Sabbath is God's wedding ring. It's a reminder of his surprising pursuit of our love.

It’s a gorgeous spring day. A warm sun paints the patio where Janet is planting petunias and snapdragons in large terra-cotta pots. After pressing the soil around the last petunia, she pulls her hands from the dirt, pushes back her hair with the back of her hand, then studies her fingers. With her thumb she rubs the dirt off her wedding ring. The dull gleam of gold takes her back to the day she first met Andrew.

She was waiting tables at a cheap Italian restaurant on First Avenue, a block from Bellevue Hospital. It wasn’t the job she’d dreamed of when she left Shaker Heights after her junior year in college. She was going to be an actress. She knew it would be hard, but she had some secretarial skills and figured she could make enough to live on while she developed her acting career. But all she could find was temp work, and too often she didn’t even get that. She met a guy at an audition. They dated a few times. When she didn’t have the money for another week at the YMCA, she didn’t dare call home for help. She moved in with him.

They’d been living together 3 months the first time he hit her. He was terribly apologetic. He promised it would never happen again. But it did. Usually when money was tight. So, she’d taken the job waiting tables at Pappa Roma’s. It didn’t pay much, but it was regular, and sometimes the tips weren’t too bad.

One night her boyfriend came home drunk. Again. They got into a shouting match, and before she knew it, he was hitting her. Again. He ended up sobbing that he was sorry. She slept cuddled in his arms. He hadn’t broken anything, and in the morning she was able to crawl out of bed. She did what she could with makeup and headed for Roma’s.

Lunchtime at Roma’s was always packed. Doctors and staff from the hospital. Relatives of patients. Andrew had come in with a couple of interns for lunch. Janet bantered with them a bit, angling for a tip. Okay, she flirted. She needed the money. The doctors got up to leave, but instead of heading out the door, Andrew came back to the kitchen looking for her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Sure. Never felt better.” She tried to be flippant.

“Look,” he said. “I’m an ER doc. You did a pretty good job with your makeup, but I do know a battered face when I see one. I’m worried about you. I don’t want to see you down the street where I do my business. I much prefer seeing you here. So take care of yourself, okay? You don’t have to let anyone beat you up. Get some help before you get killed, okay?”

And then he was gone.

Turns out Andrew was in his final year of an emergency-room residency. He was single. He kept coming to Roma’s for lunch.

Janet still can’t quite figure out how it happened. But they’d been married 12 years now. What had he seen in her? What had he seen behind the makeup on someone else’s battered girlfriend?

With Andrew’s encouragement and financial support she’d gone back to college and finished a fine arts degree. His family, an old, established Connecticut family, had embraced her as one of their own. Their three children were a delight. Her husband’s practice was going well.

She is wealthy, socially secure and spiritually whole—all because of her husband’s love. And every time she glances at her hand and sees that wedding ring, she remembers.

Sabbath is God’s wedding ring. It’s a reminder of his surprising pursuit of our love, a symbol of our privileges as the chosen people of God, a declaration to the world of our admiration for our heavenly husband.

“I [God] gave them the Sabbath—a day of rest every seventh day—as a symbol between them and me, to remind them that it is I, the Lord, who sanctifies them, that they are truly my people.

“Keep my Sabbaths holy, that they may be a sign between us. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God” (Ezek 20:12, 20).

The word “sanctify” means to set apart. God sets people apart for a special relationship with himself. He gives us the Sabbath to help keep alive our awareness of his love in a world full of evidence to the contrary. The Sabbath reminds us of where we have come from and what God has in mind for us.

Sabbath celebrates God’s initiative and God’s intentions in his relationship with humans. None of us complain if our beloved is good-looking, wealthy, smart, caring and responsive. But the Bible pictures God as coming and wooing us while we were broken and poor. He found us when we were living with a violent boyfriend, waiting tables in a cheap restaurant. It mattered to him that we were getting beat up. He saw in us a beauty no mirror could reflect. He won our hearts and made us his own. The Sabbath symbolizes all that.

“We love him because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

“When the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us–not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy” (Titus 3:4-5).

“And you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21).

Sabbath celebrates the spiritual realities described in these Bible passages.

But why the Sabbath?

At first thought, the Sabbath seems rather arbitrary. Why the seventh day? The year, month and day all are based on readily observable natural rhythms. But what’s the week based on? In spite of scholarly efforts to find an ordinary historical origin for the seven-day week, the best evidence continues to be that it originated in the Jewish practice of keeping Sabbath. And the Jews kept Sabbath because God said, On the seventh day, rest! Society has its week, and believers have their Sabbath, because of the arbitrary command of God: take the seventh day off.

I used the word “arbitrary” deliberately to be provocative. A much better word is “personal.” The Sabbath is a personally-chosen gift of time from God to his people. Part of its charm is its personal–you could almost say, its idiosyncratic–nature. Like Janet’s ring.

Janet could go to a jeweler and buy a replacement ring. It would give her the appearance of being married and might even be prettier than the original ring. But no ring she bought could ever convey to her the same message of affection and love her husband’s ring does. He chose and won her for reasons buried deep in his own heart, and gave her the ring as a sign of that love.

It’s the same with the Sabbath. There’s nothing intrinsically unique about Sabbath time. It’s like every other day, except for the personal intention and action of God. Taking one day off every week, no matter which day it is, provides many of the benefits of the real Sabbath. Any day off could provide release from ordinary work and the crushing stress so many of us work under. Any commonly accepted day could provide us with an opportunity for corporate worship. Any day is better than no day. But no substitute Sabbath can ever convey the personal message of divine affection embedded in the Sabbath. This is the primary argument against substituting Sunday for Saturday as the Sabbath. Sunday can appropriately commemorate Jesus’ resurrection and offers a convenient time for church services. But it does not have the overtones of divine grace the Bible links with Sabbath. Substituting Sunday for Sabbath is like substituting a ring of my choice for the ring given me by my beloved.

Sabbath is God’s wedding ring, a reminder of where God has brought us from, a symbol of his abiding affection, a promise of an eternal future together. It is one of the great treasures of Adventism.