👥 Shadow vs. Substance: How the Book of Hebrews Unlocks Old Testament Law

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Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm joined again by the hosts of the Bible Unbranded podcast, Rebecca Schosberger and Renee Duffy, and we're going to continue our conversation of Deuteronomy, and today we're really going to focus in on where to use the Sabbath as sort of an example of how to go about interpreting laws within a theological framework, one might say, and so thinking about how these laws convey something of the character of God and something of the underlying realities of the world that we're trying to live in. And along the way, then we'll dress probably how might the Church think about Sabbath the rest even in today's world. So we'll get a little practical as well, but that's where we're headed, and so welcome back. It's great to have you both here, and thanks for being on.

00:01:21
Speaker 2: It's really nice to be here and have these conversations, So thank you very much for this collaboration.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this. I've been teaching Hebrews on Wednesday mornings with this group that I do, and when I was thinking about our conversation about how this works from a theological perspective, that notion of shadow and substance or shadow and copy that Hebrews uses, the way it gestures up to sort of this quote unquote heavenly reality, or as I like to refer to it as the substance, I think gets a little patonic. So I don't want people to think that I'm like just drawing on that. But the idea is that so much of what we do and so much what Hebrews describes from an Old Testament perspective is gesturing towards something in that language better. It's not that this stuff that we're exhibiting right now isn't real or isn't good. It's just that there's something ahead of us that's so much better that these things that we're living in now are gesturing toward They're pointing us toward them. They're creating sort of an ache that conditions us to move in that direction, as I like to think of it. And so I'm wondering how that framework might fit with something like when we go to a Saba command or really any command, whether that framework is a helpful framework coming from the Book of Hebrews back into the Old Testament and saying, what if we started thinking about these things as copies and shadows without diminishing them, but also really thinking about them as how are they pointing us somewhere forward? So I'll just leave that. I'll just start us as a conversation starter, and either of you can start what do you think.

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Speaker 3: I have?

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Speaker 4: But I want Rene wants it like a chance to respond?

00:03:17
Speaker 3: Get it now?

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Speaker 2: Okay, It's so fun, James talking to you about these things, because genuinely you bring up all these things in the New Testament that I.

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Speaker 4: Of course believe in, and of course, but because for so many.

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Speaker 2: Factors I have stayed primarily as an Old Testament scholar. I remember one day I heard someone I think it was Trumper Longman and he said in a conversation, he said, I think it was him. I am an Old Testament scholar and a New Testament lay person, and I thought, okay, there's a space allowed for that.

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Speaker 3: That's me.

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Speaker 2: But the reason I understand Hebrews better now is because so I don't have to go backwards to do that. That's how I'm understanding Hebrews. The thing that I want to address is there's this idea in scholarship that has been proposed about the law by people I respect really highly, people who have influenced me by their writings. But I disagree with this perspective. And it's that in the idea of it pointing us forward, it's almost got And this is not the scholar's language, this evolutionary model, like God wanted to fix things up so messed up, he had to start slowly, and things like polygamy or slavery or all of those things have to get kind of pointed towards something better.

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Speaker 4: In here and now.

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Speaker 2: And that if you have training in that background and are hearing that, you might think that I'm affirming that. That's not how I see it at all. I think this is what you were alluding to. That, and I don't even want to restate what you said, but the idea that, but I'm gonna try in it, the idea that what law is calling for or anything that we're doing down here when we see but a glimpse of how great and how right everything will be. And I see that in a couple of ways out of my own study of Deuteronomy. One of them, and I think we talked about this last time, is that if we assume, rather than these laws somehow built this utopia that if we could just get back at we would be a more righteous nation or whatever. Rather than that, if we see that these laws are expressing elements of the character of God, that.

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Speaker 3: In settings where they.

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Speaker 2: Might be applicable, not because of the top, not because of the characters in the setting, but because of issues that arise out of that kind of brokenness. So like marriage brings a lot of like conflict of hierarchy and you know, family whatever. So the settings create a good spot for this thing to be practiced, whether it's human dignity or use of authority orrap not morality.

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Speaker 3: I'm like.

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Speaker 2: Anyway, looking for a word, we would call it modesty or something like that.

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Speaker 3: Sure, but they're.

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Speaker 4: Practiced character of God by broken people.

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Speaker 3: And then when Christ comes.

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Speaker 2: We talked about this last time, he's practicing the character of God as God.

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Speaker 4: And obviously, in the future, whatever.

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Speaker 2: Heaven looks like, no idea, there's that reality thing for us. It's in the future, you know, And that's the thing we are getting glimpses of of who God is.

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Speaker 3: So that's.

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Speaker 2: But that's all kind of like a big fancy explanation. What And this is where I think, Renee, maybe we haven't talked about it, but might be able to help and add to the conversation.

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Speaker 3: Is the reason.

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Speaker 2: That that seems to be happening is rhetorical.

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Speaker 3: It's it's almost.

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Speaker 2: Literary, and that you have.

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Speaker 3: The God of the universe.

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Speaker 2: I was trying to write this out yesterday and a different contexts, and if I.

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Speaker 4: Wrote incomparable and incomprehensible.

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Speaker 5: Lovel, just true to describe who the Almighty.

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Speaker 2: Is and what that looks like through words and deeds and examples for which we have no paradigm.

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Speaker 4: So literally, at its very best, all.

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Speaker 3: We could see is a shadow.

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Speaker 4: Because I don't even know how we're going to get the comprehension.

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Speaker 2: You tell me that I could live like even just a utopia.

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Speaker 4: I don't know that I want to. I like to struggle a little bit, you know, I have to earn something.

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Speaker 2: There's all these concepts we can't even get our brains around.

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Speaker 3: And so.

