The Egalitarian Nature of God
We are all God's creatures, and we all deserve a time to rest and relax!
This is part 6 of Chapter 6 of Friends With God: The Gifts Of God.
In this chapter we are exploring the blessings that God gives to those who delight in his way of life.
In previous posts in this series we have seen that one of the great blessings God has given us is the weekly day of rest, called the Sabbath.
The Sabbath The Great Leveller
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath (rest) of the Lord your God. (we rest on God’s Day) You shall not do any work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor the stranger within your gates. (Exo 20:8-11)
Every week everyone gets a day off work, and it’s the same day. By keeping the Sabbath, we demonstrate our love and friendship toward all other people, and our work animals, every seven days. Keeping the Sabbath is a great way of showing God’s love to others.
Photography by Author.
Why would God need to command us to take a day off work? Perhaps God saw that while we ourselves may be happy to take at least one day a week off work, we may not be inclined to allow our employees or servants to do so. This egalitarian element of the weekly Sabbath is clear: it’s not just ourselves, but our family, employees, and strangers visiting us, and even our animals, who are to all have the same day off work every week.
Why should God care about animals working on the Sabbath? Animals were a major form of transport, yet to use them to pull a cartload of people to Church on a Sabbath would not be acceptable. If our animals are working, then we need to be keeping an eye on them, which means that we are not fully resting either.
Rest for our animals ensures we also have rest from work. It’s also a reflection of God’s mercy and kindness and understanding of the need for animals to rest- which is another part of God’s nature that we can glean from the Sabbath:
Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel. (Proverbs 12:10)
Resting our work animals on the Sabbath is showing them mercy and kindness. They are physical as we are, and need a regular rest.
God, however, instructs us to have compassion on our animals, so that we feed and care for them on the Sabbath. (Luke 13:15, 14:5) Our responsibility for doing good to our animals is not negated by our need to rest, and also demonstrates our love to the creator of our animals.
We therefore must look after and love the animals in the manner that God requires us to. This, like doing good to our fellow man, shows how much we love God, and is also a light to the world of his mercy and kindness toward all his creation. (Matt 5:13-16)
Photography by Author.
Being Rich In This World
Servants were very important before we had the modern conveniences of heating, light, stoves, etc. Someone had to do the hard work associated with these things. If you had any money at all, you would have a servant or two to help. Yet the Sabbath not only gave the servants one day a week off, but it was the same day as their masters. In Israel, even if your servant was not an Israelite, he still had to rest on the Sabbath Day.
All rich people had to look after themselves on the Sabbath Day- care for their own animals, get their own food, care for their own children etc. The Sabbath makes the rich and poor equal on this one day per week, which reflects how God sees us, and helps us to become like him:
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female,
for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:27-28)
We Are All Made In God’s Image
Added to this, the Sabbath is a time for congregating- the rich and poor, master and servant, Christian and non-Christian, Jew and gentile, all congregated in the Synagogue on the Sabbath during the first century. (Acts 13:14-15, 13:42)
Christians worshiped God in the Jewish Synagogue, on the Sabbath Day. (Acts 10:34-35, 17:1-17, 18:4-19) They all went to worship the same God at the same place and time, and to read the same scriptures, and had the same hope of eternal life.
The egalitarian element of keeping the Sabbath, was a fundamental aspect of their relationship with each other and Christ:
for One is your teacher, even Christ, and you are all brothers. (Matt 23:8)
How we love others demonstrates how we love God. (1John 4:20-21, 1John 5:2-3) The Sabbath emphatically demonstrates the attitude of respect that we should have toward our neighbours, in particular our servants and those who work for us.
As Christ is Lord of the Sabbath, (Matt 12:8, Mark 2:28, Luke 6:5) it’s obvious that when we are one in Christ Jesus, that we are to keep the great egalitarian reminder of the Sabbath Day.
For this day teaches that all people are made in the image of God, and all have the same potential to be born of God, and to become the sons of God, and friends with God. (Acts 17:24-30, Gal 3:26-29, John 15:14-15)
We may feel that egalitarianism lowers us to a common denominator. In reality, however, keeping the Sabbath in a merciful and generous spirit, actually raises us all to the same level- that of being loving friends of God, with the gift of eternal life waiting for each of us.
Far from being a burden, the Sabbath lifts a burden off us all: the burden of inferiority for the poor, and the burden of self-importance for the rich and dominant in society.
Egalitarianism also needs to be applied in the home, where women, who in most countries still do the majority of the domestic work of making food and caring for children, also need the Sabbath day as a day of rest. However, some work will need to be done, so husbands and older children should help doing such necessary work on the Sabbath, to ensure the women can have as much rest from work as possible.
Cooking On The Sabbath?
