For some forty-five years, Israel enjoyed relative peace. God showed them his undeserved mercy. For God’s kindness is meant to lead one to repentance. But what did Israel do with this gift from the Lord? How did God’s people respond in a time of peace? There was opportunity to reflect on their past, take stock of their sins, and to repent and resolve to live for the Lord. Do we see this happening? We do not see any mention of idolatry here, which is good. But there is also no mention of removal of the temples of Baal. There is no record of repentance. There is no inkling at all of gratitude for the Lord’s abundant mercy in saving Israel. There is no indication that the leaders reminded God’s people of what they are called to be and to do. There is nothing. God’s name is not even mentioned. It is hard for us to be confident that this intermission in the narrative was positively used by Israel, other than to rest from bloodshed. In fact, right after the burial of Jair, the whole cycle starts over again in Judges 10:6 with Israel again doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord, serving the Baals of the nations, forsaking the Lord. That casts a shadow over Israel’s time under Tola and Jair.

But God in his mercy gave this time. And what he gave Israel, he also gives to us. In his mercy he brings us times of relative peace and calm in our lives. He gives intermissions. And here we think not so much about things like vacations, or times when your stress is relaxed and your life seems manageable again. For Judges 10:1–5 is concerned with the breaking of the cycle of sin and disobedience. God works to break that cycle for us, to give us times of relief so that we would repent of our sin, and renew our hope. God gives you that opportunity every week again. God gives us the Lord’s Day as a day of rest. In corporate worship, he gives us an opportunity to reflect on the past week, to see and confess the destructive patterns of sin in our lives, to repent of our sins, and to receive from God the word of grace that forgives, and renews your soul to grow in holiness in Christ. The Lord’s Day is a gift. It’s a day where God gets us to hit the pause button. Why? Well there are a lot of reasons. But so far as the present text is concerned, Sunday rest is given by God to break, halt our cycle of sin. God gives us relief to rest from our sin.¹

This is also confessed in the Heidelberg Catechism. Lord’s Day 38: What does God require in the fourth commandment? First, that the ministry of the gospel and the schools be maintained and that, especially on the day of rest, I diligently attend the church of God to hear God’s Word, to use the sacraments, to call publicly upon the Lord, and to give Christian offerings for the poor. Second, that all the days of my life I rest from my evil works, let the Lord work in me through his Holy Spirit, and so begin in this life the eternal Sabbath. So in the fourth commandment, God is saying to you that the rest that you enjoy on the Lord’s Day is the rest you are to enjoy every day: rest from your evil works. God regularly gifts us with a time for relief, to rest from sin, to worship, and to thereby renew our hope.

What are you doing with these regular intermissions, these weekly times of relief that God gives you? Are you able to say that you use these times to rest from sin and renew your zeal for serving the Lord? Worship, we need to understand, is covenant renewal. This is the day, every week again, when God renews his covenant with his people. This needs to happen every week. Why? Because we break the covenant through the week. We sin, and holy God cannot have fellowship with a defiled congregation. Corporate worship is where we as a royal nation are confronted with our sin and must confess it. Following that, God comes to us in his Word, giving his promises to us, and calling us to respond: with repentance and faith in Christ. Yes, to break the cycle of sin, to rest from our evil works, and to renew our hope in the Christ of the Scriptures.

This is how close the message of our text comes to our hearts. God regularly blesses us with a time for relief to rest from sin, to worship, and to thereby renew our hope. But if we are honest, sin is not that far from us even when the Lord gives us a time of rest and refreshment. By God’s grace we do grow in faith, but we don’t use God’s gift of rest to its potential. How much do we get to hear God speak to us, and yet how far do we still have to go until full maturity in Christ? We are sorely reluctant to break with our sins, even when they bother us. And we greatly struggle to place our full hope in Christ, because we find it hard to rest from our evil works. We want to serve God and his kingdom, but perhaps like Jair we indulge ourselves, looking for our security in this life.