God Rested
If you haven’t listened to or don’t know about Andrew Peterson’s Resurrection Letters Anthology, go listen to it RIGHT NOW. Do not walk, run, and find it on Spotify or something. You will be blessed.
In the original release of the Resurrection Letters albums, there was a very short one called Prologue. The whole movement of the story through these songs is amazing, but this short EP tells of the death of Jesus. The last song in the Prologue is called “God Rested”. It was this song, when I heard it for the first time a few years ago, that tied together the loose ends of so many things I’d been learning and turning over in my mind regarding rest, sabbath, and the true nature of my relationship with God. As we wrap up my mini-series on Sabbath, I’d like to tie those loose ends for you.
It’s no accident that I’m posting this on Good Friday. I love details.
As ever, the BEMA podcast and The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (John Mark Comer), are my favorite resources on this topic and I draw heavily on their ideas. Ok, enough prologue (get it?), let’s get started.
In the beginning, when God made everything that is, he worked hard for six days. (As I mentioned in a previous post, please do not get distracted or try to drag me away from my point by worrying about whether or not it was a literal six days. That’s so far removed from the point of anything that I’ve ever taught on this passage that I’d be grateful if you’d forget it or take up that debate with someone who cares. I do not.) At the end of his six days of work, God has made everything, called it good, and then sat back to enjoy it. The language is that of rest, delight, and refreshment. God works hard, and then takes a break to enjoy the result of his hard work.
Later in the Biblical narrative, God’s people are given an actual command to rest on the seventh day of the week, just as he did. This day was called the “Sabbath”, which has a rich meaning that I and others have explored elsewhere. I find it fascinating that we still have remnants of this word in contemporary English: Saturday. In romance languages, it’s even closer. I speak Spanish and “Saturday” is “Sabado”. Even today, we still call the seventh day something close to its Hebrew name, though we’ve forgotten the meaning.
In the same part of the Bible where God’s people are given the command to rest, they are also given some patterns and rituals through which to collectively tell their history every year. The most important of these rituals was the feast of Passover. Jews still celebrate it today. Passover rehearses and reminds God’s people about how he delivered them from slavery in Egypt. If you grew up in Sunday School, you probably remember the story of Moses and ten plagues. The last of those plagues was the worst: the death of the firstborn son of every household in the land. Unless you followed God’s command: slaughtered a perfect lamb and wiped its blood on your doorframe. If you did that, the lamb died instead of you and God’s judgment passed over your house. Thus, Passover. It was after Pharaoh's son died in this plague that he finally let the people go.
Jesus, being a good Jew in the first century, traveled to Jerusalem every year to celebrate the Passover feast. We have a record in the Gospel of Luke where he even stayed longer than the rest of his family and they had to come back and find him. During his public teaching and ministry, Jesus traveled to Jerusalem for the feast every year, even the last year of his public ministry when controversy was afoot and the religious leaders were ready to do something desperate. He went up to Jerusalem, knowing that there were plots to arrest and kill him because he wanted to celebrate the feast. Yes, Jesus intended to celebrate the Passover and so much more. It was on this last journey to Jerusalem that Jesus was betrayed, arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced to death, tortured, and ultimately murdered by the Roman government. All of this happened on the day of the Passover Feast. Today, in fact: Good Friday.
This is significant for SO MANY reasons, but I want to focus on the very clear parallel between the life and death of Jesus and the first Passover. In the Bible, Jesus is referred to as the lamb of God. John the Baptizer, Jesus’ cousin, calls him this early on in the Gospel of John (1:29). In the book of Revelation, the Lamb is referred to over and over again (5:6, 7:17, for starters). In the book of Isaiah, there are references to a lamb being silent before shearers (53:7). In the book of Genesis, Abraham sacrifices a ram in the place of his only son (Chapter 22). It’s literally all over the place. During the first Passover, the lamb died instead of the Israelite families and it was its blood on the doorway to their houses that saved them from tragic death and loss. On Good Friday, the lamb of God died a bloody death instead of the whole world so that his blood could “be on us and our children,” as the crowd ironically shouted at Pontius Pilate earlier in the day (Matthew 27:25). It was no accident that “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” died on the day of the Passover feast. God loves details, too.
Since the beginning, God has been trying to get at our hearts through his story. The story that he tells on Good Friday is that it was always the blood of Jesus that was meant to set you free from slavery. Not necessarily physical slavery in Egypt or some other place, but spiritual slavery to your own selfish impulses and destructive behaviors. It’s not a secret that every human being is capable of evil and that evil has wrecked the world. Sometimes we can’t stop it, even if we want to. We feel trapped in our own cycle of self-sabotage and we wonder, along with the Apostle Paul, “who will save me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24) In a resounding answer that, for all its layers of significance we and the first-century Jews miss, God says, “Jesus. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”.
This sacrifice, this taking away of the sin of the world was harder than making it by far. God made the world in six days through his words. He would save it one afternoon in the spring by spilling his own blood. And if you thought he’d like a break to sit back and enjoy the fruits of his labor in the beginning, you’d be right in guessing that he’d rest after this work.
It was after I listened to “God Rested” in the spring a few years ago that I realized God was remaking the world with his blood. He made the world in six days and then rested. He saved the world on Good Friday and then he rested again. In the tomb. Dark. Dead. Decaying, for all we knew. After his great work of rescuing his people from real slavery (that to sin and death), he rested, just as he had done in the beginning. Because it was never about accomplishing, achieving, or doing anything. It was about enjoying. It was about delight. It was about the work being finished by one so much more powerful and more capable than us that he can make the world with a word and save it with his blood.
I like to think that when Jesus took his first breath in the tomb on Easter Sunday that there was a smile on his face. He completed the work. He rested. And, now, every day is a Sabbath day to the Lord because there is nothing else to do. Of course, there is work to be done, but no more ultimate work. Just as it was in the beginning: there was a garden to tend to- work to be done. But the ultimate work of creation and sustaining fell on God and that work was finished. So it is now: there is a world full of broken, hurting people to tend to. There is a kingdom to usher in. But the ultimate work of freedom from slavery and the ability to do the work in the first place is finished. It fell on Jesus’ shoulders and will never fall on ours.
Because God rested on the seventh day in the beginning and in the tomb after his crucifixion, he is the ultimate Sabbath rest. Every day is a day that we GET TO work FROM the rest and salvation that he procured for us, not a day that we HAVE TO work FOR rest and acceptance. I believe that it is still good and right to remember the seventh day and keep it holy (read: observe a weekly Sabbath), AND I believe that every day is a Sabbath day because I’ve been saved. The wrath of God has passed over me and fallen on my perfect, spotless rescuer. Like the Israelites taken out of slavery and delivered into the Promised Land of rest through no real work of their own, I’ve been set free from my own personal slavery to sin and death and delivered into the Promised Land of Sundays where Jesus walks up out of the tomb (to an Emminem song, “Guess who’s back? Back again? Shady’s back. Tell a friend”). I get rest and acceptance because Jesus worked hard for me. And then? I follow my rescuer, savior, teacher, king, father, and friend: God rested.