“Frank is mowing his lawn! He’s breaking the Sabbath!”
My son was just five years old at the time and scandalized by our neighbor’s flagrant disregard for observing the Sabbath command. His dismay mirrors most people’s approach to the call to rest as God rested on the seventh day. As such, it mirrors the tendency to turn the Sabbath into an issue of personal morality. But though there are personal benefits to keeping the Sabbath and personal drawbacks to not keeping the Sabbath, it has community at its heart. It is ultimately relational.
Sabbath-keeping is primarily about protection. It protects our relationship with God by preserving a day that’s wide open, unencumbered by work so we can worship and pray freely. Likewise, it protects our relationships with others by eliminating hierarchies and slaveries and other injustices from our human relationships.
Because of its position as the final and completing day of the creation week, Sabbath has always had an eschatological, future orientation to it. It looks forward to the final, completing work of God in the world. It’s like hors d’oeuvres. It is both a part of the meal and not a part of the meal. It is a taste of what is to come without being the fullness of what is to come.
A weekly Sabbath is a weekly reminder. It reminds us that what’s wrong with the world and all the things that need to be worked on are not the things that define the world. God defines reality.
God underpinned everything and is involved in everything. And because of this, we can rest. We can rest from our work. We can rest from our worry. We can rest from our need to try to control things and people. Every week that we stop our efforts and rest, we assert that God is greater than whatever is wrong and that he will not stop working till all that is wrong is made right.
Sabbath is an assertion of peace, of wholeness, of shalom. It takes a small bite of shalom this week, knowing God will bring all things under his good shalom in the future he is shaping.
Psalm 92 is the Sabbath psalm, as it notes in its inscription. It brings together all of what I’ve written above in its 15 brief verses.
The first thing it does is offer praise to God.
It is good to praise the LORD
and make music to your name, O Most High,
proclaiming your love in the morning
and your faithfulness at night,
to the music of the ten-stringed lyre
and the melody of the harp (Ps. 92:1-3).
Sabbath has worship at its heart because it asserts God as the central reality.
When God is central, everything else falls into place and everything becomes worship.
I hesitate to say that music is essential to worship. It’s not. And worship shouldn’t be reduced to singing. But music is exuberant. Poetry is language on fire and singing piles high the fuel for the flames.
Music and song have the unique ability to release joy in the middle suffering and sorrow. Song can beat back the darkness in the middle of the night. So, even though I’ve said song isn’t essential to worship, I will now contradict myself and say it is. We need its exuberant joy to celebrate Sabbath, to acknowledge the goodness of God in ways only song can.
The psalmist here suggests such music-making is an all day affair, stretching from morning to night. The entire day is caught up in the gladness of praise, basking in the goodness of God.
That goodness is expressed in the twin words love/mercy/lovingkindness (Hebrew: chesed) and faithfulness/truth/integrity (Hebrew: emeth). These two are paired throughout the Psalms, expressing the matched realities of God’s intensely passionate love for his people and his single-minded, unbreakable commitment to them. Together they provide the reassuring foundation of our lives: God’s determined devotion to us.
There’s a lightness to the worship expressed here. Elsewhere in the Psalms, we hear of ram’s horns and pipes and crashing cymbals. But here we have stringed instruments alone. No blasts. No percussion.
For you make me glad by your deeds, LORD;
I sing for joy at what your hands have done.
How great are your works, LORD,
how profound your thoughts (Ps. 92:4-5)!
God’s goodness isn’t just an idea, not just a matter of wishful thinking and theological conjecture.
God’s goodness is seen in action: “by your deeds”; “what your hands have done”; and “great are your works” all express this action. We don’t just assert God’s faithfulness, we’ve seen it.
And then we switch from God’s actions to God’s thoughts. They are profound. This is in contrast with what comes next.
Senseless people do not know,
fools do not understand,
that though the wicked spring up like grass
and all evildoers flourish,
they will be destroyed forever (Ps. 92:6-7).
