THE
FOURTH COMMANDMENT
This fourth word of the Decalogue closes its first
section. That section deals with man in his relation to God. Having stated the
fact of the Deity, and urged the claims of God on man in the first three, and
before passing to the second half of the law which deals with man in relation
to men, the present command is given. It provides for the perpetual maintenance
of a symbol of the relationship that exists between God and man. At regular
intervals through all the days, man is to turn wholly from that which is
material to that which is spiritual. By the recurrence of the Sabbath, he is to
be reminded that every day is measured and planned in the counsels of God. By
turning from the activities of his physical being, in order that his spiritual
nature may, without distraction, take hold upon spiritual verities, the fact is
to be kept in his memory that his whole being is of God, and its well-being
conditioned in His government.
In every hour of human life the physical and the
spiritual interact upon each other, and in their proper inter-relation each
contributes to the strengthening of the other. Of this fundamental law of human
nature the Sabbath is the perpetual symbol. For the days of earthly probation
the value of the Sabbath is created by the intervening days, the light of the
seventh is a perpetual suggestion of their true meaning and final import. The
right understanding of this relation is all-important to a true conception of
the meaning and method of the fourth commandment.
Consider, then, first, the two-fold command; and,
secondly, its application to our own day.
This commandment has been spoken of as referring only
to the Sabbath. This is a mistake, and the full weight of that part of it which
refers to the seventh day is only appreciated as it is remembered that one-half
of it has to do with the six days. Stripping the commandment for the moment of
all explanatory and expository sentences, it will be found to consist of two
simple injunctions:
First, "Remember
the Sabbath day, to keep it holy." Second, "Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work."
The will of God for man is that he should work. It is
also that at the seventh day interval he should cease his work, and worship.
The work of the six days, being the carrying out of a Divine purpose, is in
itself practical worship of the highest description. The worship of the seventh
day, in which he turns to the places of contemplation, meditation, and
adoration, is work in the highest realm. Each is the complement of the other.
He who never works is unfitted for worship. He who never pauses to worship is
rendered incapable of work. While the present study, for reasons that will be
obvious, deals almost exclusively with the obligation of the Sabbath, it is
absolutely necessary to start with a clear understanding that the final
statement in the first section of the Decalogue is that man fulfils the ideal
relationship to God, contained in the statement of the first three
commandments, only as he is a worker and a worshipper.
The reason for this is found in the fact of the
kinship of man to God. Every side of his nature is a result of Divine thought
and action. It is constructed upon the basis of thought and action.
Consequently, the threefold nature of man, resulting in the one person fulfils
its highest possibilities within this realm only. The first word of God,
therefore, is-"Six days shalt thou
labor, and do all thy work." The complex system of present-day
civilization makes it possible that some men may live without work. That,
however, is only possible in the proportion in which men have departed from the
Divine ideal. Man is placed in a world which contains all that is necessary for
his physical being, but to obtain it he must work. The soil is stored with
forces of life, but man must bend over it and smite it with labor before it
will answer the demands his need is making upon it. The harvest comes by the
way of human work. Man needs bread, and works upon the soil, and the golden
harvest is God's crown upon human labor. This fact of labor is not the result
of the fall. It is part of the original intention, for man was placed in the Garden
of Eden "to dress it and to keep
it." (Gen. 2:15) In the
process of the centuries men have been discovering the secrets of God long locked
in the treasury of Nature. These all, rightly understood and applied, minister
to the possibilities of increased power to do the work that provides for the
needs of the race. To that side of the commandment the vast mass of human
beings are obedient, not willingly always, but of necessity.
This being granted, the Infinite Love, in perfect
understanding of the need of His own creation, provides that every seventh day
man should lay aside the tools of his craft and enter into the upper reaches of
his life's possibilities. It is well worth a careful note that the old
essential Hebrew idea of the Sabbath was not that of gloom, but rather of
gladness. The Sabbath was a day of delight, a holiday, a day in which man
found, in cessation from toil, the possibility of entering into the realization
of his own nature's capacity for enjoyment. To think upon Jehovah, to commune
with the Infinite, uprising from the earth to stand erect, conscious of
affinity with God, man was to foretaste the larger life for which the present
was but a probation, and thus be equipped for taking hold with new consecration
and firmer grip upon the work of the coming days.
Thus the Sabbath had its ethical meaning. From the
quiet calm of the Sabbath day man returned to the necessary and swift movements
of the six. As he did so, the integrity and justice of the things with which he
had communed in the hours of rest, touched and influenced him in all the hours
of work. He delved deeply, and measured justly, and weighed righteously for six
days, because on the seventh he became conscious of the balances of the
sanctuary and the righteousness of God.
Thus the two commandments are one, so interrelated
that they can never be separated. To fail in obedience to the one is to make it
impossible to obey the other. Obedience to each creates the power to obey the
other. Work makes worship, worship fits for work.
