Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we've got John English Lee with us to talk about his new book, There Remains a Sabbath Rest for the People of God. He answers all the questions. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Jason, remember years and years and years ago, I was preaching through Deuteronomy and we hit Deuteronomy five And we realized a lot of people in our church really didn't understand the Lord's Day.

I think I might have been one of them. And it was it was really transformational. So that's what we're going to talk about today. We've got with us John English Lee with us, who's the pastor of discipleship. Wait a minute, are you probably not the pastor of discipleship at Morning View anymore, are you?

Technically I am for three more weeks. My employment there will end at the end of this month. In January 1 of 2025, I'll begin full-time as academic dean of Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary here on campus in Owensboro, Kentucky. Yeah, yeah. And you know, you've been a professor there and now starting a new job.

What a great thing. We love Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary, so praise the Lord for that. Well, you've written a new book called there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. And it's very detailed. I love the book.

I thought it was really fantastic. A biblical, theological, and historical defense of Sabbath rest as creation ordinance. And so anyway, John Inglis, thank you so much for writing the book. I really, really benefited from it. I thought it was really helpful.

Glad to hear that. The book is the fruit of my dissertation that I was able to write six or seven years ago now. And I wasn't sure if it would ever see the light of day or not in terms of a publication, but was able to bless to have founders publish it for me and I'm hoping that it is a blessing to the church. The project was birthed out of a pastoral question I was discussing with a pastor friend of mine. How do we think about a non-attending church member?

Someone that says, I don't want you to take my name off the rolls, but I'm just not going to come regularly. Can you discipline that person out? And as I thought about it, and the pastor friend of mine was questioning me. I said, well, the New Testament says don't forsake the gathering of the assembly in Hebrews 10. And so the guy says, well, I don't forsake.

I'm there faithfully every Easter and every Christmas. And so if you don't have a doctrine of the Sabbath that's grounded in Genesis 2, then you don't have strong case to deal with that person in terms of discipline because he has not forsaken the assembly technically he's still faithfully coming once a year or twice a year and so that kept me questioning well is the Sabbath a creation ordinance or not what is the church taught about this And that's that's really the springboard that sent me down the rabbit hole So how I want to read the text itself. I'm actually preaching in the early chapters of Genesis right now. So this is The book was good timing for me and this podcast is good timing for me. This is Genesis chapter 2 verses 1 through 3.

Thus the heavens and the earth and all the hosts of them were finished and on the seventh day God ended his work which he had done and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made so and I think it's accurate to say the central thesis of the book is that the Lord's Day or the the one day and seven for rest is actually creation ordinance. And that's the one very tight thesis that I tried to prove in the dissertation and I kind of expanded on it a little bit in the book here, but is Genesis 2 and that pattern of 6 and 1 in any way prescriptive for us today? That was the major question. And as I studied it and looked at it kind of historically, I saw that the word creation ordinance or creation pattern is a relatively new term. Theologians have not used that term very recently, and even then there's no agreed upon definition, There's no agreed upon standards by which we judge what is or is not a creation ordinance.

I mean you could look at the creation account and pull out bad things and say, well, it's in the Genesis account, therefore it must be prescriptive today. So for example, here's a silly one. Adam and Eve were created and they were naked. Therefore that's a creation ordinance and we should all walk around naked every day. That would be a bad way to just say it's definitely, it is a creation ordinance or you conversely flip it the other way and say, well, Sabbath is not a creation ordinance because I say so.

So I tried to propose a definition of creation ordinance and What I did to do that is I took two other things which people in our circles normally agree are creation ordinances monogamous heterosexual marriage and Work and I showed how those things are built into creation how they function typologically throughout the canon in the Mosaic covenant into the new covenant and even into the eschaton and Saw the kind of pattern that they make and then I tried to say okay since we this is how they work I want to see also does Sabbath function similarly throughout the canon It's typological pointing forward to the new covenant. It's partially fulfilled now, but it's also waiting for final fulfillment in the eschaton. And so that's what I tried to prove that Sabbath functions similar to marriage and work in That it's a pattern built into creation for our good for human flourishing and it's something that Function typologically pointing forward under the old covenant to the work of Christ. It's in some way transformed or it's perhaps we could better say its original meaning was clarified and brought to light in the greatest way in the new covenant.

