Parts 1 and 2 have traced the Sabbath’s course from Sinai to Christ’s empty tomb. The Sabbath commandment, given to Israel as the sign of the Mosaic Covenant, Part 1 argued, was never detachable as a free-standing law of rest but was bound to Israel’s fidelity, her land, her history, and her redemption in Messiah. Part 2 showed how the Gospels present Jesus as the fulfillment which the Sabbath as a sign always anticipated: Lord of the Sabbath, greater than the Temple, the one who grants True Rest to the weary and heals on Sabbath days as redemptive signs, who, after announcing the completion of his work on the cross, at last rested in the tomb during the Old Covenant’s last Sabbath Day and, having established the New Covenant, rose on the first day to inaugurate the new creation.
Part 3 completes the argument by turning to the sermon of Hebrews, where the Preacher declares, “There remains a Sabbath Rest for the people of God” (Heb. 4:9). At stake is a crucial, often overlooked question of translation and Christology: whether the “he” of Hebrews 4:8, who did not give the exodus generation of Israelites rest and who later spoke of “another day,” is Joshua, son of Nun, as most modern translations assume, or Jesus Christ himself, as the King James Version and the Greek text read. Getting this right, as this last section argues, shows that it is Jesus—not Joshua, and not merely a timeless truth about believers in general—who has himself entered God’s rest and now invites his people to enter it also.
Jesus Christ the True Sabbath Rest, the Sign’s Fulfillment
There Remains a Sabbath Rest for the People of God
In his sermon, the writer to the Hebrews argues, “For if Jesus had given them rest, he would not have spoken later about another day. Consequently, a Sabbath Rest remains for the people of God” (Heb. 4:8–9, author’s translation).1 The claims made in Hebrews 3–4 and David’s Psalm 95, which Hebrews cites, do not contradict the unambiguous claim of Joshua 21:43–45, that “the Lord gave them rest on every side just as he had sworn to their fathers.” To understand the argument of Hebrews 3–4, it is crucial to recognize that Hebrews and David speak of “those who left Egypt led by Moses,” those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness” (Heb. 3:16–17), not of the generation to which the Lord gave the land under Joshua’s leadership. Lamentably, many commentators, including John Owen, wrongly conflate the two generations, the old one that left Egypt and the new one that entered Canaan and received God’s rest, thus confusing the text’s argument.2 By citing Psalm 95, Hebrews argues that the generation that left Egypt and rebelled against the Lord at Kadesh Barnea never entered the Promised Land under Moses to receive God’s Rest (See Num. 13–14). David and Hebrews recall that rebellion and warn against repeating it.
1. The KJV translates the Greek name Ἰησοῦς as “Jesus,” whereas modern versions translate it as “Joshua.” I concur with J. Michael McKay, Jr., who persuasively argues that the KJV is correct. J. Michael McKay, Jr., “Is Joshua a Type of Christ in Hebrews 4.8? An Assessment of the Referent of Ἰησοῦς,” New Testament Studies 68 (2022): 105–18. For my argument, see Ardel B. Caneday, “‘We Must Not Test Christ as Israelites Tested Him and Were Killed by Serpents’: The Pastoral Significance” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, San Antonio, TX, November 14–16, 2023).
2. John Owen mistakenly claims that “if Jesus had given them rest” (Heb. 4:8, emphasis added) refers to “the new generation that entered Canaan” (John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, ed. W. H. Goold, vol. IV [Johnstone & Hunter, 1855], 317). Many commentators mistakenly conflate the two generations of Israelites into one, thus altering the argument in Hebrews 3–4. Beau Landers does the same in Christ Will Give You Rest, NSBT 66 (Inter-Varsity Press, 2026), 288.
Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was provoked with that generation, and said, “They always go astray in their heart; they have not known my ways.” As I swore in my wrath, “They shall not enter my rest” (Heb. 3:7–11).
It is significant that Hebrews links “my rest” from David’s psalm (Ps. 95:11) with God’s rest at the close of creation week by contrasting the unbelieving exodus generation with believers in Christ Jesus, stating,
For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said, “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest’” although his works were finished from the foundation of the world. For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works” (Heb. 4:3–4).
