How to rest in the Lord when your world is turned upside down

Our culture basks in frenzy, stress and lack of sleep like a badge of honor. As the news reports regularly, more than half of Americans don't use their allotted vacation days and are likely to take work with them when they take a vacation. Work gives our identity a commitment to guarantee our status. Stimulants like caffeine and sugar provide the means to get moving in the morning while sleeping pills, alcohol and herbal remedies allow us to forcibly shut down our body and mind to get restless sleep before starting all over again because , as the motto goes, "You can sleep when you are dead." But is this what God meant when He created man in His image in the Garden? What does it mean that God worked for six days and then rested on the seventh? In the Bible, rest is more than the absence of work. The rest shows where we place our trust for supply, identity, purpose and importance. The rest is both a regular rhythm for our days and our week, and a promise with fuller future fulfillment: "Hence, there remains a sabbatical rest for the people of God, for everyone who entered into God's rest also rested. from his works as God did from his ”(Hebrews 4: 9-10).

What does it mean to rest in the Lord?
The word used for God resting on the seventh day in Genesis 2: 2 is Sabbath, the same word that will later be used to call Israel to cease their normal activities. In the creation account, God has set a rhythm to follow, both in our work and in our rest, to maintain our effectiveness and purpose as created in His image. God set a rhythm in the days of creation that the Jewish people continue to follow, which demonstrates a contrast to an American perspective on work. As God's creative work is described in the Genesis account, the pattern for ending each day states, "And it was evening and it was morning." This rhythm is reversed with respect to how we perceive our day.

From our agricultural roots to the industrial estate and now to modern technology, the day starts at dawn. We start our days in the morning and finish our days at night, expending energy during the day to collapse when the work is done. So what is the implication of practicing your day in reverse? In an agrarian society, as in the case of Genesis and in much of human history, the evening meant rest and sleep because it was dark and you could not work at night. God's order of creation suggests starting our day in rest, filling our buckets in preparation for pouring into the work the next day. By putting the evening first, God established the importance of prioritizing physical rest as a prerequisite for effective work. With the inclusion of the Sabbath, however, God has also established a priority in our identity and worth (Genesis 1:28).

Ordering, organizing, naming and subduing God's good creation establish man's role as God's representative within His creation, ruling the earth. Work, while good, must be kept in balance with rest so that our pursuit of productivity does not come to represent the entirety of our purpose and identity. God did not rest on the seventh day because the six days of creation wore Him out. God rested to establish a model to follow to enjoy the goodness of our created being without the need to be productive. A day in seven devoted to rest and reflection on the work we have completed requires us to recognize our dependence on God for His provision and the freedom to find our identity in our work. In establishing the Sabbath as the fourth commandment in Exodus 20, God is also demonstrating a contrast for the Israelites to their role as slaves in Egypt where work was imposed as a difficulty to demonstrate His love and providence as His people.

We can't do everything. We can't get it all done, even 24 hours a day and seven days a week. We must give up our attempts to gain an identity through our work and rest in the identity that God provides as loved by Him and free to rest in His providence and care. This desire for autonomy through self-definition forms the basis for the Fall and continues to plague our functioning in relation to God and others today. The serpent's temptation to Eve has exposed the challenge of addiction with considering whether we rest in God's wisdom or whether we want to be like God and make the choice of good and evil for ourselves (Genesis 3: 5). In choosing to partake of the fruit, Adam and Eve have chosen independence rather than dependence on God and continue to struggle with this choice every day. God's call to rest, both in the order of our day and in the pace of our week, depends on whether we can rely on God to take care of us as we stop working. This theme of the attraction between dependence on God and independence from God and the rest that He provides is a critical thread running through the gospel throughout Scripture. Sabbatical rest requires our acknowledgment that God is in control and we are not and our observance of sabbatical rest becomes a reflection and celebration of this arrangement and not just a cessation of work.