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Speaker 2: In God's humility and desire to reach us, he conveys them the only the only ways we can understand them, and those are but a shadow. So both of those pieces I think are absolutely fundamental to what's going on and on. That's why when I read a Hebrews I'm like.

00:09:08
Speaker 4: Oh, thank you.

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Speaker 2: This is why you know, when Abraham's called righteous or other characters that we look at and go, huh, I guess it was fine that he sent his wife off to a harem to save his life.

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Speaker 3: Okay, and.

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Speaker 2: It Abraham is a great example and he's a shadow of So anyway, let's out there, right, Can you help with all my I.

00:09:41
Speaker 1: Mean I'm kind of interested, you know, yeah, because Rebecca brought it up, but you know that literary aspect, I'd be interested to hear you talk about it. And then yeah, I've got a couple of thoughts i'll share too.

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Speaker 6: Yeah.

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Speaker 7: I mean, first I want to just acknowledge that I think when all three of us are like building all these guardrails right to the thing that Jane's introduced to talk about, which is I'm interested to actually get to talk about. But I will also just add to the guardrails, I guess.

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Speaker 6: And that we all all have this risk of falling into the fallacy of time snobbery.

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Speaker 8: Right Like we we look back and we think, oh, these are all the things that have been fixed already, like POLYGONI is fixed now, so that means we must be further along. But the reality is like, like you're identifying we, it's incomparable. We can't we can't get we can't understand the the nature of God, the perfection of Jesus in flesh, who is God. And so this is one of the reasons why we have so much story and narrative in our Bibles, right is because this is something we can relate to. It's something that we can begin to comprehend because there's overlap with.

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Speaker 6: All human ex experience and with the use of narrative.

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Speaker 8: That's like, just throughout all of human history, narrative has been an important way that we figure out who we are and how we connect to the past and where we go in the future, and what's going happening to us now and what's happened then, and so all of this are these layers that God has graced us with so that we can begin to comprehend in our moment.

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Speaker 6: But at any given moment along the way, God has accommodated himself to us through these ways. And so rather than I.

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Speaker 8: Mean there is progression, right, there's there's a redemptive history that moves forward, but humanity isn't really what has moved forward. If we're going to talk about being like God and understanding God.

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Speaker 6: God has moved his redemptive plan through, but we're still humans. We still can't get it.

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Speaker 8: And so it's important to know that while there are there are things that we see differently than ancient peoples did, they still got so much, just like we get so much.

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Speaker 6: And so instead being able.

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Speaker 8: To read narrative or read law in context to a best of our ability and then looking to the person of God, which is, you know, what we're here like poised to begin doing, is helpful in keeping that guard rail of that time snobbery. Instead of trying to place ourselves in a place which is what you are talking about I think back to this idea that they've put forward that there's something that you know has changed with us when they're when there really isn't. We're still struggling just as much as any other generation has struggled through all of time.

00:12:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's I think it's important to put the qualifier of the evolutionary app respect on it. And I think that what we want to avoid is thinking that we're making some sort of progress. I think more what we see in Hebrews is something akin to what I've been reading. This will be like my super geek moment. I've been reading Philip Reef his book Life and the Death Works, and he talks about culture in terms of sacred order that in social order, and culture transliterates the sacred order into a social order. And so what I see in Hebrews is this moment, this post resurrection moment, and I use moment as sort of the epoch, right, this post resurrection moment is now telling the community of faith, look, your social order needs to reflect a new sacred order. There's something very different post resurrection of Christ that everybody in the Christian community needs to recognize and then reflect within unity and so that is better than what you had before. But that's very different than saying it's an evolutionary move. It's what you're seeing is you've got the way I think about it. And I think there says some rooting in actually in Hebrews, because in the first chapter you have the set up between the revelation given by angels and the revelation given by the Sun. And so there's something too if we think about God's self disclosure, about God being hidden and God being or making himself present, making himself available to us. And so what I think we have in the Old Testament Law is very good when he makes the contrast between what's given through the angels and what's given through the Sun. He's not saying, oh, and by the way, through out everything that the Angel's ever told you. In fact, you know in that chapter he quotes the Old Testament multiple times. So it's not a jettisoning of this old revelation, but it's a recognition that now we have something different and better that we have to incorporate an embody. And so I think there's a really interesting move to be made to say, now as we're reading Old Testament Law, yes, it has to. It still reflects God's character, and as we read it as a reflection of God's character, we also have a further revelation in the Sun that helps us even understand the Old Testament law that much better.

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Speaker 3: Now.

00:15:35
Speaker 1: I'm an Old Testament guy, and so I'm very cautious of like, hey, let's just do Christological readings of the Old Testament. I don't believe that's what we should do, right, But I do think that it's impossible for us to divorce ourselves from a context in which we have the Sun revelation and try to read the Old Testament as if that weren't there, sure, right, And so that's always attention for me. Because I don't particularly gravitate toward Cristological readings of the Old Testament. I think we need to read the Old Testament on its own terms and allow it to sort of then organically connect into Christ as opposed to like saying, nope, that the Angel of the Lord is Jesus, it's a you know, Christophany or something like. I just don't really love that sort of move, but hopefully that clarifies that I love that sort of sacred order, social order, just you know, explanation and the culture, which would be in this case the literary as you were talking about Rene, But I would also say the symbolic, the structural right, the temple, it's cultus, the legal, the laws, to the extent that we would separate that from a literary right. You know, you have all these different layers that now create a culture, that are conveying, for lack of a better term, belief, Right, this is the reality we believe the sacred order to be, and so we're structuring our lives around it here and now, and as we and then as you get to Hebrews, you kind of sit back and you go, oh, okay, there is a new sacred reality because Jesus has risen. He's been given authority over heavens and the earth, and you know, he's in a new place. We have a new high Priest and they're teasing out all of these things. And it's like, now, this has different implications for how we order ourselves. Yeah, so that's sort of my broader thought process.

