REMEMBER

I find myself on a Saturday, the first in December, and almost through another Sabbath day. I wanted to buck my intuition and continue writing on a very important subject, to be posted as soon as possible on my blog, titled, “In The Beginning”. It is not complete and I just wanted to call your attention to something our country desperately needs.

When Moses compiled the Ten Commandments, he had a wealth of knowledge about life and the nature of our world. Though his frustration with the people of Israel is documented in the books he penned and demonstrated by the harshness and arduous complexity of “the law”, there can be no doubt that the original intent on the tablets was to provide a simple yet comprehensive documentation of the natural law which had
spiritual and social components. It is easy to determine the defining line between the two areas of concern except for the fourth, which I believe is a mixture of the two. It was wise and appropriate to place it exactly where he did. You should take note that while a secular country like ours may be tempted to diminish the spiritual, to tolerate the personal nature of that side of the law, governing outside of the spiritual influences of the law will and has depreciated the understanding and adherence of the remainder of the law. You can witness the consequence of this reckless inattention to God’s will, and while the appeal of our constitution is that no spiritual philosophy can or should be subjugated or dispensed of, the idea that the very basis and nature of that constitution could be written out of it, and our daily lives, by secular government mandate, is appalling.

So why the importance of remembrance? The Fourth Command is by far the longest of the ten and in its entirety, can be read I Exodus 20: 8-11. The general meaning of the Sabbath is a call to rest but that does not identify the importance and acknowledgment that emanates from the very beginning and throughout the text. The Hebrew word, “zakhor”, translated (remember) means more than merely recalling something past, but suggests actively focusing the mind upon something in the present, a call to mind, that on all other days, we are to look towards this day. It is not the laborious Deuteronomy version where the Hebrew word is “shamor” which has a more legalistic translation of keeping or observing as opposed to remembering. More importantly, the Sabbath is a perpetual testimony that God alone is the unique Creator of all things, that no other day could graduate to its importance and that Moses recognized that by writing it into the Holy Ten. The significance of that fact propels its applicability far beyond Sinai and is supported by going further back to the unique calling of Abraham who recognized God as Creator of all things, and the Sabbath.

Memorializing Creation does not complete the significance of The Day. That is the natural side of things. Tying The Fourth to the spiritual, that which the Christian church today has diminished, that which our country so desperately deserves reformed, which is the appreciation of God’s work and observed by experiencing the liberation from the toil of labor for all of God’s creatures. It must be administered in a way that by resisting the usual cares and concerns of the secular world, we can unite and be fulfilled by study, rest, and the enjoyment of reflection with each other and by God’s blessing. Should we as a country restore our celebration of this day, we re-establish unity of community and family so abhorrently lost in our society. We deny the absurdity of the unnatural and dream of a restored spiritual and, in my opinion, Christian nation.
B. C.