Who doesn’t enjoy going on a holiday? Holidays are great! When you return, people ask, “Did you have a good holiday?” The answer given is often determined by the weather that was experienced. It was a great holiday if it was sunny and a bad one if rainy and wet.

But, what really constitutes a good holiday? In our day and age, we almost take holidays for granted. We have them all through the year and especially in the summer many people can have an extended period of relief from their daily work. It was not always this way. And yet holidays are nothing new. God’s people, living under the Mosaic law in Old Testament times, did enjoy many days off. It may be good to pause for a moment and reflect on this.

The Lord was Generous with Holidays⤒🔗

God was and is no slave driver. He came to set his people free from bondage! Out of Egypt He called them, away from the backbreaking labour of making bricks for a despotic Pharaoh who did not even supply the straw. En route to the Sinai He reminded them of the blessing of the Sabbath, by making it impossible for them to go out to get manna on that day, for there was none. They had been instructed to get twice as much the day before and rest on the seventh day (Exodus 16:23-30). And at the Sinai the Lord renewed his covenant with his people and, among other things, gave his people holidays to celebrate!

When one stops to think about it, the number of holidays Israel had was truly astounding. Besides the weekly day of rest, there was a monthly day of rest called the New Moon (Numbers 10:10; 2 Kings 4:23; Amos 8:5) and analogous to the Sabbath, every seventh year constituted a Sabbatical year when the land and the vineyards were not to be worked for an entire year (Exodus 23:11; Leviticus 25:1-7). Furthermore, every fiftieth year, the year of Jubilee, was to be celebrated which like the Sabbath year meant, among other things, that Israel was released from working the land (Leviticus 25:8-22). Annually three pilgrimage feasts had to be observed when all the males were expected to go up to the place which the Lord would choose for the Passover (which was immediately followed with the seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread), the Feast of Pentecost, and the seven day Feast of Tabernacles (Deuteronomy 16). Furthermore, there were the annual Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16) and the Feast of Trumpets (Leviticus 23:23-25).

It is significant that all these feasts, as God ordained them, involved rest and a break from the routine struggle of work in a fallen world. Also, in all these feasts God was telling or reminding his people in one form or another of his salvation and redemption. For example, the Passover spoke of God’s delivering his people from the bondage of Egypt, but it also reminded the people of that great deliverance from sin that would come through the perfect sacrifice of the Lamb of God. That salvation and redemption included the promised rest for his people. For the rest that was promised in the land of Canaan was to be in anticipation of that glorious perfect rest to come (cf. Hebrews 3:7-4:11).

It is, therefore, also significant that the Lord remembered the disadvantaged in Israel when He legislated feasts for his people. They too had to share in the joy of their Lord and experience something of a foretaste of that beautiful rest that was waiting for the people of God. In all the struggle of the old creation, his people could know that debts would be erased every fiftieth year and families could return to the inheritance of their fathers (Leviticus 25). And if they had become enslaved because of unpaid bills, they would be set free in the seventh year (Exodus 21:2) or in the Jubilee (Leviticus 25). The poor could celebrate and share in the bounty of God’s blessing of food and drink during the feasts (e.g., Deuteronomy 16:11, 14).

One could summarize by saying that God gave his people many days of rest and celebration in which he reminded them of the gravity of their sin, but also of the redemption that was theirs. The respite they could enjoy pointed to the future rest!

Holidays are Holy Days←⤒🔗

It is clear that Israel’s holidays were holy days, days dedicated to the Lord and his service. Historically this is also how we got the term “holidays.” “Holidays” means holy days. In medieval Christianity, no distinction was possible between a day of rest from work and a day of celebrating one sort of feast or another. We do not want to go back to the “holy days” of that era in which one saint after another received a special day. However, because we live in a secular society, we do well to honour the origin of the term “holiday” in the sense that it literally means a holy day. While society as a whole does not want God at the centre of their life, we still do, do we not? And are our vacations then, like the rest of life, not to be holy to God with all the consequences this brings with it? Indeed, we do well to remember some of the riches of the Old Testament for this subject.

What is the Sense of a Holiday?←⤒🔗

Today people often live for the weekend. In our neopagan society this means the Saturday and the Sunday (although in the Christian calendar Sunday is the first day of the week and Christians should not include it in the “weekend”). When the warmer weather comes, many live for the long weekend, which includes the Monday and they start counting down the days to their holidays of a week or more.

As Christians we may also look forward to periods of rest from our daily labour, but we will do so differently. What constitutes a good holiday? Merely being physically or mentally refreshed? That is an important element, but it is only the beginning of the benefits that can be received! The Lord never gave his people holidays and feasts only for physical relief. He always included a reminder of the larger picture; namely, that He as covenant God was busy working salvation for his people and this salvation included removing the curse from work and from life generally so that the real rest, the full rest would come. It can also mean (where this is possible) to help those with special needs, as was done in Israel within this context. Think of the blessings realized in participating, for instance, in a camp for the handicapped or by going abroad to help those who have less.

Holidays are, therefore, an excellent time to ponder and reflect on the great things God is doing for his people and to take more time than may be available otherwise to share and discuss the great things of God at leisure in the family circle. Holidays should be a time not only of physical or mental refreshment but also of spiritual rejuvenation and renewal. The key holiday we may enjoy is of course the Sunday, the Lord’s Day. We may start each week with a celebration of the great things God has done in Jesus Christ and the new creation He is raising up. Let us never underestimate the great blessing of the Lord’s Day, the day of the resurrection! But when the Lord in his goodness also gives us more and more days off from our daily work, let us not abuse this gift by simply putting ourselves in the centre of it, but treat them as holy days which are holidays to be used with the Lord in mind, for is it not for Him that we live? Let us thank our God and give Him the glory also in the manner in which we holiday by using the many opportunities to realize more and more our richness in the God of life who is taking us to his eternal rest.

Will you have or have you had a good holiday? The best holiday that one could have is the one in which you come back refreshed and reinvigorated, not only physically and mentally, but also spiritually in the Lord, ready to do one’s task in a fallen world. For those refreshed spiritually will have had another foretaste of that joyous rest to come, the rest that still remains for God’s people (Hebrews 4:9), the rest in a perfect world where there will be no more struggle against sin or the brokenness of a fallen world, but where all will be whole and beautiful before the sight of God and his people.