Systematic Theology – Work

Work and Rest

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 17 of 19

Track: #17

Year:

Dictation Name: 17 Work and Rest.

[Rushdoony] If not, let us begin with prayer.

All glory be to Thee oh God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. We praise Thee that Thou hast cause us to be Thy people, that by Thy sovereign grace and mercy Thou hast made us a new creation and given us a task, to bring all things unto captivity to Jesus Christ, to make all things new in Him, to bind up those that are hurt, to comfort the broken hearted. To bring Thy justice to those suffering from injustice, that Thy righteousness may cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. Arm us to this most holy task by Thy word and by Thy Spirit, and grant us Thy peace. In Jesus name, amen.

We continue this morning our studies in the theology or doctrine of work, and our subject today is “Work and Rest” and our scripture, Exodus 20:8-11, the Ten Commandments.

“8 Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

9 Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work:

10 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 manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

11 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.”

As we have seen there is an essential relationship between work and rest, between work and the Sabbath. The Ten Commandments have only one reference to work and this is in the Sabbath law, which says “six days shalt Thou labor and do all Thy work.” Cassuto, the great Jewish Scholar in Israel, said that this law has as its primary purpose to recognize and attest that the Lord is the creator of the world. The creation fact is set forth in verse eleven; because God is the creator He governs our use of time, because he is the creator of time and the universe. In terms of this fact, that God is the creator of time and the universe there are two facts set forth in one, a positive fact in this commandment “six days shalt thou labor” and a negative one “remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy” and “thou shalt not labor on the Sabbath.”

Only in two of the Ten Commandments is there a positive note, in this and in the commandment to honor ones father and mother. The positive notes are thus associated with rest and the family, all others are negative “thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, covet, bear false witness,” and so on. We are commanded here to hallow the Sabbath, that is to keep it sacred. What God’s covenant people must do is what God has already done, both worked and rest. We work for dominion and rest in God’s dominion. The point of work is not merely to provide for ourselves, but it is to exercise dominion, to subdue to earth, to develop its potentialities, and dominion work thus is a necessary factor in the development and growth of mankind. When we look at our recent history we can see how much dominion work has extended the resources of this country.

When I was a school boy in the 20’s I can recall the estimates, and we were taught this in the science class, that the world was running out of oil; that by the time I graduated from college the world would be sitting in darkness and automobiles would of ground to a halt. Why? Because the known world reserves of oil were so limited. Of course at that time drillers could only scratch the surface of the earth. Now they can go thousands of feet down, and they are beginning to realize that the whole earth is a huge ball of resources, and as man through his technology gains dominion over the earth, by work develops his dominion, his known reserves of one kind of a resource after another will only be expanded. Now this is dominion work, this is what God commands of men. God set man in the Garden of Eden as a pilot project, there to learn to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth.

We work for dominion, and we rest in the fact of God’s dominion, that God is the Lord, that the world is an orderly creation, that God having created it and governed it has so established it that the potentialities of the earth are amenable to man’s development as he, through intellectual work, research, and development, and then the application of that thought, is able to develop and use the resources. Thus the Sabbath rest is tied to work, both are tied to dominion. We can rest on the Sabbath, and we are commanded to take hands-off our work because it does not all depend upon us. God has created an orderly world, he has ordered all things in His providence, so that when men are faithful to Him, faithful to the conditions whereby He has established creation, they are going to realize their potential, they are going to subdue the earth. We can rest in the orderliness of God’s world, in His providential care. So we can take hands off our lives one day in seven, and in terms of all the Sabbath’s of scripture, more often. One year in seven it should be, and it is still kept only by professors and universities. But the idea is that because it is God’s universe and it is orderly it is not out of hand. We can work and we can rest, and in both we manifest our sense of dominion.

The Sabbath is tied to God’s creation of heaven and earth. 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. However in Deuteronomy when Moses in his farewell address reviews the law, he says with regard to the commandment of rest, “and remember, that Thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord Thy God brought Thee out Thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm. Therefore the Lord Thy God commanded Thee to keep the Sabbath day.” In the one the pattern is in terms of the seventh day of creation, in the other in terms of their redemption from Egypt, the day of Passover. Why the difference? Because on that day Israel was born as a people, God delivered them, made them a nation. Our Sabbath day is the day of resurrection because it was on that day that the church was born. So creation is a pattern, the creation at the beginning, the creation of Israel, the creation of the new Israel of God.

