Written by Forrest L. Marion |
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Non-competitive activities, however, may retain one’s focus on the Lord – if engaged in it thoughtfully. Again, readers may think of their favorite examples, from going for a walk or a bike ride with their children/grandchildren to a dad throwing a baseball with his son in the backyard to various other outings or indoor activities that allow for engaging in conversation or reflection on God’s sovereignty, creativity, and lovingkindness – or on the morning’s teaching and preaching. 

Among Christians, Presbyterians generally are those best attuned to the importance of the Christian Sabbath, or Lord’s Day. But this shared sense of importance does not translate to full agreement on the day’s nature or observance. For centuries, followers of Jesus Christ have differed regarding the observance of the fourth commandment.
Regardless, the Westminster Standards highlight the observance of the Lord’s Day which commemorates the resurrection of the Lord Jesus on the first day of the week. The Larger Catechism devotes no less than 7 questions – of 196 – to the fourth commandment (#115-121).
Question 117 asks, “How is the sabbath or the Lord’s day to be sanctified?” The most relevant portion of the lengthy answer is, “The sabbath or Lord’s day is to be sanctified by an holy resting all the day, not only from such works as are at all times sinful, but even from such worldly employments and recreations as are on other days lawful.” The answer to question 119 on “the sins forbidden in the fourth commandment” reiterates the forbidding of “all needless works, words, and thoughts, about our worldly employments and recreations.”
The matter of worldly recreations is the narrow topic here.
A decade ago, while serving on my presbytery’s theological examining committee, I realized that the “recreations” clause was the one nearly always mentioned by candidates taking “exceptions” to the Westminster Standards. That experience has been reinforced by articles in The Aquila Report over the years as well.
One article in 2013 by Teaching Elder (TE) Jason A. Van Bemmel observed: “The biggest objection I have to ‘worldly recreations’ is that people seem eager to engage in leisure activities that do not focus their own hearts and minds on the Lord and that require others to work in order to serve them.”
In 2015, TE Benjamin Shaw expressed the issue of post-morning-worship Lord’s day activities with both humor and insight:
So our civil culture and our theological culture alike lean against prohibiting ‘recreations’ on the Sabbath. Then, we are presented the Dickensian bogeyman of the poor children of Sabbatarians, forced to sit in uncomfortable straight-backed chairs all Sunday afternoon, dressed in their Sunday-best, while their grim-faced father reads to them the opening chapters of 1 Chronicles.    
Assuming one’s regular attendance upon divine worship in the morning at a minimum, must we choose between Sabbath afternoon “leisure activities” that do not focus on the Lord on the one hand and “grim-faced” fathers reading 1 Chronicles’ genealogical chapters to their children on the other? Is there not a more biblical, even confessional, standard to be found somewhere between those two extremes?
All Christians acknowledge the Bible as their highest authority, but challenges may arise when Scripture does not use a particular word that carries weight in one’s confessional documents. The Westminster Standards use the word, “recreations,” which does not appear in the 1599 Geneva Bible or the 1611 King James Bible, the versions most familiar to the assembly when it met several decades later. Isaiah 58:13-14 – historically the favorite Scripture passage of Presbyterians on the topic – arguably comes closest to addressing the essence of recreational activity:
If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy will on mine Holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight to consecrate it, as glorious to the Lord, and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor seeking thine own will, nor speaking a vain word,
Then shalt thou delight in the Lord, and I will cause thee to mount upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.      
Phrases such as, “. . . doing thy will on mine Holy day” and “not doing thine own ways, nor seeking thine own will,” point toward the essence of the recreations clause. In our culture, it’s all about “thine own will” – not God’s will. Even serious Christians are not exempt from such pernicious influences.
I am convinced this is where Greg Bahnsen’s thinking may help. He argued for viewing the recreations clause in the context of competitive versus non-competitive activities.*
Competitive activities by their nature focus one’s attention on the individual or one’s team. Readers may bring to mind their own examples of competition from sports to drama to music and so on. Such competitive activities promote “thine own will.” The very nature of competition means the activity must be self- or man-focused; not God-focused.
Non-competitive activities, however, may retain one’s focus on the Lord – if engaged in it thoughtfully. Again, readers may think of their favorite examples, from going for a walk or a bike ride with their children/grandchildren to a dad throwing a baseball with his son in the backyard to various other outings or indoor activities that allow for engaging in conversation or reflection on God’s sovereignty, creativity, and lovingkindness – or on the morning’s teaching and preaching.
While I cannot recall what Bahnsen may have said about King James I’s infamous – especially to the Puritans – Book of Sports, or Declaration of Sports, which was first issued in 1618 and reissued in 1633 by Charles I, without doubt the Westminster divines had this document in mind when they met in the 1640s. Some pastors, including John Davenport and Thomas Shepard, left England for America, partly because of Charles’s aggressive undermining of the Sabbath through the declaration’s reissuance (Davenport found refuge for a time in the Netherlands). Broader persecution influenced other pastors to emigrate, including John Cotton and Thomas Hooker, who traveled to America in July 1633, three months prior to the reissuance.
It is significant that several of the “lawful recreations” in which James and Charles encouraged their subjects to engage on Sabbath afternoons, were competitive in nature: “archery for men, leaping, vaulting.” The king considered them to be “exercises as may make their bodies more able for war, when we or our successors shall have occasion to use them.” This background supports the validity of viewing Westminster’s “recreations” within the framework of the competitive/non-competitive nature of Sabbath activities as Greg Bahnsen suggested.
Some writers argue for a study to address the Westminster Standards’ handling of the fourth commandment and/or the “recreations” clause. Until that happens, perhaps asking oneself whether a Sabbath activity being considered is competitive, or non-competitive, may promote a more faithful observance of the day and greater delighting in the Lord, which offers the believer a glimpse of the eternal Sabbath toward which he is headed.
Forrest L. Marion is a member of First Presbyterian Church (PCA), Crossville, Tennessee.

