The Seventh Day

Last week we looked at the first chapter in the book of Genesis and poured over the complexities of the creation story. And there are a lot of complexities... when did creation happen, why is the story ordered into seven days, should we interpret this chapter as historical, poetic, or scientific?

And because of the nature of Genesis 1, Pastor Brad and I chose to respond to a few questions that were sent to us during the teaching time and we received a lot of really good questions. In fact, if you want to view the questions that came to us and some of the responses, you can locate this page on our church website. We’ve called the page “The Fifth Quarter” and it’s in our resource section.

Now I thought about enabling our Twitter feed again this Sunday, but mostly because I’m interested in how the Seahawks are faring against the Chicago Bears and I thought this might be a helpful way to receive updates. Last Sunday, I received a text during the sermon asking if God cared about the Seahawks. My reply was, “Of course He does. How else can we explain their victory over the Saints!” But I did come to the conclusion many years ago that my teams don’t seem to play any differently if I’m wearing their colors or watching the game live, so I’ll just have to trust that statistics don’t mean anything and they’ll end up winning another game that they aren’t supposed to.

One of the topics that we mentioned briefly last week is that Genesis provides us with 2 creation stories and the two are very different from each other... both in the writing style, and also in the creation order. And in most instances, the Bible is organized around helpful chapters that give structured breaks around natural transitions. But this isn’t the case with Genesis 1 and 2. Even though these are two different accounts of creation, the first story bleeds into Genesis 2. And the part that slides into Genesis 2 is perhaps the greatest part of the first story. It’s the account of creation day 7.

The seventh day of creation completes the 7 day creation story and it’s actually the very pinnacle of the entire creation week. It’s a strange passage really... there’s a ton of repetition. It’s like the narrator had one sentence of information to communicate, but he needed to fulfill a word count, so he says basically the same thing in 2 or 3 different ways.

So before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s read the opening verses of chapter 2 where we are introduced to the seventh day of creation:

TEXT Slide [Genesis 2:1-3]

Four years ago, I completed a lengthy paper on the topic of the Sabbath. I read lots of books, I studied all of the Biblical passages that referenced the Sabbath, and I experimented with different Sabbath-honouring strategies.

Generally speaking, when a person commits a large amount of time to research and implementation, they reach expert-level status.

However, this is not my experience. I found that the more I studied Sabbath, I more I became baffled by it. The more I tried to craft a summary statement, the less I understood. The more I tried to implement a Sabbath-keeping pattern, the more frustrated I became. A couple of years ago, I actually had to re-read the conclusion of my paper, because I couldn’t even remember the resolution that I came to. And when I skimmed my paper again this week, I’m not sure how much I agree with what I formerly wrote.

The Sabbath is a tricky subject, but I partly think that this is what God had in mind when He blessed the seventh day.

So while I wish that I could in fact present you with 3 points and a poem as Pastor Brad promised you last week, all I have to offer you is more questions, a few thoughts and hopefully some inspiration to discover how well-ordered rest can feed your soul. Once again, some of you may find this frustrating, but I usually find that teaching principles in Genesis are difficult to pin down. And this is probably why the book of Genesis remains my favourite book in the Bible. It reminds me that our faith is not about obtaining more knowledge or finding a specific answer, but offering our questions to God and allowing Him to amaze us with His vastness.

Those of you who listened to this passage carefully will notice that the word Sabbath was never used. Yet I quickly transitioned into this topic after the text was read. The institution of the Sabbath, a time that was devoted to the ceasing of work by the Israelites, is closely connected to the story of God’s rest on the seventh day. There are many theories about when the practice of Sabbath-keeping began... whether Adam, Eve, and future generations observed this up until it’s biblical introduction in Exodus when it was included in the Ten Commandments.

This is a question for another day... but the point needs to be made that while no mention of the Sabbath is given in Genesis 2, God’s rest on the seventh day is the only explanation that is given in Exodus for why Israel is commanded to honour the seventh day. How we understand Genesis 2 is extremely important.