00:17:41
Speaker 6: Like, yeah, it reminds me not to drag us backwards. But as you're talking about this like.

00:17:50
Speaker 8: New reality, we re incorporate, right, we reinterpret with what we know and how like, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking, right, and that's that's the exciting part, right that us on this side of resurrection, this is exciting for us and we can understand that and actually being able to use that experience to understand what was exciting about what was happening in the Old Testament for them, that God was doing and showing up in new and exciting ways, and how that was reinterpreting the world around them, and how he used the cultural things around them in order to do that. Like all of that kind of piled in together is some of what I get the most excited about.

00:18:32
Speaker 1: So agree that. Yeah, Becky, uh yeah, I.

00:18:37
Speaker 2: Was just going to say, I'm definitely going to go listen to this podcast again so I can figure out everything you were saying, because this, like, and I'm not tongue in cheek, like this is a question that students ask me all the time about, you know, the relationship between the two and what's new and what's different that because it might be a weakness of mine.

00:19:04
Speaker 3: I'm not sure. I don't know.

00:19:05
Speaker 2: I just but because of how much I've set in the law and how I see all those exciting things pointed out, and this will bring us right back to Sabbath. And I'm going to make some you do who I haven't finished reading the dissertation yet are super excited about though.

00:19:23
Speaker 4: But.

00:19:25
Speaker 2: This will bring us right back to the Sabbath. And I'm going to make super big claims about what the Sabbath is designed to help the people practice as part of their weekly routine.

00:19:44
Speaker 3: And it's so exciting.

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Speaker 4: That it includes the Cross, like even though they don't know that.

00:19:55
Speaker 2: It includes the Cross, rather than, in my opinion, rather than somehow being changed by the Cross. So I really struggle not with the concepts, but like literally with understanding or explaining the concepts.

00:20:10
Speaker 3: A it's a in.

00:20:13
Speaker 2: My outworking of my own teaching or my theology that I haven't found ways to articulate.

00:20:19
Speaker 6: So I loved what.

00:20:22
Speaker 2: You said and will definitely be listening to it again to go like, okay, well, I.

00:20:26
Speaker 1: Will say, just as a sort of a plug, I was aled to Phillip Brief's Life and the Death Works through Kevin Flatt's book called Secularization, Social Order, and World History, which I would recommend all over the place. I think he does a fantastic job he doesn't deal with Christianity up front, right, He really starts with Confucism and you know, Islam and various other things, and he shows how this sacred social order actually worked through these other traditions, and it's really fantastic. So I was definitely led back to Reef from him, and we want to give him attribution for that.

00:21:06
Speaker 3: But either way we.

00:21:07
Speaker 1: Can, Yeah, we can. Let's move into Sabbath a little bit and talk through. You know, how does Sabbath then convey the character of God. I think the easy one is, you know, you look at it in an Exodus. It's rooted in creation. There's something about the ordering of time and the keeping that time set apart that creates a cadence in our lives, a sort of notion that God desires to give rest somehow, a notion that God is the ultimate provider and that our work is important but ultimately insufficient in some way. Like there are a lot of things I think we could tease out of that, but it is interesting to think, like, you know, you have the creation, then you have the Exodus reference in Deuteronomy five, and so you know, Sabbath is a sign that we are now under the order of God and how that relates to the created order. Like, there's a lot of ways we could take this, So I'm kind of interested to see, you know, where should we start. How do we move from something like a Deuteronomy five twelve through fifteen to a statement about who God is? And I would say, I would argue that that needs to be even apart from what's embedded in the text, right, that God is the one who brought Israel out of slavery, right, because that's explicit there. But I think there's more layer to it. I don't know whether you both agree to that, but maybe if I can start with Renee, like when you think about creation Exodus narratively across Genesis through Exodus, let's say, and then you think about Sabbath commands, is there an intuitive sense in which that connects for you?

00:23:02
Speaker 6: I'm not a hundred percent sure what you're asking. We talked, Becky and I talked a.

00:23:08
Speaker 8: Little bit last week, so I'll kind of I'll share what where we went, and maybe it does.

00:23:13
Speaker 6: And maybe it'll be like not what I was thinking at all, But we were thinking about the difference.

00:23:19
Speaker 8: I was thinking about the difference in the idea that Creation is put forth.

00:23:28
Speaker 9: In Exodus, and the Exodus is put forth in Deuteronomy. But it's not because the Exodus hasn't happened in Exodus. It just happened, right.

00:23:40
Speaker 8: Like, here's something about it being so fresh in their minds in this thing that again they're they're thinking about and they're they're trying to make connections.

00:23:50
Speaker 6: What is happening, like what just happened?

00:23:54
Speaker 3: Who is this God? Who are we? What?

00:23:56
Speaker 6: What's going on?

00:23:57
Speaker 8: They're in the middle of that narrative of their life, and so in the middle of actually experiencing it where it's fresh, they need to hear about creation because there's this recreating happening. And then as they move forward, there's a way in which the Exodus almost supplants creation in some ways where it's still it's still very important, it's still part of all of their narrative, but it becomes the pinnacle moment for the people that explains who they are, even way.

00:24:30
Speaker 6: After it's over.

00:24:33
Speaker 8: And so there must be some way in which not must be. Obviously, there is this way in which the creation and the Exodus are connected so tightly that it can it can take this place as they're going through it, and then as after they go through it, the thing they went through the Exodus can then sit in that spot and do the same thing that Creation did in the first way.

00:25:01
Speaker 1: So let me ask this just as a follow up, that's getting at what I'm thinking.

