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This article originally appeared in a Christianity Today Series book, The Midas Trap, published in 1990.

Wealth is stored-up work. In its various forms-savings accounts, insurance policies, bonds, cash, and commodities-it is an economic battery, charged up by yesterday's labor, and able to be converted to provide both tomorrow's needs and its delights.

By storing up the results of our labor, we are able to bridge the gulf of time: we set aside something "for a rainy day," we insure against catastrophic medical costs, we prepare for retirement or save for a college education.

Money gives us power over the future, or at least the illusion of power. For although money can be used to pay tuition, it cannot buy wisdom; although money can purchase medical insurance, it cannot buy health; although money can stake out a space for us in a sunny community on the Florida coast, it cannot buy us a long and happy life. All our attempts to bridge time and control the future can be foiled in the vulnerable moment when a vagrant blood clot hits the brain or a speeding vehicle hurtles across the expressway median to intersect our own trajectory.

God alone is Lord of time. He has given to us, his human creatures, dominion over space, over earth and sea, to be stewards of the species for their well-being and our own. But only Yahweh is the Lord of time, moving as he will through history, unhindered by the boundaries of sunsets and equinoxes. Our attempts to shackle time, to squeeze from the moments every drop of value, to control the clock by storing up labor, often become a tasting of forbidden fruit, a savoring of the vacant promise that we shall be as gods. And when we store up treasure on earth, God says to us, "Fool! This night your soul is required of you" (Luke 12:20).

A bridge across time

To spare his people that judgment, God gave them the Sabbath, a weekly rift in time across which is laid a bridge of grace. It was to be a time in which no work was done, and thus in which no future value was to be milked from it. All other time is a passage away from the past and a groping toward the future; but the Sabbath is pure present. The Sabbath is pure present moment because it is filled with the Shekinah, the Presence of God. As Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, "[W]hen the Sabbath is entering the world, man is touched by a moment of actual redemption; as if for a moment the spirit of the Messiah moved over the face of the earth."' And again, he speaks of the Sabbath as a time "when a beautifying surplus of soul visits our mortal bones and lingers on." And as both pure present and pure Presence, the Sabbath deflects us from our hurtling course toward an uncertain future, and it assures us of love and grace in this moment.

The Lord of Time showed this day of Presence with a sign and with sustenance. Here is the tale of the giving of the Sabbath:

The Israelites, freed from oppression, from the exploitation of their labor by their Egyptian masters, had walked for six weeks through the desert toward the wilderness where Moses, their leader, had once tended sheep. They had felt the oppression of thirst, but at Marah and Elim they had drunk the sweet, liberating waters. But now they felt the sting of hunger's lash and murmured their discontent.

The Lord chose the occasion to show them his Presence: "That I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law or not" (Exod. 16:4b). He fed them quail at twilight, and he feasted them at the dawn with bread—bread, fine as hoarfrost and white as coriander, and sweet, sweet as wafers made with honey.

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November (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47