When the Sabbath was first explained in detail, God ensured that people undertook as much work as possible the day before, in preparation for resting on the Sabbath:
And he said unto them, This is that which the Lord has said, Tomorrow is the rest of the holy Sabbath unto the Lord: bake that which you will bake today (Friday), and seethe that you will seethe; and that which remains over lay up for you to be kept until the morning. (Exo 16:23)
Israel was being provided manna from heaven for their food at this time. God sent it to them in the fields around the camp, and they would gather it every morning. However, on the day before the Sabbath, God provided twice as much manna as other days, and told them to bake it and prepare it, so that no collection, preparation or cooking would be required on the Sabbath. This directive occurred just a few days prior to God’s speaking the Ten Commandments to Israel.
Does this directive for Israel to prepare food before the Sabbath, have any importance for us today?
We don’t have manna from God, and we live in a very different society. There are some who consider that this verse implies that we should do all our cooking prior to the Sabbath.
To counter this perspective, other scholars have noted that baking, or general food preparation on the Sabbath, is never explicitly mentioned in any other scripture. This has led them to conclude that this prohibition on cooking was only for this occasion, when Israel was in the desert being fed manna.
We must be honest when reading the scriptures. We should not try to pick and choose those laws we want to obey, and ignore or dismiss those we don’t.
The Weekly Sabbaths And The Annual Sabbaths
As discussed previously, along with the weekly Sabbath there are seven annual Sabbath Days, or Holy Days. When we compare the annual Holy Days to the weekly Sabbath days we find that food preparation is mentioned many times, although it takes a bit of comparing verses to understand what is actually being said.
If you read Leviticus Chapter 23, which mentions both the weekly Sabbath and the annual Sabbaths, you will see that the weekly Sabbath is identified as being on a par with the annual Sabbaths. Both the annual and weekly Sabbaths are called God’s feasts:
Concerning the feasts of the Lord,
which you shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts.
Six days shall work be done: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of rest, an holy convocation;
you shall do no work therein: it is the Sabbath of the Lord in all your dwellings. (Lev 23:1-3)
The weekly Sabbath is therefore the first of God’s Holy Day festivals. The rest of Leviticus 23 elaborates on the annual festivals of God.
There is a clear distinction between the work permitted on the weekly Sabbath and that permitted on the annual festivals. On the weekly Sabbath, God says to do “no manner of work”. (Lev 23:3, Exo 31:15, Deut 5:14) However, on the annual Feast Days he says to do “no servile work”. (Lev 23:7-8, 23:21-25, 23:35-36, Num28:18, 28:25-26, 29:1, 29:12, 29:35)
There is no need to make up our own definition for “servile work”, as many have done, for by simply comparing two scriptures we can see what God means.
In Numbers 28:18-25 God tells Israel to ‘do no manner of servile work therein’, for the first and last days of Unleavened Bread. This command for Unleavened Bread is repeated in Exodus 12:16, but here it says:
on the first day (of Unleavened Bread) shall be a holy congregation (gathering of people together), and in the seventh day (of Unleavened Bread) there shall be a holy congregation for you. No manner of work shall be done in them (these two days), except that which every man must eat, that only may be done by you.
The definition of ‘servile work’ mentioned in Numbers 28, is therefore shown here to mean anything other than making food to be consumed on these annual Holy Days.
Therefore, as there is no proviso given for being able to make food on the weekly Sabbath to eat, we must logically conclude that on the weekly Sabbath we are to do no work at all, including no food preparation, but on the Holy Days we can make food for eating on that day.
The reason for the distinction seems that, as these Holy Days are special annual days of great celebration, God wants people to have lots of good food to rejoice with. While resting is an important part of these Holy Days, as they are also Sabbath Days, it’s evidently more important to emphasise the celebration of the particular events that each Holy Day represents.
Eating lots of good food, and rejoicing on these Holy Days, is shown by God as being more important than having a total rest from food preparation, as is required on the weekly Sabbath.
Following God’s Example
Another distinction between the annual and weekly Sabbaths is what God did on these days in order to make them holy. On the weekly Sabbath God rested, and he made it holy for this reason. On the annual Sabbaths (as discussed in this previous post) God undertook some significant work, such as freeing Israel from Egypt at Passover, or giving the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. We therefore, in celebrating these great works of God, are also permitted some work to make food for celebration of these great events. Whereas the weekly Sabbaths we celebrate by resting, as per the example he provided.
The point of God giving us the days he has made holy, be it the weekly Sabbath or the annual Holy Days, is that we are to stop our normal activities and focus on His spiritual work with us.
There is, however, one annual Sabbath when God does not permit people to cook or even to eat food- the Day of Atonement, which is a day of fasting. In the next post we will examine the relationship between this unique annual Sabbath and the weekly Sabbath.