Rest is part and parcel of living in God’s story. And this is a story that precedes us, a story we live in now and forever. The writer of Hebrews in the New Testament says, “There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.” This is why the Bible so closely connects the principle and practice of Sabbath with the invitation for rest. To devote one day of seven to wholehearted, embodied resting is to live more fully in God’s story. 

Karioshi suggests that the necessity of rest can be a matter of life and death. This Japanese word essentially translates as “death from overwork,” a tragically regular phenomenon in Japan in which men and women die, whether of natural causes or suicide, because of too much work and no rest. Even though this concept is given a name in Japanese, it’s not a foreign concept to the American worker.
We have a problem with rest. We don’t do it. In the United States nearly 50% of workers do not take full advantage of their paid time off. Further, Americans are half as likely to be taking vacation in any given week as they were 40 years ago. Even as we give lip service to the fact that rest is important, we have trouble actually stopping our work long enough to embrace rest.
As an international relations major in undergraduate, we read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: an early document drafted and approved by the United Nations to serve as a guiding frame for national legislation. I was surprised by Article 24, which declares, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”
Article 24 is, in fact, a decent distillation and summary of the biblical concept of Sabbath, with one glaring omission. The Declaration assumes that this right, and the other rights it enshrines, are self-inhering. That is, these rights rise out of us as human beings and have no external referent.
The Bible gives a different origin of our rest, not first in us, but first in God, and given to us:
Genesis 2:1-3
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
Exodus 20:8-11
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep 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, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
In other words, we know rest is important, but we’ve forgotten the true source of and reason for our rest. And when forget where rest comes from—true, soul-satisfying, bone-deep rest—we fail to stop work long enough to rest, and we miss out on a truly full and flourishing life.
So, in a world that doesn’t remember why we rest, is less and less likely to stop work at all, and who increasingly has trouble understanding rest as a key part of life, what do we do? The Scripture offers a threefold practice in response to our unwillingness to rest: remembering rightly, stopping intentionally, and embracing the life God offers.
The fourth commandment is the lengthiest of the 10 commandments. Further, it is one of only two that do not begin “Thou shalt not.” Instead, the first word of the fourth commandment is “remember.” What does remembering have to do with rest? In rest, we first and foremost remember who God is. Everything in the true and better story starts with God. And what do we remember about God? God is a God who created, a God who works, but beautifully, wonderfully, almost surprisingly, he is also a God who rests (Gen. 2:1-3)—a God who completes what he started, who brings to fruition all his plans, and as a result can step back and enjoy all that he has made.
My brother-in-law is a civil engineer. Specifically, he works as a Director of Traffic Engineering and Survey. In other words, he makes roads. In his case, he spends a lot of time taking bad roads and turning them into good roads. Speaking of driving on a road that he designed, he says, “It feels like completion and immense satisfaction. I constantly look left, right, and ahead at all the features my team designed over the course of months and years. I think about all the challenges we overcame to make the road function in a way that the public can enjoy it without even really thinking about it.” After all, we only really notice that road when it doesn’t work for us.
We all know the difference between a task checked off the list and a job well done. Creation is God’s job well done. On the seventh day, God looked left, right, and ahead at all the wonderful beauty of his creation and was glad. God is not an exhausted worker or a detached clockmaker; the God of the Bible is a delighted craftsman.
But the truth of rest does not simply require remembering who God is; it requires remembering who we are. To get the frame of reference on this, we must look even earlier in the book of Genesis. In Genesis 1:26-27, God says, “let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And what God says, God does: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Who are we? Humans are image-bearers of the almighty God who created all things by the word of his power in six days and rested on the seventh. As image bearers, we are called to work in this world to the glory of God and for the good of our neighbor. When we experience rest from that good work as a job well done, we are, momentarily, looking like God. It is an integral, inescapable part of being a human being—we were made to rest because we were made in God’s image. True rest is not a picture of laziness or inability but a picture of sufficiency, joy, and delight.
Yet, even this is not the full picture. We are not simply in the image of God, but also we are creatures, created by God. All too often, we rest not out of a job well done, but out of a desperate necessity, a deep exhaustion. Remembering who we are in rest is remembering that we are not God, that we cannot care perfectly for our children or our aging parents, that we cannot perfectly love our roommates, that we cannot work at our maximum limit one hundred percent of the time. Eventually, as they say, our bodies keep score and we shut down and sleep.
