The Sabbath as Delight, Resistance, and Self Denial

This article is an excerpt from a chapter in Abraham Cho’s forthcoming book Defiant Joy: A Vision for Christian Witness to a World of Anxiety, Loneliness and Outrage. Release date January 2027 with Brazos Press.

The word “sabbath” simply means “to cease.” In our always-on world, it feels more to me like a warm invitation than a stern command. We are invited to cease our anxious doing. To cease our frenzied striving. It is an invitation to lay our desires to rest, not because they need to be repressed, but because in the Sabbath we anticipate the day when they will be filled to overflowing—not as wages owed but as gift undeserved.

To look more closely at the crucial role the Sabbath played in the life of Israel, let’s consider the passages where Sabbath-keeping is commanded by God—the Ten Commandments. I’ve always found it interesting that the Ten Commandments can be found in the Bible in two different places, first in Exodus and again in Deuteronomy. The Exodus account tells the story of the Ten Commandments as they were given to Moses on Mt. Sinai shortly after Israel’s exodus from Egypt and before the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Deuteronomy, on the other hand, takes place on the far side of those barren years in the desert as Israel finally stands on the cusp of entering into the Land of Promise. Between the two accounts, an entire generation of Israelites has died during the forty-year sojourn, and Moses stands on a second mountain to renew the covenant of God with this new generation. Most of them were born free in the wilderness and have no memory of the weight of Egyptian chains, or the sound of the wings of the Angel of Death, or the parting of the Red Sea, or the clouds and lightning at the mountain of God.

Considering these two accounts side by side can be illuminating. Let’s start with the account in Exodus, which reads:

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” (Exodus 20:8–11)

Notice the reason given for the keeping of the Sabbath here. As Heschel noted, it goes back to creation. Israel is to keep a Sabbath because the God of the Bible kept a Sabbath. As a nation, they are to uniquely image the one, true God on the geo-political stage of a pagan, polytheistic world. The manner of their resting, not the manner of their producing, is what would make them peculiar. Their ceasing, not their achieving, is what would set them apart as holy. After all, in a world defined by local gods warring for supremacy, rest would be foolish, dangerous even. But in a world fashioned entirely by the creative delight of an unrivaled, transcendent God, rest becomes a sign of his unimpeachable royalty.

But this raises an interesting question. Why would an infinite, omnipotent God need to rest? Are we to imagine the Great I AM being overcome by divine exhaustion? Did the Almighty need a day to replenish a depleted store of supernatural energy? Was the Sabbath an unfortunate concession needed to overcome the fatigue of God? The vision we get of the Sabbath in Scripture is none of these. For the God of the Bible, rest is not a remedy for sapped strength. It is a response of overflowing joy. A God of infinite capacity “ceases” for no other reason than to be overjoyed. To look at the rhythms of his creation and say, “That never gets old.” To say each day, as G.K. Chesterton so aptly put it, to the sun and the moon and the daisies of the field, “That was great. Do it again.” It is a day of divine beatitude, of divine delight.

But the Sabbath is not merely God’s response to a completed creation. It is the response that consummates creation itself. The South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han puts it this way:

The rest enjoyed on the Sabbath consecrates the work of creation. It is not mere idleness. Rather, it is an essential part of creation. . . . Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion. Without it, the creation would be incomplete. God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. It is the essence of the creation.^[1]

Without the arrival of the Sabbath on that seventh day, a vast, gaping void would have hung in the middle of the created order. The cosmos was incomplete without the delight of the Sabbath. In a sense then, all the other days are a pilgrimage to the Sabbath^[2]. They are the ordinary steps along a journey that take on the quality of sacredness because of their destination.

It is no wonder, then, that rather than simply prohibiting labor on the Sabbath, God, the Great Lawmaker, would break out into benediction right in the middle of the legal document he was chiseling into stone. The Fourth Commandment is the only commandment that morphs into a blessing: “Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” As Heschel puts it, he couldn’t help but add to the command “the blessing of his delight and the crown of sanctity.”

A God who rests, it turns out, poses a theological problem only for those who have been conditioned to see rest solely as a remedial act for diminished power and production. In the enchanted world of Scripture, rest is part of the very essence of God, his divine joy in all that he created. Rest is primary. It is the purpose, the telos, the climax, the pinnacle of time.

I like to imagine Adam and Eve, gasping to life from the dust of the earth on the sixth day, and immediately receiving an enormous assignment from their Maker. Fill the earth and subdue it. Tend the Garden of God and protect it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and the creatures that crawl on the land. Be fruitful and multiply. Endowed with the role of vice-regents and co-creators, they were called to draw out under their hand all the latent potential that God had tucked away into his creation. Genesis 2 seems to go out of its way to draw our attention to raw materials like gold and aromatic resin and onyx, buried in the ground, waiting to be discovered and put to use. I imagine them taking up this charge with big, solemn eyes and an overwhelming sense of both dignity and responsibility.

