Post 1: Preparation and Permission to Rest
Welcome to The Notes of Rest Fellowship
(My soft electric piano track can accompany as you read. It runs about as long as the post.)
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all their multitude. 2 On the sixth day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. 4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. - Gen 2:1-4
Hi everyone,
Welcome to the first post for The Notes of Rest Fellowship! Today I invite you to give yourself permission to rest as God rested. In our self-centeredness it is easy to think that God’s ultimate creation was humanity. After all, on the sixth day, after the seas, trees, and bees were made, God created humans and told them to be fruitful. Sadly we often live as if we are the stars of the show. But the Jewish week does not end with the creation of humanity as the crowning achievement. Rather, God’s culminating activity was in resting. Rest is the end of creation. It’s where we are all headed. It’s that important, and it’s that central to who we are now.
Walter Brueggeman in his book Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, observes that when God rested, the world carried on. That is, the systems of the earth were in good order such that God could rest. This observation can seem irrelevant to us given how sinful the world’s systems are now. There is always more money to be made, more problems to fix, more burdens to lift. But as we will see in Moses’ engagement with Sabbath in a future post, rest was not given to the privileged few, but rather as a system of rebellion for those who lived under the weight of sin from their economic oppressor Pharaoh. God was restoring to Israel permission to rest after they had been denied it for 400 years. It’s not that Israel’s systems had to be perfect in order to rest. Rather, they had a relationship with a faithful God who enabled them to rely on God and the original goodness in the earth so that they could rest from their labors.
When do you give yourself permission to rest from your labor, paid and unpaid? Both can be taxing.