1. The Problem
I have a problem. You have a problem. Let’s be honest, we have a lot of problems! But here’s one of them: we are busy. And many of us wear that busyness like a badge of honour. How are you doing? “Oh, good, just really busy”. Oh, wow, you’re so important, so many things to do, look at you. I’m guilty of that, you might be too. We are busy, full, stressed, and sometimes, proud of it.
What’s funny is that people used to think that as technology increased, our lives would become much less busy. A book by pastor and author John Mark Comer called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry supplies a lot of what I’m going to say here in the opening. It’s a book I highly recommend if you want to dig into any of this more. A famous American governmental report in the 1960s said that by the ‘80s, Americans would be working 22 hours a week for 27 weeks in the year. As in, you’d have half your year for vacation, and a solid four day weekend every week. The idea was that technology would make our lives easier, more efficient, and that the big problem would be what we would fill all this extra time with. Seriously. People thought this.
So what happened? Obviously, not that. The average American works about 47 hours a week, with many working more than that. They also work, on average, four more weeks of the year than in the 1970s. Why? There are lots of reasons- one being the gig economy, where a lot of millennials especially have to piece together a bunch of different jobs to make a living. At least some of that also has to do with technology- after all, for a lot of jobs, there’s no more leaving your work at the office. Your emails follow everywhere you go because of this little devil here. You’re always on call, always expected to be available. (Note: this sermon was preached before COVID-19 and the work-at-home trend…it would be interesting to note how these trends have either been mitigated or exacerbated since).
But our busyness goes beyond how much we work, it has to do with how we spend the rest of our lives. Again, partly because of our social media, our kids and teens are way busier than I remember my generation being 20-30 years ago. One of the problems is that we are so aware of how many amazing things everyone else is doing because they post them on social media, and we get this bad case of FOMO- the fear of missing out. We feel like we need to do what they’re doing, or we’re losers, or we’re not giving our kids the right experiences, or whatever. And then there’s all the time we spend on these devices.
You know how many hours we spend on our phones? One study said that the average iPhone user touches their phone over 2600 times a day, for an average of 2.5 hours a day. Studies of younger generations found twice that number. The average American spends 2200 hours a year– about 6 a day- watching video of some kind, whether traditional video, streaming, or whatever. Of course, because of our poor Netflix content, Canadians are probably way lower, I’m going to guess at like 2100 hours. Still, that’s around 90 days of the year just stuck in front of a screen. You could read over 1000 books in the same amount of time. According to another study, the average male spends 10,000 hours playing video games by the time they reached 21 (Comer, ?). You know what you can do in 10,000 hours? Research says that’s how long it takes to become an expert at basically anything (see Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers). You can become an Olympic athlete in 10,000 hours- not even the lame sports like curling but cool ones like sport climbing. You could memorize the Bible. You could walk to Miami, Florida and back five times- although I feel like you got there the first time, you’d be done.
And these things that suck so much of our time also suck so much life out of us. Techies in Silicon Valley are putting their kids in tech-free schools and banning devices from their homes, because they know what they do. Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, says that “the thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them….was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” (Comer, 38) That’s addiction straight up, and there’s plenty of evidence for our technology being exactly that: addiction on par with drugs and alcohol. One study found that even having your phone in the same room causes your cognitive abilities to go way down. The report concluded that “if you grow dependent on your smartphone, it becomes a magical device that silently shouts your name at your brain at all times.” So they make us busier, dumber, and cause all kinds of mental stress. Anxiety, depression, relational brokenness, family dysfunction, loneliness, burnout- all of this stuff has been around a long time. But you try to convince me that our technological “progress” hasn’t made it worse. One article said that for millennials, burnout isn’t just a condition you visit once in a while and come back from- it’s your permanent home. If you’ve seen the recent Netflix film The Social Dilemma, all of this is familiar to you.
And this has had an impact on our spiritual health too. Dallas Willard said that “hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day”. The great enemy. Another study showed how distracted Christians had become through “busyness” and suggested a cycle that might ring true for you. As Christians become assimilated to a culture of busyness, God becomes marginalized in their lives. That true for anyone? That busyness, including the time-sucking addictive tech, creates less room for God? As God becomes marginalized, our relationship with Him deteriorates. As that deteriorates, Christians are more vulnerable to the ways of the world, and that leads to even more conformity with a culture of busyness (Comer, 22). You know how a lot of us feel like God isn’t as present as we’d like Him to be? He feels far from us? Sometimes that’s just part of this mystery that the saints have dealt with for a long time, but as John Mark Comer points out, a lot of times, it’s because we’re absent. We’ve lost the ability to be aware of God’s presence. It’s not Him. It’s us.
Like I said, we have a problem. Our culture has a problem. Something needs to get reframed. Let’s talk about Genesis 2 and the concept of rest.
