The Sabbath Way: Finding the Rest Your Soul Craves by Travis Westნიმუში

Can We Understand the Gospel Without Understanding Sabbath?

As several of the previous days’ Bible passages have made clear, Sabbath rest and flourishing is not reserved only for humans. God wove Sabbath into the fabric of creation itself (see Genesis 2:1-3), and all of creation received Sabbath as a birthright from the Creator. To exist is to belong to the Sabbath community, the community of all creation.

Leviticus 25 applies the Sabbath’s pattern of six days of work and one day of rest to the cultivation of land—six years of planting and harvest, then one year of letting the land rest. The fruitfulness of the earth cannot be extracted without ceasing. Just like humans’ ability to work and create requires regular rhythms of sleep, the land’s ability to produce is dependent upon rhythmic seasons of rest. The sabbatical year provided that rest.

Leviticus 25 then applies the basic principles of Sabbath to the very structures of society in a radical social, economic, and humanitarian vision that the Bible calls the Year of Jubilee. Celebrated every fifty years (one year after a “week” of sabbatical years—seven cycles of seven years), it mandated the forgiveness of debts, the restoration of ancestral property, the liberation of the enslaved, the institution of economic protections against exploitation, and rest from land cultivation, reserving wild produce for the vulnerable. The Year of Jubilee was the application of the Sabbath’s core message to the social, economic, political, and religious structures of Israelite society. To quote Jesus and Isaiah, the Year of Jubilee was “good news to the poor” (Isaiah 61:1; Luke 4:18, NRSV).

The core message of the Sabbath is that everyone is created in God’s image and beloved of God, that no one can earn God’s love or grace, and that delight, rest, abundance, and joy are the birthrights of all creation. When we look at Jesus’ words in Luke 4, as he quotes the prophet Isaiah to inaugurate his public ministry, we see that the Sabbath provided the template for the Year of Jubilee, which provided the template for Jesus’ mission in the world. In other words, to understand the core message of the gospel, we must first understand the Sabbath.

And this prompts us to ask a very important question: If we aren’t practicing the Sabbath, are we able to truly comprehend the gospel? Put another way, if we aren’t regularly letting go of our need to achieve, to earn our way, to prove our worth, to compete with others, and to worry about the future, and if we aren’t regularly pausing to receive the grace of God, to remember that we are enough, to join in God’s delight, and to bask in our belovedness, then how will the gospel move from idea to reality in our hearts and lives?

The Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments for a reason. It is central to God’s vision of human and creation’s flourishing. To reject a gift is to reject the giver. Sabbath is one of God’s greatest gifts. Will you receive it?

If you found this plan helpful and are intrigued by what a Sabbath-oriented life might look like, you can find out more about the Sabbath and how to practice it in my book The Sabbath Way.