consecrates us now through the reading and the preaching of his word. Our sermon comes to us from Exodus chapter 20. It's a familiar chapter. It's where we hear the 10 commandments. And today we're going to be reading verses 8 through 11, which is the fourth commandment. Page 61. in the ESV Bibles. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh is a Sabbath. to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who's within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Life can get busy. I think we all can agree about that, especially if you have a family, or if you're a student in school, or if you have a demanding job. Maybe it's all of the above. All of these things are examples of what we call work. Whether you're being paid by employers, or paying your schools, or not being paid at home, but managing your families and your households, work is work. And work is a good thing, because God created work. When man fell into sin, though, it not only affected our very nature, but it affected our work. started thinking about work in a different way after we fell into sin, started calling work other names like labor, toil, chores, drudgery, the daily grind. And when we experience this, we long for a break from our labor, from our toil, from our chores, from the daily grind. We long for rest. We desire rest. But what is rest? Well, certainly rest can involve sleeping. It can involve relaxing. It can involve recreating. But it's much deeper. than these definitions. There's a spiritual dimension to resting. There's this concept of resting in the Lord, which is expressed in worship. And this sense of rest is summed up in one word. It's a word that we find throughout the scriptures. The word Sabbath. This morning we're going to focus on the Sabbath, especially what it says about the Sabbath in the fourth commandment. And we're going to consider three parts of this commandment. First, the command to remember. Second, the specific restrictions and how they've been interpreted. And last, the spiritual reason. for the commandment, why we rest in worship, who fulfilled that rest and thus deserves our worship and how we're supposed to rest and worship as his people. Fourth commandment begins with a command to remember, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. The word remember has an important biblical meaning. It means acting upon a previous commitment. We've already seen how God remembers, if you look back in the book of Exodus, how he remembered his people in their slavery. He didn't forget about them. God doesn't have memory lapses. He remembered His promise and acted upon it at just the right time. So if Israel is called to remember the Sabbath, then Israel is also being called to act upon the command that is given to them. And they're being called to keep the Sabbath holy. How are they supposed to do that, though? Which brings us to the restriction they're supposed to remember. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. The restriction involves work. Six days are set apart for work, but not the seventh. That day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. And not only for you, but this also describes the entire household in Israel. Your son, your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, your livestock, even the sojourner, the traveler who is in your gates. Back in chapter 16, Israel had a dress rehearsal for this commandment. When God sent them that bread from heaven, the manna, Six days, God says, you may go out and gather the manna, but not on the seventh day. That was a Sabbath. That was a day of solemn rest. But not everybody was on board with that commandment, for on the seventh day, some of the people actually went out to gather manna. And what did they find? They found nothing. The Lord wasn't pleased with their disobedience. He says, how long will you refuse to keep my commandments and my laws? See, the Lord has given you the Sabbath. Therefore, on the sixth day, he gave you bread for two days. Are we really any different? God is commanding me to rest, but I have so much stuff to do. But God gives us six days to take care of our stuff so we can rest on the seventh day. Why does God mention the whole family? Because even in a society that was governed by fathers, a patriarchal society, the rest was not just for him. It was for everybody. For 400 years, Israel never got any rest. Think about it. They were slaves. They never got a day off. They were physically worn out day after day, and they were spiritually deprived of worshiping God. So this fourth commandment is gracious. He's giving them an opportunity that they haven't had in 400 years, a day of rest for their bodies, an opportunity to be replenished in their souls. You're probably asking yourself a question. What is being restricted here? The manna doesn't apply to me, right? That ended when the Israelites entered the land. What can't I do on the Sabbath? Well, Exodus 20 doesn't tell us. But other parts of the Old Testament fill in the blanks. Exodus 35.3 talks about kindling fires, that those were prohibited. In Jeremiah 17, it talks about carrying burdens out of the home were forbidden. In Nehemiah 13, engaging in commerce, buying and selling in the marketplace was prohibited. But you know what? Even though God gave them those restrictions, those were too general for some people. So generation after generation, people who interpreted the Old Testament started filling in all the blanks. Kindling a fire, was applied to lighting a stove or in the 20th century starting a vehicle or flipping on a light switch. Carrying a burden was applied to carrying anything out of the home. These were sincere efforts to apply the fourth commandment to daily life. And this is what Orthodox Jews do today. That was the Old Testament. We don't practice those things. We don't worry about driving or flipping our light switches on and off, right? We carry all sorts of things on Sunday. And we scoff at people who are so trivial about these things. Such legalists, right? Pharisees. We applaud Jesus for exposing the legalism of the Pharisees, for criticize the disciples for picking grains on the Sabbath day because they considered the grain picking and the opening up of those kernels harvesting. None of us wants to be legalists like the Pharisees. So how do we apply this commandment to our situation? The answer is found in verse 11, which is the reason we're given the commandment. Six days, the Lord made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them. And he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, God blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy, which tells us a few things. This tells us that the Sabbath is rooted in creation. And if it's rooted in creation, then it's for all times and places. So whether or not the church in Genesis rested on the seventh day, which we're not told, that day is being set aside for God's people throughout the Old Testament. It also tells us something else. It tells us that our Sabbath is based on God's Sabbath. This is why