But it’s extremely frustrating too because like some many stories in Genesis, the seventh day provides us with lots of questions. Here are just a few that came to me this week:

(please advance one-by-one as I address each question)

= Why was the seventh day necessary? If creation was finished, why not stop at day 6, or if 7 was needed for significance (7 day weeks, numerology), why not space out the rest of creation to fit 7 days?

= How does God’s rest “finish” his work? Most employers that I know don’t pay for hours after a job is done. What does it mean for God to finish his work on the seventh day?

= Why is the seventh day holy and how does God’s rest make it holy?

And a fourth question... maybe the most important one:

= Who cares about the seventh day?

What difference does the Sabbath make? It’s Old Testament stuff, it’s the only one of the Ten Commandments that isn’t repeated in the New Testament, and there are lots of story in the gospels where the Pharisees are angry at Jesus for breaking the Sabbath laws. So why is it relevant to us?

These are good questions... and it’s a great way to begin our examination of this story.

Even though God rested on the seventh day, the story tells us that creation was not completed in six days, but on the seventh day. Creation was not yet fully functional. Creation required another step and the step was God ceasing his work.

“Ceasing” is the best way to understand the word that’s been translated “rest.” It means to cease. In other contexts, it used to describe food ceasing and conversation amongst people ceasing. So the impression that we get from these verses is that God stopped his work. His work ceased.

And the fascinating part of his work stoppage is that this leads to a blessing. We learn that because God ceased his work, the seventh day is blessed and made holy. How interesting that the first thing blessed in creation is not an object or a being... not a mountain or a sea creature or a human... but a day.

The sacredness of the seventh day shows us the incredible importance of time. Time was made holy.

I’m indebted to Abraham Heschel and his great understanding of this concept. In his book called The Sabbath, he says, “The sanctity of time came first, the sanctity of man came second, and the sanctity of space last. The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space” (10).

But it’s not just the holiness of time that’s important. We still have the lingering question of God’s rest. Does the author point out God’s rest to tell us that he was tired? Or maybe that he wanted rest?

When I think of rest, I think of relaxation. I think of sweat pants and the couch. I think of a good book or a good game on TV. I think of a full stomach and no dishes to wash. I think of silent neighbours and a sleeping baby. I think of a deep breath in and a slow exhale. And when I’m truly resting, I don’t think about the clock.

But this is what I associate with rest. The question is whether this is what God was doing.

I want to credit John Walton for his knowledge and research into the ancient world and for his explanation of what rest would have meant to the first hearers of this story. Rest meant something different than what I think... or at least, divine rest did. Rest was the end result of when a crisis had been settled or when stability had been achieved. It’s what happened when things had settled down and normal routines were about to begin again.

[Advance slide w/ Walton quote]

The best modern example that I can think of is when weekend guests have left your home. After your place has been vacuumed, bed sheets laundered, dishes cleaned, furniture rearranged... your home and your life return to normal. Stability has returned... order has been restored.

But what was the crisis that was settled? The crisis was that the earth was unproductive. You might be familiar with the phrase “formless and void” but a better description of the earth from Genesis 1:2 is non-functional and without purpose.

The implication of God’s divine rest is that he ordered an un-ordered world. He brought function, he brought purpose, he brought stability and order. And this was made complete by his rest on the seventh day.

But this still doesn’t help us understand why it was necessary for the author to include God’s rest in the story? Why is a specific day set aside for his rest?

Based on the rhythm of the story, we see that each day is significant and each part of creation has a function and purpose. And when we reach the seventh day, this pattern is no different. The cosmos has a designed function for God and there can be no doubt that it has something to do with his rest.

And what’s difficult for us to see in this text would in fact have been obvious to the first hearers of this story. Divine rest was associated with a specific place... and that place was a temple. The purpose of a temple was to house the divine spirit... it was the dwelling place of the divine.

This was a concept that was second-nature to ancient peoples... gods needed space to rule, a spot to function, a place to actualize their order.

But there is no temple in the creation story, and this is where the point of the seventh day finally appears. There is no mention of a temple, because this is not the account of the temple, but the account of the heavens and the earth. This is the creation story of the entire cosmos and it concludes with the climax that God sanctifies the final day of creation because the whole of creation is suitable to house his presence.

