The Rhythm of Life

By Mark G. Johnston, Editor

Reprinted from the January 2024, Issue #724, The Banner of Truth Magazine

Life has a rhythm. It is woven in by God’s design and is intended for the wellbeing of his entire creation. From the very beginning, as recorded in the creation account of Genesis, God not only created the material elements of the cosmos, but the immaterial as well. He created spirit (the Hebrew word is nephesh), which is both invisible and intangible, but is essential to all life. He also created the forces that hold the world and universe together: gravity and the other unseen cosmic powers that govern the movement of stars and planets. But even more significant than these is the fact God created time. He wove it into the fabric of the universe and the continuum of life. The balance of life and the wellbeing of the created order are bound up with the interplay between these two aspects of God’s design.

As another year begins, we are reminded of the rhythm of life. We see how the passage of time takes its toll in multiple ways—not least as we get older and feel its ravages on our bodies, minds and faculties. This should make us pause to reflect on how far our race has drifted from God’s design for its wellbeing and stability. For all the sophistication of the lifestyles that have become the norm in today’s world—not least with their emphasis on relaxation and leisure—the vocabulary of ‘stress’ and ‘burnout’ has become commonplace and suggests people need to think again about true equilibrium and where it can be found.

If we let the Genesis record be our guide, it becomes clear that God’s institution of the Sabbath is crucial. Into the flow of life with the passage of time God built in a definite rhythm of life designed to govern its balance (Gen. 2:1-3). The world, universe and humanity were never intended to be just carried along by the relentless passage of time. Instead, God shaped its progression to meet the needs of creation generally, but also to provide for the needs of his image-bearers in a very special way. He saw fit to build a weekly sabbatical into the way time is structured.

As God’s revelation expanded with the giving of the Ten Commandments, he enshrined the weekly observation of the Sabbath Day as a key component of a divinely ordered life. For life to have balance, it needs a rhythm that includes rest as well as work and recreation. God, however, takes this principle further and expands the sabbath provision into the larger framework of life. He includes a regulation for the sabbatical year as part of Israel’s schedule for living (Lev. 25:1-7); but then takes it to a whole new level with the inclusion of the Year of Jubilee (Lev. 25:8-18).

In one sense, in an Old Testament context, God was effectively ‘turning back the clock’ for his people at regular intervals through these institutions by cancelling debts, restoring lands and liberating those who had been enslaved under various circumstances. He allowed them to go back to the way things had been. With the Year of Jubilee, he took the same principle, but lifted it to an even higher plane. It was far more than a restoration of what had been lost for half a century, but a foretaste of what lay ahead in God’s ultimate purpose: ‘the restoration of all things.’

Scholars debate whether the Year of Jubilee was in fact ever celebrated in the history of Israel. Nevertheless, even if that were the case, the very idea it enshrined would still have resonated with God’s ancient people because it would have seemed to them to be the stuff of dreams. It was more than simply ‘Eden restored’ but a ‘better Eden established.’ In that sense, the institution of the Year of Jubilee was designed to be a preview and a foretaste of the renovated world and universe promised with the coming of Messiah.

This is precisely where the significance of the Sabbath spills over into the New Covenant epoch in a way that the early Christians, whose background was in Judaism, knew only too well, yet we, their Gentile heirs and successors, often fail to grasp. Namely, that the Sabbath, or Lord’s Day, is meant to let us to sample the joys of heaven while we are still on this earth.

Its negative requirements, which involve laying aside certain elements of life that dominate our week from Monday to Saturday, are designed to shift our focus from things that belong to this present evil age to those that belong to the perfection of the age to come. Since the very essence of this present age’s evil is its marginalisation of God, and the essence of the coming age is God’s being recognized as the centre of all things, it stands to reason that he should be the focus of his day.

The ‘secularisation of Sunday’ is not merely a phenomenon of the post-Christian, secular world in which we live; it is increasingly a feature of the professing church of Christ. The very fact it was on ‘the Lord’s Day’ (Rev. 1:10) that the aging Apostle John was given the most vivid glimpse of the wonder of the age to come against the backdrop of the darkest circumstances of his life says it all. The ultimate horizon by which he navigated the twists and turns of his earthly existence was the promise of the future. And far from it seeming distant and surreal, God in his mercy allowed him a glimpse of that coming age that was not merely an encouragement to him in that moment, but would be the means of strengthening the faithful through the ages.

The tragedy of modernity and the worldviews and lifestyles it has spawned is that they have left successive generations ground down by the relentlessness of their chosen way of life. Even with its emphasis on leisure and recreation, these too manage to lose their refreshing value and end up adding to human emptiness—whatever benefit they may offer, it falls far short of the highest benefit for which we were created and through which we are fulfilled.

This raison d’être and the blessings to which a rediscovery of the sabbath leads is a growing knowledge of God through his Son and by his Spirit. And this not simply privately and personally, but in the shared fellowship of his family as the church. It is in that context and through the means God has graciously provided that we not only come to know him in salvation, but we grow in our shared knowledge of him in the fellowship of the saints.

As another year begins, may it be an opportunity for us to recalibrate our lives and retune them to the rhythm of life which God has embedded in his creation, revealed in his word and displayed perfectly in Christ.