And then it will ultimately go away. Like for example, there won't be marriage in the final state. We won't be working and resting in the same kind of way in the final state. The anti-type will be fully present and realized So we won't need the type in the same way. You know, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on this podcast is I wanted our listeners to hear you give the, that entire arc from creation to the new creation.

And I was hoping we could squeeze out of you just a long explanation, you know, from Genesis to Revelation, just to be able to see it the way that you played it out in the book, because I love the way it was played out in the book. Yeah, obviously you're the expert on the book as the writer, but I'm a very recent reader of the book. And so I thought I would give an Overview of the structure of the book just from from a reader's Standpoint because and the reason I wanted to do it because I found this the structure to be really helpful and value so You start out by making the case That it is it is fundamentally creation ordinance. And then you give the principles of interpretation. So you talk about hermeneutics, and you actually hand the reader the lens through which you're going to be interpreting the scriptures, which is really important because then you proceed to work through the scriptures from Genesis to Revelation and showing all of the key instances where the Sabbath shows up.

And then you trace the views of this through history starting in early church, through the medieval period, through the Reformation, through modern era, and then you end with some practical applications. So I just wanted to say as a reader the structure was really helpful because it's very systematic and I appreciated you handing us the lenses through which you were going to be working through scripture and then as you worked through the scripture, we could see that's exactly how you handled it. So thank you for that. Yeah, I'm glad to do it. And the the hermeneutics are really, you know, if you approach the text with wrong presuppositions, you're gonna come out with wrong conclusions.

And so it's really you need to try and read the Bible, I think, as a cohesive whole. So we're reading the beginning in light of what we know the New Testament and really the end. We're reading the beginning in light of the end. And that helps us try and do justice to not only the nitty-gritty exegetical minutiae along the way, but also the big picture arc. So why don't you walk us through the arc?

Okay. Well One of the things that we see in Genesis 1 and 2 is that God chose to take seven days to do his creation week. We know that God is omnipotent. He could have done all of it in a microsecond, but he chose to take six days to build creation, but then he didn't stop at the end of six days. He chose to take another day and to stop what he had been doing to do something different, which was to rest, as the text says, or cease to stop what he had been doing to do something different.

And this rest is, I tried to give a little bit of this in the book, but the rest is kind of the language is connected to kind of enthronement language. It's God seated on his cosmic throne, reigning and ruling over his cosmic temple. It's kind of a coronation picture. I think it's also significant to kind of skip ahead a little bit, but we see that Adam's first full day as a creature is a day of rest. So he's made on the sixth day and his first full day in existence is to enjoy God's creation and rest with him.

And so I think that's a little built in picture of what we're waiting for, what we're anticipating as creatures. Our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him, enjoy his rest of his creation. And So we have this cosmic temple of rest where God is seated, he's reigning and ruling, and then in Genesis 3 we have unrest is brought into creation. We've got thorns and thistles, we've got relational strife and rest between Adam and his wife. We've got disconnection between man and his creator, and eventual expulsion from the garden, and it just spirals out of control all the way through the book of Genesis.

And then we see God out of compassion is moved to see his children slaving away for hundreds of years in Egypt and he wants to bring them out of that house of bondage. And he does so through his mighty work of Exodus. And he brings them to, before he brings them to Mount Sinai, we have Exodus 16, where he says, you're going to observe the Sabbath and Nobody says observe what what are we doing? It's kind of assumed knowledge is Israel Israel knew what the Sabbath was before the giving of the law and Exodus 20 at Mount Sinai. And so it's another little hint that the Sabbath didn't begin with the giving of the law in Exodus 20.

Right. It was there beforehand. Right. For all who struggle with math, 16 is before 20, right? Exodus 16 and the call for the Sabbath is before the giving of the ten commandments but there's this this requirement to rest on a day yeah and so one of the arguments that people make against the Sabbath being a creation ordinance is they say well there's no example of any of the patriarchs observing it beforehand and and that while that may be explicitly true that that we don't have you know and therefore Jacob observed the weekly Sabbath We don't have a statement like that, but we do have Exodus 16 in which the Sabbath is mentioned and it's without explanation.

It's just kind of assumed knowledge. This is what's supposed to be happening here. And so for non-saboteurians, I've never read a good explanation as to why Exodus 16 could be before Exodus 20, if Exodus 20 is when the Sabbath is supposed to start. But we get to Exodus 20 and God gives his moral law, the Ten Commandments, and the, I think significantly, the Fourth Commandment includes or it assumes that you have been faithful in doing everything that you should be doing for the six days and then the seventh day you're going to rest. So it's not simply concerned with the cessation of activity.