The work is the work of the redeemed and the rest is the rest of the redeemed in their dominion calling. Work presupposes God’s purposes and rest acknowledges that our work and our time are under God. Rest means total trust, it means taking hands off our lives and all our today’s and our tomorrow’s and committing them unto almighty God. The text speaks of six days, 24 hour days, there is no other way to read the text of Genesis honestly. Creation was a work of God in time, God could have created all things instantaneously, but He did His work in time. We are temporal creatures, as is all creation. And the temptation of man in Genesis 3, his original sin, his attempt to be as God is to despise time, and when men begin to despise time what they then seek to do is to try to create an eternal order. This is what the dictatorship of the proletariat aims at, to create an eternal order, the perfect communist state, which communist theoreticians compare to a beehive in which everyone automatically does his or her work to perfection without any self-consciousness and the only thing that really exists is the hive, no individuals. There is no sense of time in a beehive, it has no consciousness. And of course the whole concept of alienation as Marx developed it was a doctrine that man by becoming self-conscious is alienated from himself and from his fellow men, and the goal is to destroy self-consciousness and to make men as unself-conscious as ants in an anthill or bees in a beehive

Again, in the Western world in the non-Marxist forms of the same dream you have Dewey’s great society or Wallace’s great community in which again men are to lose self-consciousness, to lose any sense of time, a world in which change disappears, because everyone becomes a part of the anthill and has no sense of self-consciousness or of time. But God has made us temporal creatures, he has given us a sense of time which is ineradicable, and is a blessing. Time gives us the opportunity to work, to expand our dominion over all creation, and to rest in that sense of dominion, to change, to grow, to think reflectively upon the implications of time as it develops. God honors time, He works in it. Work thus is in time and for temporal purposes, not to create an unchanging order. The sad fact is that to often Christians have picked up the perspective of Greek philosophy which despised time and the world of mater. As we saw the Greek philosophers regarded working with ones hands as debasing; so that when a couple of Plato’s students worked out in actual models some of the geometric problems they were accused of debasing philosophy. One should be impractical, hence the ivory tower orientation of intellectuals who are non-Christian.

But work and rest are in time, they are to deal with man’s growth and dominion in time. A leisure society, which we dealt with a couple weeks ago, cannot rest. It has no true Sabbath because it seeks to escape from work and time into irresponsibility, and rest and time and work belong one to the other. Work under God is thus the foundation of the Sabbath, and rest is inseparable in scripture from the dominion mandate as P.C. Craigie said and I quote “to rest on the Sabbath day was to remember that man as a part of God’s created order was totally dependent on the creator. Man’s divinely appointed task to have dominion over the created order carried with it also the privilege of sharing in God’s rest. The Exodus too was a type of creation, and thus forms an analogy to the creation account in Genesis.” In Scripture the Sabbath rest presupposes dominion work, there is no dominion work if there is no dominion rest and vice versa.

Our Lord in Mark 2 verses 27 & 28 dealt with the Pharisees who condemned Him and His disciples because they did not keep the Sabbath in the Pharisaic way, which was full of rules and regulations and turned it something that was altogether legalistic in which there was not the spirit of rest, but rules and regulations for them. And we are told “he said unto them the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath.” This He said in answer to the Pharisees who criticized the disciples conduct on the Sabbath, and our Lord cited the example of David who went into the tabernacle and the priest brought him the showbread from the alter, sacred bread, and gave it to him for David and his associates to eat. In other words, the need of man came before the forms and the rites of holiness.

So as Joseph Addison Alexander said in commenting on our Lord’s words, and I quote: “The meaning of the sentence therefore must be that the Sabbath having been ordained for men, not for any individual, but for the whole race, it must needs be subject to the Son of men who is its head and representative, it’s sovereign and Redeemer.” Our Lord by declaring Himself to be the true Lord of the Sabbath makes clear that the Sabbath is made for all men, but if they are not members of Him, if they are not engaged in dominion work, they cannot have dominion rest. It is the day in which dominion man rests and rejoices in His work. That as Isaiah declared of the ungodly “the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt, ‘there is no peace’ saith my God ‘to the wicked.’”

Today there are all to many who have no calling to work, and no ability to rest. Alcoholism and drugs are pseudo-rests from life, people go to them in search of rest, and their idea of rest of course is an escape from God and from reality. But as we have seen rest is possible only in terms of work. We have our choice then, to work under God and to rest in Him, or to have no rest.

