QQ57-58. Which is the fourth commandment and what is required by it?

A (57). The fourth commandment is, Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath-day, and hallowed it.

A (58). The fourth commandment requireth the keeping holy to God such set times as he hath appointed in his Word; expressly one whole day in seven, to be a holy Sabbath to himself.

As the two proof-texts corresponding to these two answers suggest, the Fourth Commandment (just like all the others) were repeated to the second generation that would enter the land of Canaan. However (also, as with all the others), in Deuteronomy there is not a mere repetition of the law, but an unpacking of the importance for life in the land. That foreshadows even our Christian life in the land we inhabit. I want to frame the entire three weeks (six questions) on the Fourth Commandment with these words from Walter Chantry’s book Call The Sabbath a Delight. A generation ago now, he wrote this:

“Ours has become an antinomian society. It is impatient of laws, of rules and regulations. People will respond angrily to demands for discipline or sacrifice. Instantaneous solutions are demanded for all social ills. Charismatics are popular just because they offer immediate miraculous answers to all of our woes through one emotional experience. That is much more attractive to modern man than a day of worship, study, prayer and service week after week.”1

We will have more to say about the cultural backdrop and the contrast that emerges from it. For now, we want to begin in the scriptural case for this Commandment as moral law, answering to a basic element of man’s relationship to God and to each other. If there was a “big idea” to this, it would be short and sweet. God knew what He was doing! That seems easy enough to affirm, and yet not many professing Christians believe in this commandment. They either do not think it applies today, or do not find its demands very attractive.

Our outline will cover that, 1. the Sabbath is to be kept holy; 2. the Sabbath remains as moral law; and 3. the Sabbath rest is a ceasing and refreshing. 

The Sabbath is to be Kept Holy

The word “keeping” here may not be the same as for the priestly “guarding” (שָׁמַר), but it is still a very “religious” word that means “consecreate” or “set apart” (קָדַשׁ), from the adjective “holy”(קֹדֶשׁ). And so to “sanctify” or “keep holy” this day is to set it aside, to ensure that it remains special, and is treated as an honor to the Lord. Now the first thing to notice about the Sabbath is God’s own initiation:

“So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy” (Gen. 2:3).

We will come back to this verse in its whole context shortly. For now, just notice how God—who alone is holy in Himself—nevertheless makes a day holy. So the linking action item between Genesis 2:3 and Exodus 20:8 is “God … made it holy”; Now you, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” And at the heart of keeping this day special and separated and protected is to recognize that before we can talk about the Sabbath’s blessing to man, there is the glory to God in the time spent with Him. If we honor God with a tenth of our income (when it all belongs to Him) surely we can honor Him with a seventh of our time (which also all belongs to Him). 

Six days are required for the seventh. There are two parts to the Sabbath command, and we typically gloss right over the first part. Directly following the words “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” it adds, “Six days you shall labor, and do all your work.” One does not sanctify the day of rest unless he has already done things on the other six days that protect that special day. One theologian explains why in saying that, in Adam, we are “wired for works.” This means that we are always anxious to get everything done. But every-thing is a lot of things! Part of the rationale given is that by assembling together for worship was dependence on God. He was showing the families of Israel that neither their work life, nor their home life, could perfect them:

“You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, ‘Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you” (Ex. 31:13).

God’s people have always been designed to need the means of grace in the assembly. We will come back to what is required in this “rest,” but for now just get the theology of that rest.

The Sabbath Remains as Moral Law

In the first place, the Sabbath is a creation ordinance. It was on the seventh day of what? Creation. 

“And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation” (Gen. 2:2-3).

If it was a creation ordinance, it is moral law. John Owen’s argument that Genesis 2:2-3 is an institution text is worth noting: “Not that he kept it holy to himself, which in no sense the divine nature is capable of; nor that he celebrated that which in itself was holy, as we sanctify his name, which the act of an inferior towards a superior; but that he set it apart to sacred use authoritatively, requiring us to sanctify it in that use obediently.”2

The second reason that the Sabbath belongs to the moral law is that it was instituted for man as man—remember, not merely man as Israelite priest? 

“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mk. 2:27). He does not say, “The Sabbath was made for Israel — not Israel for the Sabbath.”

Now Calvin did not develop this thinking; and so a tradition emerged among the Continental Reformed, led by Johannes Cocceius, that followed this notion that the Sabbath (while patterned after God’s rest) was not instituted until Sinai and thus it was for the Jews. Now we’re going to push back against that minority report among the Reformed, by remembering what the Jews forgot to observe, when they were collecting the manna on their way to Mount Sinai. 

“On the seventh day some of the people went out to gather, but they found none. And the LORD said to Moses, “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 gives you bread for two days. Remain each of you in his place; let no one go out of his place on the seventh day.” So the people rested on the seventh day” (Ex. 16:27-30).

