Rest from the Lord

On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes mistakenly fired missiles at a civilian flight, Iran Air Flight 655.  Not only was the attack unprovoked, but the jet airliner was no match for radar-guided missiles.  The flight fell out of the sky into the Indian Ocean; all 290 people aboard had been killed.  Officially, the crew who had authorized the missile launch said that the flight appeared on the radar to be descending like an F-14 Tomcat to attack the ship and they fired preemptively but mistakenly.

Following the tragic disaster, reports from the Vincennes began to surface that the operators of the Vincennes' high-tech Command Center had been stressed and fatigued, making the radar-reading mistake seem to be the result of a lack of sufficient rest.  Strangely, the event took place in the middle of the night.  Needless to say, the fatigue and lack of rest for the crew played a substantial factor in a highly-trained radar-reading naval crew misreading a relatively routine (daily in fact) commercial flight for an F-14.

Rest is an interesting endeavor in a culture such as ours.  For starters, most people think of rest either as recreation and hobby, or as a hindrance to work.  As a result of this misconception, rest is often polarizing, finding those whose seeking breeds sloth and others whose rest sounds considerably more like work.  Because of this, a biblical understanding of rest may be useful.

It is interesting that rest, in its most divine sense, is decreed in the very beginning of the Bible.  God, having created all of existence in a matter of days, looks back at the goodness of His creation and rests in response to the utter and complete perfection of His work (Gen. 2:1-3).  God, the omnipotent Creator of the whole of the universe, upon finishing His work, rested.  It would be incorrect to say that God was fatigued or weary, but rather, He was setting an example for us to follow, that in the completion of work we should rest for our efforts.  Therefore, as God rested from His work so too shall we.

Additionally, rest is something bestowed by the Lord (Psa. 91:1; 127:2).  Rest is one of the gifts that God presents to those who seek Him.  This flies in the face of the understanding that rest is merely what occurs between working.  Instead, rest is a presence, a state of being in Him.  Because rest requires the presence of God, obviously then, in order for us to truly be at rest we must be held in Him.  This is part of the promise: we have a promised eternal rest that is made perfect and secure in the work of Christ Jesus  (Heb. 4:9-10).

Rest is a necessary part of life.  Much like the crew of the Vincennes, if we do not rest but push our person to exhaustion, the mental, physical, and spiritual fatigue will cause poor decisions and mistakes.  Instead, we should seek the rest that comes down from above, knowing that it is only in Him that we truly receive the rest that matters.  Jesus describes in plain details that the rest from the Lord is the pursuit of Him (Matt. 11:38).  Let us then pursue the rest that comes from the Lord!