And, sometimes, as one pastor put it, sleep is one of our greatest acts of faith, because sleep is the declaration that God is God and we are not, and that is good news.
Rest starts with remembering, but it does not end there. Consider the remainder of the fourth commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep 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…”
The second pattern or practice of rest is to stop. We are meant to rest by stopping. Sabbath, the word that appears throughout Scripture in connection with rest, has as its most foundational meaning “to stop.” In Genesis 2, it says that God finished his work and rested. A more basic translation might be that God finished his work and stopped. Exodus 20:8 reads “Remember the Sabbath day.” We could also say, “Remember the stopping day.” God gave his creation, and specifically his people, the gift of Sabbath as one day of seven to embrace the practice of stopping.
True and better rest means stopping work.
This is, after all, what God did. What did Genesis 2 say?
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We must acknowledge that men throughout our culture and churches are in need of much soul care.  The answer is not therapy that in addition to being atheistic in origin is contrary to the nature of men.  Instead, the answer is Scripture, which was given by God through the pens of men to speak to the hearts of men.  Scripture is uniquely suited to help all people address their problems, including helping men approach problems in a masculine way.  Therefore, when men cannot find sufficient help in male discipleship relationships, men need biblical counseling.

Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who have an anxious heart, “Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.”
-Isaiah 35:3-4, ESV
Recently, I discussed how to approach depression, suicidal thoughts, and anxiety biblically.  These along with anger, trauma, substance abuse, and a myriad of other issues are commonly seen in biblical counseling.  I discussed the need for biblical counseling in general here, but many of these issues disproportionately affect men, and men often avoid counseling.  So while all Christians can benefit from biblical counseling, this post focuses on men.  We will see that the Bible (and therefore biblical counseling) is uniquely suited to help men.
The Problem
Are men really affected disproportionately?  Recent statistics show that more women than men are affected by them, anxiety and depression, though men have higher rates of substance abuse.  However, one fact in particular suggests that the problem may be much worse than reported.  Of nearly 100,000 suicides in 2021 and 2022, almost 80,000 were men.[1]  This shows that women seek help much more often than men do, thus making it appear that less men struggle with these issues.  Many professionals have observed this, calling it a men’s mental health crisis.  In this, they are not wrong.  Our society gives men ample reasons to be depressed and anxious—enough to turn to substances and suicide.  It demonizes men and glorifies women in the name of “equality”, making every woman out to be a queen and ever man a monster such that one can unironically ask questions like “are men worthy of compassion?” and “do we even need men anymore?”.  It presumes guilt whenever a man is accused by a woman, urging everyone to “believe all women” regardless of evidence.  It encourages women to set impossible expectations for men then leave or commit adultery when “their needs are not being met”, destroying their husbands’ lives through no-fault divorce.  A family court system stacked in women’s favor then makes marriage an all-risk-no-reward proposition for men—at least from a secular perspective.  This is not to disparage the institution of marriage itself.  After all, I recently commented on the beauty of biblical marriage.  However, no-fault divorce has eliminated any societal accountability for husband and wife to uphold their marriage vows.  Without that, men have everything to lose and nothing to gain from divorce and therefore marriage.  Finally, this perverted society works tirelessly from childhood to squeeze males into a feminine mold, demonizing their masculine distinctives as “toxic” such that they become effeminate, assume they are defective, or rebel and become abusive.  All of this men’s sense of removes purpose, which is a very important anecdote to depression.  So yes, there is a men’s mental health crisis, which should surprise no one.
If it is so bad, why aren’t men getting help?  Scholars point to stigma regarding men and mental health, a general hesitation for men to talk about their emotions, and even “toxic masculinity”.[2]  There is like some truth in that (except for the toxic masculinity part), but I propose a simpler explanation.  Perhaps men who suffer from depression and anxiety refrain from seeking treatment because of their perception of the treatment itself.  Unlike medical treatment—which men are notorious for avoiding as well—mental health treatment often involves therapy, which is the last thing most men want to do.  The prospect of lying on a couch talking about your childhood with a stranger and then talking endlessly about feelings is somewhat less preferrable than undergoing a root canal.  Furthermore, it is obvious enough to be cliché that men are solution-oriented.  Men want to troubleshoot the problem, identify the root cause, and solve it.  But due to the complexity of the issues in question, psychology and psychiatry often cannot offer such solutions.  Therefore, therapy—at least in men’s minds—is reduced to “talking it out”, which seems futile. It all seems very feminine, and in a culture that is working hard to strip men of every last vestige of masculinity, can we really fault men for not wanting to go to therapy that could threaten to emasculate them even further?[3] I have no idea whether that image bears any resemblance to actual therapy, but this is a case in which perception is more important than reality.  The perception alone is enough to scare most men away from therapy.  If only help for men could be found coming from wise and masculine men.  If only manly men from “the good old days” wrote a book to men that addressed these problems in a way that acknowledges their masculinity.
