The Sabbath - Participation in the Coming Kingdom

On the Sabbath we are free to live in the coming Kingdom rather than being constrained by the current one. On that day we lay aside all that will stand in the way of living in the Kingdom of God. This will require knowledge of what the Kingdom of God truly is. To live in this day correctly one must contemplate God's intention for humanity and the world. The Sabbath reminds us that creation is a good resource to look at how the coming Kingdom will look for the Bible tells us that the Sabbath memorializes that event. In addition Revelation 14 reminds us that to fight the great beasts of the end time we must worship the God who made the world. This contemplation of creation and how things "could" be different and how things "should" be different is subversive to the present world. We learn that things do not have to be as they are. We learn this because we have contemplated it, and more than this we know it because we have participated in it by living in the coming kingdom.

A Sabbath keeping church must spend some time in reflection of how the coming kingdom will look and thus be able to live in that kingdom every week. We cannot live in the new kingdom without knowing how the kingdom will look. Something is wrong when we perpetuate the worst parts of the present evil world even on the Sabbath. Something is wrong when God has given us this gift to live in the coming Kingdom and we live it just as we live every other day. We continue to make differences between people based on class. We treat the rich tithe payer as of more importance than the poor one. Something is wrong when God has given us this gift to live in the coming Kingdom and we perpetuate the worst of the present order by placing the fight for justice on the same level as the fight for injustice (I once heard a Sabbath School teacher say that the NAACP was the exact same thing as the KKK). Something is wrong when we take principles of injustice and inequality with us into the Sabbath when according to the Bible ALL rich, poor, slave, free, male and female were nothing but simply "resters" on that day.

But thanks be to God, we may not have kept the Sabbath correctly and participated in the Coming Kingdom, but another Sabbath is coming...And God calls us to "Remember the Sabbath day...."