Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace
The Sabbath Rest
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Pentateuch
Genre: Lessons with Q & A
Lesson: 56
Track: 56
Dictation Name: RR172AD56
Date: Early 70s
Let us worship God. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before His presence with singing. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving and into His courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name; for the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endureth to all generations.
Let us pray.
Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, fix our hearts on Thee and Thy Word, that by Thy Spirit, we may be more than conquerors, that we may see more than the world sees, that we may know the truth, and that the truth shall set us free. Thou hast called us to be Thy people, Thy army in an alien world. Make us strong and courageous that we may fight a good fight and conquer in the face of all things. Bless us to this purpose, in Christ’s name, amen.
Our scripture is Leviticus 23:1-8. “The Sabbath Rest.” Leviticus 23:1-8, “The Sabbath Rest.”
“1 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,
2 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, concerning the feasts of the Lord, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts.
3 Six days shall work be done: but the seventh day is the sabbath of rest, an holy convocation; ye shall do no work therein: it is the Sabbath of the Lord in all your dwellings.
4 These are the feasts of the Lord, even holy convocations, which ye shall proclaim in their seasons.
5 In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is the Lord’s Passover.
6 And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread unto the Lord: seven days ye must eat unleavened bread.
7 In the first day ye shall have an holy convocation: ye shall do no servile work therein.
8 But ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord seven days: in the seventh day is an holy convocation: ye shall do no servile work therein.”
God’s laws in dealing with our actions, include also our use of things—our use of our bodies, the world around us, one another, and also and emphatically, our use of time. The Laws of the Sabbath give us laws concerning time, as do also all the laws concerning work and worship and all things. In every area of life and thought, we live in time, and we are responsible to God for the use of time. The Hebrew word for the sabbath is related to a verb meaning, “to cease, desist, or to rest.” Now ancient paganism had periodic days of observances for the gods and for kings, but these had a different focus than the Sabbath. They honored gods; they honored sacred kings, whereas in God’s Law, we honor not a tax-collecting king or gods, but celebrate the providence of God.
Before the giving of the Law, we have an event in the Wilderness which sets for the meaning of the Sabbath. In Exodus16, we have an account of manna. We are told that every sixth day, God gave enough manna for two days, to teach Israel that man shall no live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God. They were cared for by the manna. The manna, which otherwise would not last, would last for the Sabbath day.
Moses declares the meaning of manna in Deuteronomy 8:1-3:
“1 All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers.
2 And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.
3 And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.”
In other words, the meaning of manna was closely linked with the meaning of Sabbath. You stop from your labors.
Now, labor historically, almost until our day, has been inseparable from survival. People have had to work to survive, and even today in most of the world, if people will not eat, they are dead in a matter of days. Their life is marginal. The idea of a welfare system is new, and only in Christian civilization has there been charity to help the poor. As a result, work has always meant survival.
Now, consider the implications of that, coming as it did in antiquity, in Moses’ day, for God to declare that one day out of seven you were not to work, that there were many other holy days in the year when you were not to work; that one year out of seven you were not to work. This had far-reaching implications. It required faith, it required a trust in the providence of God, that if you lived according to His Law, if you kept His Sabbaths, you would be provided for. You work would not only give a sufficiency, but a surplus. Now, this was a difficult thing to believe.
Our world has replaced the Sabbath with leisure time. In the process, it has destroyed the concept of work and the relationship of work and rest, so we have an abundance of leisure and no rest, and we have a decreasing productivity per hour as far as work is concerned. We are eroding the connection between work and provision, because we are eroding the theological foundations of our civilization. We have tampered with that which has made possible for us to forget the association between work and survival. It’s something that only a Christian culture has been able to forget. And having forgotten the theological foundations thereof, it is endangering it.
E. Parmalee Prentice, early in this century, called attention to the fact that throughout history, it has not been natural disasters that have created famine. Natural disasters normally strike in one area, and there is food in another area, and the price goes up, but it comes in, and other areas often are over productive in that particular year. And he demonstrated that every known famine in history has been a product of the debasing of coinage, and the interference of a state with agriculture—controls. We are forgetting everything that has made work productive, the theological and the natural facts. We’re destroying them. And therefore, we are endangering our future.
Now, the purpose of God’s Laws are not to inhibit us or to put impositions upon us which will be difficult, but to bless us. And so, the rest God requires of us is to bless us. The rest ordered by God includes all men, including servants, including work animals: everyone.
