Why Rest Matters

We live in a culture of busyness. In fact, Americans are just about the busiest people in the world. And we are worn out from all our busyness. I won’t give you all the statistics to back up how busy we are–you can easily Google them. I just want to ask you one thing: wouldn’t you like to get more rest? Wouldn’t you like a Sabbath?

I haven’t always liked the idea of Sabbath. I remember reading the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder as a child, and how much Laura hated Sabbath because it was boring–she couldn’t run or play or have any fun. All she was allowed to do was sit quietly on a chair. When she was older, she could read or sew or engage in other quiet activities. None of this sounded like fun to me when I was seven or eight years old.

I’m older now, though, and I have a toddler and a full-time job. Translation: I am tired. There are many days when I’d like to crawl into bed and just take a long nap. And sometimes, I do. But most of the time, there is so much waiting to be done that I just press on. Seven days a week. Outside of my job, there are dishes to wash, laundry to do, meals to cook, groceries to buy, emails to answer. And on and on. You get the picture, because you probably have many of the same things on your to-do list. Things that are constantly screaming to get done. My point is, most of us aren’t very good at ignoring the screaming and choosing intentional rest instead.

Last week, I was reading Numbers (I know, not exactly the most exciting book of the Bible, but I’m slowly reading the whole thing through from beginning to end, so Numbers is just part of the deal). In chapter 15, there’s an account of a man who was found gathering wood on the Sabbath and was therefore stoned to death by the Israelites–at God’s command. This shocked me.

More importantly, made me think about how serious God is about rest.

To be honest, the whole stoning thing kind of scared me. I mean, this man died because he was doing something as simple as gathering wood. It took me a while to wrap my brain around this. And the Bible doesn’t unpack the situation much more for us–we don’t know what was going on in the man’s head. Was he willfully disobeying the Lord’s command? Was he just being careless? We can’t be sure. But what we do know is that the whole nation of Israel had a hard time following God’s commands in general. Kind of like a two-year-old. And since the Lord said in Exodus 31 that anyone who did work on the Sabbath would be put to death, it occurred to me that God may have felt it necessary to make an example of the wood-gatherer, so as not to have total anarchy happening on the Sabbath. Those Israelites had to be kept in line!

Friends, there are over 150 references to Sabbath-keeping in the Bible. Did you know that? I didn’t. That’s a lot of instruction on rest. The Old Testament alone contains 93 of these references, many of them repeating a version of the same instruction: that because God rested for a day after spending six days creating the world, we, too, are to rest every seventh day. There are more detailed instructions that tell us how to rest as well–instructions that tell us not to gather, not to cook, not to do work of any kind. Because the Israelites apparently needed detailed instructions lest they slide into bad habits, and they needed those instructions repeated frequently.

The traditional Jewish Sabbath is still a well-ordered ritual. Some Orthodox Jews don’t even use electricity or drive on the Sabbath! And they don’t cook–all food is prepared ahead of time. (I’ve always wondered who does the dishes, though. Do they get left piled in the sink, all stinky and crusty, until Sabbath is over?)

It would be easy to become caught up in extremes like this based on God’s admonition that ignoring the Sabbath warrants death. But interestingly, Jesus kind of overthrows the extremes in Mark 2 (the same story is also told in Matthew 12). He and his disciples, who are traveling by foot, glean some grain from a field as they are passing through it, and the Pharisees later call Jesus out on this, accusing him of dishonoring the Sabbath. Jesus is too sharp for them, though, and he calls out the thing they are missing: that Sabbath is not something to obsess over in a legalistic manner; it is intended to shape the heart and restore the spirit, helping us turn both inward and toward God.

“The Sabbath was made for man,” Jesus says, “not man for the Sabbath.”

We need Sabbath both for physical rest as well as for spiritual restoration. In observing the Sabbath, we remember that God, too, rested, and by association, we remember that he created us and everything around us. And let’s be honest–it’s easy to forget that in the scheme of a too-busy life.

If God himself needs intentional rest, how much more must we humans, who were created in his image, also need it?

What are you doing to get intentional rest, both physically and spiritually? I’d love to know your answers.

Mercy & grace~

Harmony

Photo credit: Sandee Pachetan. License: Creative Commons 2.0