Although the moral-spiritual benefits of the Sabbath are uppermost, the benefit of the day’s physical rest is important, too. Indeed, the Sabbath’s physical rest facilitates and complements the believer’s resting upon Christ by faith. That heaven has granted to the beasts this rest proves the reality of physical benefit for both man and beast. How? Because the beast enjoys only the bodily benefit.

Last year one of our grandsons decided to try a new culinary delight. He ate a roly-poly. Yeah, the bug that rolls itself up when threatened by a hungry two-year-old. His mom began to suspect the crime when he came inside with dirt around his mouth. Following an initial denial, careful interrogation elicited a confession that, yes, he ate a roly-poly. She admonished him gently: “Son – look at me – do not eat roly-polies. That is not being merciful to the beasts. . . . That will hurt them.” Her son repeated after his Momma: “I will eat no more ‘oly-olies.’”

Long after my wife and I had finished enjoying this incident which our daughter-in-law (DIL) was kind enough to record on Marco Polo for our edification, it dawned on me that she had struck a chord that our forefathers understood very well from rural, agricultural life. That is, the fourth commandment’s merciful provision of physical rest both for mankind and for what was often called “the brute creation” or “beasts that labor.” The Sabbath’s rest for domestic animals constitutes the prime example in Scripture for what our DIL expressed as “being merciful to the beasts.”

In Western culture today, with so many sedentary occupations and a general lack of significant physical exertion on the part of great numbers of the populace (the latter is problematic), it’s very easy to overlook the issue of physical rest in the text of the commandment. Certainly, the greater benefit of the day is to be found in the believer’s spiritual resting upon Christ by faith, which is expressed particularly in corporate worship. But the moral obligation to provide rest for domestic beasts (as well as to mankind) supports the real – albeit the lesser – benefit of physical rest on the Sabbath. In Exodus 20, we read:

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and 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.[1]

In terms of the brute creation, Exodus 20 mentions only “your cattle” in its rendering of the fourth commandment. But Deuteronomy 5’s account is more robust on this point: “. . . in it you shall not do any work, you or your son . . . or your ox or your donkey or any of your cattle. . . .”[2] Clearly, the commandment includes the domestic animals of one’s household in observing the day of rest.

Two centuries ago, Christians that wrote on the subject of Sabbath observance often included the mention of rest for the brute creation. Three examples will suffice (with exceptions for legitimate works of necessity or piety such as the milking of dairy cattle or the employing of beasts of burden to carry worshipers to the house of God).

In 1831 a Presbyterian minister in Alabama addressed the blessing of the Sabbath “to man in his temporal pursuits.” In his sermon preached on December 25th, the Rev. Joseph Parks Cunningham (1799-1833) declared the day to be “a merciful mitigation of the curse pronounced on man for his transgression—‘That in the sweat of his face he shall eat bread.’” He continued: “Neither men nor beasts are able to endure unceasing exertion. It will soon crush the most vigorous constitution, and destroy the soundest intellect.”[3] Cunningham ministered in one of the highest cotton-producing areas of the South, where both men (especially the slaves) and beasts were greatly in need of the weekly Sabbath rest.

In 1835 the Virginia Sabbath Society published a pamphlet whose writer highlighted the temporal benefits of the holy day as “either Physical, Intellectual, or Civil.” He argued that the benefit of physical rest on the Sabbath applied both to men and to one’s animals:

. . . unless the Sabbath is necessary for the repose of the physical powers . . . why did the divine command include beasts that labor, as well as men? ‘Thou shalt not do any work—thou—nor thy cattle.’ The moral and intellectual benefits of the Sabbath can be enjoyed only by moral agents; bodily repose, then, is the only possible reason why a Sabbath was secured to beasts that labor.[4]

While the writer acknowledged that laboring beasts received no moral or intellectual benefit from the Sabbath, the fact of their inclusion in the commandment proved there was, in fact, genuine physical benefit (“bodily repose”) to the day’s rest.

In the same year the Religious Herald newspaper of Virginia Baptists printed a statement made by a leading physician before the British House of Commons. Dr. Farre reported on his long-term observations concerning the uses and abuses of the Sabbath. He affirmed that

One day in seven by the bounty of Providence, is . . . as a day of compensation, to perfect by its repose the animal system. You may easily determine this question . . . by trying it on beasts of burden. Take that fine animal, the horse, and work him to the full extent of his powers every day in the week, or give him rest one day in seven, and you will soon perceive, by the superior vigor with which he performs his functions the other six days, that this rest is necessary to his well being.[5]

Farre considered that in the “bountiful provision of Providence for the preservation of human life” the Sabbath was to be “numbered amongst the natural duties, if the preservation of life be admitted to be a duty.”[6]

Such writers in that period perceived what we may miss: that although the moral-spiritual benefits of the Sabbath are uppermost, the benefit of the day’s physical rest is important, too. Indeed, the Sabbath’s physical rest facilitates and complements the believer’s resting upon Christ by faith. That heaven has granted to the beasts this rest proves the reality of physical benefit for both man and beast. How? Because the beast enjoys only the bodily benefit.

Of course, the harder one works on the other six days of the week has much to do with one’s appreciation of the Sabbath rest – as did a friend of mine years ago with a lawn service in Montgomery, Alabama – who greatly needed and appreciated his weekly rest day.

I’m unsure whether we should go to the roly-poly for an example of hard work, but with certainty let us “Go to the ant” (Proverbs 6:6).

Forrest L. Marion is a ruling elder in the First Presbyterian Church (PCA), Crossville, Tennessee.

[1] Ex. 20:8-11, New American Standard Bible [emphasis added].

[2] Deut. 5:14, NASB [emphasis added].

[3] J. P. Cunningham, Man’s Interest in the Sabbath. A Sermon, Delivered in Concord Church, Greene County, December 25, 1831 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1832), 11-12, including quotes [emphasis in original].

[4] Horace Hooker, Lecture on the Temporal Benefits of the Sabbath (Richmond, Va., 1835), 4-6, including quotes [emphasis in original].

[5] “The Sabbath,” Religious Herald [Richmond, Va.], Jul. 17, 1835, including quote.

[6] Religious Herald, Jul. 17, 1835, including quotes.