Thus, it becomes clear that Hebrews discerns that the Promised Land, over which David was king, was an earthly shadow of the heavenly rest God entered on the seventh day when he ceased from his creative work, and a foreshadowing of the heavenly rest Jesus entered when he announced from the cross, “It is finished!” Both Adam and the exodus generation forfeited that heavenly rest by rebelling against the Lord. David’s appeal, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,” makes clear that refusing to believe is to rebel, shutting off access to God’s rest. Only those who believe the good news lay hold of the “promise of entering his rest” (Heb. 4:1).
Thus, the Preacher in Hebrews makes his appeal in 4:8–10.
For if Jesus had given them rest, he would not have spoken later about another day. Consequently, a Sabbath Rest remains for the people of God. For the one who entered his rest rested from his works just as God did from his own (Heb. 4:8–10, author’s translation).
A Christological Argument: If Jesus, Not Joshua, Had Given Them Rest
Correctly understanding Hebrews 4:8–10 hangs on two essential decisions, suppressed by modern translations and most commentaries.
First, contrast the modern translations of Hebrews 4:8 with the King James Version.
For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later (ESV).
For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day (KJV).
Without prejudicing readers, the KJV presents a straightforward translation that accurately reflects the Greek text of Hebrews. “Jesus” (Iēsous) is the Greek form of the Hebrew “Joshua,” and “Jesus” is the antecedent of the pronoun “he,” highlighted above.3 Contrast this with how modern translations and many commentaries presume, with little discussion, that Joshua of the Old Testament is the actor of the first clause in Hebrews 4:8.4 Consequently, without any grammatical connection, they insert God as the antecedent actor who “spoke of another day.” Scholars overlook the fact that this passage sustains the Christological acclamation of Hebrews 3:1–7, the preamble to Hebrews 3:7–4:13, which presents Jesus, the Son over God’s house, as worthy of more glory than Moses, a servant in God’s house, and concludes by calling believers to steadfast confidence. Then, the quotation from Psalm 95 makes the point that, because of their unbelief, Moses, God’s faithful servant, did not lead Israel into Canaan, the land of rest. “For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses?” (Heb. 3:16).
3. By translating Ἰησοῦς as “Jesus,” the KJV wisely followed the Geneva and Bishops’ Bibles rather than Tyndale, Coverdale, and Whittingham, which used “Joshua.”
4. When the wilderness generation finally entered the Promised Land, Scripture explicitly states, “Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to give to their fathers. And they took possession of it, and they settled there. And the Lord gave them rest on every side just as he had sworn to their fathers” (Joshua 21:43-44). The Lord used Joshua to lead the generation surviving the wilderness into the land but does not credit him with giving them rest.
Because the entire argument of Hebrews 3–4 begins with this Christological exaltation of Jesus over Moses, when Hebrews 4:8 explicitly mentions Jesus, whom readers already know “is faithful over God’s house as a Son,” to read this as Joshua, the son of Nun, is to interrupt the sustained Christological argument of the whole passage. This claim concerning Jesus, that he transcends time, is reinforced when Hebrews speaks of Moses, who “considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt” (Heb. 11:26). Thus, why not take the text at face value in Hebrews 4:8, that the writer has no difficulty speaking of Jesus as the one who did not give rest to the generation of Israelites who left Egypt? After all, Jude states the same: “Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe” (Jude 5).5 Neither Hebrews nor other passages, including Jude 5, entail a chronological misplacement of Jesus Christ, who transcends history.6 Rather, these alleged anachronisms deliberately reflect the New Testament Christology. By referring to Jesus as the one who led the exodus, the author of Hebrews emphasizes three things: (1) the continuous nature of the story of God’s redemption in Jesus (Iēsous) prophesied and foreshadowed by his visitations to the Israelite ancestors but now revealed in the flesh and speaking to inhabitants of the Last days—“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1–2); (2) the eternality of Jesus (Iēsous), a major theme with which the sermon called Hebrews begins (Heb. 1:1–4); and (3) the covenantal contemporaneity of Jesus (Iēsous) with both God’s Last-Days’ people and our Israelite ancestors, albeit the change of covenants.