And so, I can see them getting to bed early on their first night on the Earth so they can rise with the sun and get started on their big, serious work. And because they are just a day old at this point, they wake up, ready to jump in with all the energy in the world. But it is the seventh day. The Sabbath. And all they are allowed to do in this garden of untapped potential and unrealized possibility is to enjoy it, to delight in it, to be overjoyed at it all. They are not allowed to develop or improve or optimize a thing. For a couple of two-day-olds, an entire day of ceasing would have felt like half a lifetime. And the greatest wonder of all to me is that, almost certainly, they would have bumped into the God who still walked in his garden in the cool of the day. And I can see him laughing at the amazement on their faces as he invites them over to sit with him and share in his joy. The work of fashioning the world could wait. I like to think that the work could only proceed after Adam and Eve had learned to rise into it from pure joy.

So, the first reason given for keeping the Sabbath is to join God in his joy. It is to bask in the beams of his delight. Those made in God’s image become most fully themselves when they act as joy refractors in the garden of delights. It is a joy that crowns and completes creation. So, friends, we remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it happy.

The second reason given for the Sabbath, found in Deuteronomy 5, is strikingly different. On the heels of their liberation at Sinai, the rationale given for the Sabbath in Exodus was the delight of God. This Sabbath joy would crucially sustain Israel for the forty-year journey through the wilderness that lay ahead of them. But when Israel finally found itself on the verge of entering the Land of Promise, the Sabbath took on a different quality. Pleasure and delight would not be in short supply in a land flowing with milk and honey. And in these conditions of material abundance, the Sabbath needs to be kept for radically different reasons. Deuteronomy 5:12–15 reads:

“Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”

In Exodus 20, the purpose of the Sabbath was joy; in Deuteronomy 5, the purpose of the Sabbath was resistance to slavery. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt,” it commands. Remember the days when you had no choice about resting from your labor. Remember the four hundred years of oppression when you were not permitted to cease. Remember when you were exploited for your labor, when your work was extracted from you through the relentless calculations of another nation’s greed. Remember when your worth was reduced to your production. So for Israel, Sabbath-keeping was also a declaration of freedom, an act of public defiance. It was, as Walter Brueggemann put it, “a quiet but uncompromising refusal to be defined by the production system of Babylon, so that life is regularly and with discipline enacted as a trusted gift and not as a frantic achievement.”^[3] According to the very words of the Ten Commandments itself, the Sabbath was both an act of joy and resistance—an act of joy as resistance.

This is also why it is important to remember that the Fourth Commandment is not just a command about Sabbath-keeping. It is also a command about Sabbath-giving.^[4] A day of rest was not merely a gift to be received from God; it was also a gift to be given to neighbor. “On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do.” Not only are you not allowed to do work yourself; neither are you allowed to extract the work of others.

Within the conditions of Canaan’s abundance, Sabbath-keeping would become for Israel a crucial way to prevent the oppressed from becoming the oppressor. It was a profoundly social practice, kept by an entire community that crossed classes, genders, and ethnicities. It was designed to restore a sense of dignity to the poor and marginalized and forge deep bonds of solidarity and belonging amongst all who bear the image of God. It posed the profound question that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks raised in his book The Dignity of Difference: “Can I see God’s image in one who is not in my image?”^[5] In the logic of Deuteronomy, the Sabbath becomes the spiritual smelling salts administered every seventh day to awaken God’s people out of the spiritual amnesia that inevitably accompanies material prosperity. It reawakens us to the face of God and re-engraves his face on the face of every neighbor.

And so Sabbath-keeping reorients us every seventh day to the grace of God in a way that makes us both joyful (Exodus 20) and different (Deuteronomy 5) in a world of anxious performance.

There is a third reason found in Scripture for keeping the Sabbath. For those of us in the modern West, this third reason will sound the most radical and confrontational of all. The clearest articulation of it is found in Isaiah 58:13–14. There, the prophet Isaiah confronts Israel and its failure to keep the Sabbath with these bracing words from the Lord:

“If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
     and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
     and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
     and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
then you will find your joy in the Lord,
     and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
     and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”

According to Isaiah, the Sabbath can be broken not only by laboring on the Sabbath, but also by “doing as you please on my holy day.” Israel is being sharply chastised here not primarily for working on the Sabbath, but for using the Sabbath to do whatever they wanted.^[6] Sabbath rest had become self-indulgent leisure, luxury, and exploitation. (See, for example, Isaiah 58:3 where Israel “doing as you please” is equated with “exploiting all your workers.”) It was no longer a Sabbath “unto the Lord your God.” It had become a Sabbath “unto the self your god.”

The insight here is profound. The issue at stake for Isaiah is that Sabbath observance is not so much about the ceasing of interminable work; it is about the ceasing of interminable desire. It is about laying to rest what Walter Brueggemann calls “the way of mammon” which he defines as “the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness.”^[7] The Sabbath in the moral imagination of the Hebrew prophets directly speaks to our impulse to produce more and our appetite to consume more. It resets our desires through a weekly ceasing, an embodied enactment of satiation, a recalibration of our sense of enough. “It is in knowing the meaning of enough that we receive a sense of abundance,” economist Bob Goudzwaard says, “for abundance is the awareness of having more than enough.”^[8] The sense of fullness and abundance we chase after so endlessly in our production and our consumption, paradoxically, can only be received when we learn to recognize when we have enough. When we have produced enough. When we have consumed enough. By cultivating that enough, we clear the ground for the joy of abundance to spring up.