The entire cosmos is God’s temple... his rule extends to every part of the universe, his domain extends from sea to sea, he governs from the highest mountain to the lowest valley. His rest represents his control of the entire cosmos.

Listen to how God describe his presence in relation to the cosmos in Isaiah 66:

“Heaven is my throne,
   and the earth is my footstool.
Where is the house you will build for me?
   Where will my resting place be?
² Has not my hand made all these things,
   and so they came into being?”
            declares the LORD.

This is why the seventh day is made holy. It was a holy moment. It was the time that a satisfied God took off his working gloves that he used to create and eased into his control room of the cosmos... his temple, his dwelling place, his place of rest.

And if this is in fact how ancient Israel understood the seventh day of creation, then the implications for us are several.

- We stand on holy ground

                = Every part of our world is holy, for the cosmos is the resting place of God.

                = Every space is sacred space... for it houses the presence of the living God.

As King David once sang:

⁷ Where can I go from your Spirit?
   Where can I flee from your presence?
⁸ If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
   if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
⁹ If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
   if I settle on the far side of the sea,
¹⁰ even there your hand will guide me,
   your right hand will hold me fast.

- Time is sacred

                = God exists in every moment... we are not alone in any moment

Perhaps it’s best to say it the way that the prophet Isaiah saw it and the way we will all see it one day. It was true in the beginning, it continues to be true, and it will always be true:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD God Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

The seventh day reminds us of this unmistakable truth: God is in control. God’s presence knows no bounds... neither time nor space.

This is the point of seventh-day and this is the purpose that the Sabbath reminds us of:

The POINT of the Sabbath: to affirm God’s control of the cosmos.

Finding ways to honour the Sabbath can be puzzling because the Old Testament Sabbath command is based on two imperatives: remember the Sabbath and don’t do any work. Beyond this, we are told very little about what we are to do.

These can be frustrating parameters, especially if you have a personality like mine. But this is part of the beauty of the Sabbath - we can honour it in almost any way imaginable. It’s up to us to imagine how we can acknowledge that God is on his throne.

Whenever we affirm God’s control of the cosmos, we honour God’s divine Sabbath and his continued work in our world.

We can honour the Sabbath by walking through the woods... letting our feet touch holy ground and letting our eyes see the beauty of his dwelling place.

... by letting our thoughts dwell on his divine attributes and adoring him with our praise.

... by savouring good food that he created for us to enjoy.

... by celebrating God’s rule with the company of family and friends.

Because the Sabbath isn’t about rule-keeping, it’s about affirming God’s control of the cosmos.

I think this is what Jesus meant when he rebuked his legalistic critics by saying:
“Man was not made for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for man” (Mark 2:27).

And the Sabbath WAS made for man. It was made for us to remember our Creator. It was made

And when we come to the realization that God is in control, the sacredness of the Sabbath begins to have an impact on us. In a strange way, God’s rest begins to provide us with rest.

- Rest from the anxiety of thinking that we have to be in control.

- Rest from the weariness that comes from trying to control.

The Sabbath is a sacred time when we remember the sacred space that God rules.

As you think about today’s message, I encourage you to let your mind explore ways that you can honour the Sabbath. Choose something that excites you. Choose something that will help you remember that our God is in control of the cosmos.

As you spend time doing this now, you’ll notice a video playing on the side screen. It’s a song written by Brian Doerksen called “Enter the Rest of God.”

___________________________________

In his book The Rest of God, Mark Buchanan tells wonderfully story about what it means to affirm God’s control of the cosmos.

Several centuries ago, Philipp Melanchthon turned to Martin Luther and announced, “Today, you and I shall discuss the governance of the universe.” Luther looked at Melanchthon and said, “No. Today, you and I shall go fishing and leave the governance of the universe to God.”

As you go from this place today, may you see each and every place and each and every moment as sacred. And as you honour God’s reign over the cosmos, may you truly experience the rest of God.