00:25:04
Speaker 4: So you.

00:25:08
Speaker 1: When you think about that connection creation, because there's been a lot written on this. I remember Terrence FRETHEIM, I think, wrote a book on connecting Creation and Exodus, and so there's typeological things you can do with it, you know, there's all these different connections you can make. But one of the things I've always been sort of fascinated by is the narrowing down to Israel. And I think ultimately you can make the argument of narrowing down all the way to Christ, but certainly in this setting, narrowing down to Israel of a creation vocation. So now they are the essentially, and I don't mean this vernacular in an overly technical fashion, but they are the first born that have now the they've taken up the mantle of carrying the Covenant forward into these multiple generations. And part of the way they would demonstrate that is by keeping the law and for our purposes, keeping the Sabbath like and that now connects them to this deeper creation vocation. Does that ring true to your inn ae and you don't you know?

00:26:18
Speaker 10: Yeah, as you know, I'm doing this work with Jacob right now and I'm literally in the think of thinking about what he does and doesn't do.

00:26:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:26:32
Speaker 8: And so as you're saying that, I'm just thinking, Yeah, they have this creation mandate and yet they're not actually doing it. Their participation in it is being the vessel of God's promises. Yeah, and that that comes with not doing at least one day of the week.

00:26:56
Speaker 11: Hate.

00:26:59
Speaker 1: I just think it's important to kind of get there and wrestle with it because I don't know, and Becky, y'all let you kind of wax philosophical on this, but just so you understand why I'm taking this line of questionings, like, I think it's kind of important to situate it within the overarching narrative that's come before at least a little bit, and to me, that gives us some clues about what we might say about God in this context. So I don't know how you think about it, Becky, but i'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

00:27:26
Speaker 2: Okay, I want to pad this by saying that One of the things that I have personally learned about myself by working with Renee is that my like charging in and clashing at something to wrestle with it for my sake can sound like shutting everything ouse down and proposing something brand new.

00:27:49
Speaker 4: So like, no, here's and that's not what I'm trying to say.

00:27:54
Speaker 2: In fact, when we podcast, here's a little spit, and Renee's at our podcast table right now, and I'm but we have a little thing on my desk that says yes and so that I.

00:28:06
Speaker 4: Can practice you know, no, no instead of doing that saying yes. And so this is not to say this is just my sorry, that's.

00:28:19
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, And honestly that's how I mean this, even when I'm combating it's but I I am not great with philosophical ideas, and I am I always I am trying to see, like simply what is going on, and and so hyperbole, exaggeration, those are all black and white. That's all part of how I do this. So this is going to come through right now in that what I'm hearing, I think, even in your language, James, is something that I hear all the time in scholarship, and it's very important but it's not how my brain works. I will say that one of the things about talking to you that's so helpful is I feel such a safety to be who I am and what my brain. I mean, it's wonderful to talk to you, and I can start to figure out things that I'm hearing from others that I'm not quite understanding.

00:29:19
Speaker 3: But you keep I think you keep.

00:29:23
Speaker 2: Talking about what's happening in the scriptures, even with Sabbath, Biblical Lot, almost like it's on a timeline, a redemptive timeline, and where the people are in that timeline and how things are changing or how this affects them in order to understand how God's working and moving. And that's I mean, everybody is interested in that except me, So it's totally.

00:29:49
Speaker 4: Valid and important and all.

00:29:51
Speaker 2: Of those things for me, because I think I grew up in that culture and I by nature combat anything that's the standard so that I can understand it better.

00:30:10
Speaker 3: I would almost go.

00:30:11
Speaker 2: Far to say, and this is an exaggeration because it's absolutely not true, I'm going to go back and ruin everything and how the people look at the world. But my exaggerated explanation would be I don't care at all about the people. Now that's not true. But they're not the thing that I'm trying to learn about. They're not the peace that I want to emulate. They're not even the piece usually that the author is telling us an evaluation of how they're doing with God. So I, in my very black and white kind of approach, which might be unique to me, anytime i'm looking at what the people's role is going to be. Before I get to the very end of my working through something, I am shutting myself down and going, no, I don't know. All I really care about is what God is saying about himself. So for example, yes, maybe the people are part of a new creation. Then I see that. I see that, but I see that as part of helping me understand what God is saying about himself. So how does this apply, for example, to Sabbath? Unless either of you want to respond to that, because I know for me that it's a little bit hyperbolic in the way I express it, I can go there at.

00:31:29
Speaker 1: Lea No, it's cool. I'll just say this. I don't disagree with you, so when I was.

00:31:37
Speaker 4: Doing honestly, I don't with you.

00:31:40
Speaker 6: It's just the way I Yeah, I know, I know.

00:31:43
Speaker 1: I think that I'm I would say, I'm doing something very similar to what you're doing from a slightly different angle. And so when I was doing my study on the Sabbath, I actually was always thinking, I don't really care if these wereite people practice is Abbath, it doesn't matter.

00:32:02
Speaker 2: Reading your stuff that I read so far, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah.

00:32:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't I don't care, Like because it's inscribed in the text, that is, and from the perspective I was looking at, that is the cultural memory, that's what is inscribed there, that just the inscription of it makes it important. Whether they practice this or not, that doesn't make any difference. And so when I'm talking about these sort of through scripture themes, my thinking is is more attuned to what cultural memory is being reconstructed in the moment where the Sabbath command is being written down and regiven.

00:32:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in.

00:32:42
Speaker 1: My in my sort of constellation, in the way I think about it, God is a social agent within the setting of Israel, and he's pictured that way in scripture. And so when I'm doing that, I'm assuming a lot that I'm not saying your articulate So I think that's why I resonate exactly with what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing. But I'm not making it clear I'm not, so I'll just say.