Where God’s thoughts are profound, the godless don’t know, don’t understand. As Psalms and Proverbs assert, wisdom arises from the “fear of the Lord” (awareness of God in all circumstances) whereas foolishness comes from atheism, since the fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
Not looking for God, not acknowledging him, not worshiping him leads to a foolish life, a senseless life, an empty life. It is the road to the wicked life. Their lives may look lush and green now, but that’s part of the folly, part of the not-knowing. For that green is the green of grass, an image throughout the Scriptures for temporariness and futility. In a culture without sprinkler systems, grass grew quickly during the rainy season and dried and died quickly in the dry season (Israel having not four, but two seasons).
It’s easy to be discouraged by the success of the godless, tumbled over by them as they claim the spotlight and flaunt their godlessness.
Today, I was looking through social media which was dominated by two popular singers whose song lyrics are over-the-top filth. Some basked in it. Others bemoaned it. But the truth is, the song and its singers will be gone like grass, mowed and dumped in the compost. Forever.
This isn’t my take on things. This is Psalm 92’s Sabbath perspective. One-hit wonders abound. They make their splash, but the ripples quickly fade and the stone that made them settles to the bottom of the pond. If we let them, they will dominate our imaginations. Sabbath whispers a quiet but defiant, “No!” There is no substance to these me-first bullies. They are a flash that blinds for a moment and is gone for ever. Used up. Nothing.
God, however, is exactly the opposite.
But you, LORD, are forever exalted (Ps. 92:8).
Where the wicked “spring up,” God is “lifted up.” Where they rise on their own and for their own sake, God is lifted up by our praise and lifts us up as well (as we’ll see later). Where they are self-focused, God and we are mutually oriented. Where they are a spark, God is a sun.
For surely your enemies, LORD,
surely your enemies will perish;
all evildoers will be scattered.
You have exalted my horn like that of a wild ox;
fine oils have been poured on me.
My eyes have seen the defeat of my adversaries;
my ears have heard the rout of my wicked foes (Ps. 92).
Again, Sabbath exposes the transience of the godless. They will perish. They will be scattered. They will be defeated. They will be routed.
Psalm 92 is insistent. There is no question here. There is certainty. Their loudness and brashness and over-confidence may make them seem like the permanent ones, but it’s not true.
They are over-inflated balloons which pop with a blast of hot air.
That’s their future. Our future is exaltation — not by our own hand or for our own glory, but by God’s hand and for our mutual glory.
A wild ox raises its horn in victory over its foe, its horn being a source of its power and domination. Anointing oils are wealthy, kingly, and fragrant. Together they image God’s empowering and favor poured out on his people, for he lifts the horn and pours the oils.
And then a final image.
The righteous will flourish like a palm tree,
they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon;
planted in the house of the LORD,
they will flourish in the courts of our God.
They will still bear fruit in old age,
they will stay fresh and green,
proclaiming, “The LORD is upright;
he is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in him” (Ps. 92:12-15)
We end in God’s house.
In the center courtyard is a garden and we’re planted in it. We’re not ephemeral grasses. We’re study, stately trees, growing taller and stronger as we get older. Our fruit gets sweeter and more abundant the longer we live in God’s house.
Here we encounter the word “flourish” again. Where the godless seemed to flourish, we flourish indeed.
And so we burst out into a final three-statement song of praise: Yahweh is upright; he’s my Rock; there is no wickedness in him. Two affirmations and one negation.
Why a negation? Why sing that there is no wickedness in him?
Those who have suffered, have been abused, have endured pain often need an assurance that the one they’re with afterward won’t hurt them like they’ve been hurt before. Along with an affirmation of their caretaker’s goodness, they need to know that this one won’t hurt them like the last.
The hurting will cease. Sabbath promises it.
God is upright. We can trust him.
God is our Rock. We can build our lives on him.
God has no wickedness in him. We can stop being afraid.
Sabbath doesn’t deny the difficulties of today. But it stops reacting to them and reorients toward God.
As it does so, singing its reorienting worship full force, it sees a future that extends the Sabbath shalom into eternity. And with that image in its eyes, it settles into rest.