The Rest of God

by Mark Buchanan

  The most determinate fact of reality is not things that were or things that are. It is things to come. It is things that will be:

  Now he has promised, “Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” The words “once more” indicate the removing of what can be shaken—that is, created things— so that what cannot be shaken may remain.

  Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our “God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:26–29, emphasis mine)

  What you see is not what you get. What you see will vanish, never to reappear. What is coming is permanent, never to diminish. It endures forever.

  It is more real.

  There is only one right and wise response to this, the writer of Hebrews concludes: thanksgiving and worship.

  Not complaining or worrying.

  Not scheming or tinkering.

  Not settling scores or collecting trophies.

  Just be thankful and worship.

  This is where the book of Hebrews’ slant on the Sabbath takes on deep resonance. Hebrews makes explicit the joining of the three dimensions of past, present, and future—then, now, and when— and makes it exactly at this point of Sabbath rest. In Hebrews 3, the writer condemns the generation of Israel under Moses who did not believe God’s promise of a land God had prepared for them and so did not enter God’s rest.

  “Therefore,” the writer says in chapter 4, “since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it” (v. 1). Because of their forfeiture, the promise has been extended to you and me. “Now we who have believed enter that rest” (v. 3).

  It is a rest both present and future. It is a rest we taste now, enjoy now, receive now. But this present Sabbath is only a shadow of another Sabbath. This other Sabbath is beyond this world. Earthly things suggest it but never fulfill it. Even the rest that God’s people received under Joshua, when they entered the Promised Land, was at best a rough facsimile of the rest to come: “For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day. There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God. . . . Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest” (Heb. 4:8–9, 11).

  By faith we make every effort to enter this rest, not by striving, but by trusting. Not by works, but by believing. Later, in Hebrews 11, the writer spells out the nature of this faith: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (v. 1).

  In that certainty, we live boldly, joyfully, dangerously, dying to self yet fully alive. All of Hebrews 11—the gallery of the faith-filled— shows that. Each of those named in that chapter lived for something that nothing on earth could provide. For all of them, the world was not enough. Only heaven held out that prospect: “By faith [Abraham] made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:9–10, emphasis mine).

  Abraham and sons lived like strangers even in the Promised Land. They were vagabonds in paradise, nomads in Shangri-la. They lived that way, not only because God’s bequeathing of the land to his people was yet centuries away, but because they knew better anyhow. They knew if they settled in that land, with all its milk and honey and grapes and pomegranates, settled for that land, then the true home that was to be the object of their deepest hope would fade from sight. They knew that every inch of the earthly Promised Land, just as every moment of this world’s Sabbath rest, was only a foretaste of the true Promised Land and the final Sabbath rest.

  Only a foretaste.

  Yet still a foretaste. Sabbath isn’t eternity, but it’s close. It’s a kind of precinct of heaven. A well-kept Sabbath is a dress rehearsal for things above. In finding the rest of God now, we prepare for the fullness of God one day.

  In Sabbath, we anticipate forever.

  Make every effort to enter that.

  SABBATH LITURGY:

  Practicing Heaven

  “Faith,” the writer of Hebrews says, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (11:1 NKJV). What he has in mind is, not any earthly hope, but a heavenly one—a city whose architect and builder is God. There Jesus is seated at the right hand of God, cheering and coaxing us on. Faith is clarity about that. It is a tenacious conviction that this world is not enough and was never intended to be. It is a steadfast refusal to seek ultimate things— ultimate pleasure, ultimate fulfillment, ultimate purpose, ultimate understanding—where God has not laid them. Not one ultimate thing is stored down here. God has kept them for our homecoming, and none can be filched beforehand.

  The eclipse of heaven,1 as one writer calls it, is a massive loss to the contemporary Western church. We have become so earthly minded we’re of little heavenly good—or earthly good, for that matter. In fact, the current malaise in the church, the weariness and jadedness we see all over, is I think largely due to this. We have let consumerism tutor the church in its creed of more, better, brighter, faster. So we have fostered expectations that no church, no home group, no pulpit, no band of brothers, no brand of worship, no conference, no Bible school can ever deliver. The shortfall between what we dream and what we get is vast. All is weighed and found wanting in our sight.

  Only we set our sights on the wrong horizon.

  The truth is, we’re always a bit restless. We’re supposed to be. This is not a flaw in our faith, it is faith’s substance. It is a divine ruse to keep us from making permanent settlement this side of eternity. Our citizenship is in heaven. Between now and then, here and there, we live as sojourners, Bedouins, exiles, tent dwellers. There is always a little sand in the sheets. There is always a sense that over there is better than right here. If ever we achieved perfect Sabbath here, unbroken rest and restfulness, then the eternal rest that Sabbath hints at would become irrelevant.

