Sabbath Rest

In this morning’s Gospel lesson we learn that Jesus’ Sabbath healings were intended to usher in the true and unending Sabbath, consisting in peace and rest with God in His presence. The whole OT period can be seen as a movement towards this peace and rest with God. It is the peace and rest that Adam was to have experienced on that first Sabbath Day in the Garden, but which was thwarted by the Serpent. Thus instead of peace and rest in the presence of God, Adam was banished from the Garden to experience discord and hardship. But God sent another Adam, the Seed of the Woman, in the midst of this discord and hardship to conquer the Serpent and bring man back into the Garden to enjoy peace and rest with God. That is what Jesus was doing in His Sabbath healings. He was telling the people that peace and rest with God could be restored in the kingdom He was preaching. The peace and rest with God that the Sabbath stood for was never to be confined to one day in seven, but was to spill out and transform the other six days. The Sabbath was a picture of what God was going to do the world. Well that Sabbath, and all that it stood for, arrived in Jesus Christ. In Him you are readmitted to the Garden to enjoy peace and rest with God. In Him you have entered the true and unending Sabbath. That is why we worship on the first day of the week. The Sabbath that Jesus spent in the tomb marked the end of the OT Sabbath as the Last Adam suffered the penalty of the first Adam’s Sabbath sin. When he rose again the next day, He threw open the doors to a new week for the world, an eighth day that surpasses the first seven in every way. And yet we know that we don’t yet fully experience the peace and rest with God that Jesus came to bring. Each week as you kneel to confess your sins you’re reminded of the truth that, “there remains therefore a Sabbath-rest for the people of God.” And each week you’re given a foretaste of that rest that is to spill out and transform this rest of your week. What we do here this morning is a picture of what God wants to do to the world!