Recently Giglio made news, on social media anyway, by announcing “For two Sundays, August 26th + September 2nd, our House will be stepping away from our normal weekend routine and into the rhythm of Sabbath.” This announcement produced howls of protest. I would be among the critics of this move but before we get to criticism there are some things to appreciate about what Giglio said. 

The last time we saw Atlanta Pastor Louie Giglio it was January 2013 and he was embroiled in controversy because he had been invited by President Obama to participate in his second inauguration. It had been discovered that Giglio held the biblical and historic Christian position that same-sex (homosexual) desire and sex is sinand he opposed the re-definition of marriage to include same-sex marriages. Washington Post journalist Natalie Jennings called his opposition to homosexuality and same-sex marriage “inflammatory.” If she thinks that what Giglio says about nature, marriage, and sin is inflammatory wait until she reads Romans 1–3.

More recently Giglio made news, on social media anyway, by announcing “For two Sundays, August 26th + September 2nd, our House will be stepping away from our normal weekend routine and into the rhythm of Sabbath.” This announcement produced howls of protest. I would be among the critics of this move but before we get to criticism there are some things to appreciate about what Giglio said. The first of those is his recognition “that God intended to weave Sabbath rest into the fabric of creation.” This is quite right and something that virtually all evangelicals (QIRE) and fundamentalists (QIRC) miss. Because they are the children of the Pietists and Revivalists (and behind them, the Anabaptists), American evangelicals tend to have neither a doctrine of creation nor a distinction between nature and grace. For evangelicals, salvation swallows everything whole. It is almost as if God never said, “Let there be” and he only said, “It is finished.” In truth, however, he said both things. In historic Reformed theology grace does not destroy nature nor “perfect” it (Thomas Aquinas) rather it renews human nature in salvation but nature remains. It is this swallowing of nature, the obliterating of nature that marks the over-realized eschatology of most evangelicals.

The fundamentalists (used here in the post-Machen sense of the word) think that creation refers entirely to the length of the creation days. In their approach to Scripture, the main thing for which Genesis is good seem to be to establish the age of the earth by adding up the chronologies and to refute 19th century geology and paleontology. They spend hours defending “creationism” while breaking the Sabbath at the creation museum (open from 12:00 PM to 8:00 PM on Sundays).

In Recovering the Reformed Confession I described these two approaches to theology, piety, and practice as the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience (QIRE) and the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Certainty (QIRC). Neither of them understands nature and grace properly.

Properly, the Reformed have understood and confessed that the Sabbath is a creation ordinance and pattern. The Sabbath was instituted before the fall. It is the culmination of the creation narrative. In it God is figuratively said to “rest” (Gen 2:2). Exodus 20:8 says that the post-fall Sabbath is an imitation of the divine “rest.” In other words, God is said to have rested, as it were, as an example for his image bearers and as a testimony to the eternal rest and fellowship with God that was offered to Adam on condition of his perfect obedience to God’s holy law. That fellowship was symbolized by the “tree of life” (Gen 2:9) and the consequences for disobedience were symbolized by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:17). One promised life, the other death. After the fall, we were to rest in anticipation of the rest that comes to those saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Under Moses they had those gospel promises under types and shadows but under Christ we have their reality. We are all members of the same church (1 Cor 10:1–4).

The Sabbath is just as basic to the creational pattern as marriage (Matt 19:4, 8; Mark 2:27). In that regard, the NFL has been a threat to the family and to Christian piety rather longer than same-sex marriage. Before the 1950s, college football was king and professional football was more like a semi-pro league. In the 1950s, however, professional football moved to Sundays to fill television time and the rest, as they say, is history.

Giglio further characterizes the Sabbath with three appropriate terms: “stop,” “rest,” and “remember.” This is quite right. These ideas are embedded in the Sabbath. It is about stopping the regular business of our daily life. It is about resting from our work and resting in Christ and in his finished work for us. The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) 103 we confess that on the Christian Sabbath, inaugurated in the resurrection of Christ (the formal beginning of the New Creation) means “that all the days of my life I rest from my evil works, allow the Lord to work in me by His Spirit, and thus begin in this life the everlasting Sabbath.” He is right to say that the Sabbath is, in this way, “counter-cultural” and that on the Sabbath we remember essential truths and realities. It is a time of re-orientation.

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