Put another way, in a land flowing with milk and honey, the deepest act of resistance is not so much defying a Pharaoh in Egypt who is demanding an impossible quota of bricks without straw. Instead, it is learning to defy the Pharaoh within. The unrelenting voice in each of our hearts that demands an ever-increasing quota of production and performance and consumption to display and validate our worth. It is this disapproving voice within, the prophet Isaiah suggests, that drives us both to our frenetic over-work as well as to our conspicuous consumption. It is what philosopher Byung-Chul Han has aptly referred to as “auto-exploitation.”^[9] In a land flowing with milk and honey, we have internalized Pharoah’s insatiable drive for ever more production. The Pharaoh within demands more and more from us in order to prove our sense of worth. We no longer simply perform in order to produce labor; we now perform in order to produce a self. Bricks without straw, indeed.

And so for Isaiah, there is a deep, intrinsic connection between our ability to cease from our labors and our ability to cease from indulging our every desire. It is resting from our self-justifying impulses that strive to be defined by both our production and our consumption. It is enacting the glad tidings that our salvation—and the salvation of the entire world—can’t be achieved by the works of our hands or by the consumption and display of the right products. It will only arrive as a gift of God’s grace through the work of Jesus Christ. In other words, keeping the Sabbath of the Lord is designed to bring us, in mind, spirit, and body, to the Lord of the Sabbath—Jesus Christ. We don’t keep the Sabbath of the Lord. The Lord of the Sabbath keeps us.

And so, all the concepts and stories and metaphors we have been exploring together have been profoundly moving for me and have made keeping a weekly Sabbath a non-negotiable. But the purpose of a weekly Sabbath is not merely self-care or “me time.” The purpose is to clear ground in our lives to encounter Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath, and his grace that changes us. There is one quote—an image, really—that I find myself coming back to more than any other on my Sabbath days. It comes from Richard Lovelace’s little book Renewal as a Way of Life. He writes this:

It is an item of faith that we are children of God; there is plenty of experience in us against it. The faith that surmounts this evidence and that is able to warm itself at the fire of God’s love, instead of having to steal love and self-acceptance from other sources, is actually the root of holiness. . . . We are not saved by the love we exercise, but by the love we trust.^[10]

That image—of me sitting down in front of a fire, its warmth on my face, the smell of smoke and wood, the dance of the flame, the cold of the night on my back—is what I see in my mind’s eye as I close down my computer and say a prayer consecrating to God all that I didn’t get to that week. It reminds me just how cold my soul has grown and the many ways it has anxiously sought to steal love and self-acceptance through my performance and my production. It reminds me that the blazing fire of God’s love never wavers or dies down. I just have the tendency to wander away from it looking for love out in the cold. It reminds me that the approval I am looking for will not be found in the quality of love I have or have not been able to exercise this week; it will be found in returning to the unwavering love that, by God’s grace alone, I have come to trust. “In returning and rest you shall be saved” the prophet Isaiah also reminds us, “in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (35:15). And so the Sabbath of the Lord draws me back again and again to the Lord of the Sabbath. It reminds me to cease, to sit still at the fire, to bask in its beams, until my soul not only sees the light of this love but starts to feel its warmth again too.

This is what I imagine whenever I pronounce that ancient benediction from Numbers 6 over a congregation, or over my children, or over my own heart: “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.” So, friends, keep a weekly Sabbath. Guard it. Fight for it. Delight in it. Make it fun, for Christ’s sake. Make it the day you look forward to more than any other. If you need to, start small, like I did, with a three hour block each week. Shut off your devices. Here’s a profound secret I discovered that I’ll share with you now: airplane mode works on your phone, even when you’re not on an airplane! Discover the joy of no one even noticing you were off the grid for those three hours. If you’re married with young children, take three-hour Sabbath shifts with your spouse, and guard the other’s shift more than your own. Don’t over think, over spiritualize, over moralize, or over optimize it. Just relax and make it the best three hours of your week. And on the day you produce nothing for God, let that be the day you experience the warmth of his smile most tangibly. Let the Lord make his face shine upon you. Because his smile is what will restore a deep, unshakeable inner joy in a world awash with anxiety.

^[1]. Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, Kindle location 720-723

^[2]. Susannah Heschel in her Introduction to Abraham Heschel, The Sabbath

^[3]. Walter Brueggemann, Cadences of Home, 8.

^[4]. Thanks to my friend Duke Kwon for this important insight.

^[5]. Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (Continuum, 2003), 17.

^[6]. Thanks to Alistair Sterne who pointed out this insight to me in a personal email correspondence.

^[7]. Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (Westminster John Knox, 2014),

^[8]. Bob Goudzwaard and Craig G. Bartholomew, Beyond the Modern Age: An Archaeology of Contemporary Culture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 268.

^[9]. Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, Kindle location 188

^[10]. Richard Lovelace, Renewal as a Way of Life: A Guidebook for Spiritual Growth (Wipf and Stock, 2002), 160.