What Does It Mean To Keep A Day Holy? :: essays research papers

To understand what it means to keep a day holy, one must understand what holy is. Dictionary.com defines holy as spiritu tout ensembley whole or sound of unimpaired innocence and virtuousness free from sinful affections pure in heart godly godly irreproachable guiltless acceptable to God. According to this definition to keep a day holy would be to make the day acceptable to God. make a day acceptable to God will unquestionably straggle with religious beliefs.For the Christian, Sunday is above all an Easter celebration, illumined by the resplendence of the Risen Christ. It is the festival of the "new creation". Yet, when understood in depth, this saying is inseparable from what the first pages of Scripture tell us of Gods plan in the creation of the world. If the first page of the Book of coevals presents Gods " civilize" as an example for man, which it does, whence the same must be true of Gods " reliever." On the seventh day God finished his work whic h he had done" (Genesis 22)It would be clichd to interpret Gods "rest" as a kind of "inactivity". By its nature, the creative act, which founds the world, is deathless and God is always at work, as Jesus himself declares in oration of the Sabbath principle "My Father is working still, and I am working" (John 517). The divine rest of the seventh day does not allude to an inactive God, but emphasizes the fullness of what has been accomplished. It speaks, as it were, of Gods lingering before the "very effective" work.The book of Exodus tells us that we need not cease all work to keep the lords day holy but barely return "Remember the Sabbath day in order to keep it holy" (Exodus 208). Before commanding that something be done, the passage urges that something be remembered. It is a beseech to awaken memorialization of the grand and fundamental work of God, which is creation, a remembrance that must inspire the perfect religious life o f man and then fill the day on which man is called to rest. Rest therefore gains a sacred value the faithful are called to rest not only as God rested, but to rest in the Lord, bringing the entire creation to him.