5. The overwhelming majority of manuscripts support this reading.
6. See also Paul’s uses in 1 Corinthians 10: “For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ” (verse 4), and “We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents” (verse 9). Some call this “prosopological exegesis,” an ancient method that “interprets texts by assigning ‘faces,’ or characters, to ambiguous or unspecified personal (or personified) entities represented in the text in question” (Madison N. Pierce, Divine Discourse in the Epistle to the Hebrews: The Recontextualization of Spoken Quotations in Scripture, SBL Monograph Series 178 [Cambridge University Press, 2020], 4). My essay shows how and why I reject that.
These two passages in Hebrews and one in Jude present the person known as Jesus, his incarnate name, and by the title Christ as present not only among God’s people of the last days but also among the ancient Israelites. Although these passages are provocative for manuscript readings and their theological import, exegetes and biblical theologians give them less than adequate attention. Could it be that Hebrews and Jude use Jesus, the earthly name of God’s Son, to arrest our attention, prompting us to affirm that Jesus was present among the ancient Israelites as the pre-incarnate, eternal one, actively delivering the Israelites from Egypt, destroying the unbelieving exodus generation, leading the next generation into the promised land, and later speaking through David, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts”?
Hence, if Jesus is the actor of the first clause—“For if Jesus had given them rest”—then Jesus is also the pronoun’s antecedent in the second clause—“he [Jesus] would not have spoken later about another day.” Thus, because of their unbelieving rebellion, Jesus refused the exodus generation access to rest. Likewise, through his earthly patriarch’s psalm, Jesus later spoke of an eschatological day to enter God’s Sabbath Rest.
If one reads Hebrews 4:8–10 without the bias of current translations, Jesus, the explicit subject of verse 8, is also the uncontested subject of verse 10, which is the focus of the second crucial decision. Again, modern translations diverge from the KJV, which reads, “For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his” (emphasis added). Because most modern translations and commentaries take Joshua, not Jesus, as the subject of verse 8, they account for verse 10 by explaining it as a timeless and generalized reference to believers.7 Thus, they miss the verse’s lofty correlation: “For the one who entered his rest also rested from his works just as God rested from his” (Heb. 4:10).
7. In Hebrews 4:10, no syntactical or grammatical warrant justifies taking the aorist singular substantive participle (ὁ είσελφών; the one who entered) followed by an aorist indicative verb preceded by the third-person personal pronoun (αὐτὸς κατέπαυσεν; he entered) as the ESV, NIV, CSB, and as most commentaries do.
Although John Owen mistakenly reads “Jesus” in verse 8 as “Joshua,” he rightly resists applying verse 10 to believers and shows, with substantial reasoning, that the reference is to Jesus Christ entering rest from his works.8 Owen argues that verse 10 makes a direct parallel comparison between God’s “works of the old creation” and the Lord Jesus Christ’s works as “the author of the new creation.” These must be proportional, for as God rested from his works of creation, so God’s Son rested from his works. He “must suffer no more, die no more, but only continue the work of his grace, in the preservation of the new creature, and orderly increase and propagation of it by the Spirit.”9 Thus, the verse is a Christological assertion that today has arrived in these last days because Jesus entered rest from his works, inaugurating the fulfillment of the Sabbath Rest which God entered when he rested from his own works on the Seventh Day.
8. John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 332-336.
9. Owen, Exposition of the Epistle, 333–334.
Conclusion
This article, presented in three segments concerning the Sabbath in the Old and New Testaments, traces a single arc. Israel’s Sabbath was never a free-standing law of rest but the sign of a covenant, bound to Israel’s fidelity, her land, and her history. It was so integrally bound to Israel’s existence that (1) the exodus generation’s refusal to enter the land at Kadesh Barnea prevented them from entering God’s rest, and (2) Israel’s neglect of the land’s sabbatical years for numerous generations resulted in God’s appointed reckoning of seventy years of exile from the land. As much as that covenantal frame forbade Israel’s failure to remember the Sabbath as though it signified nothing beyond itself, it also forbids lifting the Fourth Commandment out of its Mosaic setting and carrying it forward unchanged.