It also assumes within the command that you have been faithful to be diligent to the creation pattern of work, which is meant to happen, not simply like 9 to 5, 40 hours a week. I'm defining work there a little more broadly in the book in terms of being faithful to all the responsibilities that the Lord has given to you according to your capacities, according to your season of life. And so as a parent, it doesn't mean that I'm faithful from nine to five in the office, and then I can go home and check out every night. Now as a parent, I'm supposed to be diligent, taking care of my children and all my duties at home and everything else. So work and rest are kind of two sides of a faithfulness coin that I want to balance both of them well.

And I think it's important because if as we know from, even unbelievers, if we know from creation that the heavens declare the glory of God, that the things that have been made proclaim the eternal power and the divine nature, Romans 1, that God exists, that He's powerful, that He's good, then it's consistent with even with just simple logic that that powerful, all-wise God deserves some sort of worship. And If that's the case, then who gets to determine the proportion of time that we ought to worship that God? So do I say, well, I'm going to worship that God once a year, or swing the pendulum the other way? We're going to have church six days a week, and you're going to go to work one day a week. If you don't have Sabbath as a creation ordinance, and that's a permissible thing, what is a week honestly?

If you don't have creation ordinances in terms of time, then everything becomes arbitrary and thrown up for grabs. So that seven-day breakdown of time and one-seventh of it being devoted to worship and the other sixth to rest is an important aspect of this creation ordinance that's picked up and reaffirmed in the giving of the law and the Ten Commandments. Now we see in the Mosaic Covenant there's all sorts of ceremonial, judicial things added to the Sabbath day or built on to the Sabbath theology that was there from the beginning. And so there's all sorts of regulations about what you can and can't do and what the punishments are if you violate this or that. Lots of things that our theologians would call positive laws.

Those are laws built onto a specific covenant, the Mosaic dispensation, and even the Sabbath itself becomes a symbol of the Mosaic covenant. So we've got all these kind of trappings tied to moses built upon the creation ordinance thread And we see very quickly israel gets in there and they start doing all sorts of things that they shouldn't do They're not obeying the Lord. They're violating the law. They're working on the Sabbath. They're keeping it as a day of commerce because they want to make money.

They're following after the false gods all around them. All sorts of problems. And we see towards the end of the prophets in the Old Testament, we see pictures of days when rest will come and there will be peace and there will be things, but it's still ahead. It's ahead. Something's coming.

And even though there's these kind of promises of rest throughout the Old Testament, Joshua doesn't bring them rest, Moses doesn't bring them rest, even David doesn't bring them rest, Solomon with all the wisdom that any man has ever had doesn't bring them lasting rest right after him the the the nation splits in half and so the kingdom splits and so all sorts of problems and so you've got all this unrest this turmoil eventually exile the people are in a foreign land and things are going poorly and then on to the scene we get to the New Testament and you have prophecies that we celebrate you know this time of year with Advent and the coming of the Lord and his birth and he's gonna be Emmanuel, God is with us and then eventually in Matthew 11 you know he makes the promise come to me and I will give you rest. That's a huge promise, full of Old Testament imagery and illusions. And Jesus, right after the one he says, I'm going to give you rest at the end of Matthew 11, you go into Matthew 12 and you've got the Pharisees accusing him of violating the Sabbath.

And he lays out principles and when he's defending the proper interpretation of the Sabbath rest, he's taking it back from the hands of the Pharisees who had made it a terrible burden. They'd made it a crushing weight that none of the people could bear. And he says, no, no, no, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. This is meant to be a refreshment. This is meant to be a mercy.

This is meant to be a joy, a picture of healing. And it's meant to point to greater realities, point to ultimately the one who would provide rest, who is the glorious Savior and Messiah. Jesus is helpful there and pulling it back from the the slave drivers of the Pharisees that were putting weights on the backs of people that they couldn't stand. So I think Jesus helps correct these flawed interpretations. He's also Matthew 12, that's where our confession gets the exception categories, and we think of deeds of mercy, deeds of necessity, and deeds of piety as those kinds of general categories to help us think through, what are the kinds of things that would certainly be permissible to do, even though they may feel like work on the Lord's Day.

