Editorial July 5, 1993 Issue

Some spiritual insights from the Fourth Commandment

Barbara M. Vining

It was a hot summer day. My husband and a young friend had been working hard on a project outdoors. So I stopped what I was doing long enough to take them something cold to drink. As I handed him his beverage, the young man said: "You sure don't look like you've been waxing the floor! You look refreshed and full of energy!" And that is exactly how I felt, even though I had been on my hands and knees for several hours cleaning and applying paste wax to the floor of a large room in our un-air-conditioned house. But all the while, I had been happily entertaining thoughts of the spiritual completeness of God and His creation. That holy, mental activity kept me fresh and energetic. Thoughts of spiritual wholeness give both rest and creative activity to consciousness.

Spiritually viewed, the Fourth Commandment has significance beyond the literal. It can be seen as instructing us to celebrate—to keep active in our thoughts and lives—the completeness of God and His spiritual creation, man and the universe. It reads: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it" (Ex. 20:8–11).

Because the divine Mind, God, has forever included within Himself every one of the spiritual ideas that make up His creation, the six days of creation can be seen as representing something other than literal time periods within which God supposedly engaged in an exhaustive endeavor to produce something out of nothing, and after which He would need a recuperation period on the seventh day. God's "day" is His progressive unfolding of spiritual ideas in fresh and varied ways that reflect His good and pure nature. The six days of creation can signify this continuous and full revelation by Mind of its own ideas.

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