aside every weight and the sin that does so easily beset, and to ask the Spirit to compose the heart for the presence of God. A harp is tuned before it is played; the heart, which is to make melody to the Lord, must be tuned before the day of melody begins. Ask yourself honestly, and do not flinch from the answer: what did you do with the last Saturday evening? If you went to your bed with the world still loud in your ears and the week's sins still unconfessed, you rose to a day that was already half-lost. Begin this week to make the evening before a holy evening, and you will find the morning after a different morning. Second, settle your common affairs on the sixth day. The word of the Lord to Israel in the wilderness is the rule for your own week: "bake that which ye will bake to day, and seethe that ye will seethe." God has given you six days for your toil, and He expects the toil to be done within them. Let the letters be answered and the accounts be settled and the house be set in order before the day arrives, so that the day itself may not be eaten up with what should have been finished the day before. There is no holiness in a conscience that spends the Lord's Day fidgeting over Monday's business, and no wisdom in a household that must be fed and clothed and arranged upon the very day that was meant for rest. The foresight that lays out the week's provision beforehand is not worldliness; it is the obedience of faith, the quiet trust that six days of labour, faithfully done, are enough, and that the seventh belongs wholly to God. Third, rest from your words and thoughts, not from your works only. This is the clause that pricks the conscience of the man whose hands are idle but whose mind is busy with the world. The day is to be kept holy in the tongue and in the imagination as truly as in the body. Worldly conversation, the endless rehearsal of buying and selling, the idle talk that fills so many Lord's Days: these are no part of a holy rest, for the tongue that trades in the world has broken the day as surely as the hand that labours in it. And the thoughts go deeper still: a man may sit in the pew with folded hands while his heart is on the morrow's business, and his body may rest while his soul works on without ceasing. The Psalmist bids us search the day's depth when he says, "I will meditate in thy precepts," and the meditation of the day is the very opposite of the daydreaming that profanes it. Let the tongue be silent of the world and the mind be filled with God, and the rest will be an holy rest indeed. Fourth, refuse the recreations as well as the employments. The day is not the world's day, and the amusement that is lawful on Monday is not therefore lawful on the Lord's Day, for a thing lawful in itself becomes unlawful when it is done in a time that belongs to God. The believer who has given the day to the world in play has stolen from God what he would never think of stealing in labour. This is not the voice of sourness but of holy jealousy; the day is the Lord's, and His is the honour of its hours. The world will tell you that Sunday is made for sport, and that a little harmless pleasure cannot hurt the soul. But the soul that spends the Lord's Day in its own pleasures has spent the one day in seven that was meant to wean it from those very pleasures, and it will find, at the week's end, that it has grown poorer in the things of God by the very amusements that promised it refreshment. Keep the day holy, and let your recreation be in the Lord. Fifth, and last, take up the duties of necessity and mercy with a free conscience, for they are the ornaments of the day and not its breach. Do not be more strict than your Lord, who healed on the Sabbath and defended His disciples when they plucked the ears of corn. If the ox is in the pit, pull it out, though it be the Lord's Day; if the sick need tending, tend them; if the poor knock at your door, open it; if the weary soul needs a word, speak it. These works are not a profanation of the day but a keeping of it, for they are the very works of Him who is Lord of the day, and a day spent in mercy is a day spent in the presence of God. Only see to it that you do not make mercy the cloak of sloth, calling every indulgence a necessity and every pleasure a work of compassion, for the Lord who honoured mercy also kept the rest, and the disciple is not above his Master. So keep the day: rest from the world wholly, give yourself to God wholly, and let mercy flow freely, and the Lord of the Sabbath will meet you in it.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who didst sanctify the seventh day and bless it, and who hast given us the first day of the week as the day of Thy Son's resurrection, we bless Thee for this holy day, and we ask that Thou wouldst teach us to keep it holy as Thou hast commanded. We confess that we have too often begun the day unprepared, with hearts uncleansed and affairs unsettled, and have suffered the world to creep into the hours that were Thine. We have kept the day with our bodies while our thoughts went after the world, and we have called our own pleasures the refreshment of the soul. Forgive us, we beseech Thee, for the sake of Him who is Lord of the Sabbath. Give us grace, O Lord, to prepare for the day in the quiet of the evening before, to search our hearts and confess our sins, and to set our common affairs in order that the day may be free for Thee. Shut the gates of our hearts against the traffic of the world, and set a watch over our tongues and our thoughts, that the whole day may be an holy rest. Make the public worship of Thy house sweet to our souls, and the private worship of our families and our closets the delight of our hearts, that from the rising of the sun to its going down the day may be filled with Thy praise. And teach us to use the day in the duties of necessity and of mercy, as those who would be like their Master, who healed on the Sabbath and did good. One thing have we desired of the LORD, that will we seek after: that we may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of our life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple. Hasten, O God, the day of Thy Son's appearing, and bring us at last into that eternal rest which remaineth for the people of God, 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.