Mark 2:27 And he said unto them, ‘The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath’

The Sabbath was ‘made’ for man and it is the common Greek for ‘to make, do’. The first thing to realise is that this verb is being quoted from Genesis 1, but we might well ask how can the Sabbath be ‘made’. How can Jesus read the making of the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1 and then apply the concept of ‘making’ to the Sabbath?

The puzzle gets worse. The Sabbath is a seventh day. It would seem therefore that you cannot make a seventh day without making six previous days. Moreover, the Sabbath was made ‘for man’; it wasn’t simply made. This last point means that the seventh day in Genesis 1 is a normal day because it’s a day that was made for man. It’s not a day that God gave himself, a day measured by a thousand years or according to God’s timescales. Rather, from the outset it was made ‘for man’. The timescale of the day therefore is that which men have enjoyed (or ought to enjoy).

This implies, in turn, that the six days prior to the seventh day were normal days. The language for the six is the same as that for the seventh except that an evening and a morning are absent for the seventh. The difference between the six and the seventh is all about work and rest. This means that the evening and the morning demarcations for the six are the demarcations of the day that were given over to work. (An evening and morning, in this order, do not top and tail the extent of a day, and so the argument that the evening and morning shows that we are dealing with normal days, does not work. The evening and morning demarcation shows that we have normal working days.)

It follows from the foregoing that the six days were made for man at the same time that the seventh day was made for man. But the making of them is by example – a pattern of doing things on the part of God each day ‘makes’ a working day and his rest then ‘makes’ a Sabbath. (God is not making days; he is making working days and a day of rest.) So, the answer to our puzzle is simple: God can make things by example by stepping through a behaviour of work and rest – but the example he steps through is scaled for us.