00:33:11
Speaker 4: That you're polite. I'm just like guys.

00:33:17
Speaker 2: And I'm also used to working with students who don't understand the differences. So if I look at all of scripture, which I do, this is my biblical theology as the revelation of God, and He is outworking with creation, which.

00:33:37
Speaker 3: Happens to hold.

00:33:38
Speaker 2: We talked about this in the Genesis podcast. Humanity in a very special place, but it's with all creation. So everything in scripture is for me revealing more about the character of God. And this may or may not be too simplistic, but there are places when He is giving explicit instructions or descriptions of who he is, and they just are emphatic statements, here's who I am, and we have language for it, but we can't understandstand the depth or extent of what it means when God does these things. When I am patient, it means I put up with my granddaughter who's now a toddler and could just be walking through and meeting her at her level all day without losing my temper. When God is patient, he will watch people murder children in the name of religion for thousands of years without wiping them off the planet. So we're talking to different levels of all these things whatever. So it makes his descriptive statements. But because those, again are so beyond what we can grasp, he also shows examples of who he is. And I know they're written by human authors, but I and that comes a big play in my understanding of literature in the Old Testament. But those are like when you have a relationship with a person or a people group. For God, because he lives a lot longer than we do over time, we call that history. And so he's got all of these examples of how he has walked from the beginning of time when he created them until like the story of Esther, where even though they're not anywhere near their old practices that they could do and they feel like God's already rejected them and thrown them out, He's coming back and saying, look at the insane things I'm going to do to protect you. So all the way through he's showing who he is in relationship to them, and we can I think it's really important to talk about the history of it, the story of it, all of those things. But then he has like these prescriptive pieces where I haven't tried this word before. Renee just said something that triggered it in me. She talked about how story is so an important way of communicating or everything you said about story to me, law is practiced story. So if story is showing us what God looks like in tangible form as he's dealing with his people, then law is like, okay, now you go practice it. And for for me, one of the law is always going to be telling us something more about the character of God. And I gave this example last time in Deuteronomy ten, when it says like I took care of you when you were foreigners in Egypt, and I took.

00:36:55
Speaker 3: Care of you, so you go.

00:36:57
Speaker 2: Take care of other foreigners in your land going to fundamentally look like I do because of who I am. And there's all kinds of implications for that, for like what that tells us about God. But for right now, holding onto that idea that behind his instruction is something he wants us to understand about him, and he wants us to understand it by practicing it, and in Sabbath by practicing it regularly, literally every seven days, which I remember the day I learned that it was.

00:37:34
Speaker 3: Likely that God didn't.

00:37:36
Speaker 4: Invent the seven days, but that.

00:37:39
Speaker 2: The structure of a week was already in place in society because they understood things.

00:37:45
Speaker 3: It's not that he didn't invent.

00:37:46
Speaker 2: It, but but that he was using a time structure to say regularly in the way you order time.

00:37:56
Speaker 12: And the thing behind the thing, the thing about God that both the reasons he gives.

00:38:12
Speaker 2: That we're supposed to reflect. In other words, we're doing the law because it's telling us something about who he is, and the becausees are because on the seventh day I rested and I created. I created everything, and I created it all perfectly. And on the seventh day I rested and you were in slavery and I rescued you. And so those are both pictures.

00:38:43
Speaker 3: Of this fulfillment.

00:38:45
Speaker 2: And I can't wait to go read the book connecting Creation and Exodus, because I'm seeing a clear connection between those two.

00:38:53
Speaker 3: But those are pictures.

00:38:55
Speaker 4: Of the completion, the perfection, the.

00:39:00
Speaker 2: Redemptive elements of God. And he doesn't ask us to do something to practice completion, or he asks us to not do anything and rest in the fact that he has done it. So, when I'm talking to students about Genesis one, if we have enough time, one of the things I like to tell them is I know that culturally, we have had a long history of getting like is it seven days or isn't it? And can you be a Christian if you think da da da da da da da da? And what does this have to do with science? And I'm like, if I told you that all of the creation narrative was leading up to a day, a weekly practice of celebrating, for lack of a better word, heaven, wouldn't that mystery and the desire to experience that and overshadow that? Or wouldn't that overshadow any question of like how this happened?

00:40:13
Speaker 3: Or That's not the point.

00:40:17
Speaker 2: The point is, Oh, my goodness, I serve a God who sees me, whether it's in the chaos or the redemption. And he has promised to do this thing, and he's done it before like twice now, once for the globe and once for the Israelite people, and he's gonna do it again. And my participation in it is to recognize that he's gonna do it, and how crazy that.

00:40:47
Speaker 4: He picked, Like these are things you can teach a five year old, like, no, today, we don't have to work because God does the work. I remember Doctor Block had a huge influence on me.

00:40:56
Speaker 2: He's like the ninth of thirteen children from Saskatchewan, you know, like.

00:41:00
Speaker 3: You need a story like that.

00:41:02
Speaker 2: And his dad was a potato farmer and you know they have like a three.

00:41:07
Speaker 4: Bedroom whatever, Like he has these crazy stories.

00:41:10
Speaker 2: And his dad was the only farmer in the area that refused to work on Saturday and it sometimes was life or death. I mean, if the hail is coming, you have a shook up today when you don't, and his dad would be like no, which I'm not.

00:41:25
Speaker 3: Saying that's how we should live.

00:41:27
Speaker 2: I'm saying that example, that picture of how he did live impacts even me in terms of what it meant to him that where his role in this process was. He's invited in, but he's not in charge like all of these people.

00:41:49
Speaker 6: God's got it.