This shift in the understanding of rest as dependence on God and consideration of His provision, love and care as opposed to our search for independence, identity and purpose through work has important physical implications, as we have noted, but has fundamental spiritual implications as well. . The error of the Law is the idea that through hard work and personal effort I can keep the Law and earn my salvation, but as Paul explains in Romans 3: 19-20, it is not possible to keep the Law. The purpose of the Law was not to provide a means of salvation, but so that “the whole world may be held accountable before God. By the works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, for through the law comes knowledge. of sin "(Heb 3: 19-20). Our works cannot save us (Ephesians 2: 8-9). Even though we think we can be free and independent of God, we are addicted and slaves to sin (Romans 6:16). Independence is an illusion, but dependence on God translates into life and freedom through justice (Romans 6: 18-19). Resting in the Lord means placing your faith and identity in His provision, physically and eternally (Ephesians 2: 8).

How to rest in the Lord when your world is turned upside down
Resting in the Lord means being completely dependent on His providence and plan even as the world swirls around us in constant chaos. In Mark 4, the disciples followed Jesus and listened as he taught large crowds about faith and dependence on God using parables. Jesus used the parable of the sower to explain how distraction, fear, persecution, worry, or even Satan can interrupt the process of faith and acceptance of the gospel in our life. From this moment of instruction, Jesus goes with the disciples to the application by falling asleep in their boat during a terrifying storm. The disciples, many of whom were experienced fishermen, were terrified and woke Jesus up saying, "Master, don't you care that we are dying?" (Mark 4:38). Jesus responds by rebuking the wind and the waves so that the sea calms down, asking the disciples: “Why are you so afraid? Don't have faith yet? "(Mark 4:40). It is easy to feel like the disciples of the Sea of ​​Galilee in the chaos and storm of the world around us. We may know the right answers and recognize that Jesus is present with us in the storm, but we fear he doesn't care. We assume that if God truly cared about us, He would prevent the storms we experience and keep the world calm and still. The call to rest is not just a call to trust in God when it is convenient, but to recognize our complete dependence on Him at all times and that He is always in control. It is during storms that we are reminded of our weakness and addiction and through His provision that God demonstrates His love. Resting in the Lord means stopping our attempts at independence, which are futile anyway, and trusting that God loves us and knows what is best for us.

Why is rest important for Christians?
God set the pattern of night and day and the rhythm of work and rest before the Fall, creating a structure of life and order in which work provides purpose in practice but meaning through relationship. After the fall, our need for this structure is even greater as we seek to find our purpose through our work and in our independence from a relationship with God. But beyond this functional recognition lies the eternal design in which we long for the restoration and redemption of our bodies "to be freed from his bondage to corruption and to obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God" (Romans 8:21). These little schemes of rest (Sabbath) provide the space in which we are free to reflect on God's gift of life, purpose and salvation. Our attempt at identity through work is but a snapshot of our attempt at identity and salvation as independent of God. We cannot earn our own salvation, but it is through grace that we have been saved, not by ourselves, but as a gift from God (Ephesians 2: 8-9). We rest in God's grace because the work of our salvation was done on the cross (Ephesians 2: 13-16). When Jesus said, "It is finished" (John 19:30), He provided the final word on the work of redemption. The seventh day of creation reminds us of a perfect relationship with God, resting in a reflection of His work for us. Christ's resurrection established a new order of creation, shifting the focus from the end of creation with the Sabbath rest to the resurrection and new birth on the first day of the week. From this new creation we await the coming Saturday, the final rest in which our representation as image-bearers of God on earth is restored with a new heaven and a new earth (Hebrews 4: 9-11; Revelation 21: 1-3) .

Our temptation today is the same temptation offered to Adam and Eve in the Garden, we will trust in God's provision and take care of us, depending on Him, or we will try to control our lives with futile independence, grasping the meaning through our frenzy. and fatigue? The practice of rest may seem like an intangible luxury in our chaotic world, but our willingness to relinquish control of the structure of the day and the pace of the week to a loving Creator demonstrates our dependence on God for all things, temporal and eternal. We can recognize our need for Jesus for eternal salvation, but until we also give up control of our identity and practice in our temporal practice, then we don't truly rest and put our trust in Him. We can rest in the Lord when the world is upside down because he loves us and because we can depend on him. "Did not you know? You did not hear? The Eternal is the eternal God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. It does not fail or tire; his understanding is inscrutable. He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no power he increases strength "(Isaiah 40: 28-29).