Why Did God Need a Day of Rest?

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If God is omnipotent (all powerful) why did it take Him six days to create the world? He could have just spoken once to create it all. And why would He need rest? Surely God does not get tired.

We find the answer in Exodus 20:8-11: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.  Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates.  For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” This is the fourth of the Ten Commandments.

God worked for six days and rested for one in order to provide an example for us. He knew that some people would need frequent reminders to spend six days getting their work done. In our modern day, most of us spend five days a week earning a living, but then we need a day for all of the “life stuff” like maintaining and cleaning our homes, shopping, doing laundry, and on and on and on.

God also knew that some people would need frequent reminders to stop working on and on and on. He didn’t actually need the rest, but He knew that we would. He knew that some would be harsh parents and employers, so the commandment also included the need to provide a day of rest for your children, your servants, your animals and the alien within your gates (that would be aliens from foreign countries, not other planets.) Avoiding Sabbath work by getting others to do it for you is cheating.

Sometime during the two thousand or so years between the time when God gave the law to His people through Moses, until the time of Christ, a group of well educated people called the Pharisees (separated ones) emerged from Jewish society. Their role was to study the Scriptures and teach the people. This was long before the invention of the printing press, so with the Scriptures being hand copied, there were not many copies available. The people had to trust that the Pharisees were teaching the truth from God’s Word.

By the time of Christ, the Pharisees had become an elitist group who taught the people many manmade rules and traditions which they enforced as rigidly as they enforced God’s laws. They had many rules about what constituted work, and what actions were forbidden on the Sabbath.  For example, hunting was forbidden on the Sabbath. This sounds reasonable until they started to be more specific about what actions were considered to be hunting – like trapping a scorpion who wandered into your home. You would have to wait until after the Sabbath to do anything about it. Harvesting grain on the Sabbath is a reasonable no-no, but the Pharisees condemned Jesus when they saw Him and His disciples walking through a field, plucking and eating a few grains of wheat (Matthew 12:1).

Jesus spent a lot of time condemning the manmade rules of the Pharisees. For example, in Matthew 23:16-17 He told them: “Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’  You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred?”

Needless to say, Jesus was not very popular among the Pharisees. They watched Him closely, waiting for Him to break a law so that they could condemn Him. They especially watched for Him to break the Sabbath laws. On one Sabbath day, Jesus entered a synagogue, and a man was there with a shrivelled hand. Looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, the Pharisees asked Him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”

He said to them, “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a man than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”  Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other (Matthew 12:10-13).

Perhaps this would be a good time to discuss how the Old and New Testaments differ, and how Christians are to see the Old Testament laws. I receive many comments about how Christians ignore many of the laws of the Old Testament. Jesus Christ came to fulfill the requirements of the law on our behalf. Hebrews 9:15 says: “For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance–now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.”

Christians are saved by God’s grace and mercy, not by the deeds that we do or the sin that we avoid. This does not give us license to sin. We live our lives in a relationship with God, through Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf, and with the help of the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us to teach and to guide.

To use the analogy of parenthood, the Old Testament laws are like house rules for children. Children need to be supervised and monitored. The parent must communicate specific rules and standards of behaviour. But when the child is an adult, he is expected to have internalized the rules, and his behaviour is now his own responsibility. From a child’s perspective, house rules seem harsh; and they can’t wait for the freedom that they think they will have as an adult. What we as adults know, however, is that with freedom comes responsibility.

In Galatians 4:1-7, the apostle Paul explains this difference: “What I am saying is that as long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. He is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were children, we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.”

Getting back to my original question, how is a Christian to observe the Sabbath? First of all, we have changed the day of worship and rest to Sunday rather than observing the Jewish Sabbath, which was the last day of the week.

In our society, avoiding work on Sundays is not always possible. Most Christians try to arrange their schedules in order to attend Sunday morning church services, and many also try to avoid making others work on Sundays by not going to restaurants or stores on Sunday. But making a list of what activities constitute work and trying to legalistically enforce these standards in our churches and families would put us right back into living under the law rather than grace. Grace means following our conscience and the guidance of the Holy Spirit to live a healthy life which balances work and rest.

(All Scripture references from the New International Version)

By same author: Why the Ten Commandments still matter