we rest and worship on the seventh day. We work six days and rest one because God works six days and rested on the seventh day, which raises an important question. What does it mean for God to rest? Did God need to catch his breath after all of that hard work? Did He grow weary from creating the heavens and the earth? And we know the answer, right? The answer is God never gets tired. Isaiah 40 says that God never grows weary. He doesn't need to rest. He's all-powerful. So then why does it say that He rested? Ever wonder that? Because rest can mean something else. not refreshment, not catching your breath, but for God, it can mean enthronement. Psalm 132 talks about this. The Psalmist calls God to remember what David did, how he vowed not to rest until he built a dwelling place for God, a place where God's people could worship him. And then in verse eight, Psalm 132 says, Arise, O Lord, and go to your resting place. That wasn't the place where God went for a nap, where He went to lie down and catch His breath. No, that was the place where God was enthroned over the cherubim, right? A place where His people would go to worship Him. A place where He rested, where He was enthroned. that was in the tabernacle, and later in the temple, where God's rest, His enthronement was symbolized by the Ark of the Covenant, a symbol of the heavenly reality, where God occupies a heavenly throne, and He's exalted over the whole creation. And because of this, we are called to worship Him. And by worshiping Him, We enter his rest, but there's more for just as God entered his rest on the seventh day, he called his image bearers to also rest on the seventh day, not just to worship him, but to be enthroned in glory. Revelation 321 says the one who conquers I will grant him to sit with me on my throne as I also conquered and sat down with my father on his throne. We're called to rest to sit with our Lord on thrones. Adam was called to do this. He was created to conquer his test. He was given that test in the Garden of Eden. And had he accomplished that, had he passed that test, he would have entered God's rest. But something got in the way. That three-letter word, sin. And none of Adam and Eve's descendants could enter God's rest on their own. None of us could ever be enthroned in heaven beside our Lord unless God solved our problem. And that's exactly what he did. That's why he sent his son, Jesus, who's always been God, but became man who took on human nature at just the right time, who passed the test that the first man failed to pass. By living a perfect life, by obeying God's Word perfectly, by paying the price for our sins, He fulfilled God's rest so that we could enter it as well. How are we supposed to rest and worship knowing what this means. There's three ways I'm going to suggest to us first by embracing God's rest. Hebrews 4 urges us to enter God's rest today. So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works just as God did from his were called to enter By faith, by not trying to earn it on our own, that's impossible. Heidelberg Catechism 103 says that every day of my life I rest from my evil ways. Let the Lord work in me through his Holy Spirit and so begin in this life the eternal Sabbath. That's what's in store for us everlasting life. Our entrance into that rest is when we believe the gospel. When we believe we we receive what Jesus has earned for us. So we enter God's rest by embracing it. We also enter God's best by worshiping on the day of rest. The seventh day was a Saturday. That was the day, the original day of rest in the Old Testament. That was for the people of Israel. And Jesus fulfilled that day. For after he died on the cross, he spent the Sabbath resting in his death. He rested from the work of redemption, but he rose on the first day of the week, or as some would say, the eighth day, which is why the early church worshiped on Sunday, not Saturday, why they received the sacrament of the Lord's supper on the first day of the week, why they took offerings like we do on the first day of the week. It's because of the resurrection, the assurance that we will enter God's rest. which is the first part of Heidelberg Catechism 103. And that especially on the festive day of rest, I diligently attend the assembly of God's people to learn what God's word teaches, to participate in the sacraments, to pray to the Lord publicly, to bring Christian offerings to the poor. The catechism is reflecting upon the finished work of Jesus Christ and how we enter his rest on the first day of the week and how that plays out in our worship. Finally, we enter God's rest by resting so we can worship. Westminster Confession tells us to refrain from works, words and thoughts about worldly employments and recreations, which is a pretty strong statement. It helps us focus on. The Lord's Day on this day of rest, but there's another way of thinking about this. We keep the Sabbath when we worship and when we rest in order to worship. It's less specific, but it's more open-ended. It allows us a variety of activities on the Sabbath, as long as those activities don't interfere with what we're supposed to be doing, which is worshiping. And as long as those activities don't get in the way of the gospel, Paul says in Colossians 2. Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food or drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. He's not saying here that the Sabbath is completely done away with because we know that the Sabbath was instituted at creation. There is still a Sabbath rest awaiting us when we pass from this life into the next. But Paul's saying something else. In Colossians 2, he's saying that the Old Testament restrictions are to be done away with. But the principles behind those restrictions should inform our practice. Working and creating burdens goes against the very meaning of the day. Because this is a day of blessing rather than a day of burden. The blessings come when we come to worship God, when we arrange our days so that we can worship God. That's where we receive the blessings. But this is difficult in the modern world. Because sometimes work is out of our control. Some jobs are essential to our society. And some of our jobs sometimes require us to work on Sundays. So we need to use wisdom when we apply this commandment. Because if we get convinced that we need to keep the Sabbath and we're working on a Sunday quitting our job without a replacement income. is not wise. That's breaking another commandment, the eighth commandment. It's better to work toward an improvement in our situation, trying to get off work on Sundays. And if necessary, do that while looking for another job. But the goal is to worship God on his day, because when we do, We experience a foretaste of heaven, and we grow because He feeds us. This is the only place where we can get the means of grace that He offers, His Word preached, and His sacrament, until we grow as God's people, until that day when we pass from this life into the next, and we fully enter His rest. May that day come soon. Amen.