  God lets us groan now to woo us heavenward. He gives us rest here, but not enough to fully satisfy, just enough to keep us in the race. With rest he mixes restlessness. Vacations are always too short, always less than ideal. Dream homes have problems, some nightmarish— leaky pipes, creaky joists, faulty wires, cracking foundations. Good health is hard to maintain and snatched at the whim of some rogue gene or sudden mishap or stray virus. Community is fragile, and even amid close friends we feel a little lonely.

  Sabbath is for rest. But it is also a good opportunity to point our restlessness heavenward. Like a wisteria plant, our restlessness needs to be trained to go in a certain direction, or else it follows a path of least resistance. When we recognize that our loneliness, our hunger, our weariness, our disappointment—that these are not final verdicts but only rumors of things unseen, it changes their meaning. It empties them of their power to defeat us. It fills them with an energy to spur us toward deeper hope.

  Jesus, speaking of things unseen, often talked about “how much more.” If you, though evil, know how to give good gifts, how much more does your Father in heaven? If even bad judges eventually dispense justice, how much more our God?

  This last Sabbath Liturgy is to help train your restless heart heavenward, and it borrows from the logic of “how much more.” If this meal with friends and family is rich, how much more the banquet of the great King? If resting in this patch of sunlight is refreshing, how much more to rest in that place where God and the Lamb shine brighter than any sun? If lovemaking with my spouse is blissful, how much more what no eye has seen and no ear heard but which God prepares for those he loves?

  Take anything you delight in here on earth: Your children. Your craftwork. Your hot tub. The dewed green of a fairway on a July morning. The sweet corn from your garden, butter-drenched.

  Enjoy them all. Find rest in them.

  But imagine how much more awaits you.

  EPILOGUE


  NOW STOP

  In 1976, archaeologist Mary Leakey, rooting and sifting for bones and relics on the plains of Tanzania, made a groundbreaking discovery: a single footprint in what was once damp volcanic ash. There it was, the hard ball of the heel, the light arch of the instep, the plump curve of the big toe, stamped as perfectly as an orthopedist’s plaster cast. She set out to uncover what else might be buried there and dug up a length of human footprints, a pair of them like a rough basting stitch in the earth. There were fifty-four in all. These came to be called the Laetoli Footprints. They marked the brief journey of two long-ago companions, both short and with quick, brusque strides, keeping step for step. They walked for a spell, stopped, turned slightly to glance behind them, then carried on.

  Who knows who they were: a man and his wife, perhaps, walking uneasily beneath the volcano’s smoking shadow, or a father and his son hunting under a brooding sky, or two women seeking water. Who knows? The Laetoli Footprints give us an intriguing, elusive glimpse into a moment of history eons old.

  For three years, Mary Leakey’s team studied, measured, analyzed, photographed, and took casts of the footprints. And then, finished, they buried them again, to protect them from damage, both natural and human. But here they made a mistake: the materials they used to cover the tracks were riddled with the seeds of acacia trees. Some sprouted, and their roots twined down into the brittle volcanic earth, playing havoc with the footprints. In 1995, the site was reexcavated, the tree roots unraveled and plucked out. But what to do now? Someone proposed carving up the printed rock into massive slabs, crating them, shipping them, storing them in a museum warehouse. This plan was rejected for being too complicated and costly, too likely to go awry. Someone else suggested building a museum of sorts over the footprints, a kind of private vault for them. This was rejected for being too difficult to maintain in such a remote area.

  So they buried them again. This time they started with a layer of fine sand, minutely sieved to winnow out all hint of seed. Over this they laid a thick coating of porous plastic, to let rainwater through but nothing that germinated. And then more sand. And then root-defying textiles, and more sand, and more tiles. They crowned it all with soil and lava boulders.1

  And so they lie there today in northern Tanzania, the Laetoli Footprints, hidden deep beneath tons of earth and things of man’s devising, twice buried. It’s funny, when you think about it. Those two people, whoever they were, could never have imagined their day’s journey—the sooty ground, the burning sky—would one day cause an international stir: that it would take herculean effort and Solomonic wisdom and Crossian wealth to simply uncover and cover the remnants of their ancient stroll.

  And funnier still that the only way we can figure out how to keep something is to bury it.

  How many times in history—and maybe personally—have we uncovered Sabbath, only to find it is too fragile a thing to preserve in the open air, and so buried it again? I fear that in writing this book. I have done the best I know how to excavate the gift of Sabbath in its original form, to measure the depth and shape and length of its imprint. But I fear it won’t take long for erosion to set in, and then for us to spread layers and layers of fill over it. We’ll do this first to protect it, but in essence we’ll conceal it and then in time forget it.