00:41:50
Speaker 2: And even in practicing Sabbath, because we can talk about the practical of it, sometimes we're sabbathing from where that feels like you're so needed in the equation sometimes we're sabbathing from something that even if we work on, we cannot fix. I remember when my mom was walking through cancer, or when Karl was walking through cancer. You know, Sabbath almost seems to fly in the face of that because I can't fix it. God might not fix it now, those kinds of things, but I'm reminded that he, like I feel like about greet, that he will. He will redeem everything. So for me, grief doesn't have as much immediate hope as some Christians like to encourage me toward.

00:42:43
Speaker 4: I don't want that someday.

00:42:45
Speaker 3: I want it now.

00:42:47
Speaker 4: But one day a week.

00:42:50
Speaker 2: I can rest in the hope and then I let myself just grieve with the other six days still even a year later, because.

00:43:01
Speaker 4: I want immedia fixes for these things, but I can.

00:43:04
Speaker 2: I can set that aside regularly and go, Okay, you're right God, I don't have to brave this one who doesn't have hope.

00:43:12
Speaker 3: I don't quite know what to do with.

00:43:13
Speaker 2: That, but regularly I can remind myself and reinfuse that. And that's one of my goofy Sabbath practices. Anyway, all of that to say, what behind the Sabbath for me? Is what God wants us to understand about who he is. And I think it's very significant that the Bible like begins with I did it all perfectly and ends with and I'm going to fix it all again.

00:43:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, and once a week we sit in that.

00:43:50
Speaker 1: Let me so, I think we want to transition to the practical side of this, unless Renee, you have anything to add, No.

00:43:56
Speaker 6: Let's let's keep going.

00:43:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll just say this. I think that as we look at the law, there are laws that are much more challenging than the Sabbath to understand how to see the character of God behind them.

00:44:10
Speaker 4: Right.

00:44:11
Speaker 1: I was just doing some research on Deuteronomy twenty three to one the other day. This is about people with crushed testicles not being able to enter the assembly and.

00:44:21
Speaker 13: The vidical someone, Right, I mean, you've got these really for what are for us strange laws that are simply stated with no real commentary.

00:44:34
Speaker 1: And I think that one of the reasons I like the Sabbath laws. I think some of the other ones that we talked about, we've talked about, you know, muzzling the oxen, when is treading grain? Right? All these is because they start to give you glimpses of what we're how we're supposed to read the law. God's more explicit, and that's what I mean by commentaries giving more explicit texture to each of these laws. And so you sit back and you go, well, is it just for this one or is it for a bunch of others? And I think, combined with Renee what you mentioned about the story and the narrative, where we understand the stories, we see the stories, we get an understanding of how the dynamic works between us and God, who God is and who we are in relation to him. This then adds forced as we move into the law. And now we look at something like the Sabbath command where at first rooted in creation, then rooted in Exodus, and you go, oh, I'm starting to get it. Now, I'm starting to see why how we're supposed to read these laws. It's not just a checklist that my to do list for the day. It's now shaping something of who God is that I'm supposed to respond to. And these laws help the Israelites to respond to God. Right, they were to help the Israelites respond to God, but not just that, they're also helped. They're also to help me respond to God to understand who he is, and as we respond that may look very very different. And I think so as we pivot over into Sabbath, it can be easy when you read the rest of the ten commandments, right, well, you know, should we keep should we not murder in the same way the Israelized didn't murder? Should we not steal in the same way the Israelites? And still and you're kind of like there's a little one to one that comes across culturally, like those are pretty yeah, maybe stealings kind of we keep that one, right, It's it's pretty steady. But Sabbath is one of those where we kind of sit back and go, I'm sorry, go ahead.

00:46:38
Speaker 3: It just doesn't need redefinition.

00:46:40
Speaker 1: Culturally, it really doesn't. But the Sabbath is one of those that I think, really does, you know, it really does need a redefinition. It's got some some robustness to it that I think we have to sort of revisit in and say, is this really about taking Sunday off? Is that a necessary application or practical outworking of this command or could it be an optional way depending on where we are in the world right now. So I'll kind of leave it there, but I wanted to give people a little bit of a framework, like as they're reading the law. I think these are really great touch points to go. This isn't an exceptional way of reading the law. It's probably the normative way of reading the law, and it should inform the way we read some of the odder ones that we run into. That's right. So with all that sort of preamble out of the way, I'll just start with it. I'm interested to understand how each of you would think about Sabbath. Now, Becky, you've already kind of given us a little bit of glimpse, and how you do this? Renee, do you think how do you think about Sabbath in your daily life? Do you do you think about it? Is this something you practice? Yeah, just thoughts.

00:47:59
Speaker 6: I don't have.

00:48:00
Speaker 8: I don't have really hard and fast like ritual or rhythm that I adhere to. I think that's probably primarily because I'm the mom of four, so having people in my stead like, there's a lot of life that I don't I don't have control over anyway. But I will say that the idea at least of.

00:48:28
Speaker 6: I mean, let's just even take like the most obvious, like we go to church every Sunday. We go to church every Sunday as a family.

00:48:35
Speaker 8: And that didn't used to seem like such a thing, like we didn't make it a really hard and fest rule.

00:48:43
Speaker 6: It was a pattern to our life.

00:48:45
Speaker 8: As our kids have gotten older and we've also moved to a different area of the country.

00:48:51
Speaker 6: More of the rest of life is starting to ask for that time from us.

00:48:57
Speaker 8: I've got kids in athletics and oportunities to be in greater athletics or traveling athletics, or even just social things, and as that is kind of like coming in and asking for more of us we have, we have laid a.

00:49:19
Speaker 6: Pattern of Sundays being a day that we attend church together and we eat lunch together and like.

00:49:26
Speaker 4: It.