2. What God Does: Genesis 2
We’ve been in Genesis 1 and 2 over the last few weeks, focusing especially on Genesis 1, the account of God’s creation. The account is framed with the structure of a six day work week. There’s this problem at the beginning of Genesis, that the world is formless and void. It’s disorder and chaos. And what God does is fix that, we get three days of forming- God making the structures of the place- and then three days of filling- God decorating and making the place a home (World Reframed: Science and Faith). The climax of His creation is day 6, where He makes humans in His image. But that’s not the finale, that’s not the conclusion, that’s maybe not the climax of the week as a whole. That comes in Genesis 2, where we read:
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
Genesis 2:1-3
God does not create anything on this day, but He does do three things. What are they?
He rests
First of all, He rests. Now, when we hear the word rest, we think of someone who is tired and needs a break. I mean, creating a universe seems like it would be pretty hard work, you know? Making all those molecules and atoms, we wouldn’t blame someone for needing to put their feet up. But we know that can’t be the case because if God is God, He doesn’t get tired. One of the Psalms in the Old Testament says this, that God doesn’t slumber or sleep (Psalm 121:3-4). He’s not like us. The other thing we might think is that God is just not doing anything anymore. As in, He set the thing in motion, put everything together, and now He sits back to let it run without any kind of interference. That’s called deism, and it’s a heresy, and we’re not going to go there. Jesus says in John 5 that His Father never stops working, and in other places the Bible talks about God sustaining all things- meaning He’s actively involved in keeping things running the way they need to. Or we might think that God’s just being a good example for us. He doesn’t need rest, we do, so He’s just pretending to rest to show us the way. It’s like the way I don’t really need to eat my vegetables, but Carolyn insists that I do anyway to be a good example for my kids. There’s part of this last one that might ring true, but I’m not sure it really captures it. So what does it mean for God to rest?
I’ve talked before about how there are all kinds of parallels between the creation of the world in Genesis and the creation of the tabernacle and temple later on in the Bible (World Reframed: Who is God?). It’s like the temple in Jerusalem is a kind of micro-world, or that the universe is seen as a kind of mega-temple for God. There are also these parallels between the creation of the world in Genesis and the inauguration of temples in the ancient world. For example, there are these inauguration ceremonies that would last seven days- seven days of making a new temple functional as a temple. The week would climax with the installation of the image of the god, meaning a stone or wooden statue. At the end of the week, the god was said to have made his rest in the temple. In Genesis, we have something like that, but with some significant differences. Instead of a man-made building, you have a universe, and instead of wooden statues, you have living human beings. But the point I want to make here is that the concept of divine rest in the ancient world had to do with the god taking up residence in his temple. This temple had been established, now the god could be present. And a lot of scholars think that’s what’s going on in Genesis 2. God has made the world, given it order and structure, and now He comes to take up residence. He’s made the universe as a temple to fill with His presence, that’s the point of the resting.
To jump forward a bit, one of the implications of this is that when we rest, one of the primary purposes is to enter more fully into God’s presence, which is the point of His resting. Resting is about presence. The seventh day is about God’s presence.
He blesses
The second thing God is said to do on this day is bless it. He blesses the day. What’s interesting here is that God blesses a couple of other things in Genesis. In 1:22, we read about Him blessing the birds and fish, telling them to be fruitful and increase in number. In 1:28, God blesses humanity and tells them to…guess what, be fruitful and increase in number. So what does God’s blessing mean? It has to do with life! With the flourishing of life. God’s blessing is His creating the conditions for life to be experienced and multiplied. So here is God blessing a day. What does that mean? It means that this day is uniquely capable of cultivating life.
Jumping forward here, this means that when we rest, we are putting ourselves in the position of God’s blessing. We are opening the door to life. The seventh day is about God’s gift of life.
He sanctifies
And the third thing God does on the seventh day is that He makes it holy. The word for making it holy essentially means to separate something, to set it apart. In the temple later on in the Bible, there were objects that were “sanctified”. They were made holy, they were set apart, meaning they could only be used for particular purposes within the temple, in service to God. And God does this with a day. This day is marked out. Genesis is really clear about that. Three times we read about the seventh day. No other day is marked out this way. All the other days have good things happening and God is active, but none of them are set apart, none are made holy. Except for this one.
The implication here is that when we rest in a Genesis sense, it means setting time apart that is remarkably different from the rest of our week. It’s about time being sanctified, being made holy. The seventh day is about holiness. To sum up, God makes this seventh day all about His presence, His life, and His holiness.
And here’s the other thing about the seventh day that has often been noted: there’s no end to it. Not in Genesis 2. Every other day has an ending: “there was evening, and there was morning- the first day” and so on. But not this one. It’s as if the seventh day continues on, it’s as if we are in some sense living in the seventh day even now. It’s as if life in this world will somehow continue to involve the seventh day in a way that the other six days aren’t. So let’s go there next. This is what God does in Genesis 2. What are humans called to do?