You know, if your ox falls into a ditch, yeah, pull it out. If your neighbor's car breaks down on the side of the road, yeah, pull over, help them out, do what you need to do. If somebody's sick and they need to see a physician, yeah, get them, get them the help they need. So those are really helpful categories that our confession builds off of Jesus's words in Matthew 12. Yeah, you talk in the book about those who maintain the proposition that if something is not repeated in the New Testament Then it's not legitimate for the New Testament believer, and you're addressing that now the Lord Jesus did Speak about the Sabbath.

He was correcting How How else would you answer that question? And I don't really want to stop you on the arc but maybe just for a moment and deal with that question and then keep on going to the apostles in the early church and the other areas that you address in your book? Well I think that that's not how Paul kind of utilized ethics and I think it's got a strange view. I think that that hermeneutic can reveal a deficient view of the law. So I think there's a bedrock moral law of God, this unchanging perpetual standard of righteousness, which most people have seen as clearly summarized in the Ten Commandments and There's a clear distinction even in the Mosaic Covenant between the Decalogue that the Ten Commandments the ten words and then the judgments all the additional laws stipulations regulations everything that was built on top of or flowed out of the Ten Commandments.

And I think those Ten Commandments show us what the moral core of what righteousness ought to look like. And that also helps us understand which things from Moses still carry over today and which ones don't. Well, the things that carry over to us directly, one-to-one, are the moral law of God, which is never unique to a particular covenant. Righteousness does not fluctuate. Holiness is the same, because it's a reflection of God's own moral character.

It's a reflection of God himself. And so if God doesn't change, then the reflection of righteousness isn't going to change. But once you start tinkering with the Ten Commandments and say, well this one counts but this one doesn't, it really muddles things and it can take us in places we don't want to go. Not everybody goes that way, but it can get really strange if you just say, no, all of that was for the Jews, and we are in the New Testament, and so we have our law of Christ. And that kind of sharp discontinuity between the Old and New Testament is very strange and it's not consistent, I think, with what Paul and the other apostles were doing.

I mean, Paul used Old Testament all the time to appeal to his New Testament ethics that he was prescribing to people even when he you know like Don't muzzle an ox while he's treading grain. So he's taking a moral or he's taking a kind of a ceremonial a mosaic positive law getting to the root behind it, which is the moral commandment, and then applying it to paying pastors, they're just wages today. And so there is still utility in the old covenant ethics applied carefully today. And the way that we do that is by getting to what's the moral behind the positive law and then we can apply that to us today. Try and learn how to apply the moral law in the right way.

Yeah I love that section where you were demonstrating the continuity of the Old Testament law of the Sabbath and how how the Lord Jesus and the Apostles established it Yeah, I think I think I think you're right. I think we need to Yes I'll stop there. Do you want me to keep going through the Apostles? Yeah. Okay, so once we get past the resurrection, we see the apostles, the early church, and even after the closing of the canon with the early church fathers, we see complete geographical agreement and universal observance to Lord's Day worship.

There is no debate, there's no question, there's no minority position about who are the seventh day observers. No, no, it's total because for them, going back to the old Sabbath, Saturday, was sabotizing, was kind of you're going back to your Jewish roots, and we're not Jews, we are Christians, we're followers of Christ. He was raised on the Lord's Day, Sunday, and that's a significant transition. And one of the distinguishing markers is that Christians would worship on Sunday, the Lord's Day, even when persecuted, even when that was a work day for them and they were slaves and so they would wake up before the crack of dawn and go worship and then go work their their job that they had to do because they were slaves and that was the way that they had to provide for themselves and their family. And so we have this clear transition of the day of worship has changed.

And that is, I think, part of the typological transition. The significance of the day is seen because in the old covenant, you worked and worked and worked and worked looking forward to the last day of the week, Saturday as rest. And so you were looking forward to rest, you're working, striving, trying to get to that rest. But in the New Covenant Christ has come, the first fruits of the new creation, and this Sunday which is the eighth day or the first day of a new week, it's as if there's a new creation has started. But instead of us working, working, working, working, looking forward to that rest, we as believers start from the day of rest on the first day of week, because we have true rest in Christ.

We have our salvation earned by him. And from that position of rest, we then go out the remainder of the week and live out our week and try and work faithfully because he's already earned and secured the rest that we need for our souls. And that pattern is going to continue all the way until he returns again and brings us into the final state where that that typological, the anti type, the final thing that has been pictured all along is finally here. And we are with him face to face. We had the beautific vision.

