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Holy Days


Ezekiel 20:12
Also I gave them my Sabbaths as a sign between us, so they would know that I the Lord made them holy.

Thought for the day – Holy days
Christians have always been a bit awkward about the Sabbath. Saturday or Sunday, take your pick — we've argued about it for centuries. It's meant to be a day of rest, a day when we down tools completely. For our Jewish brothers and sisters, that's exactly what happens: nothing happens, full stop. We don't hold it quite so tightly. And I wonder if that's because we've never really understood what the Sabbath is for.

In today's verse, God tells Ezekiel that He gave His people the Sabbaths as a sign between them and Him, so they would know that the Lord sanctifies them. Read that again. We don't have a Sabbath because a day is holy. We have a Sabbath because we are holy — the Lord has made us so. Not the day. The people.
That's not nothing. It means our worship, whatever day we land on, is where our holiness gets worked out and made complete.

Now, as Protestants, we get twitchy about anything that looks like works. We're saved by grace, not by what we do — full stop. So how does keeping a Sabbath make us holy? Simple: it doesn't earn it. It practises it. Peter tells us to "be holy in all you do; for it is written, 'Be holy, for I am holy'" (1 Peter 1:16, quoting Leviticus 11).

Holiness was never a one-off event. It's a daily habit, with the Spirit's help — not a badge we pin on once and forget. The Sabbath simply reminds us, weekly, that God is holy, and so, astonishingly, are we.

So why are we so quick to treat it as ordinary?


 

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