More Than a Day
The Sabbath, the Lord’s Day, and the rest we’ve been given.
I am currently in the thick of a lengthy sermon series on the Book of Exodus, with the sermon from this past Sunday serving as part twenty-three of an unknown number of sermons covering the entire narrative. To be honest, this series feels more daunting than when I preached exegetically through both 1 and 2 Kings. Despite the density of historical data in those two books, the theological scope of Exodus is rivaled only by Genesis and Isaiah, as far as the Old Testament (OT) is concerned.
My approach so far has been to see the Exodus narrative as more of an ecclesiological window. As God rescues and fashions a people for himself out of a nation of former slaves, so, too, does God rescue and fashion a church for himself out of sinners. This lens is indebted to Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7, where he refers to the Israelite multitude in the wilderness as the “church” or ekklēsia “in the wilderness” (Acts 7:38). The parallels are even more robust than you can imagine, with Romans 6 serving as a sturdy New Testament (NT) counterpart.
If you haven’t listened to it yet, Sunday’s sermon examined the third and fourth of the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:7–11). I spent the bulk of my preparation ruminating on the connective tissues between not taking the Lord’s name in vain and keeping the Sabbath holy, especially from a New Covenant perspective. What do both of these directives mean for the church? Well, in short, they mean a heck of a lot more than not cursing or not doing any kind of work on Sundays. A Christological undulation pulses through both.
One of the threads I spent a great deal of time studying was the correspondence of the OT Sabbath with the NT Lord’s Day. A very common refrain is the understanding that the Sunday gathering of the church has replaced the Sabbath, with some even referring to it as the “Christian Sabbath.”1 Despite the prevalence of this theory, there really is no biblical basis for it. In fact, to conflate the two is to misunderstand both. Insofar as the church assembles out of adherence to a Sabbath-like law, the point has been missed. The gospel has been diminished.
Twentieth-century Lutheran theologian R. C. H. Lenski is tremendously helpful here:
Since the days of the apostles, our day of worship is Sunday and no longer Saturday. This does not abolish the type which, like all other types, belongs to the Old Testament. The New Testament adds no types. It also continues none, for the antitypes begin in the New Testament. Our Sunday, the day of Christ’s resurrection and of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, is thus by no means the Jewish Sabbath which has been shifted to the first day of the week. It is far more, for by the power of Christ’s resurrection and by his Spirit (Rom. 8:11) our mortal bodies shall be raised up to enter the blessed rest of the heavenly Sabbath, which the resting of God on that first seventh day only typified.2
Following God doesn’t mean flattening Sundays and the Sabbath into some sort of hybrid day of the Lord. Rather, faith in the gospel of Christ means clinging to the one who fulfills the Sabbath. Even that day was a shadow of which Jesus is the substance (Col. 2:16–17). In other words, when the Body of Christ assembles on Sundays, it does so not out of a sense of duty, but because of the incandescent news that Christ is risen. This is the announcement that, like an electric current, pulsates through every sinner-saint, drawing them to their Redeemer.
Grace and peace.
My mentor and former pastor, Dr. Jim Blalock, who serves in Jupiter, Florida, has a tremendous sermon on this very topic, which you can listen to here.
R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Epistle of James (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1966), 136–37.
Wonderful!