  Jesus’s Sabbath-keeping always looked, to his enemies, like Sabbath-breaking. That was one of the many ironies of their accusations against him: people who knew nothing of rest accused a man whose every word and gesture came from rest of Sabbath-breaking. Nevertheless, they hurled their accusations. There he was, Jesus, cutting across a farmer’s field and plucking new grain as he went, each seed like a slender, petrified tear. He cupped handfuls of it in the wideness of his carpenter’s palm and offered some to his disciples. To his opponents, he appeared to flagrantly violate all they believed most sacred about Sabbath-keeping. To Jesus, he was simply fulfilling the day’s true intent. His were acts that sacralized the day, kept it holy. His gestures enshrined the day as a gift bestowed on us, shaped into a gift to give back to God. To Jesus, these were the means by which Sabbath is preserved, held pristine, protected from both erosion and encrustation.

  “The Sabbath,” Jesus said, “was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

  And that, actually, is all we need to know to keep the Sabbath holy. This day was made for us. God gave it to you and me for our sake, for our benefit, for our strengthening and our replenishment. That is the point religion always forgets, not just about Sabbath, but about virtually everything. Religion is insidiously idolatrous, taking good things and giving them a centrality and veneration out of proportion to the thing itself. Religion makes fetishes of mere tools, icons of sheer gifts. It hallows the form and profanes the substance.

  Religion did that with the Sabbath in Jesus’s day. What was meant to serve people ended up demanding tribute from them. What was meant to restore people was turned into their drudgery. What was meant to be gift became a kind of punishment. What was intended to be our handmaiden became our despot. We found ourselves spending so much energy just trying to keep this thing from eroding, so much time fussing over it.

  So we buried it, buried it deep, and forgot it.

  And now we’re all tired. Now we dream of that day when our work will be done, when we can finally wash the dust of it from our skin, but that day never comes. We look in vain for the day of our work’s completion. But it is mythical, like unicorns and dragons. So we dream, instead, of evacuating our lives, of somehow taking leave of our duties and responsibilities, for a month, or three months, or a year, or more.

  But what about Sabbath? Sabbath was made for man. It was something God prepared long ago, inscribed into the very order of creation: a day when all the other days loosed their grip. They were forced to. It’s a day that God intended to fuss over us, not we over it. It was designed to protect us, pay tribute to us, coddle us, in all our created frailty and God-imprinted beauty and hard-won liberty, in our status as men and women whom God made in his own image and freed by his own hand and own blood.

  It is a father’s gift to indulge his children.

  Before we ever keep the Sabbath holy, it keeps us holy. All we do is tend that which tends us. We feather the bed we sleep on. We feed the goose that lays the golden eggs. God, out of the bounty of his own nature, held this day apart and stepped fully into it, then turned and said, “Come, all you who are weary and heavy-laden. Come, and I will give you rest. Come, join me here.”

  He makes the footprints, and we just follow along beside.

  In one of my other books, I tell the story about the time Philipp Melanchthon turned to Martin Luther and announced, “Today, you and I shall discuss the governance of the universe.” Luther looked at Melanchthon and said, “No. Today, you and I shall go fishing and leave the governance of the universe to God.”

  Ah, the rest of God.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1 . Mary Oliver, “The Swan,” New & Selected Poems, Vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 79.

  CHAPTER 1

  1 . Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions (New York: Collins, 1997); cited in Leadership Journal: A Practical Journal for Church Leaders, Fall 1997, 81.

  2 . Source unknown.

  3 . Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, (New York: New Press, 1997).

  4 . Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus, &Giroux, 2001), 47.

  5 . Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Nashville: W Publishing, 1998), 194–95.

  CHAPTER 2

  1 . Leaving mother and father was part of God’s original charge to Adam—oddly, since he had neither. But the idea is so central to what God wants to communicate to men and women about marriage that Adam, the first man, was told to do it anyway.

 
2 . Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York: Penquin, 1991), 13–14.

  3 . I first heard this from Gary Collins, a former British Columbia Finance Minister and a pilot. I have since confirmed it with several pilots.

  CHAPTER 3

  1 . Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest (New York: Bantam, 1999), 3.

  2 . Ibid, 2.

  3 . Ibid, 4.

  4 . From The Cat in the Hat By Dr. Seuss, copyright TM & copyright by Dr. Seuss Enterprises L. P., 1970, renewed 1998. Used by permission of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  5 . Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: The Holy Community at Table with Holy Scripture (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 2000), 43.

  6 . Unpublished poem by Loni Searl, 2004. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 . Sietze Buning (Stanley Wiersma), “Obedience” found in Purpaleanie and Other Permutations (Orange City, IA: Middleburg Press, 1978). Used with permission of the Middleburg Press, Box 166, Orange City, IA 51041.

  2 . C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (England: Puffin Books, 1978), 123–24.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 . Henri J. M. Nouwen, Reaching Out (New York: Bantam, 1986).

  2 . Mary Oliver, “Entering the Kingdom,” New & Used Selected Poems, Vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 190.

  3 . Ralph Schoenstein, “The Great T. P. Shortage,” TV Guide (New York: TV Guide, 1974).