I am sitting in church, listening to a sermon from a guest preacher. It’s pretty good except that I am slightly distracted by whom the preacher reminds me of. That’s irrelevant to where I am going though. Suddenly for the sixth or seventh time I hear something conveyed that I had heard before. That sounds normal for listening to a sermon but this idea or concept is rather unique. It is something that most people would not think of. Then he cites the source and all of the different people (some of whom work in very different circles) that have brought this up before are connected to the source person. What he conveyed is an idea that sounds really good and spiritual. It sounds like a brilliance of God thing… Like, God is so incredible that he created a system that defies what we could figure out ourselves and is so much better. God is like that, so I am all ears to these things. This time however, because of reading a book recently for a class, the idea that sounded so wonderful suddenly does not ring true. What is it?
The idea contends that we are meant to work out of our rest. I find it comforting to think that rest will give us the focus that we need to begin our week. And it’s not simple rest but sabbath rest with God that the source contends gives us energy and strength for the week. I find this to be true. However, the argument goes that because our work week follows the sabbath, we are meant to work out of our rest. It makes logical sense. Sunday is the first day of the week and we are meant to spend that time with the Lord. This then shapes the rest of the week. I like this and I think it should be the case. It’s a very nice idea but what do we find in Genesis? God rested after creation and if there is a pattern to notice here it is that work is followed by rest. Little distinctions like this may not be significant or seem important but an effective distortion of truth starts with a slight variation of something true and sounds not only true but appealing to many. Where is the flaw in the argument? The seventh day of the week is Saturday. That is the sabbath day in the Bible. We in Christianity shifted our sabbath to Sunday because that is the day the Lord rose on. We rightly consider that the Lord’s day. So, while we currently can work out of our rest, because our sabbath is experienced on Sunday, it’s not actually God’s original pattern. If we take Genesis seriously, we see that God in fact established the week for us and created our understanding of time by doing so. I guess if the idea was not presented as God’s design, I’d have nothing to say here. As it stands, it comes across as a sloppy interpretation of scripture at best and a minor distortion at worst. A more accurate teaching on this might say… God’s design was for six days of work followed by a day of rest in Him. Given that as Christians we shifted the sabbath to Sunday (from Saturday) due to the resurrection, we now have an opportunity to rest on the first day of the week and then work out of our rest. In some ways that sounds great. Then again, most of us work from Monday to Friday and Monday is for all practical purposes the start of the week.
So, why blog about this? Maybe more than anything it struck me just how easy it is to make little changes in our understanding of God’s word that sound wonderful. Little changes can however distort the truth of scripture over time. We have to be careful how we handle scripture and especially how we teach it to others. What I have raised here is fairly insignificant, but there are passages in the Bible that a slight change in understanding means huge doctrinal shifts.
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