On the Sabbath, We Act like God

In his Confessions, Augustine doubts we can really experience our present moment. Our objective “present” is merely an imperceptible moment with no duration. He believes our lived experiences are almost entirely built on the psychological tension of our past and future. How we experience our days is defined by how we relate to what’s happened and what’s coming. The heartache within a fallen world is that this tension defaults to regret about the past and worry about what’s coming rather than gratitude and hope.

By the end of each week, we look at what we didn’t get done or we did poorly, and the obligations and expectations coming. Regret and worry. How we often relate to our time only exacerbates this dynamic.

In our culture of achievement, time is optimized to squeeze out double the productivity with maximum efficiency. In our culture of well-being, we need time for self-improvement and self-enhancement. But time bears witness that our physical and mental decline outpaces our self-improvement strategies. Our successes don’t survive our death. Achievement culture manufactures new regrets by resetting the bar every week, and well-being culture manufactures new worries by making the self a project that’s never finished.

At some point, we all take something like a Sabbath. Some relief is needed. We practice self-care or self-medicate. We scroll mindlessly while at our jobs or institute a four-day workweek. As a friend of ours says, “Five beers on a Friday night is a world looking for Sabbath.” These secular Sabbaths provide means of escape but never healing.

A biblical Sabbath is different. It’s not an escape route or a coping mechanism. Nor does it simply provide a means of rest that we might become better versions of ourselves. Practicing Sabbath is a way that we become like God. In turn, we begin to see our days and our weeks in the way that God sees them.

Become like God

Annie Dillard, in her book Holy the Firm, tells a story of reading by candlelight while camping. She noticed a shadow fall across her page, looked up, and saw a moth fly directly into the candle’s flame. She watched the wings ignite like tissue paper, legs curl up, body shrink, and head disappear in the fire.

Practicing Sabbath is a way that we become like God.

As she kept watching, something unexpected happened. The moth didn’t simply die—it changed. Its body, swallowed by wax, shifted beside the wick and became a second one—bringing a second flame. Now there were two flames. Two lights. One candle. “The moth’s head was fire,” writes Dillard. “She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within.”

Fire has that quality of turning things into its likeness. Fire doesn’t just destroy; it also transforms. The moth, for at least two hours, received a new vocation, maybe even a higher one: She gave light.

At Pentecost, God’s presence descended like fire—not to destroy but to dwell. Tongues of flame hovered over the disciples’ heads. Not like the moth-made wick, but more like the burning bush. God’s presence—a consuming fire—set on a bush, but the bush remained unchanged (Ex. 3:2). God’s people were animated and awakened, rather than consumed and destroyed by the presence of God’s Spirit on them. In the incarnation, God became like us. At Pentecost, he began the work of making us like him.

At Mount Sinai, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. The fourth commandment, the one about the Sabbath, is longer than all the others. This is how your workweek should look: Six days you shall labor, and on the seventh you shall rest.

What’s the reason behind this command? “For in six days the LORD made…