The Third Commandment

One

“Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath for your God. You shall do no work that day. For in six days, God made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that these hold, but on the seventh day he rested; that is why God has blessed the sabbath day and made it sacred.”

Why would God command us to do this?

In the Old Testament, one of the commandments that was most emphasized, and most ignored, was the commandment to rest on the Sabbath. This is the only commandment that God directly models for us when He Himself rests on the seventh day. And yet this is one of the most difficult commandments for people to follow.

People like to work. People like to make money. People like to get stuff done. It’s rewarding, it’s pleasant, it’s nice to have something to do.

So why would God take that away from us? Why would He insist that we take one day and make it holy, that we refrain from work?

Two

The Ten Commandments are for our sake.

We always seem to forget that God gives us the commandments not because it makes Him any better off, but because it makes us so much better off.

All the commandments are for our sake.

Jesus makes this abundantly clear when he says, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

We are given the third commandment for the same reason we’re given all the other commandments – so we can be happy.

And, as it turns out, happiness and rest are inextricably linked together.

Three

Rest and happiness

When God rested on the seventh day, it wasn’t out of exhaustion. God doesn’t get exhausted.

When Scripture says that “God rested from the work He had done,” it meant that He delighted in the good He had done. He had made a good world, full of good things. And so He devoted the seventh day to appreciating it.

That’s what rest means. It means to delight in God and His good world, and the good things within it. Rest means stopping your work so you can appreciate reality.

That’s what happiness ultimately is: appreciating the goodness of God and the reality He has made. 

That’s what Heaven is, and that’s what - at least one day of our week - is supposed to be too.

What the third commandment consists of, ultimately, is a very loving Father, telling his busy, distracted, anxious children, “At least one day out of the week, I want you to be happy. I’m telling you – I’m commanding you – take some time and be happy.”

Four

Trust in God or in ourselves? Happiness in God or in the works of our hands?

Why did the Israelites so often refuse to rest on the Sabbath? Why do we so often fill our Sundays with work and homework? 

The answer is very simple: we don’t trust in God. 

We still think we are God and the weight of the world rests on our shoulders. We don’t believe He will make us happy. We think we have to make our own happiness, through our own sweat and cleverness. 

This is basically a kind of self-idolatry. 

Idolatry, remember, is when people would worship the work of their hands. They would hope for salvation in a little statue that they themselves had made.

That’s why we won’t let go of our work. We’d rather be anxious and busy than happy and at rest in the Lord. Because we too worship the work of our own hands. We too hope for salvation in things we ourselves have made. We trust in ourselves alone to keep ourselves and our families safe and secure

But Sunday is a day to remember that God is God and we are not God. That God is in control. This means, if we entrust our happiness to God, we can stop stressing out and stop frantically trying to get stuff done, at least for twenty-four hours.

Because the Lord has it well in hand. And our chances of being happy, and being saved, are infinitely better when we rely on God as opposed to ourselves.

This is why Jesus came. To assure us that we didn’t have to be constantly freaking out and constantly working. 

He says, “Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28).

Sunday is a day to come to God, to entrust our happiness to Him, and then to look around and appreciate the goodness of what the Lord has done. 

Five

Give the Lord 24 hours

Now Jesus is clear that sometimes, emergencies come up on the Sabbath. And sometimes, people need your help on the Sabbath. That’s why Jesus healed people on the Sabbath, and why he said that you’re allowed to pull your ox out of a pit on the Sabbath.

So too, sometimes work emergencies come up. Sometimes your job involves helping people who need help on Sunday – like if you’re a nurse who gets assigned a hospital shift on Sunday. And sometimes, your job involves helping other people rest on Sunday – like if you work at a restaurant or something.

So there can be legitimate cases where you have to do your job – the thing you get money for – on Sunday.

But when those cases come up, you should be sure to give the Lord a straight 24 hours of rest somewhere else in the week. Maybe you can go from noon on Saturday to noon on Sunday. Or there are other ways you can get creative.

But in any case, for most of us, we need to start taking Sunday rest seriously and have the discipline of abstaining from our primary form of employment.

That shows trust in God. It shows obedience to God. And it shows that you want to be happy – and that you know that getting stuff done will never get you there. It’s a foretaste of Heaven, where you will rest forever, overwhelmed by the joy that comes from appreciating how good the Lord is, and what wondrous things He’s done for us.