Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World

by A.J. Swoboda

Ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind. (Job 12:7–10)

“The righteous,” Proverbs 12:10 tells us, “care for the needs of their animals.” My faith—our faith—should reach so far as to change the way that we treat the animals God has made. But

The gospel is hypocritical without the social gospel, and the social gospel hollow without the gospel.

As we cease from our steady toil, we learn the valuable lesson that the whole of creation does not exist exclusively for us and to meet our desires.”18

God’s intention is not that we use the animals in such a way that we destroy their kingdom and species. If our use of anything in God’s garden destroys or annihilates that thing, then we are improperly using it. To Sabbath is to extend the joy of the Lord to the whole of God’s garden, not just the human occupants.

Friends, to a world that worships at the altar of hyperactivity, Sabbath raises all kinds of questions. The Sabbath is weird. The Sabbath makes us weird. And we should keep it that way.

The lesson Moses learned was that he did not need to worry about when to find rest because God was more concerned with that than he would ever be. God was going ahead and preparing a place of rest for him. Our task, like Moses’s, is to enter what God has already prepared for us.

Jesus is God being vulnerable.

Someone once described to me a lake that was being drained. When all the water was drained out, garbage and other debris were found at the bottom of the lake, which could then be cleaned up. Silence is giving space to see what is at the bottom of our souls.

On the Sabbath, I cannot pretend to be anyone else before the living God. I have to be me.

how freeing!