Pushing Pause: A Challenge to Our Culture

In part three of this series, Major Mat Badger urges us to view Sabbath rest as ‘scheduled social justice’ and a powerful countercultural practice that declares our identity as image bearers of God.

Let’s begin with the reminder that God worked for six days and then … God rested. Breathe deeply and take that in; God rested. If we are made in God’s image (and we all are) then it follows that we are also designed to rest. Exodus 20:8 reads, ‘Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God’. Most of us need to hear the second part of this verse. But on the flipside, some of us may need the reminder about the first part, because there is a rhythm of both work and rest.

All work and no play

Work is a good thing, but if your life is all work then over time you will grind your soul into the ground and become more of a machine than a human being. Similarly, if your life is all rest then you’re in danger of living a life devoid of meaning, purpose and significance. Both overwork and underwork rob us of the life designed for us. In Deuteronomy 5, Moses reminds Israel’s descendants of this balance, by drawing their attention to the slavery endured by their parents and grandparents in Egypt.

There’s a 40-year gap between the end of the book of Exodus and the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy, because Moses is writing to different generations. Exodus was written to the first generation as they came out of slavery in Egypt, with the command to ‘remember the Sabbath’; while Deuteronomy was written four decades later to their descendants who had no first-hand experience of relentless work devoid of rest. This is why they were commanded not simply to ‘remember’ the Sabbath, but to ‘observe’ it. The Hebrew word for ‘observe’ is ‘shamar’ which means to guard or keep watch over.

The second change from Exodus to Deuteronomy comes at the very end of the passages. In Exodus we read, ‘For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the seas, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day’. But in Deuteronomy it says, ‘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’. In Exodus, the rationale behind the Sabbath command is grounded in the story of creation, but in Deuteronomy it is earthed in the story of freedom from oppression.

A rhythm of rebellion

In Deuteronomy, Israel stands on the banks of the Jordan River about to enter the promised land. Here the command to observe the Sabbath is about rebellion—not against God but against a system that values production over people. It’s a stern warning never to go back to Egypt or live within a system of all work and no rest. In Exodus, the Sabbath was about soul health for the whole society, but in Deuteronomy it’s also about resistance—a rebellion against Pharoah and all that Egypt stood for, as well as a warning to guard against becoming the slave drivers of the future.

Deuteronomy 5:14 reads, ‘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’.

Israel used to be both servant and foreigner. What we see here is social justice in action hundreds of years before the phrase was coined. In the Israelite world, everyone is to experience Sabbath—not just the rich or powerful, but servants, animals and the planet itself. In remembering the Sabbath, Israel was being reminded that they were image bearers of God—the God who rested. The Sabbath was a statement to the rest of the world about Israel’s identity. A declaration that they were different and not like the culture around them. Author John Mark Comer makes the observation that ‘Israel not only kept the Sabbath, but the Sabbath kept Israel’.

Scheduled social justice

Sabbath brings balance back to creation, ensuring we live within a rhythm of work and rest, just as God established. When we rest, we are image bearers not slaves—not subhuman machines but made in the image of God. The Sabbath is scheduled social justice.

Here in 2024, we also need to draw a line in the sand because the values of Pharoah are alive and well in Aotearoa, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa.

In 2019, a lawsuit was filed against Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dell and Tesla. Like Hebrew slaves making bricks, men, women and children all under armed guard were filmed working to get cobalt-rich rocks out of the ground, working for less than a dollar a day, all so you and I can have a cellphone. There are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in history—around 28 million. We have become bound to this system because it has become almost impossible to function without a smart phone. Practicing Sabbath stands against this injustice by helping us break the addiction to our phones as we reconnect with God.

Initially, practising Sabbath will seem strange and even hard. But if we persevere with this subversive practice—this scheduled social justice—we exchange the restlessness of our culture for true rest. When we adopt a rhythm of rebellion against the values of the world we also adopt an alternative way of being, by reflecting something of the image of God. I challenge you to try it…