Man lives in time. And it is a temptation for men to attempt to command time for their own purposes. God, however, orders us to rest in time and use it for His purposes. The Sabbath was made for man. And that man for whom it was made was defined for us by our Lord Himself—it is He! And it is us in Him. And its purpose is to bless men in God’s service, to restore the earth to God and establish His kingdom. It tells us that it is not our independent work that serves us best, but God’s work and our work in Him. The Sabbath is tied to manna, God’s provision for His covenant people as they live in faithfulness to Him and to His Law in faithfulness to His justice.
In these eight verses, we are told that first, there is a weekly Sabbath rest (verse 3). We are told in verse 5 of the Passover Sabbath, and we are told in verse 6 of two other Sabbaths—on the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the last day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. There are seven main festivals, we are told:
The Feast of Unleavened Bread
The Day of Atonement
The Day After Booths
The Feast of Weeks
The Feast of Booths
The Last Day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread
Now, most of these occur in the seventh month of the year, which was in Israel, the harvest month. The seventh year is the Sabbatical Year and the seven seven of year, the Jubilee, and all are forms of the Sabbath.
On the regular Sabbath, all works except works of necessity are forbidden. According to Leviticus 23:28, all work is forbidden on the Day of Atonement. On other holy days, it is servile or laborious work which is forbidden. Bamberger has rendered that phrase, “ye shall not work at your occupation.”
Now, the Sabbath celebrates the gift, the providence, the mercy, the redemption of God. In return, we are to manifest gratitude, “and none of you shall appear before me empty,” according to Exodus 34:20. The Sabbath is a celebration of rest, of rest from our work, and in the fact of God’s work and victory. It is a rest from the government of man, from our self-government, into God’s government. It celebrates God’s provision for us and for the whole earth. It celebrates God’s provision for all our todays and our tomorrows.
The Passover celebrates the birth of Israel, even as Christ’s Passover celebrates the birth of the new humanity of Christ. The Passover began on the fourteenth day of Nisan at sunset. It was followed by the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which lasted seven days. Only unleavened bread was permitted during the Passover. When Israel left Egypt, the bred prepared was unleavened bread, both because of the haste of preparation, and because the bread had to last for a time without becoming moldy. It also signified the absence of corruptibility on God’s atonement. The first Passover occurred in the night before Israel and the believing Egyptians and other foreigners left Egypt. It was during the Feast of Unleavened Bread that the waters of the Red Sea parted for Moses and the people. This feast therefore celebrated that great victory while commemorating also a hasty departure and deliverance. It celebrates the death of the army of Egypt in the waters of the Red Sea.
God’s Law has a plain and telling incisiveness Hebrews 4:12-13 tells us, “12 for the Word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.13 Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” Now, the tendency and temptation of men has been to blunt and to sentimentalize the plain words of the Bible.
This tendency of course goes back to Israel. According to the Midrash, the angels wanted to sing the praise of God when the Egyptians were drowned, but God refused to allow them to rejoice saying, “The work of my hands is drowning in the sea and you want to chant a victory song before me?” Now this kind of sentimentality of course, goes back to Buddhism. And according to Buddhism, the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, sits outside the gates of Heaven until the last man is saved and brought in. According to one Hebrew commentator on the Midrash, “How can one be fully happy when others are suffering, even deservedly?” Well, such a view is an indictment of Moses and of Israel, celebrating the defeat of Egypt. It is an indictment of God. Moses’ joyful song in Exodus 15:1-22, which began, “… sing unto the Lord… the horse and his rider he has hurled into the sea…” That joy supposedly was wrong in such a perspective.
Modern Humanism would have us apologetic for any victory and contented only with defeat. And this is why modern Humanism is taking the whole world into defeat. Now, it is significant that Kline, who made that statement with respect to the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, was not God-centered in his perspective. He said that, “Above all, the Passover is a festival of national freedom.” And we have supposedly Christian leaders today speaking of it as a Spring Festival, singing about the rebirth of nature.
Today, God is put the service of everything—Nationalism, or Internationalism, and both are forms of idolatry. God and His covenant kingdom are alone the focus of scripture and of history, and we are to rest in Him, not in our perspective. Notice the difference. God gives us victory, without guilt, with a deliverance from sin and death and the world tells us that even in victory, we are to be sorrowful, that instead of rejoicing, Moses and Miriam and all the hosts of Israel should have sat down and wept that the people who killed them were drowned in the Red Sea. And this is what the Humanist preachers of our time tell us—the same message. They are all them as Walter Lippmann was well-described as being, “trumpets that always sound retreat.”
But the Sabbath rest is one of celebration! Celebration of the fact that this is the victory that overcometh the World, even our faith.
Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that Thou hast given us a day for the celebration of our victory in Thee, for the celebration of victories past, present, and of victories yet to come, of the fact that the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. We thank Thee that the trumpets that sound retreat shall be judged, confounded, and destroyed, that those who would turn Thy kingdom into a kingdom of guilt and of pity for evil shall be judged and found wanting. Make us strong in our most holy faith, that in Christ Jesus we may always be more than conquerors. In His name we pray, amen.
Are there any questions now about our lesson first of all?
Yes.
[Audience] Uh, one of the pillars of Muslim belief, I believe, is to give to the poor.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Audience] So, uh, is it not, then not just Christians who, uh.. {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes. That of course, is a Biblical precept that has been adopted by Islam and, uh, in spite of the fact that it is a requirement, it’s not that well-kept, as anyone going to any Islamic country can testify. Poverty there is appalling.
[Audience] The word ‘servile’… what, um, Bible were you reading that from, was that King James? {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, it’s in the King James. Others translate it as ‘laborious,’ others as ‘necessary,’ in the sense of being part of the daily routine, but not a work of necessity in the sense of an emergency, and all work is banned on the regular Sabbaths, and on the special holy days, servile work is banned.
[Audience] Servile only applies to the special days?
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Audience] Not to regular days. I wasn’t clear on that.
[Rushdoony] Yes
[Audience] I would think of servile as, uh, trivial, trivial work. Trivial work
[Rushdoony] Yes, uh…
[Audience] It’s work with no great importance.
[Rushdoony] Yes, that was included, uh, however, uh, some of the records indicate it was not intended to prevent somebody from preparing a meal and doing things of that sort, but anything apart from a necessary routine on these special holidays was banned.
[Audience] On shipboard, Sunday was considered the day of rest, but the engine crew still had to keep the engines going and the helmsman had to steer and so on.
[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s in terms of the old Biblical standard.
[Audience] But we didn’t paint our ship!
[Laughter]
[Rushdoony] Yes?
[Audience] I was interested in your reference to the Sabbath being a rest from our self-government. Could you expand on that concept and let us know how, how to{?}
[Rushdoony] Yes. I think one of the sins of many who are very strict otherwise in keeping the Sabbath is that they do a lot of thinking on the Sabbath about, ‘well, I’ve got to do this and that tomorrow’, and they worry about their work, uh, they’re trying to govern their lives, instead of saying, ‘God is going to take care of me and I take hands off my life.’ So it can refer to fretting, it can refer to planning. So, it’s trying to say, ah, ‘if I don’t worry, if I don’t do some thinking, when I go to work tomorrow, I’m really in trouble.’ There is an old saying that I think is choice, that sums up the stupidity of that opinion, and it’s this: “Why pray when you can worry?”
Yes.
[Audience] Years ago, Degrazia wrote a book called Work and Leisure.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Audience] And if I recall, and it must have been 20 years ago,
[Rushdoony] It was in the 50s, easily.
[Audience] 30 years ago. He pretty well outlined the fact that we have less leisure than any generation in history that is in the West.
[Rushdoony] Yes, an interesting fact that we forget is that although after 1860, when our culture began to be secularized and many people were working 7 days a week, Christian standards were progressively thrown out. The rail roads, for example; but up until that time, while men did work 10-, 12-, 14-hours a day, they also had as many as a hundred and fifty days in a year that were holy days when they did not work. So in the Middle Ages and in a good deal of the modern world after the Medieval Era, the days of rest were very great, so men had more rest.
[Audience] Protestants took the blame for curtailing leisure by knocking out all the Catholic holidays.
[Rushdoony] Well, to an extent that has been true, but, uh, the Catholic holidays have disappeared in the Catholic countries as well. What happened was that with the Reformation— or before the Reformation, there were some steps in operation. The Catholic Monarchs were seizing the monasteries and Church properties. What Henry VIII did was an imitation of the Catholic Monarchs. They did it by forcing Concordats on Rome. The smaller monarchies and the German monarchs couldn’t do that. That’s why they tended to go with the Reformation; it gave them an excuse to do it without a concordat.
At the same time, there was a progressive secularization of the calendar. Now, neither the Reformation nor the Counter-Reformation was able to arrest that. And in some areas, ah, Protestant rulers were able to speed it up a little more rapidly. You must remember that, ah, the Church was Gallican in France, it was semi-autonomous in Spain, the same was true in Austria and elsewhere, so that the monarchs were pretty much re-ordering everything, including the calendar to suit themselves, while paying a lips-service often to the Catholic or Protestant faith that they professed. So the secularization had set in previously.
Some of the Protestant countries, England in particular, were quicker in abolishing them, uh, because they did not want people to maintain a façade of Catholic loyalty under the guise of the various holy days.
