Our salvation—and the salvation of the entire world—can’t be achieved by the works of our hands. It will only arrive as a gift of God’s grace through the work of Jesus Christ. Keeping the Sabbath of the Lord is designed to bring us, in mind, spirit, and body, to the Lord of the Sabbath—Jesus Christ.

This article is an excerpt from a chapter in Abraham Cho’s forthcoming book Defiant Joy: A Vision for Christian Witness to a World of Anxiety, Loneliness and Outrage. Release date January 2027 with Brazos Press.

The word “sabbath” simply means “to cease.” In our always-on world, it feels more to me like a warm invitation than a stern command. We are invited to cease our anxious doing. To cease our frenzied striving. It is an invitation to lay our desires to rest, not because they need to be repressed, but because in the Sabbath we anticipate the day when they will be filled to overflowing—not as wages owed but as gift undeserved.

To look more closely at the crucial role the Sabbath played in the life of Israel, let’s consider the passages where Sabbath-keeping is commanded by God—the Ten Commandments. I’ve always found it interesting that the Ten Commandments can be found in the Bible in two different places, first in Exodus and again in Deuteronomy. The Exodus account tells the story of the Ten Commandments as they were given to Moses on Mt. Sinai shortly after Israel’s exodus from Egypt and before the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Deuteronomy, on the other hand, takes place on the far side of those barren years in the desert as Israel finally stands on the cusp of entering into the Land of Promise. Between the two accounts, an entire generation of Israelites has died during the forty-year sojourn, and Moses stands on a second mountain to renew the covenant of God with this new generation. Most of them were born free in the wilderness and have no memory of the weight of Egyptian chains, or the sound of the wings of the Angel of Death, or the parting of the Red Sea, or the clouds and lightning at the mountain of God.

Considering these two accounts side by side can be illuminating. Let’s start with the account in Exodus, which reads:

“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

Notice the reason given for the keeping of the Sabbath here. As Heschel noted, it goes back to creation. Israel is to keep a Sabbath because the God of the Bible kept a Sabbath. As a nation, they are to uniquely image the one, true God on the geo-political stage of a pagan, polytheistic world. The manner of their resting, not the manner of their producing, is what would make them peculiar. Their ceasing, not their achieving, is what would set them apart as holy. After all, in a world defined by local gods warring for supremacy, rest would be foolish, dangerous even. But in a world fashioned entirely by the creative delight of an unrivaled, transcendent God, rest becomes a sign of his unimpeachable royalty.

But this raises an interesting question. Why would an infinite, omnipotent God need to rest? Are we to imagine the Great I AM being overcome by divine exhaustion? Did the Almighty need a day to replenish a depleted store of supernatural energy? Was the Sabbath an unfortunate concession needed to overcome the fatigue of God? The vision we get of the Sabbath in Scripture is none of these. For the God of the Bible, rest is not a remedy for sapped strength. It is a response of overflowing joy. A God of infinite capacity “ceases” for no other reason than to be overjoyed. To look at the rhythms of his creation and say, “That never gets old.” To say each day, as G.K. Chesterton so aptly put it, to the sun and the moon and the daisies of the field, “That was great. Do it again.” It is a day of divine beatitude, of divine delight.

But the Sabbath is not merely God’s response to a completed creation. It is the response that consummates creation itself. The South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han puts it this way:

The rest enjoyed on the Sabbath consecrates the work of creation. It is not mere idleness. Rather, it is an essential part of creation….Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion. Without it, the creation would be incomplete. God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. It is the essence of the creation.^[1]

Without the arrival of the Sabbath on that seventh day, a vast, gaping void would have hung in the middle of the created order. The cosmos was incomplete without the delight of the Sabbath. In a sense then, all the other days are a pilgrimage to the Sabbath^[2]. They are the ordinary steps along a journey that take on the quality of sacredness because of their destination.

It is no wonder, then, that rather than simply prohibiting labor on the Sabbath, God, the Great Lawmaker, would break out into benediction right in the middle of the legal document he was chiseling into stone. The Fourth Commandment is the only commandment that morphs into a blessing: “Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” As Heschel puts it, he couldn’t help but add to the command “the blessing of his delight and the crown of sanctity.”

A God who rests, it turns out, poses a theological problem only for those who have been conditioned to see rest solely as a remedial act for diminished power and production. In the enchanted world of Scripture, rest is part of the very essence of God, his divine joy in all that he created. Rest is primary. It is the purpose, the telos, the climax, the pinnacle of time.

I like to imagine Adam and Eve, gasping to life from the dust of the earth on the sixth day, and immediately receiving an enormous assignment from their Maker. Fill the earth and subdue it. Tend the Garden of God and protect it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and the creatures that crawl on the land. Be fruitful and multiply. Endowed with the role of vice-regents and co-creators, they were called to draw out under their hand all the latent potential that God had tucked away into his creation. Genesis 2 seems to go out of its way to draw our attention to raw materials like gold and aromatic resin and onyx, buried in the ground, waiting to be discovered and put to use. I imagine them taking up this charge with big, solemn eyes and an overwhelming sense of both dignity and responsibility.

And so, I can see them getting to bed early on their first night on the Earth so they can rise with the sun and get started on their big, serious work. And because they are just a day old at this point, they wake up, ready to jump in with all the energy in the world. But it is the seventh day. The Sabbath. And all they are allowed to do in this garden of untapped potential and unrealized possibility is to enjoy it, to delight in it, to be overjoyed at it all. They are not allowed to develop or improve or optimize a thing. For a couple of two-day-olds, an entire day of ceasing would have felt like half a lifetime. And the greatest wonder of all to me is that, almost certainly, they would have bumped into the God who still walked in his garden in the cool of the day. And I can see him laughing at the amazement on their faces as he invites them over to sit with him and share in his joy. The work of fashioning the world could wait. I like to think that the work could only proceed after Adam and Eve had learned to rise into it from pure joy.

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