The Bible’s Masculinity
Such a book exists: the Bible.  This may come as a surprise since the broader American church has largely feminized Christianity.  The worship songs, sermons, and ministries of many churches cater so much to women that men can feel very out-of-place, leading them to believe that the Bible is not for them.  Every word of Scripture is infinitely profitable for all Christians, whether male or female, but to counter the error of feminization in our churches, we need to stress the masculinity of Scripture.  First, every word of Scripture was inspired by the Holy Spirit, who like the Father and Son is repeatedly portrayed in Scripture as male.  He inspired men to then write those words down—not people in general, but men in particular.  Moses, David, Solomon, Israelite historians, and the prophets were all men, as were the apostles, Mark, Luke, James, and Jude.  And of course the Gospels record the words of Jesus, the perfect man.  Even passages spoken by women, such as the songs of Miriam and Deborah, the prayer of Hannah, and the Magnificat, were recorded by men.  The only passage of Scripture attributed to a woman is Proverbs 31, which was an oracle from the mother of King Lemuel.  But like the others, it was relayed by a man to male writers, so it too is the words of a man recorded by men.
Much of Scripture was written to, for, and about men.  Job and his friends were all men.  Many of the psalms were written as battle songs for the Israelite army.  Much of Proverbs is written from father to son.  Many of Christ’s teachings were directed at specific men, and several of the epistles were written to specific men.  It should be unsurprising then that the Bible is written in a way that appeals to masculine strength.  Even in the songs of Miriam, Deborah, and Mary, one cannot help but notice the themes of conquest and strength.  From Abraham to Hezekiah, the narrative of Scripture is full of the exploits of the men in war.  Abraham defeated five kings to rescue Lot (Genesis 14).  Joshua led the Israelites to defeat the Amalekites during the exodus (Exodus 17).  Caleb claimed Hebron mainly because he would have to fight giants there (Joshua 14:6-15).  Then there’s most of Judges followed by Saul and his armor bearer defeating an entire Philistine garrison by themselves (1 Samuel 14), David’s entire life and Mighty Men, and many others.
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Written by Jared C. Wilson |
Saturday, April 2, 2022

Nobody gets out of here alive. Even the Christian must die. But dying isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. Dying after you die is the worst thing that can happen to you. But for those who are united to Christ by faith – we have unconquerable, eternal life.

Because Jesus is God we can know that he is able to save. But we are encouraged not just that Christ is able to save, but in knowing that he has actually exercised his ability to save us.
In other words, to say that God is able to save isn’t exactly the good news, because God is able to do many things that he nevertheless chooses not to do. Whenever he says “no” to one of our prayers, for instance, we should not construe him to mean that he’s saying “I can’t.” (Unless we’re asking him to sin or otherwise act against his nature.)
I’m thinking along the lines of the old Carl Henry saying: “It’s only good news if it gets there in time.”
That Christ is able to save is no benefit to those who do not find themselves taking refuge in him!
Well, Christ is an able Savior and because he’s always on time—indeed, he has authored time itself— he’s an unconquerable Savior.
Look, for instance, at John 17:9-19, where in his “high priestly prayer” Jesus turns from praying for himself to praying for his friends. Christ’s interceding on the sinner’s behalf is GOOD NEWS, and here it rises to the surface of his prayer in wonderful relief:
I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.
He has given us the only kind of life he has within himself – ETERNAL LIFE.
The primary facet of eternal life on display in vv.9-18 is the eternality of it, the forever protection Christians have by Christ himself. Review from the passage, for instance:
v.10 = all yours are mine and mine are yours, meaning we belong to God
v.11 = the Father is keeping us
v.12 = he has guarded us, and not one of them has been lost
v.15 = keep them from the evil one
vv.16-17 = sanctify them (or set them apart)
All of this points us the safety we have in Jesus!
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