The Sabbath Mandate, rooted in Genesis 2:1-3, highlights the necessity of rest in God’s creation narrative. While work is essential for personal growth, family, and legacy, God calls us to pause weekly for worship and renewal. Nature reflects this pattern, synchronizing work and rest with light and darkness, echoing the Divine order!
If you are one of those that would rather listen to it than read it, well below you can do just that.
The Place of Rest In The Christian Life
God embeds “rest” into Creation in Genesis 2:1-3 through the giving of the Sabbath Mandate. It is a gift to us, a day of rest from focusing on all the other Creation Mandates, which involve work. Gaining competency, managing family life, going out into the world, entering a vocation, and competing for resources (Gen 1:28) is strenuous. Those of us with children in their late teens and early twenties sometimes feel a weight that moves us to sit them down to try to warn them about the amount of stress ahead of them. Work is good for man, but he also needs rest and recreation. All work and no rest makes Jack a wreck.
The sinful nature of sin is displayed in us when we take the “good” things given to us in the Creation Mandates, such as personal growth, family, legacy, and vocation, and turn them into vices and idols. Nevertheless, these are also the ways God gave mankind to “take dominion” over the earth. These are the “mandates” or “callings” or “duties” or “works” God requires of man. We were not made to sit on our thumbs. We are workers because God works.
However, we are also told to rest because God rests. In Genesis 2:1-3, we are instructed to glorify God by resting from our labor as He did from the Creation. We are to cease one day in seven from business, commerce, and our own wills to give ourselves to the worship of God and the resting of our souls. Christians begin each week coming to the Father through the intercession of the Son, empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit in worship. We begin each week bowing our knees together before the Triune God, as His people, as a witness to the world that He is Creator, Redeemer, and, if we trample on the redemption, our Judge too, who is coming again to judge the living and the dead. Christian worship testifies to the future glorious eternal rest promised to us in Christ Jesus.
Interestingly, to me anyway, I also see the pattern of rest in nature too. I pointed this out in a little email devotional a few Mondays ago. In the northern hemisphere, we have four seasons and in one of those seasons, winter of course, the vast majority of warm and cold-blooded creatures grow dormant. An example of this would be fish. Fishing in winter has to be done at depth because the fish move away from the freezing edges and surface to go to the deepest water. Why? It doesn’t freeze. The mass of water acts as a thermal battery and maintains some heat, so the water doesn’t freeze. But the cold, because the deep water is often just above freezing, causes fish to not move around very much so as to conserve their energy. In the spring and summer, they move back to warmer surface waters, and with it comes more movement, which requires more food. Thus, the lake and river banks fill up with anglers when the Spring thaw occurs.
The southern and eastern climes also have seasons of inaction too. You’ve never seen rain, unless you were in Nashville in 2010, until you’ve seen rain in the Amazon Basin or the jungles of Asia. To say it in a southern way, which I like to do, as you know, when the rainy season comes to those places, “you ain’t going nowhere.”
God embeds the pattern of rest into every single day, if you think about it. He gave man a time when most work cannot be done: night, with its trademark darkness. Darkness triggers natural effects in the human body; it makes people sleepy. Then sunlight comes and has the opposite effect. It causes the body’s temperature to rise, and like fish moving from deep to shallow water, we awaken. As we open our eyes, the light triggers a million small chemical responses throughout our body, each one of them prodding us to go and fulfill the Creation Mandates. The day calls us through the light to do our work. What work? Well, the Creation Mandates, of course. They encapsulate the work that God has called all of mankind to do through our common creation on the 6th Day. Praise the Lord for the design of God our Creator and His glorious light that shines everywhere we look in His Creation.
We proclaim with the Psalmist “He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting. 20 You make darkness, and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep about. 21 The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. 22 When the sun rises, they steal away and lie down in their dens. 23 Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening Psalm (104:19-23).
May the Lord richly bless you. Go in peace to love, serve, rest, and be renewed in Him!
Jeremy Mack
Teaching Elder
Solomon’s Porch Christian Church
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