This New Life

On September 21, 1956, a test pilot by the name of Tommy Attridge shot himself out of the sky. It was a classic case of two objects trying to occupy the same space at the same time—one being his Grumman F11F-1 Tiger jet, and the other being a gaggle of his own bullets. Attridge was test-firing his 20mm cannons while flying at the speed of Mach 1.

At one point he entered a shallow dive, and at 13,000 feet he pulled the trigger on his guns for a 4-second burst. He fired again for a few seconds to empty the belts. Eleven seconds later, at 7,000 feet, he caught up to his own bullets and was struck by them. He had overtaken and then passed through his own gunfire! The plane crash landed into some trees, but Attridge was able to escape, relatively unharmed. It was the aerospace equivalent of a tiger biting its own tail.

What a great metaphor for workaholics who are so driven they can never take a break. They never slow down, never go on vacation, and never take time to smell the roses. Despite all the time-saving devices in our modern world, they still don’t have time to get everything done they want to accomplish. So, they fly through life at Mach 1 with their hair on fire. But there’s a price to be paid for moving through life too fast—namely, physical exhaustion, mental weariness, emotional distress, spiritual disillusionment, or good old-fashioned burnout.

Thankfully, God understands the human need to rest and re-charge. In fact, the fourth commandment teaches us that God’s people are to rest in peace before they die. Quite significantly, the Sabbath law is the longest commandment of the ten, and it’s the most unique. It took Israel out of sync with the heavenly bodies, out of sync the Egyptian workweek, and out of sync with the entire known world. It was simultaneously oriented toward God, others, and oneself. In that sense, it aligns with Jesus’s teaching that the greatest command is to love God with all one’s heart and one’s neighbor as oneself.

Most surprisingly, the Sabbath was a “mini suspension of the curse.” Keeping it meant not having to sweat from the brow or handle thorns from a cursed earth. Implementing it is to experience God’s grace in the midst of life’s fallenness. No wonder Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30). Like Father, like Son. God wants his people to have a safe landing. In this life and the next.

Sermon Resources:

Series: Carved in Stone: Some of God’s Ways for All of God’s People

Rest in Peace before You Die (Sermon Outline PDF)Download

Rest in Peace before You Die (Sermon PowerPoint PDF)Download

Contact This New Life directly for the sermon audio file.

“The Sabbath was God’s good gift to a weary people, and all who embraced it enjoyed its beauties, mysteries, and delights.”
– Timothy R. Valentino

Below is a link to my article, “Artistry and Architecture in the Fourth Commandment: New Proposals on the Context, Structure, and Beauty of Israel’s Sabbath Law,” published in the Fall 2015 volume of the Evangelical Journal. The introduction and thesis paragraph are reproduced here, and a link to the full article follows below:

The fourth commandment (Exod. 20:8–11) occupies a unique and exalted place among the laws of the Decalogue. Rabbi Bahya ben Asher, a medieval scholar, called it “the primary commandment given to Israel,” and “the first principle of faith, as weighty as all the rest of the commandments combined.” Other sages have described the Sabbath as the “bride” of Israel, elevating its status to the intimacy and mystique of marriage. In his classic treatise on the significance of Sabbath, Heschel goes so far as to say, “The Sabbath is the presence of God in the world, open to the soul of man.” So important is the Sabbath law to Judaism that some rabbis have placed it on par with the entire Torah. To keep it is to keep the whole law, and to break it is to break the whole law.

Historically, the Sabbath was God’s gift to a weary people. For more than four-hundred years, the Israelites had lived and labored as slaves down in Egypt, a nation organized around a ten-day workweek with no regular day off.5 Into such a world came the surprising text of the fourth commandment. The people who first heard it would have received it gladly. Their grueling and oppressive workweek had just been shortened from ten days to seven, with the seventh being a day of rest. In the text of this unique commandment, then, Yahweh reveals his compassion toward his people. His kindness and generosity are on display, as are his care and concern for all creation.

Centuries of scholarship have aided our understanding of the Sabbath law. What is often missing, however, is a detailed look at its literary context and internal arrangement. Such an omission is due primarily to the claims of higher criticism that the law has been embellished over time; therefore, its present form must be unoriginal and therefore untrustworthy. This paper challenges that claim. It proposes, instead, a sharpened arrangement for the Decalogue, and a new literary structure for the Sabbath law, showing how its internal architecture reinforces its meaning. Our investigation will reveal that (1) the fourth commandment constitutes its own unit within the Decalogue, and (2) the commandment itself is chiastically arranged. It is an exquisite text that defies any attempt to attribute its canonical form to scribal misadventure, editorial emendations, or other evolutionary developments. Indeed, the Decalogue is said to have been written “on tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God” (Exod. 31:18). As such, God’s artistry is on display in the Sabbath law. Not surprisingly, its literary presentation befits the beauty of its message, which we will also briefly consider.

The full article can be found here:

“Artistry and Architecture in the Fourth Commandment: New Proposals on the Context, Structure, and Beauty of Israel’s Sabbath Law” by Timothy R. Valentino. Published in Evangelical Journal 33/2 (2015): 49–67.