Exodus 23: The Sabbath, A Revolutionary Time and Space Where God and Humanity Meet

Exodus 23: The Sabbath, A Revolutionary Time and Space Where God and Humanity Meet

"Since my Name is in him, he will not forgive your rebellion." (Exodus 23:21, NIV)

Concern for the weak is not mere humanism. It is the most powerful act of faith (theological practice) that brings the first through third commandments (love of God) into the present reality of here and now. If love for the invisible God is not transformed into justice toward our visible neighbors, such faith remains nothing more than an empty concept.

Jesus said, "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me," ontologically uniting love of God with love of neighbor. Preventing the inevitable social classes in human society from hardening into discrimination, dismantling the contradiction of worshiping God while maintaining discrimination—this is the spirit of the fifth through tenth commandments and the core of laws protecting the weak.

And the explosive meeting point of this vertical faith (commandments 1-3) and horizontal ethics (commandments 5-10) in time and space is precisely the Sabbath (the fourth commandment). The Sabbath is a time when all production and consumption, all domination and subjugation cease. In this revolutionary time when masters rest, servants rest, and even animals rest, humanity finally recovers its true identity not as a rank or class but as the "image of God." When the Sabbath collapses, faith escapes into ideology, and ethics degenerates into legalism.

Yet paradoxically, we see despair throughout history. Whether in the wilderness period of the Exodus, the post-Babylonian exile era, or today, humanity's DNA has not changed. The constancy of human sinful nature—trampling the weak, rebelling against leaders, and continuously creating discrimination—is relentless. Despite thousands of years of temporal distance, "human character" seems not to have improved in the slightest.

But precisely at this point, the gospel shines. The only thing that covers this relentless constancy of sin, which will continue until humanity's extinction, is God's faithfulness alone. Humanity does not change, but God does not change either. Rather, God's love is more persistent than human sin. God's grace, which embraces this tension—the tension of being simultaneously sinner and righteous—continues to sustain our history even today.