"If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the LORD honorable, and shall honor Him, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, then you shall delight yourself in the LORD; and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth, and feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father. The mouth of the LORD has spoken." (Isaiah 58:13-14)
Israel's Holidays in Need of Reformation
The whole of Isaiah 58 is a summons to repent of hypocritical forms of worship, and especially the kinds of hypocritical worship that occur during holidays. The people of God have "fasted" (v. 3a) on their appointed days of fasting, and they have claimed to have "take[n] pleasure in approaching God" (v. 2) through their holiday worship. But their fasting has been hypocritical, as well as their supposed "pleasure" in God:
"In fact, in the day of your fast you find pleasure, and exploit all your laborers. Indeed you fast for strife and debate, and to strike with the fist of wickedness." (vv. 3b-4a)
That is, Israel's "holiday worship," her fasting and her claim to have taken pleasure in God, is a farce. It is, in actuality, self-serving wickedness. Rather than taking pleasure in God, Israel has used the ritual of worship to pursue her own pleasures, and has oppressed the poor in the process. But the Lord will not accept this kind of holiday fasting and worship:
"Is this not the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; when you see the naked, that you cover him, and not hide yourself from your own flesh?" (vv. 6-7)
As with fasting, so it is with Sabbath-keeping. The people of Israel will never know the true blessing of God without first repenting of their hypocritical forms of worship during the weekly Sabbath holy day. Just as Israel has fasted for the sake of her own, selfish pleasures, so too does she celebrate Sabbaths for her own pleasures:
"If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the LORD honorable, and shall honor Him, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, then you shall delight in the LORD; and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth..." (vv. 13-14a)
Israel has turned Sabbath holy days into selfish, pleasure-seeking holidays. Instead of using this sacred day of rest for worship, she is filling it with her "own ways" and her "own words" (v. 13). She has turned the Sabbath into a day of personal frills rather than making it a day of humble, reverent, and restful delight in God.
Thanksgiving Day in Need of Christian Reformation
Christians are no longer required to keep the seventh day holy in the same manner as the Jews did in the time of Isaiah. Rather, Christians are to celebrate the "rest for the people of God" found in the Gospel of Christ Jesus (Hebrews 4:9). In that Gospel, we have "ceased from [our] works" (v. 10; that is, we are saved by faith in Christ Jesus, not by works, and so we can rest, by faith, in the finished work of our Lord Jesus--in His death, burial, resurrection, and ascension), and thus find rest in God, alone.
However, Christians still must rest. We must keep the Sabbath rest of the Gospel. We keep it every day when we ask, in prayer, for God's grace to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. We also keep the Sabbath rest of the Gospel when we gather together every Lord's Day to worship the Risen Christ. And, yes, there is a very true sense in which Christian holidays (and Thanksgiving originally was, historically has been, and ought to remain, today, a distinctly Christian holiday) are a form of Sabbath rest in the Lord Jesus.
So what should we do during this Sabbath rest called Thanksgiving Day? Should we continue to fill it with our own pleasures? Is it honoring to God to spend the Thanksgiving holiday in over-indulgences of food and entertainment? Should "I ate too much" be a common saying in a Christian household on Thanksgiving Day? And is not our gluttony of greed, practiced in shopping centers around the nation on the day after Thanksgiving, far too close to the way in which Israel celebrated her holidays (i.e. with much materialistic appetite), to the neglect of the weak and the poor in her midst? How can it be a holy occasion, if we fill it with godless sporting telecasts and seductive movies instead of God's holy Word?
We need guidance. Fathers need to be taught how to lead their families back into a more worshipful approach to Thanksgiving Day. And it all begins with learning to delight in God, Himself, rather than in our own selfish pleasures.
Firstly, then, we must learn to delight in God, Himself, on Thanksgiving Day:
"If you...call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the LORD honorable, and shall honor Him...then you shall delight yourself in the LORD..." (Isaiah 58:13a, 14a)
Secondly, reforming Thanksgiving Day back towards Christian piety means learning to exalt God's Word on Thanksgiving Day above our own, self-serving words:
"...not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words...The mouth of the LORD has spoken." (vv. 13b, 14c)
We are, then, to delight in God and in His Word, rather than finding pleasure in our own ways and in our own words. Therefore, the spiritual danger facing the celebration of Thanksgiving Day in America boils down to two enormous questions. First, do we delight, primarily, in God, Himself (in who He is), on Thanksgiving Day, or in other things? Second, do we delight, primarily, in God's Word on Thanksgiving Day, or in the words of secular man?
