Why Sabbath Matters in the Ten Commandments

I sat down with a college student this past week. He showed me the calendar app on his phone. It was filled with more colors than my daughter’s box of crayons. “I’m missing something on that day, too,” he added. This is part of our human condition, isn’t it? We fill our lives with activities and obligations and responsibilities and then wonder why we don’t experience life the way we wish we could. What are we missing? This is why Sabbath plays a central part in the Ten Commandments.

To me, there are three particular places in Scripture that pop when it comes to shaping how we think about Sabbath. These are a confrontation Jesus has with the Pharisees in Matthew 12, the creation story of Genesis 1, and then the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20.

Whether your movie touchstone is Charlton Heston, Val Kilmer, or Christian Bale, remember the story around the Ten Commandments. God has rescued his people from slavery in Egypt and brought them to Mount Sinai. This is where God will be their god and they will be God’s people. They will experience the “why” behind this dramatic rescue. This is the kind of god that God is.

Throughout his works, Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann highlights the essential place that the Exodus plays in the story of God, the ways it fundamentally reveals God’s character. Key to this is the contrast between the way of Yahweh and the way of Pharaoh in Egypt. This stark contrast is a running thread through the whole Bible as we see Yahweh as the alternative to every manifestation we may see of Sin and Death in the world—Egypt, Babylon, Rome, the “powers and principalities” we experience today.

And so, the Ten Commandments represent ten strategic ways that Yahweh is different from and better than Pharaoh. They represent ten arenas of our daily lives where we need to unlearn invisible habits of our culture to re-learn God’s creation intent for human beings. And right in the bullseye center of this manifesto about God’s new vision of humanity is the notion of Sabbath.

Sabbath and holiness

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God (Exodus 20:8, 9).

Our understanding of holiness is wrapped up in this idea of Sabbath. The invitation here is to make the Sabbath holy. “Holy” means different. Holy means God’s right ordering of creation. Most often in church, we may find ourselves talking and hearing about how we become holy—how we receive holiness. And in fact, we wouldn’t be out of bounds discussing how our participation in these “ten things” cultivate holiness in us. But what the text actually invites us to is making Sabbath holy.

In this context, human beings are givers, not receivers, of holiness. We participate with God in making the world holy when we remember the Sabbath. Remembering Sabbath, that is, rightly ordering our calendar, fundamentally understanding our relationship to work, plays a keystone part in putting God’s good world back together again.

It’s worth noting, too, that there’s no mention of worship related to Sabbath—only not working. In fact, afterward, we don’t see the children of Israel “going to church” on Sabbath. On Sabbath, we put our work down and engage life with God and with others. We give our whole selves to God’s whole creation. This is a holy Sabbath.

Sabbath and community

You shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns (Exodus 20:10. 

For a season of life, I worked as a barista at a Starbucks. At that time, I worked for managers who were sympathetic to those of us who wanted Sundays off for church. I had other managers who believed we all had to share the load of working Sundays. Our busiest shift of the week? Sunday morning, right before the churches of the neighborhood started. 

Sabbath strikes at the root of our consumerism in Western culture. Sabbath not only teaches that I am not my work, it subsequently teaches me that I am not my shopping, because when I shop, I cause my neighbor to be caught up in the cycle of endless work. When cards are swiped, when money changes hands, people get used.

Sabbath means that one day in seven we refuse to participate in systems that use people, that undermine the dignity and value of human beings. As Jesus later illustrates, Sabbath restores the dignity and value of every person, especially the most vulnerable in our communities.

The Sabbath commandment is the only one of the Ten that comes with an explanation. Three of the commandments get just two words. The following commandments related to neighbor relationships are apparently self-explanatory. But not Sabbath. It requires an explanation. It gets tied back to the creation story. God made the world this way, and so be like God, is what the Sabbath command seems to communicate.

Sabbath and the 6+1 rhythm of creation

For in six days, the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it (Exodus 20:11).

To remember Sabbath is to pledge our allegiance to the Creator God above all competing loyalties. We align our commitments to the way of Yahweh instead of the way of Pharaoh. In Pharaoh’s Egypt, your value as a human being was in how many bricks you could make in a day. Each day. Every day. No weekends. No vacations. No paid time off. No days off to take care of your sick kid. Can you imagine such a world?

A healthy work ethic has limits. We should work and work hard. But it should not be our identity. Your value as a human being is not in how many bricks you can make. Your value as a human being comes because you are made in the image of the Almighty Creator. God’s economy is one of abundance and not scarcity. Therefore, we work from mindsets of joy rather than anxiety.

And the purpose of our work should not be so that we can work more. Why did God rest on the seventh day? Because he was tired? Because he needed to refuel and rejuvenate before going back at it for the next week? I think God’s rest was not a rest of replenishment but rather a rest of enjoyment. I like to imagine that on that first Sabbath, God spread out the hammock, grabbed an icy beverage, and thought with a wonder-filled sigh, “Wow! Look at all this amazing stuff I made!”

Walter Brueggemann writes, “[Sabbath] is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being…. Israel learned at Sinai, and most especially in the fourth command on Sabbath, that there is a viable way to organize the neighborhood outside the rat race.” Likewise, your calendar doesn’t need more colors than a box of crayons. All it needs is the simple reminder that God’s Sabbath is what gives it all its deepest and most profound meaning.

If you want to explore spiritual disciplines deeper, be sure to check these out:
The Truth About God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Life by Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas
Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now by Walter Brueggemann
Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Feasting by Marva Dawn