From this consideration it will be seen that the
Sabbath is not the ideal of any dispensation of Divine dealings. It is universal
in the purpose of God, and was part of the economy of time which waited for the
birth of man. The change of day in the Christian dispensation from the seventh
to the first is of great symbolic value, and although no Divine word was
written commanding the change, the spiritual facts of Christianity altered it
surely, yet without proclamation or noise. Until Christ had come, man worked
toward his Sabbath. Since Christ, he works from his Sabbath. In the old
economy, in the last analysis, the Sabbath depended upon the work; in the new,
the work grows out of the Sabbath.
Thus, the grace of God as revealed in Christ includes
the first principles of the Divine government, and yet brings them to the level
of the need of man in his impotence and fall.
These are the busiest days that humanity has ever
seen, days of strenuous life and quick movement, days in which men have no time
for the contemplation of anything out of which the virtue has passed, merely
out of respect for the time when virtue yet was in it. Things of
self-indulgence must be swept on one side, and only those that contribute to
the well-being of the race are to be maintained.
How will this aspect of the age affect the question of
the fourth commandment? The conditions of life today increasingly demand work,
that is, as has been before indicated, among the vast majority of the human
family. Not only the law of God, tender and beneficent, but the law of human
society, too often stern and cruel, says to man, Thou shalt work. The fact that
there are any who escape obedience to the command is the saddest fact in
sociology. If the necessity for work were still understood in all its Divine
bearings, no human being in Whitechapel or Belgravia, on Fifth Avenue or in
tenement house, would be allowed to eat a meal until that meal had been
purchased by the contribution of a quota of toil to the commonwealth of work.
If a man doesn’t work, he is not to eat. (2
Thess. 3:10, 12)
Returning, however, to the previous position, that
this is pre-eminently the day in which men work, it is an appalling fact that
forgetfulness of God has issued in the idiocy of forgetfulness of, or
opposition to, His law concerning the Sabbath. Atheism, of course, would sweep
away that great time symbol of the tender compassion of the Father of men. The
loss of the Sabbath is the necessary outcome of the dethronement of God; and
all the degradation of humanity that always follows the sweeping away from
national life of the seventh day of rest is the logical sequence of Atheism.
Well and graphically did Paul describe its issue in his word "atheists and without hope in the
world."
The most insidious and dangerous attack upon the
Sabbath, however, is that of those who would, to use their own phrase,
secularize it. These are they who would take advantage of the rest which has
come to them through the government of God, in order to prove by the folly of
their pleasure-seeking, and the weary restlessness of their feverish activity,
their departure from that government. If men had but eyes to see, and hearts to
understand the silent goings of the eternal things, a sojourn in Paris would be
the most powerful sermon that could be preached on the sanctity of the Sabbath,
and the desecration of everything that is distinctively glorious in human
nature which follows in the wake of its un-hallowing.
What is the church's duty today? Much has been made of
the attitude of Christ in speech and deed toward the Sabbath. Some have
imagined that by words He uttered and by deeds He did He relaxed the binding
nature of the old command. This view however, is to absolutely misunderstand
and misinterpret the doing and the teaching of Jesus. First, in this
connection, let it be remembered that all He said concerning it He uttered
while He was fulfilling His mission as the Jewish Messiah. It is impossible too
clearly to state the fact, because many who teach that in the Christian
dispensation the original ideal of the Sabbath is not binding, quote our Lord's
words in support of their contention. This is indeed to fail to distinguish
between things that differ. His great statements reveal the true meaning of the
Sabbath as observed under a Jewish economy. They undoubtedly have a far wider
application, reaching back to the original ideal, and throwing light far on to
the end of time. Said He, "The
Sabbath was made for man." (Mark
2:27) The fair inference is that while man walks in the ways of God, he
must of necessity make a divinely intended use of this great gift. Said He,
moreover, "The Son of Man is Lord
also of the Sabbath." Not, let it be noticed, "Son of God," but "Son
of Man." Speaking here of Himself certainly, but of Himself in
representative capacity as fulfilling the first Divine intention, He claims to
be, not the destroyer, but Lord of the Sabbath. He is the Lord not the
Destroyer of the Sabbath.
Those who through His finished work have entered into
that new realm of life in which all work grows out of rest, and the meanest
activity of the commonest day finds its root and inspiration in the cross of
His passion and the glory of His resurrection morning, must ever be loyal to
the law of Infinite Love, and during the little while in which they wait and
watch for the morning, gather in the seven-fold light of the Christian Sabbath
for spiritual development and exercise, that so through all the working days
there may be perpetual life in the power of the eternal things considered on
the first day of the week. The Sabbath idea, as now embodied in the
resurrection day, must be defended from all attacks, and by the joyousness of
worship and the readiness of service, demonstrate its delight.
No comments:
Post a Comment