To His Beloved He Gives Rest
At the end of the fourth Psalm, there is an exciting line, and it is far from the only place in the Bible where this idea is found. David has just finished listing out some of the blessings that the set apart of God enjoys when he says, “I will both lie down in peace and sleep.” My mind naturally went to the verse that says that to God’s beloved, He gives sleep or rest, but in the process of looking for that verse, I found several others that hadn’t immediately come to mind. It turns out that rest is mentioned quite a lot as one of the blessings that obeying God brings.
Psalm 4:8 NKJV I will both lie down in peace, and sleep; For You alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.
We find several different types of rest mentioned in the Bible, from death to ceasing from work to sleep, but they all point to something greater, with none of them being an end unto themselves.
Following God enables us to be able to lie down and go to sleep without fear of what will befall us in the night because we know that God is watching over us. This is not so for everyone; in fact, some aren’t blessed with sleep at all, let alone peaceful sleep. Working in the medical field has enabled me to get an inside look at one of the major health problems plaguing the world around us. Lack of sleep. There are all kinds of different medications out there to bring sleep, yet still, good sleep eludes most adults in America. There are a lot of reasons that this could be, but I would like to put forth that the number one reason for lack of sleep is disobedience to God and lack of a relationship with Him.
Psalm 127:2 NKJV [It is] vain for you to rise up early, To sit up late, To eat the bread of sorrows; [For] so He gives His beloved sleep.
Proverbs 3:24 NKJV When you lie down, you will not be afraid; Yes, you will lie down and your sleep will be sweet.
If we maintain a close relationship with God and are obedient to Him, He blesses us with sleep. Sleep is as important as drinking water and we quickly die without it. Rest points to something greater than just getting a good night's sleep, just as water points to something greater than the physical water we have now.
God promised the Israelites rest if they were obedient to Him. This is Jesus who is making this promise to Moses and the Israelites, and He extended this same promise to us in His time here on earth.
Exodus 33:14 NKJV And He said, "My Presence will go [with you], and I will give you rest."
It is a promise of eternal rest, rest in His kingdom, a place where we will never sorrow again.
Matthew 11:28-29 NKJV "Come to Me, all [you] who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
29 "Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
In His great wisdom, God gave us several things that point to the eternal rest we will receive. In death, we sleep and await the return of Jesus, and it is a rest no one but He can wake us from. Death is talked of as a protection for His people as well since nothing can harm us there, and there is no more suffering.
In our day-to-day lives, God gave us something a little more tangible to picture and point to that ultimate rest, something we get to celebrate at least once a week. At creation, He wrote certain days into the fabric of the universe for us to rest on. The Seventh day of the week was created for rest, as well as several other holy days throughout the year. We get a week in the spring with the Days of Unleavened Bread and a week in the fall with the Feast of Tabernacles.
Hebrews 4:1-5, 7-10 NKJV Therefore, since a promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it.
2 For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them; but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard [it].
3 For we who have believed do enter that rest, as He has said: "So I swore in My wrath, 'They shall not enter My rest,' " although the works were finished from the foundation of the world.
4 For He has spoken in a certain place of the seventh [day] in this way: "And God rested on the seventh day from all His works";
5 and again in this [place]: "They shall not enter My rest."
6 Since therefore it remains that some [must] enter it, and those to whom it was first preached did not enter because of disobedience,
7 again He designates a certain day, saying in David, "Today," after such a long time, as it has been said: "Today, if you will hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts."
8 For if Joshua had given them rest, then He would not afterward have spoken of another day.
9 There remains therefore a Sabbath keeping (sabbatismo) for the people of God.
10 For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God [did] from His.
The Sabbath represents the ultimate rest that we will be able to take in the kingdom. It is a weekly reminder, a reset button, if you will, to put us back on course after we have strayed a bit from the path during the week. The Sabbaths are regular compass checks on our journey to the kingdom. They are a day to rest from doing business with the world, from seeking our own pleasure, and instead a day to seek our pleasure from God.
With as vital as that sounds to our spiritual life, you would think that our enemy Satan would devise some way to keep us from getting those regular check-ins. If you were thinking this, you would be correct. It’s called Sunday, and it is the first day of the week rather than the seventh. It is a day of worship to Satan’s counterfeit religion rather than a day of worship to God. God has preserved the seven day week cycle down through history despite many attempts to change it, which only makes sense because it is the way He created the world.
Mankind could no more change the cycle of the week than they could change the second law of thermodynamics. Yet Satan has managed to pass off a lie that the weekly cycle was changed or that the Church had the authority to change the day from Saturday to Sunday, even though they admit that the Sabbath was never changed in the Bible. The Pope stands in the place of God, and all who keep Sunday recognize and yield to the authority of the Pope, so they say. I’m going to share a verse here and you tell me if it fits the one who has changed the feast days and the sabbaths.
Daniel 7:25 NKJV He shall speak [pompous] words against the Most High, Shall persecute the saints of the Most High, And shall intend to change times (moed) and law…
As Hebrews 4 says, we should fear lest we come short of entering that rest. It’s not something that we can take lightly, and in fact, Israel themselves were found to come short of it. They stomped all over the Sabbath, and by the time Josiah came along, they hadn’t kept the Passover with zeal in hundreds of years!! Hezekiah was the last one before this time to celebrate the Pass over at all.
2 Kings 23:22 NKJV Such a Passover surely had never been held since the days of the judges who judged Israel, nor in all the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah.
When Judah returned from captivity, Nehemiah restored the right way of worship and sought God zealously. Judah had been kicked out for breaking the Sabbath, among other things, and it wasn’t going to happen again. One man’s zeal was not enough to keep them on the straight and narrow; soon after he left, Judah left God’s way and returned to keeping the way of what was right in their own eyes and worshipping Satan. Some say Nehemiah was far too zealous in his pursuit of God and that he instituted things that were too strict. As Brett Gray explores in his study of Nehemiah, that was far from the case.
If you look close enough and long enough with open eyes, you can easily see a counterfeit system. A parallel system that has existed alongside God’s true system since almost the beginning of the world. Satan’s counterfeit takes many forms, but he does not vary all that much from one system of false worship to another. In today’s modern and so-called “Christian” world, instead of God’s Holy Days with unknowable depths of meaning and prophecy, they have pagan holidays that glorify the lusts of the flesh and Satan. Instead of the day of rest built into creation from the beginning that has so much meaning for those who choose it, Satan has baited and switched them with a cheap counterfeit day of worship to himself.
God wrote His picture of ultimate rest into the fabric of the universe, and though many have tried, they have not been able to rewrite and change the pattern of the week. It is God who gives us our rest and our sleep, and it is because of Him that we can lay down in safety and sleep when so many others are robbed of their sleep. So many others don’t get a good night's rest, let alone the blessing of a weekly rest. It is truly a blessing from God!
It stands, then, that if we have trouble sleeping, there is a good chance we are not close to God. This is not always the case, but we should examine our lives and see where we are separating ourselves from Him. Is it what we are watching, what we listen to, what we are reading, or is it the way we treat other people? Maybe we have been ignoring God for a while, and we need to turn to Him and seek Him again. Whatever it is, ask God to show you what you need to change, and He will show you. If we seek our rest in Him and place our trust in Him, then He will bless us with sleep. To His beloved, He gives sleep!
We have nothing to fear or anxiety about because we put everything into God’s hands and take our rest in Him. He is our rest, and He gave us a weekly reminder of this with the Sabbath. The next time you lay down to sleep, remember that a great night’s sleep is a blessing from God!
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