Some years ago I was speaking somewhere in the other end of the country and I touched on, in passing, Genesis 3:5, original sin, Man’s temptation to be his own God and determine for Himself what constitutes good and evil, what constitutes right and wrong and law, and I said the two choices are for man to play God or to be under God and to obey God. And someone came up afterwards to protest the fact that I had given just these to choices, and he insisted we lived in a multiple choice situation and after he left someone who knew him laughed and said “you should of asked him where his children are.” Multiple choices don’t exist, there is good and there is evil, and he having come from a Christian background and reflecting still the character, the discipline, and the work ethic in which he had been reared, still was able to function; but not communicating that to his children they had gone to the logical conclusion. They had followed the antithesis to logical disaster. Many have the forms of faith but cannot give it to their children.

A few days back we were discussing this point at the dinner point and Dorothy and Grace came up with a good term for what exists all around us, the triviality culture, the triviality culture. People all around us try to fill up their lives with trivia, they become experts in trivia, and they replace faith with enthusiasm and fads, all of which deal with trivia, and so instead of being involved in reality trivia consumes them and their lives and their homes become showroom displays which manifest their absorption with trivia.

The commandment as it speaks of the Sabbath rest specifies seven groups. First, “thou” speaking to heads of families, husbands and wives, second, “thy son” third, “thy daughter” fourth, “thy manservant” fifth, “thy maidservant” and sixth, “cattle, all farm animals and all the earth” and seventh, “the stranger that is within thy gates.” Now I mention those seven categories because there is no end to the absurdity of which churchmen are capable of and I actually read that the commandment requires rest of everybody but wives because they are not specified there. [Laughter] Well “thou” addresses the heads of families, husbands and wives. The usage there is very common to scripture so this absurdity is exactly that.

Covenant work and rest, in brief, go together. They are inseparable. In both Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, and many other passages we are told that fertility and productivity are linked to working and resting in the Lord, to faithfulness to Him and we are told that when we are obedient to God’s terms for His creation all these blessings pursue us and overtake us, there’s no-way of escaping them. And this is why when even the ungodly live in terms of the premises of God’s law word they are blessed, and those who profess to be Christian who despise God’s rules are cursed if they depart from His word.

But if man will not rest God tells us, God will give the land a rest by their destruction and captivity. The land also shall be left of them and shall enjoy her Sabbaths while she lieth desolate without them. Work and rest are inseparable, they are linked to dominion. Man has not yet begun to realize the potentialities that are possible to him, the technology that can be devised; we have barely scratched the surface. But as long as we think in terms of a leisure oriented world as more and more people are, and as long as we are involved in the culture of triviality, we will see happen what already all over the world according to a very brilliant political scientist Count Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is taking place, a decline of productivity. In every continent today the productivity of workmen is declining so that no matter how long they labor the total results are beginning to diminish. In a few places, like Japan, much less so than elsewhere, they are there maintaining it. But in most of the world the decline is precipitous; it is creating a crisis within the Soviet Union. The result can be a major and a drastic collapse of the advances of a civilized society.

But if we have again a Biblical work ethic, if we return to our foundations in the faith then again we can forge ahead and realize the potentials which are there just ahead if men will work and rest under God, if men will see their dominion mandate. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God Thou hast called us to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth, to bring every area of life and thought into captivity to Thee and to develop in terms of Thy mandate for us. Make us more than conquerors in Christ so that we might, as we confront problems and areas of life conqueror and develop them and become victors, dominion men. Give us faithfulness to Thy mandate and make us joyful in work and in rest, and grant us Thy peace. In Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes John?

[John] Not a question so much as a corollary to what Grace and Dorothy came up with in terms of characterizing the age. I was talking with Elizabeth Currier a number of years ago when she had just come out of a meeting with the ISI and she, I think fairly spontaneously said “you know what modern men can be characterized as?” and I said “well a lot of things” and she says “disco men.” At it really struck me, it’s really true, it’s the faddishness, the engagement in leisure that you were talking about, the shallowness, life really not having any meaning, just being out there doing their thing, and letting the world just go by, not controlling it, not having dominion over it.

[Rushdoony] We dealt with the subject of the difference between an elite and a hierarchy a few weeks ago, a hierarchy, sacred rule, rule in terms of God; no personal authority, the authority is God’s. An elite -self-styled superior people. Now it is interesting that elites create fads, a true hierarchy produces grass-roots results, work from the ground up.

Any other questions or comments?

[Audience member] The only other one is that disco is now out. [laughter]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

No other comments?

Well if not let us bow our heads in prayer as we conclude our meeting.

Grant us oh Lord Thy peace and Thy victory day by day, grant that we serve Thee with all our heart, mind, and being, and give us joy in Thy service. 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.