[Note: The following is the prepared text of a sermonette given to The Dalles congregation of the United Church of God on Sabbath, July 20, 2024.]

We live in a day and age where it is common for corrupt elites to enjoy pleasures that they seek to deny to the rest of humanity at large and seek to enforce regulations against ordinary people that they exempt themselves from. This is, indeed, one of the ways that we can most obviously see their corruption for what it is. We see elites purchase property in coastal communities like Martha’s Vineyard and then complain about rising oceans that threaten the world within the next few years. We see these same people fly in private jets to places like Davos, Switzerland to dine luxuriously while opining that people should eat bugs and disgusting vat-grown proteins and avoid driving gasoline powered vehicles for the sake of our planet. A few years ago we saw these same corrupt elites seek to forbid more than ten people from congregating together and trying to force people to wear facemasks for public health reasons and sought to forbid ordinary business while they went about their business without interruption and partied without facemasks or social distancing with their friends and allies on camera for all to see their double standards and hypocrisy.

Such behavior, as infuriating as it is to witness, is by no means a new thing. About fifty years ago, the German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper wrote a book titled, in English, “Leisure: The Basis Of Culture,” where he wrote about the benefits of slavery and other forms of unfree labor by the masses as a means by which an elite could have the leisure to think and create artistically and avoid the degrading effects of having to work for a living, thus producing lasting elite culture through their sponsorship of art and cultivation of minds unburdened by the need to work for their survival. Some years ago, I read a novel by the often-rewarded fantasy writer Lois McMaster Bujold called “A Civil Campaign,” which explores a fictional space empire whose ruling aristocratic elites cultivate restfulness for themselves while forcing those around them to work very hard on their behalf. In this case, art imitates life, as writers seek to imagine a world where people like themselves can live at ease while commanding the labor of others, enjoying rest and prosperity while others slave on their behalf to fulfill their wishes and protect and serve their interests.

In contrast to this ungodly view of how the world should be, the laws and gifts of God are universal. As this is a sermonette message, by necessity it will only be an introduction into a much larger subject that I wish to discuss in more detail at another time, exploring the subject with more nuance and pointing out in greater detail with more examples as to how we see the universality of God’s laws and blessings throughout the Bible. How is it that all believers are equal in the eyes of God, even if there are a variety of offices and a need to respect authority? To put it another way, a part of this exploration will entail a discussion of the grounds on which authority is legitimate. To what ends and with what mindsets do good rulers, rather than corrupt elites, exercise authority. How are we to distinguish the two? This is too much material to discuss all at one time, but all the same we will begin by looking at three passages in the Bible that indicate the universality and reciprocity involved at the foundation of God’s establishment of His people. With that foundation laid, we will set the stage for further examination of the subject of the universality of God’s laws and blessings, which sets the range in which believers can be said to be equal in the eyes of God.

It ought not to surprise us that when we look at the Ten Commandments, recorded once in Exodus 20 and again in Deuteronomy 5, we see that they are given with a universal scope. As you may have guessed from the introductory part of this message, we will focus on the Sabbath command and point out the implications of this commandment as it is expressed. In both Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 we see the Sabbath command listed, but there are different reasons that God gives for the Sabbath commandment and its universal scope as to who is to enjoy the rest that the Sabbath brings. Let us examine both of these passages in turn. First, let us turn to Exodus 20:8-11. Exodus 20:8-11, which ought to be familiar to us all, reads: “ “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

There are two aspects in which the Sabbath commandment is here shown to be universal. First, God not only tells Israel that they are to labor for only six days and to keep the seventh day of every week as a Sabbath to God, itself a universal statement, but he then enumerates in detail to whom the Sabbath applies to. Here, contrary to any expectations we would have that the Sabbath rest is to be enjoyed by elites who are waited on hand and foot by various subordinate classes of people, we see that the Sabbath is to be enjoyed by all believers, their sons and daughters, their male and female servants, strangers who are a part of their community, and even their animals. Far from commanding the labor of others to serve their own leisure as a basis of culture, God’s culture is based on the universal enjoyment of Sabbath rest by man and beast that is meant to serve in large part as the context for learning God’s ways and enjoying fellowship with God’s people. The universal scope of these aims is helped by the reason that God gives here for why Israel should follow the Sabbath day as a model for the entire world, namely that God created the heavens and the earth and all that it is in them during six days of the week but rested on the seventh day, thus setting a model for man and beast around the whole world. Even if Sabbath observance is rare, the reason provided for it is applicable to all peoples at all places within the world (or indeed, in the heavens) at all times. God’s rest serves as a model for that of everything that has ever and will ever live and breathe. It doesn’t get much more universal than that.

When we look at the repetition of the Sabbath command, we see a different reason given for its universal applicability. Let us turn to Deuteronomy 5:12-15. Deuteronomy 5:12-15 reads: ““Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”

Here we see a commandment similar to that of Exodus 20, but the reason given is different. Instead of the universality of God’s role over creation, we see the importance of God’s desire for liberty for mankind. Just as one of the marks of slavery is the lack of control that people have over their labor and the exploitation of their labor for the profit of those who claim ownership over them, so too, as we have noted, leisure is one of the marks of a privileged elite that believes it is good to avoid work and that in order to enjoy life others must be compelled to work on the behalf of a lazy and parasitic elite. Instead of this view, God commands those who have been freed from slavery to be free in order to serve God with their bodies and their time to do the same to others. It is monstrously hypocritical for those who have been set free from slavery to put others to slavery, and even though the descendants of Israel were not slaves in Egypt themselves, God considers Israel as a whole to have collectively been enslaved in Israel even though it occurred in the past, and so God’s deliverance of Israel from slavery–and its implications–were meant to be something that Israel always looked back on.

When we turn our attention from the promise of the Sabbath and the universality of its obedience (as well as of the justification of God’s own rest), and turn our attention to the giving of the Holy Spirit, we find that it is universal in its own way. Let us turn to Joel 2:28-32. Here we see at least two different grounds for the universality of the Holy Spirit. Joel 2:28-32 reads: ““And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days. I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the Lord has said, even among the survivors whom the Lord calls.”

First, at the beginning of this passage we find the universality of the giving of the Holy Spirit and its blessings portrayed in a similar fashion to that of the Sabbath, in terms of various classes and generations of society that suggest that the Holy Spirit and the Sabbath are to be enjoyed by the same broad sectors of society–men and women, youth and old people as well as servants of both sexes. We also see that God promises to deliver everyone who calls on the name of the Lord as a believer who walks in obedience, and we know from Acts that God called an increasingly diverse group of believers into His church who would follow Him and be subject to this promise. It is perhaps unsurprising that this passage is quoted as being fulfilled, or at least as being begun to be fulfilled, when God shared His Holy Spirit with thousands of brethren of diverse backgrounds and origins, and has continued to call people from all kinds of nations and backgrounds into His church since then.

Obviously, as this is a sermonette, we cannot go into the implications or the importance of the universality of God’s commands and blessings. We will have to save that task for another time. It is interesting to note, as we close, that both the Ten Commandments and the Holy Spirit are associated with Israel and the Church as well as with the festival of Pentecost, which suggests that the role of the firstfruits, of which we all are a part, is connected with the larger harvest of the fall. I will seek to explore that connection as time permits another time. In the meantime, I hope that as we follow God as small groups of people scattered across the face of the whole world, in the midst of a society that, by and large, is growing increasingly hostile to God’s ways, that we may be encouraged by the knowledge that such small beginnings are part of a larger and indeed universal plan for the calling and salvation of the entire world. I wish you all a wonderful Sabbath.