00:49:26
Speaker 3: It's funny.

00:49:27
Speaker 6: I would say, like, well, I don't know that, I like really like I.

00:49:30
Speaker 11: Make this my Sabbath, but it is just a part of our life that now I see is giving me reason to push back against some of that more taking from.

00:49:43
Speaker 3: Us, And uh, yeah, I don't know.

00:49:48
Speaker 8: I think that's probably the the most obvious primary way in which we we we do as a family. I think our kids just kind of assume it's just built in. We don't you don't talk about it really heavily, like this is our Sabbath.

00:50:03
Speaker 6: This is what we're teaching you.

00:50:05
Speaker 8: But it just is part of our life and it's and that's what sabbath is intended to be, like, not an arbitrary, legalistic thing, but.

00:50:17
Speaker 6: A rhythm and a pattern.

00:50:18
Speaker 8: And so that that's probably the primarily way that it shows up in my life because of the season of life that I'm in.

00:50:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, I resonate with that. You know, I've got four kids, three of which are still I guess my son's twenty and so he's still around, but he's much more doing his own thing now. But yeah, the others are still need things and that. You know, my girls do travel sports and that's been interesting and challenging, I will say that. And I think that as we've done the travel sports thing and have been gone on Sundays or war pulls us away on Sundays, what I've experienced is there is a real grind that you can get into. I remember this. I was working as a personal trainer through my MDiv and I used to work Monday through Saturday. So we were poor and I had to pay rent, and so I'd worked forty hours a week plus do my master you know, like I had a full time job. And so my boss scheduled me some clients on a Sunday one week.

00:51:27
Speaker 4: And.

00:51:29
Speaker 1: You know, I was in my twenties, Like you feel pretty much invulnerable to anything in your twenties, right, And so I remember going in that Sunday training the clients, going back on Monday, and by the next Saturday being absolutely exhausted. It was only a couple of clients on a Sunday, you know, no big deal, It's not like it was all day or whatever. I was absolutely fried. And I think that feeling of man, those weeks just ran together. There's no punctuation or separate there's no sacredness of time within that where you get to sort of break things up and go, no, now this work week is over, this next week, work week is going to start. But in this center part I have this sacred moment. I think we sometimes when we're doing the travel, sports and all that kind of stuff. Now I start to feel that way. It's as enjoyable as it is, much more fun than working, but as enjoyable as it is, you do start to like something starts to nag at you like you're missing something, and so I would say, yeah, Sabbath practice has become something I'm much more keen to over the last several years when we've been doing a lot of that and trying to figure out, like, what does this really look like in the midst of busy schedules that don't always line up and you know whatever, and so it's been interesting. But I will say I think for a big part of mine is just an internal clock that I don't always pay attention to, which is you're you've done enough work, you can stop now. Right. My internal clock says you've done enough work, you can stop now. Doesn't always work right. I usually hit the snooze alarm, you know, or whatever we want to say. And so I'll find myself overworked on these sort of quasi regular bases and I'm like, no, man, I gotta I gotta stop like this, this this constant stuff has to end. And so I think there's a there's a built in sort of mechanism, at least in my life where I just sit back and say I should have been taking the rest. Now I really need the rest. Why is it that I just don't take the rest more regularly. So that's my experience with Sabbath, and yeah, having written a dissertation on it, it's always puzzling that I can't figure it out.

00:53:51
Speaker 2: So Yeah, what I'm loving about this conversation is that what I'm hearing reflected, and I hear it really strongly because I resonate with it in my own life so deeply is the invitation and the freedom and the benefits.

00:54:18
Speaker 4: Would totally devoid of.

00:54:22
Speaker 2: Roles and definition and here's what day of the week. And I think sometimes for Christians when we get in this conversation, we're so afraid of doing it wrong because we're required that we're asking for all these definitions around it.

00:54:42
Speaker 3: And it's not that there shouldn't be any.

00:54:45
Speaker 4: I don't know, they're not clear.

00:54:47
Speaker 3: I have no idea.

00:54:49
Speaker 2: So instead of addressing all that, what I usually tell people, including myself, because I am a oh, if there could be a rule, I will feel safe and I can follow it.

00:54:58
Speaker 3: Or I can break it. I'm breaking it, but one or the other.

00:55:02
Speaker 2: And as believers, we need to understand that if we break it all the time, that's already paid for, that's already taken like the messing up part is already taken care of, and like it's okay. So I'm hearing you guys talk about it from a very practical.

00:55:27
Speaker 3: Place, and I.

00:55:29
Speaker 2: Think that's what it's supposed to be. So I find that absolutely beautiful. My experience, like Renet, four kids, grad school, crazy life, dissertation, period of life was really intense for me. I had eight pregnancies during this time, so my body was a mass, my heart was a mess because we were grieving losses.

00:55:56
Speaker 3: We were broke. Is dirt, I mean, the whole thing, the whole Becky.

00:56:01
Speaker 2: Lives above and beyond and does not know how to stop, or doesn't feel sufficient ever, so doesn't stop.

00:56:08
Speaker 3: And so for me, when it became most crucial.

00:56:13
Speaker 2: Was when things were at such a high stake for completion that the only way it was going to happen was with built in pause. And so Sabbath became most important to me at the time when I could afford it the least. And it wasn't like I it wasn't that I sat and thought, oh, today I can remember that God doesn't need me to do this, and that you know, it wasn't any of that. It was literally like as a believer. I know I'm supposed to do this, and I don't know how to not like I'm dying.

00:56:56
Speaker 3: I'm not keeping up. And then once I applied.

00:57:02
Speaker 2: That, our whole family did. I didn't try to get things done on Saturday. We went to church and things like that, but I didn't try to do a dissertation. Jim didn't schedule work, We didn't at times, we didn't even cook.

