Ruling by Resting

Thoughts on power, Sabbath, and showing others what true leadership is like

“Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” (Gen. 2:1-3)

This past Sunday, I had one of the oddest experiences I’ve ever had as a pastor. As I began preaching my prepared sermon on the Christian call to be ministers in their everyday lives, I began the morning by sharing that I’d enjoyed the previous week’s vacation. As the words came out of my mouth that I’d taken a week to rest, I found myself feeling an odd sense of shame and vulnerability as I stood before our congregation.

You may ask: What would make a pastor feel uncomfortable sharing that he had been enjoying some rest?

Leaders are often ashamed to share that they’ve rested. Over the years, I’ve come to find that pastors in particular—and in general, just about any person with power—can feel a disturbing sense of awkwardness self-disclosing their rest with the people they lead. One of their greatest fears, it seems, is that sharing that they’ve been resting will lead others to believe they haven’t been working very hard. This fear of not being perceived as busy is a crippling reality for many leaders. To say nothing of the fact that we are often told that we should lead through perception. That is, if people think their pastor is busy, they will think they need to be busy as well. We know that people are shaped by what they see their leader do.

So, in an effort to grow the organization and keep people working, the leader ends up overworking (or at least cosplaying overwork) so the ship can keep running with dutiful followers in tow.

In his famous treatise on the imagery of the Temple and the Tabernacle, G.K. Beale brilliantly shows that all the divine space language in the Old Testament (of Temple and Tabernacle) ultimately consists of little streams that lead upriver to the person of Jesus in the New Testament. Eden leads to the Tabernacle, which leads to the Temple, which leads to Christ. The throughline is quite beautiful—and visible for any reader of Scripture. The lover of the Bible would benefit greatly from his work in The Temple and the Church’s Mission.¹

Photo by Sai Madhav

It is Beale’s section on Sabbath rest that is most enlivening. What Beale masterfully reveals is the significance of God resting on the seventh day in light of ancient Near Eastern culture. Often, in ancient religious literature, the deity of a given cult would rest after finishing the construction of their temple. That is, they would complete their work and then enter that temple by ruling and reigning. What Beale shows is twofold. First, in light of these other accounts, the Bible casts creation itself as God’s first Temple. Second, when God rests in Eden, it is not so much his entering into inactivity as it is his entering into his full rule and reign over creation. In other words, God “rules” by “resting.”²

Indeed, God did rest on the seventh day. The work was done. That is, he stopped, enjoyed, and celebrated all that he had made alongside the humans and all of creation. But here is the most interesting aspect of this. In the first two chapters of Scripture, God issues a number of explicit commands to the first human beings. In total, I’ve isolated the following commands:

• Be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28)

• Fill the earth (v. 28)

• Subdue the earth (v. 28)

• Rule over the fish and the birds and the living creatures (v. 28)

• Eat the plants God provided (v. 29)

• Work the garden (2:15)

• Take care of the garden (v. 25)

• Not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (v. 16-17)

So, in total, God gives humans eight explicit, verbal commands in Genesis 1–2. Yet, when we come to the section on the Sabbath at the beginning of Genesis 2, we find it is the one command humans are to follow that is never stated outright in the creation account. That is, God rests. And through resting, God invites all of creation to do the same with him. Again, God never verbally commands the Sabbath in the creation story. All he does is enter his rest—and by doing so, invite us into his rest.

In all my years working with people in positions of leadership and authority, I’ve consistently found that the invitation to rest is particularly important for those in power. Why? If the person with power—the one who calls the shots and determines how things will be—does not rest, they will never give that rest to the people they are called to serve. What I mean is this: a Pharaoh can never lead an organization or a people into the Promised Land. They can’t.

We lead out of who we are and what we are doing.

A person in power can command people to rest as long as they want. But none of it matters if they themselves are not doing what God did: modeling it. We lead others out of who we are, not out of what we say. Which is why I find it significant that God never commands the Sabbath in the creation account. The humans get to see (personally, in the flesh, there, in real time) God rest. They aren’t told to rest. Some things—Sabbath being one of them—are apparently learned by watching the One with power model it for all of creation.

The truth is: if I choose to come into the office on my day off, I’m doing great violence to others by teaching them the wrong picture of what Sabbath rest looks like. What I do in my rest as a person with power sets the tone and template for everyone else. But when I model well the rhythm of stopping to be with God, with myself, with my family, with those I love, and with creation, I’m showing people what life is meant to be like.

Take a cue from watching God. He rules by resting. Whether you believe it or not, you become the most transformative leader when you choose to show the people around you that you are not well-adjusted to a sick society. Telling people that they need to rest isn’t always the best approach.

Because more often than not, they need to see it.

I shouldn’t be ashamed to rest. Nor should you. Nor should anyone. As my friend Matthew Sleeth says, there’s a reason that you’ll never hear someone being described as working like the Messiah. People only ever work like the devil. True power, then, is the power to rest with God and invite others into it.

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Thanks, as always, for being a supporter and reader of the Low-Level Theologian. You can always find me wasting as little time as possible on Instagram and Facebook. Or, check out my podcast with Dr. Nijay Gupta at Slow Theology. Remember my most recent book, entitled Slow Theology: Eight Practices for Resilient Faith in a Turbulent World. See below! Also, consider studying theology with me at Bushnell University in our Master of Theology and Culture program.

1. Beale, G.K., The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, ed. Carson, D.A., vol. 17, New Studies in Biblical Theology (IVP, 2004).

2. See chap. 2.