3. What We Do: Sabbath
The short answer is that we are to enter into God’s rest. We are to participate in it. The seventh day is all about God, so our experience of the seventh day should be all about God. And the central way we do this God-centred rest thing, in the Bible, is through Sabbath. The verb for “rest” in Genesis 2 is “shabbat”. This word is later used as a noun to describe this seventh day, the “Sabbath” day, which we know of as Saturday. God’s people, the Israelites, are commanded to observe and remember the Sabbath day. For example, Exodus 20 has the ten commandments. You know what the longest one is? You’d think it would be for something we think is really important, like not murdering people. That gets four words, in English. The longest, though, is the Sabbath command:
“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”
Exodus 20:8-11
There’s the connection back to Genesis 2. God rested on the seventh day, made it holy, so this day is holy for you too. It’s set apart, it’s for the Lord, don’t work on it. As we’ll talk about a little later on, this was a gift. Israel had come from Egypt, where I don’t think days off were plentiful. They were slaves. But now God was telling them, “rest! Stop working!” This became a really distinctive teaching for the Israelites. But as humans do, they lost sight of the life-giving intent and turned it into a burden.
By Jesus’ time, there was all kinds of debate about what was actually considered work. This is representative of some of the rabbinic teaching at the time. Mishnah Shabbat section 10 reads:
“[If] one carries out [an object] either with his right hand or with his left hand, or in his lap, or on his shoulder, he is liable” (liable meaning they were in violation of the Sabbath law)… “But if one carries [an object] on the back of his hand, or with his foot, or in his mouth, or with his elbow, or in his ear, or in his hair, or in his belt facing downwards, or between his belt and his shirt, or in the hem of his shirt, or in his shoe, or in his sandal, he is exempt” (exempt meaning they’re not lawbreakers) “because he did not carry in the way people [usually] carry.”
Mishnah Shabbat 10
So if you want to bring a book to your friend on Sabbath, go nuts! As long as you can balance it on your ear or juggle it soccer-style with your foot. As long as it isn’t something a normal person would do. It’s no wonder Jesus speaks against this legalism and gets himself into trouble by doing what a lot of people thought was “work” on the Sabbath: namely, healing people. In response to the outrage, Jesus had this great line. He said, “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27). Man wasn’t made for the Sabbath. That’s what it boiled down to for a lot of people in Jesus’ day. They were enslaved and burdened by the Sabbath. They needed to hear that humans weren’t made to serve Sabbath.
But you know what we need to hear? That Sabbath was made for mankind. The other part of Jesus’ line is what we need, because not many of us are legalistic about Sabbath. We just disregard this whole idea of rest, and of a special day for presence and life, as irrelevant. We need to hear that Sabbath is a gift from God. That’s how Exodus speaks of it in another place, that God has given Sabbath (Exodus 16:29). It’s a gift, because it’s how we’re wired. It’s how we work best. It’s how we experience life. See, it’s no wonder Jesus healed people on the Sabbath, because that’s what the Sabbath is for: it’s for healing. It’s for life.
I came across a fascinating statistic. One of the groups of people who live the longest, at least in North America, are the Seventh-Day Adventists. Seventh Day Adventists are a denomination of Christians who are distinctive for its teachings about diet and health, as well as a strict adherence to Saturday as a weekly Sabbath. On average, Adventists live 10 years longer than the average American. 10 years. Now, if you were to take a Sabbath every week for 70 years, how many years of Sabbaths would you have taken? You weren’t expecting math, I know. Wait for it…10 years. The point is, Sabbath rest leads to life in all kinds of ways. Sabbath serves our well-being, it enables us to be the humans God made us to be.
Some will point out that the New Testament nowhere commands Sabbath, even though all the other commands are generally reiterated one way or another. I love what John Mark Comer says about this. He says maybe, in the New Testament perspective, not observing Sabbath isn’t sin. It’s just dumb. He says, maybe eating concrete isn’t sin, it’s just dumb (Comer, Garden City, 195). The point isn’t legalism, the point is that we need rest to be truly human, and setting aside one whole day to encounter God’s presence and experience life is a really, really good way to do that. And so is setting aside time every day for the same thing. The point is, one of the things we desperately, desperately need in our day is to learn how to rest, and Genesis helps show us the way.
4. The Result
I originally wrote and preached this sermon a couple of months before the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has changed so many things. And we have no idea which of these things are lasting and which aren’t. We have no idea what kinds of far-reaching impacts the pandemic will have.
However, it seems to me that a lot of people in my setting experienced more rest and less busyness than ever before. And they liked it. They generally spent more time with their families. On the other hand, others used their time to binge on even more Netflix and their lives became even more oriented around the tyranny of technology.
But for those who found in this tragedy an opportunity to reset priorities and values, what they likely experienced was the life-giving power of God’s Sabbath gift. So if you don’t get anything else from this, get this: to be really human, to be present with God and with others and experience life as God made it to be, rest. Put everything away for one hour a day and one day a week and just…be…present. It’s how God made you to live.
*Biblical insights mainly gleaned from three commentaries: Bruce Waltke (Genesis, 2001), John Walton (NIV Application Commentary, 2001), and Victor Hamilton (New International Commentary on the Old Testament, 1990), as well as Iain Provan (Seriously Dangerous Religion, 2014)