Yes.
[Audience] This is also the fact that the Americans have turned leisure into work. They work at playing.
[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s very true. And people very often need a rest from their vacations nowadays.
[Audience] Regarding famine, I understand your remarks. Most famines are man-made. You see that today in North Africa, {?} But 500 or so years ago, snow fell in England in the summer, even! I don’t remember how long cold spell lasts, about 8 or 7 years and there was nothing anybody there could do about that…
[Rushdoony] In the 1200s there was, I believe 48 years of famine in England, and the weather was very bad, it was regarded as a little ice age. However, even with regard to that, it was the various controls imposed by the lords and by the Crown that kept people from being able to provide for themselves, and Parmalee Prentice has done a masterful work in (I think) at least 4 books that he wrote on the subject, which should be reprinted. They are masterpieces. Hunger in History, Famine and [Farming for Famine?] …something… uh, very important works that were regarded as standard in the field, but since the 40s, he’s dropped out of sight as far as his works are concerned, because what he had to say was simply that it is interference by local lords or by monarchs or the civil government that has led to famine. That one way or another, you can survive.
For example, when you have cold and snow and wet, as you had in those years, you should at least have some better grazing. But they didn’t have anything. They didn’t have the grazing fields. They couldn’t graze in the forests, because that was reserved for the king to hunt. Now, one of the ugliest stories in the history of England is of the royal hunting forests—vast areas of England, which were banned to the common man. If he tried to move his cow into there, or his sheep, he was subject to execution. Or if he went there to hunt because he was starving, he was going to be executed. And these were the choicest parts of England. So, that had an important part to play as well as various other controls.
[Audience] That can be seen in a different way I think, in terms of our depressions in America. Up until 1929-30, I believe our depressions lasted an average of 9 months.
[Rushdoony] Um-hm, yes.
[Audience] That one lasted until the war.
[Rushdoony] Yes. And remember that the payments that serfs had to make were ‘in kind’ usually. Well, what are you going to do if you are required to provide so much barley and it isn’t the season for barley? You still plant barley because that’s what you have to pay. That’s your rent.
Now, it’s that kind of regulation that created problems.
Yes.
[Audience] I’ve a couple practical questions in terms of {?} of thanksgiving, it’s very difficult {?} wisdom, who {?} on the Sabbath, {?} the Pharisees did, or {?} did a generation ago, yet the practical problem remains, how do I spend my time on the Sabbath. Children repeatedly ask this question. Can you give some Biblical principles that would help Christian families decide what sort of activities to engage in on the Sabbath?
[Rushdoony] Yes. Uh, it’s very dangerous to try to set up rules and regulations. And, uh, it has led to Phariseeism, so that the Pharisees were limiting the extent of travel to so many yards, and some churches have gotten into this, too. I know of one case about 30 years ago where someone who was living far out in the country was brought up before his consistory because he was driving in for the services and it was too far, so it was a violation of the Sabbath. Now that becomes ridiculous. It becomes absurd.
First we have to recognize that it’s not a kill-joy day. And some people have become fanatical on that. The Scottish Kirk reached the point where, to be happy on the Sabbath was virtually a sin. You had to be solemn. And ah, it could create rage if you were caught whistling happily on the Sabbath while you were walking home from church, even if you were whistling a hymn! That was forbidden practice.
I think it’s dangerous to set up rules. I think it’s something each family must determine for themselves. The Hebrews saw no point in barring joyful activity. It was a time (and when I was a boy, this was still practiced among my people), of family get-togethers when my aunts and uncles and all of us would come together and we’d have a meal together. And there would be 30 or so around the table. And the children would play and the, it was a family get-together, so, that was the way the afternoon was spent, and the evening, it was back to church again. Some churches would make it an all-day thing with a pot-luck out in the open. This was common when I was a boy and an outside service in the evening. But it was regarded as a time for family happiness, and it was left to the father to define what was legitimate. It isn’t today to be marked by a kill-joy attitude.
There are some funny stories from the Scottish Kirk about the extremes they went to, and Dorothy is shaking her head, meaning ‘Don’t tell them!’ So I won’t! [Laughter]
Well, if there are no further questions, let’s bow our heads in prayer.
Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that Thou hast called us to a life of joy and victory and that our lives are to be one of triumph in time and eternity. We thank Thee that our lives depend not upon our labors, but upon Thine accomplished work. Give us grace day-by-day to take hands off our lives and to commit them into Thy care, knowing that Thou who has begun a good work in us will bring it to Thine appointed conclusion. And now, go in peace. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.