*Note: I’m unable to cite that roughly thirty years ago – in the olden days of audiocassettes – I listened to a (borrowed) taped message of Dr. Greg Bahnsen (1948-1995) in which he argued for viewing Sabbath “recreations” through the window of competitive/non-competitive activities. While I regret not having taken notes on his message, my family and former church members will testify that in the 1990s anything touching upon the Christian Sabbath and its observance commanded my attention; my dissertation dealt with the subject. Years later, I contacted Bahnsen Theological Seminary, but they were unable to locate this taped message. If any reader is familiar with this message of Dr. Bahnsen’s, please contact me at [email protected].
Related Posts:

Jesus said that God causes the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45). Both believers and non-believers all share this same sin-cursed planet, and there is nothing we can do of ourselves to save ourselves from the effects of it.

Most of us came to a harsh realization of our mortality, even as children. It’s a very gloomy prospect to comprehend that we will all eventually die. And I know from crushing personal experience that this sometimes happens to our loved ones sooner rather than later.
None of us like death. Whether someone has lived a full life or dies ‘too young’, we grieve at their passing. The pain of loss causes us to ponder probably the most asked question—‘Why?’ ‘Why are we here if it is just to become nothing more than dust?’ And, ‘Why me?’ or perhaps, ‘Why us?’ In my experience, most Christians also struggle with this question. We might wonder why our loving and all-powerful Creator God would allow any of His precious children to suffer, sometimes in agony, before the end eventually comes.
Indeed, it is not a pretty picture, and there is tragic evidence that many have turned their backs on God because of the death of a loved one, or seeing a horrific international disaster that just did not make sense to them. But this struggle with the meaning of death is made far worse when people, including Christians, buy into an evolutionary understanding of death—often without even realizing it! If we do this, we can unwittingly accept some of its spurious concepts, including the idea that death is natural. As such, we might not provide satisfactory answers to others.
A straightforward answer is found in Genesis. It provides a correct biblical understanding of history, rather than the false evolutionary one. Moreover, we can find great joy in realizing that our Creator God knows our plight, and actually has done something about it.
Evolution: Death is “Just Natural”
Almost everybody has been subjected to an evolutionary/long-age view of the world at some stage. That is, all organisms have danced to the tune of death and struggle over millions of years. This story constantly invades our lives in our education, the news, and even in children’s literature. This ‘deep-time death’ theme is a form of indoctrination; hence its widespread acceptance. For example, evolutionary astronomer Carl Sagan said in one episode of his immensely popular TV science series, Cosmos: “The secrets of evolution are time and death. There’s an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.”1
His view, like most scientists today, merely echoed what Charles Darwin popularized in his famous book On the Origin of Species. Darwin wrote, “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”2
There has been much written about Darwin’s motivation for his theory. He struggled with the premature death of three of his children. And many commentators say that the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie, finally destroyed any vestiges of Christian faith he had. He stopped attending church—something that I have seen many Christians do after losing loved ones. Darwin concluded that the world was ages old and concluded that death had been here since the beginning. In this view, ‘God’ becomes the author of death and suffering and a cruel ogre. Death became king to Darwin, rather than the One who has the power over life and death (Rev. 1:18).
We see this ‘death is king’ theme even in popular movies. The hugely influential science fiction author H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was a rabid evolutionist who trained under ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ Thomas Huxley.3 The 2005 Stephen Spielberg remake of H.G. Wells’ classic science fiction tale, The War of the Worlds, stays true to its evolutionary precepts of death and struggle. But I wonder how many could see Wells’ anti-Christian ideas coming through? It employs the idea of older (on the evolutionary scale), and therefore more technologically advanced, Martians attacking the earth with the aim of exterminating mankind. Wells wrote how these ‘superior aliens’ viewed humans: “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” (emphasis mine).
Read More

We can see that God calls homosexual practices an abomination for two reasons. First, all sexual immorality violates the holiness of a human body. Second, homosexual practices violate that holiness even more specifically by overturning an especially significant part of human bodies, namely our sexual differences. If there is anything that we can all learn from this discussion, it’s that we should not approach the subject of sex with a casual or glib attitude.

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. (Lev. 18:22)
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them (Lev. 20:13).

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are some of the most offensive texts in Scripture. Even for Christians who love the Bible, these verses are very awkward. But perhaps we can learn something important from the term abomination. Maybe our avoidance of awkwardness is one of the problems when it comes to the way we talk about sex. We would rather discuss issues that are more familiar and manageable. We argue about the law, health, each side’s rhetoric, and every possible category touching on human sexuality that does not touch that one, awkward term from Leviticus.
Abomination does not fit into our manageable categories because it concerns holiness, which itself concerns questions of ultimate importance. What are we willing to live for? To die for? What is a good human life? How can I live such a life? To truly answer these questions, we need to understand holiness. And that means things might get awkward.
Holiness can lurk in strange places. Just ask Moses. Managing sheep in the wilderness, he stumbled across a humble bush — and a flame that burned without fuel. The uncreated Creator spoke with a humble creature. This was not an easy encounter for Moses: shoes off, life changed, power granted, mission undertaken. Moses found God’s holiness uncomfortable. At the same time, it was life-giving.
Sex is another strange place to find holiness. Yet we do find it there, along with this word “abomination,” which simply means a violation of something holy or sacred. Idolatry is an abomination because it destroys true and holy worship (e.g. Deut. 7:25).
Read More
Related Posts: