He Rested When Nothing Was Wrong

Go back over the last two years and find the times you genuinely stopped.

Not slept. Stopped. A stretch of a day where you were not working and not recovering, and you were awake for it.

Now look at what was attached to each one.

For most people the list comes back looking like a medical chart. A bad flu. The week after the funeral. That thing with the car. The three days after the results came back. A hospital corridor. A layoff.

Every single stop had a reason, and every reason was something going wrong.

That is worth sitting with for a second, because it means something quite specific about how a person is living. It means rest has become a thing that gets granted by disaster. Nothing else has the authority to hand it over. Not tiredness, not a good week, not a birthday, not the fact that the sun is out and the work is caught up.

So a person in this condition ends up in a strange relationship with trouble. Some of them notice, quietly and with a bit of shame, that when something goes wrong there is a small flicker of relief in it, and they never say that out loud to anybody.

It is not a character flaw. It is what happens when the only door to a room is one that has to be broken down.

The seventh day had no crisis in it

There is a line in Exodus that says something about God that I did not know what to do with the first time I read it slowly.

It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed. (Exodus 31:17, King James Version)

Read the last three words. And was refreshed.

Now hold the situation around them. Nothing was wrong. Nothing had broken, nothing had failed, nothing needed repairing and nobody needed reviving. Six days of work had gone exactly as intended and been called good out loud at every stage.

And on the seventh day He rested.

There is no crisis anywhere in that account. The rest is not attached to a problem, it does not follow a collapse, and it is not a response to anything having gone wrong. It sits on an ordinary excellent day and it is described as refreshing.

You have a kind of stopping available that has no disaster attached to it, and it has never once required something to go wrong first. Exodus 31:17 puts the rest on a day when everything was good rather than on a day of repair, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an unearned ordinary afternoon look like a door rather than an indulgence.

Refreshed is a strange word to use about God

I want to stay on that word a moment longer, because it is doing something that a lot of people walk past.

The verse says He was refreshed. That is not a word anybody would have dared invent about God. It is in there because it was given, and it is startling.

Whatever else it means, it means the seventh day was not empty. It was not a gap between two working weeks and it was not a mere absence of labor. Something happened in it. The day had a content of its own.

Which quietly demolishes the idea most of us actually hold, which is that a stopped day is a wasted day with a good excuse attached.

You are not looking at an empty square in the week, and a day with no work in it has never once been a day with nothing in it. Exodus 31:17 says he rested and was refreshed, giving the day a positive content rather than a negative one. The Spirit of God is the one who can make that true in a person's actual Saturday.

And notice the last thing about that verse, because it is not incidental. It calls the whole arrangement a sign. Something visible. Something that says publicly what is believed privately.

You are able to make an ordinary stop into something that says what you believe, and it has never once needed to be explained to anybody to do that. The written word calls the rest a sign between God and His people rather than a private recovery, and His Spirit is well able to give an ordinary ten minutes that kind of weight.

The ordinary day is the hard one

Now let me be honest about why this is difficult, because it is not difficult for the reason people assume.

Stopping in a crisis is easy. Everything gives you permission. The world lines up and says of course, and nobody questions it, and you do not have to justify a thing to anybody including yourself.

Stopping on a Tuesday when everything is fine has no such support. There is no reason to point at. Somebody could ask why and there would be no answer that sounds like an answer.

That is exactly why it has to be practiced on an ordinary day, and why it cannot wait for the next hard one. A person who can only stop when something breaks has not learned to rest. They have learned to be stopped, which is a completely different skill and it belongs to the trouble rather than to them.

You are able to stop while everything is fine, and the absence of a reason has never once been a disqualification. Exodus 31:17 sets the resting on a day with nothing wrong in it at all. The same Spirit who authored that account is not asking anybody to produce a justification first.