Sabbath? you may be saying to yourself: What Sabbath! The law had not been given through Moses yet! Exactly. The Sabbath existed from creation. The Fourth Commandment called them to “Remember” what was already established. Now where did they get this idea? We must keep in mind that natural law which Paul says was written on the conscience in all from the beginning in Romans 2:14-15.

Objection 1. Hebrews 4 tells us that the Sabbath gives way to the rest of the gospel. Therefore the Sabbath rest that “remains” is not the old commandment, but the new creation. 

Reply Obj. 1. There is no need to see the New Covenant significance and moral law aspect as an either-or scenario. Hebrews 4 can be pointing to the gospel meaning as ultimate, but without doing away with the remaining day of worship. At the very least, there is nothing logically incoherent in this position.

Objection 2. But what sort of blessing could Adam have gotten from the Sabbath as a command? This was before the curse, and rest implies exhaustion or futility, which belong to the curse. 

Reply Obj. 2. It is a much debated point what sort of life Adam would have had for obedience in the first place, and so the nature of how he would have observed the Sabbath becomes speculative. One can say without contradiction that there can be rest (as Hebrews 4 points forward to a sinless state of rest) from his work (Gen. 2:15) without it implying any of the sort of relief that we derive from rest in our age: relief from elements of the curse. 

Objection 3. This law was repeated in several ways to Israel and with stipulations that all parties agree belonged to the ceremonial or judicial law. Therefore it cannot be moral law.

Reply Obj. 3. It is true that there are ceremonial and civil dimensions of the Sabbath. But as Chantry points out, this is also true about all of the Ten Commandments, most obviously with the Fifth, so that “care must be taken in the study of most Old Testament passages to separate moral law from ceremonial and judicial additions.”3 And besides, we had already been supplied with the category by Turretin about those mixed precepts. 

The Sabbath Rest is a Ceasing and Refreshing

Dabney divides the Reformed view of the Sabbath’s rationale into three parts: (1) that we cease from our own works that are submerged in self-righteousness; (2) that we assemble for public worship; (3) that we extend the mercy of this rest to all under our stewardship.4

One of the issues that runs through any discussion of the Sabbath is the paradoxical nature of the Sabbath being rooted in the Old Creation and yet always oriented toward the New Creation. This is a deep Christian paradox. It is a biblical paradox. It is a thing that only strikes us as a contradiction when we have little interest in seeing the whole. But this deep and wide theology of the Sabbath stays with us when we have all of our controversial questions about (for example) whether it’s Saturday or Sunday, or all of our practical questions like, “

Since this is a “striving” (Heb. 4:11) or an “entering” (Heb. 4:3, 5, 6, 10), one might even use the language of other Puritans, like Watson or Edwards, in speaking of a “pressing into” or “taking of” the kingdom.

As “the law is spiritual” (Rom. 7:14), so is each commandment spiritual. So it is with the Sabbath. A crucial Old Testament passage orients us to the new creational core of the Sabbath that was built into it from the beginning. 

“If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken” (Isa. 58:13-14).

The obvious problem here is our own incredulity. Many have us have never tasted and seen that the Lord is good for exactly this promise. The ultimate fulfillment is the eternal state. On that there is rarely any debate. And yet there are foretastes in this life of a sweetness of fellowship and a comradery in spiritual arms, such that, if only others could experience it, they would want to do nothing else on the other days of the week either. We would never want the Lord’s Day to end.

Heidelberg Q.103 asks, “What does God require in the Fourth Commandment?” Answer: 

“In the first place, that the ministry of the Gospel and schools be maintained; and that I, especially on the day of rest, diligently attend church to learn the Word of God, to use the Holy Sacraments, to call publicly upon the Lord, and to give Christian alms. In the second place, 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.”

APPLICATION 

Use 1. EVANGELICAL USE. Do we “keep” or “guard” the other six days with all our hearts, souls, mind, and strength, in a way that God would be honored on His day and that we would gain all that God means for us in His means of grace on that day?

Use 2. CIVIL USE. There has long been a tug of war between the modern economy and the rest for God’s people on the Lord’s Day. Not only those who manage labor, but those who organize other leisure activity (whether sports teams or other clubs) are quick to capture the allegiance of children away from the gathering of the church.

The Sabbath is a divine call to, “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness’” (Ex. 5:1).

Use 3. DIRECTIVE USE. We can see a program for the building of a church—any church. And we can see this by reviewing those two things in Heidelberg Q103 being MAINTAINED, namely the MINISTRY OF THE GOSPEL and SCHOOLS. And then four things to do: “that I, especially on the day of rest, diligently attend church to learn the Word of God, to use the Holy Sacraments, to call publicly upon the Lord, and to give Christian alms.” We may divide this between those duties which all Christians share in common, and then those two things to be “maintained” by the officers of the church.

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1. Walter Chantry, Call the Sabbath a Delight (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), 12.

2. Owen, Works, 19:298.

3. Chantry, Call the Sabbath a Delight, 25.

4. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 372.