The God Squad: Resting for God?

In a column about religion I should be spending more time teaching about what religions believe. I will try to fix that this year.

Q: What, precisely, did God do on the Seventh Day? I like to rest, too, but staring at an empty computer screen all day gets old, at least for me. I am curious. Thank you. – (From J in Cary, North Carolina)

A: God does not need to rest but God did rest. Why?

This is one of the first great questions raised by the creation account in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. Why would an all-powerful God need to rest on the seventh day or for that matter on any day? How is the world sustained and protected from chaos on the day of God’s resting? Is one day on earth to us the same and one day of rest for God?

Rest is the first spiritual conundrum and mystery and blessing of the Bible and through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam it has become a part of Western civilization.

Perhaps God wanted to teach us that working must be balanced by resting in our lives. Resting gives us time to solidify family bonds of love and time to express our gratitude to God for our blessings in prayer on the day of rest.

The right to rest is grounded in another belief clearly taught in the creation account of Genesis and that is the belief that all people are made in the image of God. This belief in Imago Dei is arguably the great spiritual revolution of the biblical religions. Other ancient religions all taught that people were created to serve the gods. The Bible alone taught that a part of what makes God holy is also in us. It took two millennia and contact with Greek philosophy for Judaism and later Christianity and Islam to refine our spiritual identity into body and soul, but from the first chapter of the Bible the idea that we are holy like God was a foundation of faith.

So, if we are made in the image of God but we obviously are not God, our only viable spiritual option is to imitate God to the extent that we are able. If God rests, then we should imitate God by resting on the Sabbath day. Resting is a gift from God that reminds us we are made to reflect and represent God here on planet earth.

Resting is forbidden to slaves who must work constantly but is the prerogative of all free people made in the image of God. Implicit in the Sabbath day is a critique of slavery in all its forms. Resting on the Sabbath day is thus an assertion of freedom in a world that often crushes freedom for so many. The freedom of Sabbath rest is a foretaste of the soul’s freedom in Heaven.

Resting on the Sabbath day was the first great spiritual revolution of the Bible. Through resting, the Bible establishes a sacred order of time that intersects with our secular profane world once every seven days. Once that sacred order of time is established, it can then be introduced to sanctify the holidays which transform the cycle of the seasons into a celebration of God’s blessings to us in nature and in history.

An interesting element of God resting is that the Sabbath day has no marking signs in nature. A day is natural. It is naturally defined by day and night over roughly 24 hours. A month is also a natural unit of time defined by the cycles of the moon over roughly 28 days, and a year is natural as the cycle of the seasons over 12 months. However, a week has no marking point whatsoever in nature. There is absolutely nothing that demarcates seven days as one week. That is why I believe that the Bible chose the seventh day as the Sabbath. It is a statement that God is not defined by nature anymore than a potter is defined by a pot he or she has made. This makes nature worship impossible in all three biblical faiths. God is the creator of nature and nature’s cycles of time.

Overlayed over natural time is sacred time and it begins with the Sabbath day. It continues with sacred holidays most of which sacralize not just the seasons but also events in sacred history. Passover is a sanctification of both springtime and the exodus from Egypt. Easter is a sanctification of springtime and the death and resurrection of Jesus for Christians. To emphasize God’s independence from nature, Islam does not limit its sacred month of Ramadan to the same season every year.

I would love to hear ways that you and your family sanctify the Sabbath day and make God’s time real in our broken world.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)