The way in which Christian homes answer these two questions on Thanksgiving Day will have an impact on many generations to come. The "liturgy" of the Christian home during Thanksgiving (be it primarily wine, frivolity, and entertainment, or be it primarily Bible, fellowship, and worship of the living God) will shape the children of the Christian home in profound ways. They will follow what we, their parents, currently practice.
Thus Isaiah 58:1-14 calls us to reshape our Thanksgiving holidays. It summons fathers to gather their families around the Bible on Thanksgiving Day. It calls fathers and mothers to teach their children to delight in God, rather than in the world, on Thanksgiving Day. This means at least five specific things:
1. Worship ought to dominate the activity of the Christian home on Thanksgiving Day. This special day ought to start with hymns and songs of praise to God. The day ought to end with the same. There should be much Christian singing on Thanksgiving Day.
2. God's Word ought to be cited with such frequency as to exclude sinful (including secular and frivolous) forms of human discourse on Thanksgiving Day. Our conversations ought to be saturated with Scripture rather than filled with the language of gossip or coveting. The Bible ought to be raised and read at the Thanksgiving dinner table. The television ought to be given its own day of rest (if not relieved of its duties permanently!), so that the Word of God (why not gather the family around a good, Bible-rich Christian book, such as John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress or a children's level biography of George Mueller?) may be the chief delight of the day.
3. Our expressions of gratitude on Thanksgiving Day ought to be God-centered rather than human-centered. Instead of expressions such as, "I'm thankful [to whom?] for cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels," making their way around the room, we ought to say things such as, "My thanksgiving is to Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, for who He is, for His holiness, for His patience with wicked men, and for the great acts of mercy that He has performed in my life this past year. For example..."
4. Given the emphasis in Isaiah 58:1-14 on true "fasting" as the defense of the weak, and the sharing of food with the hungry, we ought to practice Christian forms of justice on Thanksgiving Day. Even though it is a day of feasting, rather than fasting, we still follow the holiday mandate of Isaiah 58:1-14 whenever we sacrificially give to the vulnerable ones of society on Thanksgiving Day. Thus Christian families ought to invite widows and singles into their homes for the holiday. They must remember to pray for their persecuted brethren around the world, and to give thanks to God for them on Thanksgiving Day. And Christians ought to give money, sacrificially, to families of Christian martyrs, to hungry children in impoverished nations, and to programs that promote the adoption, by Christians, of unwanted babies (who, for example, have Downs Syndrome). We must remember the poor and the weak (and, especially, the unborn) on Thanksgiving Day.
5. Thanksgiving Day, when practiced according to Isaiah 58:1-14, ought to be a delightful day. It ought to be a day of feasting, of merrymaking, and of laughter. So long as our primary delights are in God and in His Word on Thanksgiving, the feast ought to be bountiful and joyful. We must remember God's physical provisions for us (during the creation week, God indeed created physical things and pronounced them "good"), and give great thanks to Him for all of the good gifts that He has granted to us throughout the year. We must, as well, savor our time with family members and friends, counting each person we see as precious--someone created in the image of God. But the overarching joy of Thanksgiving must remain, each and every year, the glory of God. He is our delight. We delight ourselves in Him (Psalm 37:4). That is, during the Thanksgiving feast we should employ the delightful taste of homemade apple pie with the duty of directing our souls to the infinitely greater delight and enjoyment of knowing God, in all of His majestic glory.
Isaiah, the prophet, speaks to the spiritual danger facing the American holiday of Thanksgiving. He summons us to make it a holy-day. He calls us to delight in God instead of the trappings of American materialism, and to savor the Word of God instead of the boastful words of man. In sum, Isaiah invites us back to the heart of any Christian holiday, which is the practice of trembling, joyfully, with our families in the delightful worship of the holy God of Scripture.
Soli Deo Gloria. Glory to God, alone.
-TLF
Copyright Timothy L. Fan 2012. All Rights Reserved.
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