00:57:16
Speaker 6: We were look like we're exhausted.

00:57:18
Speaker 2: There was no homeschooling, there was no anything, and that became so physically empowering that I ended up getting I didn't even understand the theology of it, but in my case at that didn't matter. I ended up reaping the benefits and then seeing behind it like, oh, you are finite, you know, and you are totally dependent and you aren't really that needed by God, and it's you know, all of these things and it is going to be okay, and you don't have that much, you know, so I warn excuse me. I learned those things that have very important time, like renee. We don't have firm rules or days or expectations, but it's a privilege I wholeheartedly step into.

00:58:17
Speaker 3: As someone who.

00:58:20
Speaker 2: Needs a social excuse to take a break, because it doesn't. I don't feel valuable enough to just say, oh, because I need one. And that's what that's what zabbe it is to me, and I don't. It feels like I should apologize for that, but I feel like that's what it was ven for.

00:58:46
Speaker 1: I think it's really interesting. And so I read a quote the other day. It was I got on Facebook and I write a quote on Facebook. It was a really horrible idea, but it was men don't fail because they're too aggressive. Men fail more often because they're too passive. It's because they wait and they refuse to act. And you know, it's kind of one of those quotes, and I can't quote verbatim, but when I thought about it, I have this idea that I kind of come back to. It's a little pithy statement that I say, but our role is to respond to God from within a situation, not to respond to the situation as if God were active or irrelevant. And so when I read things like that, they're so hard one way, right, as if in activity and passivity restraint, right, are just really leaning you toward failure. I think to myself, No, We've got to be able to respond to God from within the situation, as opposed to responding to the situation as if God were absent or irrelevant. One of the range, one of the responses within that range to respond faithfully to God has to be to rest. And I think that because we generally don't have this sort of and I think it's been eroded. We used to have more of a Sunday's off, nothing's open, there's no sports like that. Time used to be guarded. It's not anymore. And I'm not I'm very seldom a fan of, hey, let's let's bring the horses back in the barn, right, And I think culture moves past and and and that one act just probably isn't going to work that well. Like things have to shift and change in much more complex ways. And so as we are. I almost think of it as the Jews without the temple, and they stand there and they say, then what do we do right? And they come up with all and yes, they take some blasts the gospels, but I think a lot of times what they're trying to do at heart is how do we walk with God? How we demonstrate that we are His people? Without the Temple because it was kind of central to us. And I think we should be thinking about Sabbath in much the same way, given that Sunday has been co opted for a number of different purposes and it's no longer reserved just for worship, How do we now build sacred time back into our lives given that we no longer really have access to Sunday? And I think that that then lends itself to how do we respond to God in the moment, as opposed to responding to the situation, you know, as if hey, all Christians stop doing any travels, for stop doing anything else, you've got to be back in church on Sunday. Like I suppose that's the utopian vision, but I just don't think it's particularly realistic, and it's certainly not that helpful, And so to me, it's like that's probably the wrong direction to go. The right direction goes to say, how do we help Christians understand how to cultivate sacred time in a cultural moment where busyness is driving us further and further away, not just from Sunday but from dependence on God, sort of like what you were talking about, Becky.

01:02:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to real quickly just add one for those people who are listening and are like, Okay, that all sounds good, but how do I.

01:02:23
Speaker 3: Know that that's biblical.

01:02:24
Speaker 2: I always need those concrete like something from the Bible that blows up my view of what I think Sabbath has to be. So when in Ezra ni Amayah and I don't remember if it's there or I think it is, or hey, guy, but I think it's Ezra Yamayah, when the people are breaking Sabbath constantly because yeah, yeah, God tells the Levites.

01:02:54
Speaker 3: Two go work strap on.

01:02:58
Speaker 2: I think they step on story but I can't quite remember, and stand at the gates and monitor, which is a.

01:03:05
Speaker 5: Job like this sometime, yeah, go see something right, And so the other people don't do something and.

01:03:17
Speaker 4: You're like what, And for me, that takes this like if.

01:03:22
Speaker 2: Israel was obeying it, they would literally be laying in their tents all day eating manna from yesterday and would ree re emerge from their hibernation on Monday morning and no one would have.

01:03:40
Speaker 3: Anything.

01:03:41
Speaker 2: And that's not consistent with even how it's portrayed. So the fact that it gets a little muddied sometimes, yeah, is part of even how God is instructing it in the Bible, and I don't think we need to be scared by that.

01:03:59
Speaker 3: We can be a little botfold. We can.

01:04:01
Speaker 1: You know so well, I think you have the Jesus passages, you know, where he's healing all the Sabbath and those kind of things too, and you you sort of step back, and you what you realize is, Okay, we shouldn't trivialize the Sabbath, but we shouldn't make an idol of it either, And so we've got to we've got to recognize that sacred time is sacred not because that time is reserved for inactivity. It's sacred because we are to be honoring God within it. And so there's a there's sort of a different texture, I think, to what we're looking at when we think about Sabbath. And even just to sort of almost end where we started with Hebrews. You know, you have this rest that is coming for the people of God, and so they're even in Hebrews, you have this sort of widening out of what it means to have rest. It isn't just this Seventh Day that everybody wants to do. It's something further down the road that we now will participate in the rest that God is already doing.

01:05:02
Speaker 10: So.

01:05:05
Speaker 1: You know, throw it out there. Any last words otherwise we'll close this one out last thoughts, really helpful conversation. Appreciate it, everybody, and hopefully this is fun for everybody else too, Sab It's one of my favorite topics, so I really appreciate y'all having this conversation with me, and thanks everybody for taking the time to listen. In all right, we'll call it a day there and we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.