Is this a wake up call for us? Should we change? If this effects everyone in the world, should I change? Alot of new and different questions to think about in our life.
The biggest thing that I see and perceive with society, and even christians is that we all have problems with the idea of rest. We don’t know what to do with ourselves when we don’t have work, or we don’t have a schedule of things to do in our normal life. There is no indication that we cannot just rest just for the sake of rest.
Using this as a marker, we need to see why the need exists, why we feel the need to do. It has been ingrained in us for centuries, thru many reasons, sometimes being no fault of ours. There is this need to just be busy, to work, to play, to go and not to be still.
Rest is talked about in the scriptures multiple times, in fact it is mentioned almost 300 times in the NASB. The bulk of the time the ‘rest’ is mentioned in the old testament, which should tell us that emphasize was there with the Israelites from early on in their journey with God. But why? Why would or should we be concerned with the notion of ‘rest’.
Let me digress here for a moment, I have always had a few questions about groups of people or individual’s that didn’t look back at their heritage or their history to see if their were problems that they had created or were not going along with what God had deigned them to do, and why they didn’t see this. This is one of those moments, and questions I have for the Israelite’s.
If God had designed a world for us and the only thing that we were to do, was to rest with God, why would we do anything else?
God’s design for us, or for a better word to use is our ‘vocation’ in this world was to be an ‘image’ of God , which leads us to vision us as image in the God’s world. Ironically, this is exactly the picture we see later with God’s, chosen people, the Jewish people, the Israelite’s in their Temple model, that God set up for them to be ‘near’ him. Just one dot, in the whole world, as opposed to being with his people in all of the world.
And we still can’t see this in our world today!
The Eternal Purpose 