What the Promised Land signified, the New Testament now makes clear, is the believer’s rest in Christ’s finished work of redemption. He is the one greater than Israel’s Sabbath, gentle and lowly, who bears his Father’s authority to grant knowledge of God and, with it, rest for weary souls. He healed on Sabbath days, not incidentally but purposefully, enacting the new creation that the seventh day of Genesis had always anticipated. He rested in the tomb on the Mosaic Law’s own Sabbath, his work finished. He rose on the first day to inaugurate the New Covenant to which every Sabbath—weekly, annual, sabbatical, and jubilean alike—had pointed. It is Jesus, not merely a future rest reserved for believers in the abstract, who, having entered his rest, ceased from his labors just as God ceased from his own at creation, so that a Sabbath Rest remains today for all who hear his voice and do not harden their hearts.
Thus, it is entirely fitting to apply to the weekly Sabbath the Apostle Paul’s reasoning he plainly states concerning the adjoined annual Sabbaths: Unleavened Bread and Passover. Not annually but every day, Christians are to “Keep the Festival of Unleavened Bread” in the new way “with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” because “Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5:6–8). God’s people must obey Jesus, who invites, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). Daily, members of God’s household welcome the Preacher’s reminder to the Hebrews: “There remains a Sabbath Rest for the people of God” (Heb. 4:9). Every day, “strive to enter that rest” (Heb. 4:11). How? By faithfully obeying Jesus, who “entered his rest and rested from his works just as God rested from his works” (Heb. 4:10). Daily, “Remember the Sabbath,” by banishing disobedience but instead believing in Jesus, God’s Son. Lay hold of Christ Jesus, who from heaven cast the earthly Sabbath shadows, who later came to earth in human flesh as God’s Son, whose cry from the cross, “It is finished!” set in motion the last days’ Sabbath, the fulfillment, yes, the eschatological realization of the first seventh-day Sabbath of Genesis 2:1–3.
An Afterword Concerning the Lord’s Day
Observance of the seventh day as a Sabbath, a holy day, has ended for everyone in Christ Jesus. When he fulfilled all that the Sabbath, the sign of the Old Covenant, foreshadowed, he brought it to its realized end. As I have shown, Christ’s expiring breath on the cross, saying, “It is finished!,” announced the fulfilled end of the Old Covenant with all its signs and shadows. Thus, as he was laid in the tomb, Jesus, who entered his rest, rested from his works just as the Creator rested from his own works on the seventh day. The old world was crucified with Christ, and when he rose from the tomb the next morning, he inaugurated the new creation (Gal. 6:14–15). All four Gospels make it clear that the Lord Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week (Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:2; Luke 24:1; John 20:1, 19). Hence, they attach significance to the first day of the week, but not with the force of an apostolic commandment akin to the Mosaic Law’s Fourth Commandment concerning the seventh day.
The New Testament shows that the early church congregated together on the first day of the week for worship on what they called “the Lord’s Day” (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; cf. Rev. 1:10). Never did the first Christians designate the Lord’s Day “the Sabbath,” for Sabbaths ended with the coming of Christ who cast the Sabbath shadow (Col. 2:16–17). The practice of meeting together on the first day of the week has rightly continued through the centuries, even with an admonition not to neglect these congregational gatherings (Heb. 10:25). Since its inception, Christ’s church has celebrated his resurrection weekly by gathering to worship the Lord. Neither Christ nor his apostles require Christians to cease all labor on the Lord’s Day.
This does not mean we are obligated to cease working on a specific day, though the Creator’s pattern of work and cessation of work, in keeping with the morning and evening daily routine plus the day of rest, is instructive for our well-being (Gen. 1:1–2:3). Nor does it mean that the seventh-day Sabbath has been moved to the first day of the week. Nevertheless, because everything Christ accomplished had been prefigured throughout the Old Testament and his Jewish disciples had been reared in the Mosaic Law’s routines and traditions, it is understandable that some, even Peter, found it difficult to relinquish the earthly shadows and trappings of the Old Covenant and embrace the patterns and forms of the New. Thus, it was necessary for the Apostle Paul not only to rebuke his fellow apostle, Peter, concerning food laws and circumcision (Gal. 2:11–14), but also to provide significant instruction concerning how Jewish and Gentile believers should behave toward one another with regard to food, drink, and days (Rom. 14:1–15:6).
As the title of this three-part essay implies, Christians are to keep the Sabbath in the New Covenant way daily by obedient faith in Jesus Christ. For Hebrews admonishes us, “Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience” (Heb. 4:11).