We are finally at peace and rest and joy with our creator for all of eternity. Now, I loved it. I love the way you ended the book as well. To just time out the benefits of Sabbath rest, you know, the encouragement it is to faith, the creation of a sense of dependence, just stewardship of health and stewardship of time. And then I but I loved your final sentence in the book page 247.

The best course of action is a call to inaction letting our restless hearts find their rest in God. You know, as, as a younger man, it was kind of, more of an academic exercise. I think because of my, youthful zeal, I had a lot, I had fewer children, I had more energy. But as I've gotten a little bit older, a little bit grayer, and had a few more children, the blessing that having that rhythm of work and rest has really just borne fruit and it has increased in its blessedness to me. And so it does take faith.

It takes faith to kind of put down the plow and trust that the Lord will take care of everything else, that I can pause because my existence, my sustenance, everything is not dependent ultimately upon the fruitfulness and productivity of my labor. I can put down the plow and I can go spend time with God and with God's people and I can rest. And that's such a blessing because that's what everybody needs in every generation. But particularly now you look at all the statistics of people with anxiety and depression and you know, it's only gotten worse since COVID and relational difficulties and all sorts of things. And so I think one of the ways to combat this always on workaholic consumerism type culture that we live in now is to realize just stop just look at the Lord look what he's done enjoy time with him and with his people and you'll be blessed you'll find rest for your souls I think we just point people back to Jesus and what he said at the end of Matthew 11.

John, to hold this view, there are three bombs that need to be diffused. And I felt, I found this is one of the most helpful sections, in the book when you diffuse these three bombs. The bombs are Romans 14, Galatians 4, Colossians 2, that can seem like Paul is saying that a one day in seven observance is no longer in practice. So just can you give us a summary of you diffusing those bombs? Yeah, so I think the biggest thing for me was just reading through the Old Testament and noticing the Old Testament and noticing the kind of terminology that is frequently used for the ceremonial aspects of the Old covenant observance, specifically, you know, new moons, feasts and Sabbaths, plural, that kind of triad of, you know, God is rebuking Israel, you know, you think you're giving me your new moons, your feasts and your Sabbaths, But your hearts are far from me that kind of language and it's kind of this repeated triad this this clump of words Meant to show all of that stuff and I think that that's exactly what Paul is getting at is that listen that the The particularly Jewish things the things that were tied to the Mosaic Covenant, yeah, those are shadows, those are types they're done away with in Christ.

But that doesn't undermine the pattern of six and one that was still built into creation before Exodus 20, before the giving of the law. And so I think that's what Paul is trying to do in those passages. That's a standard Reformed interpretation, so I'm not doing anything new there. And so the part about the weaker brother and don't offend anybody by how you observe a day's let them observe it this way I think that just relates to the particular feast days the kinds of things that they wanted to do it's not saying well worshipping God On on Sundays is really up to your conscience You could you could do it any other day of the week you want if you wanted to or you could you could do it as Frequently or infrequently as you want? I don't think that's what all is saying there at all So you can kind of prove the point by trying to flip the argument on its head.

If you're saying that all the days are totally arbitrary, then why do I have to come to church once a week? Why not once a month or once a year? Or why not just, you know, let me come once to get baptized and then I'm good until Jesus comes. So I think that the standard Reformed interpretation is very strong and I've not heard a compelling argument for the opposite that doesn't just open the floodgates to all sorts of subjectivism. And it's really inconsistent with the apostolic example.

They're gathering on the Lord's Day, Acts 20, verse 7, even Revelation 1-10 where he's in the Spirit on the Lord's Day. All the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus are shown to us in Scripture to be on the Lord's Day. And so the day itself, Sunday, is given such a primacy in the biblical text and the New Testament that it's hard to argue against the clear Lord's Day pattern, I think. Absolutely. Well, John, thank you so much for writing the book.

I hope a lot of people buy it and read it. You know, it's hard to find a book that answers every question as carefully as you did. And that's what I really loved about the book. So thank you so much for writing it and thank you for joining us today. Thank you, brother.

I appreciate the invitation. It's been a blessing and I hope the work is a blessing to God's people. Yeah, and I'm sure we'll be sending people to you to be under your tutelage at CBTS. Praise God, we'd love to have them. Good deal.

Well, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and I hope you can join us next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out churchandfamilylife.com