Living in a Saturday World | Dana C. Baldwin

Introduction

The nucleus of this lesson comes from a message by John Ortberg from late September 2011. While the words are mine, the outline is his and much of the insight is his. We are looking at what it means to live with purpose in this life. We have seen that our ultimate purpose—the most important thing—is to bring glory to God. We’ve seen that worry can take us away from that purpose. We have seen that living as light in this world is not an easy task. Taking up our cross to follow Jesus means that we no longer live but that Christ lives through us. Our lives are about God, not about us.

Today we continue our theme by looking at a familiar event in scripture: the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The Bible speaks of the events of Friday—the day Jesus is crucified, abandoned, the dark day of history when sin and Satan won. It was the day when Satan got what he wanted: God in the flesh on a cross. Defeat.

The Bible speaks of the events of Sunday, the greatest day in the history of the world. It is the day when Jesus comes out of the tomb, when death is swallowed up in victory, when soldiers tremble, the stone is blown away from the door of the tomb, and Jesus comes bursting forth in victory and triumph. But today we are going to focus on the day in between Friday and Sunday—Saturday. What happened on that day? Today we are going to see that Saturday matters.

Silence

Friday came. The disciples ran away on Thursday night. Betrayal occurred on Thursday, and on Friday the results of the betrayal was death. Sunday is the day of triumph and victory. But what about Saturday? Saturday is the day that no one talks about. It is the day after defeat and the day before victory, the day between despair and joy, the day between brokenness and healing, the day between death and life. Nothing happened on Saturday. God is silent on Saturday. The Bible says nothing about Saturday. In the mind of the disciples, their dream of what could have been died on Friday. Jesus failed on Friday. God failed on Friday. What is there to say on Saturday?

We all have experienced Saturday. The day after your dreams die and you don’t know what you are supposed to do next but you know you have to do something. It is the day after the funeral. You wake up the next morning and you know you have to get up and do something but what do you do? It is the day after you lost your job. The next day you have to get up but you don’t want to go job hunting. The pain is too real. It’s the day after a friend betrays you. It’s the day after she returns the ring or he says he needs his space. It’s the day after the tornado, the day after the doctor tells you there isn’t anything left to do, the day after. You know your own story. We have all had to deal with Saturday.

The Bible has several three-day stories. These three-day stories point to the activity of God. Not all three-day stories turn out well—as we judge them—but they do have a resolution. In Genesis 22, God is testing Abraham’s faith. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham goes on a journey, and it is on the third day that God provides a ram to offer as a sacrifice rather than Isaac. In Genesis 42, Joseph’s brothers are put in prison, and on the third day they are released. In Joshua 2, Rahab hides the spies, and on the third day they are able to escape to safety. In Esther 4, Esther tells everyone to fast and pray for her as she plans on going to the king, and in Esther 5:1 it is the third day when the king receives her and grants what she wants. Even the prophet Hosea reminds us of the importance of the third day in Hosea 6:2: “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.”

The third-day stories have the same general outline. Day One there is trouble, just as Jesus experienced great trouble on Friday. It is a day of defeat and loss. Day Three is the day of deliverance, the day of victory. It is Day Two that poses the problem because on Day Two there is still trouble. The problem still exists. But it is on Day Two that there is silence. The Bible is silent on Day Two. The problem with three-day stories is that we never know it is a three-day story until the third day. On the first day we pray for deliverance, and on the second day we hear nothing. The problem remains and God is eerily silent. And we do not know what more to do.

C.S. Lewis, in his book “A Grief Observed” written after the death of his wife Joy, wrote this: “When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”

Options

So we have three options. Despair. We can give up. We can say that God has failed us for the last time. We can accuse God of not being loving. We can accuse God of being powerless to deal with our problem. This often happens when the problem takes too long. The truth is that sometimes we never get to the third day. Sometimes we are stuck in the second day. The silence is deafening.

Denial. We don’t give up but we give easy and simple answers to problems. We tell people that if they had more faith then the problem would take care of itself. We somehow deny the severity of the problem or the crippling effect of the silence that exists from day to day.

Wait. Waiting on the Lord is not easy. It is also not passive. Waiting for Sunday means everything is about anticipating Sunday. It means recognizing that all human resources eventually fail. Waiting means knowing that Sunday will arrive. Waiting means refusing to live in despair nor in denial but to live with anticipation. We live knowing that Sunday is coming. I said nothing happened on Saturday, that it was silent, but that isn’t exactly the case.

Listen to the Hebrew writer in Hebrews 2: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”

What seemed like certain victory for Satan on Friday gave way to complete collapse on Sunday. Then there was Saturday. Saturday was about demonstrating that the truth of Friday was real. It was a day when there was no doubt about what had happened. Jesus was in a tomb on Saturday. The Jews were finishing the last celebration of the Passover. The Jews celebrated deliverance; Jerusalem was abuzz as the last day of the Passover came and went. No Jesus present. The religious leaders celebrated deliverance from the pressure and stress. Saturday is a day of celebration for those who realize there is a third day.

Saturday is about realizing that we have nothing to offer. Saturday is recognizing that only God can work. Saturday is to bring our uncertainty to our God and wait for the day of deliverance.

Living in the Saturday world is not easy but it carries the promise that deliverance is coming. In the silence we know that there is a third day, and while we want to see the third day in our lifetime we are certain that it exists.

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