It’s the notes you don’t play: Chick-Fil-A, the Sabbath and the duty of rest

What makes your Sabbath different than any other day?

There should be a law: Chick-Fil-A commercials should be banned from late Saturday night, when their stores close, to Monday morning when they reopen.

If you can’t drive there and get it right after seeing the commercial, that’s just wrong.

But part of me respects a company willing to take Sundays off, and forgo 15% of the work week. The people who own Chick-Fil-A don’t want to be the reason their employees miss church. They try to offer worldly reasons, like “work-life balance,” but we’re all adults here.

Even at the expense of denying your family the Sunday night chicken dinners KFC sold us for years, Chick-Fil-A keeps their doors shut.

Ours is a culture of consumerism. This week, Russia brought war to Ukraine. The bright idea stateside? Stop buying Russian vodka. That’ll show em!

These are the empty ideas of a culture that knows only two ways to express itself: what it buys, and what it doesn’t.

In such a world, taking Sundays off is a noble act. It’s a rebel yell in a world that cries for more, more, more.

What don’t you do on your Sabbath? What won’t you do? What do you make sure to do? What makes it any different than any other day?

In Genesis 2:2, on the seventh day after Creation, God rested. In 2:3, “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”

But God created an Eden in which work wasn’t necessary for man, at least not before The Fall. Turn down from what? And so we don’t hear any more about the seventh day as a holy day until the next book of the Bible, Exodus.

By Exodus 16, God has worked through Moses and Aaron to lead Israel out of Egypt.

Problem is, the Israelites were better off as slaves than free in the desert. At least they were well-fed. At least tomorrow was certain. Beats life in the Desert of Sin.

Even with the Egyptian threat killed off, drowned as Israel crossed the Sea of Reeds, Israel is still hungry. They let Moses and Aaron know it.

Their very survival is a miracle, but God needs another one. Just a chapter prior, the Israelites were singing God’s praises. (“In the greatness of your majesty you threw down those who opposed you,” they say in 15:7)

Now they’re hungry and angry. Moses needs another miracle fast, or there could be a mutiny.

It comes in Exodus 16:15, when quails drop off a delivery of bread.

But daily blessings are like the college freshman who highlights an entire page. If you’ve highlighted everything, you’ve highlighted nothing. Something has to break things up, so people know what’s special.

God delivers the food for six days. On the sixth, it’s a double portion. That because the Sabbath, the seventh day, is a day of rest. Holy.

God’s people following in God’s footsteps, again. But unlike the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or the Tower of Babel, this time they’re not punished for it.

In Exodus 16:26 Moses says: “Six days you are to gather it (bread) but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any.”

God is finally taking his day of rest again, the first day off we learn of since Genesis 2. There will be no bread, only an opportunity to keep the Sabbath and be faithful by not laboring.

As jazzman Miles Davis said, “It’s the notes you don’t play.”

More strenuous demands are coming for the Israelites, and soon. But with manna dropped in from the heavens, only one rule applies: take the Sabbath as a day of rest.

Just as in Eden, God supplies the food, with no work or slavery required. This is life as Adam and Eve knew it, not the people from Cain to Joseph.

Faithfulness, in Exodus 16, did not require industry or suffering.

Just a willingness for God’s people to rest, and let him rest, and know they would be provided for.