The Creation Text: Studies In Early Genesis (Part 2 of 0)

Sabbath – Part 3

It seems superfluous to devote a day for God to do nothing but declare the creation complete (Gen 2:1-3).

Day Seven is a day of no production; nothing new comes into existence. A short closure statement to sign off on all the vigorous activity of the creation week would have sufficed. Yet the text describes it as a full day, nearly equal in format to the other creative days. What is the purpose of this? Day Seven reaches back to the Prologue (1:1-2) to inform us that the unformed is now formed, the dark now lighted, and the void furnished and populated.

Day Seven does not begin with “And God said,” as do the six creation days. It begins with “Thus the heavens and earth were finished and all their host.”1,2This is the first of three statements all declaring the work done. The work doesn’t just stop, but it is fully complete, because it has accomplished all of the goals implied in the Prologue.

Verse 2 has two sentences that focus on God’s role. The first records his act of completion, this time with an active verb (it’s passive in the preceding sentence), “God completed on the seventh day the work he made.”3The second reads, “He rested on the seventh day from all the work he made.” For emphasis, the sentence repeats an already repetitious phrase, “work that he had made.” The second itera­tion adds the comprehensive “all,” making quite sure the reader knows that the creation program is indeed complete. The misleading “rested” is translated from the verb form of the familiar shabbat.

The third and last statement, in verse 3, adds God’s blessing and sanctification of the Sabbath. This statement also uses the “work he had made” phrase, but expands it to “all his work God created in making.” Word tally for Day Seven: “work” three times, “make” three times, and “create” once, plus “ceased” and “completed” twice each.

A whole day to do nothing?

It would be nothing unusual for the text to have a completion announcement, such as “the work of creation was completed.” One-liners to this effect occur at the end of Job’s discourses, “The words of Job are completed” (Job 31:40) and Book II of the Psalms, “The prayers of David, son of Jesse, are ended (Psa 72:20).4

The short sentence in verse 1 could do the job. Instead, the closure statement is raised to the same level as the production statements of the first six days, with its threefold structure using two different verbs, “complete” and “cease.”

The five-word (in Hebrew) first sentence of the Sabbath account (2:1), which includes “the heaven and the earth,” would make a fine bookend to the five-word opening sentence of the Prologue (1:1). This closure statement could have been set off from Day Six to stand alone as an Epilogue to match the Prologue. As it is, (and this is a matter of text itself, not of any later division of the text into chapter and verse), the conclusion receives its own “day.” This seems both odd and unnecessary; odd in that nothing happens creatively, and unnecessary because a simple Epilogue would make a symmetrical format. There’s an unusual asymmetry, or so it seems.

The key is that God’s work did not finish on Day Six. God’s activity on Day Seven requires its own “day,” although the nature of that activity is not defined until John’s gospel. The Sabbath is much more than a closure statement. Its “activity” involves a concept not fully developed until the New Testament: sustenance and restoration.

The contrast between creation and completion

A seventh day, in which God rests and pronounces all of his work completed, puts the work of active creation into perspective. The expression of closure is just as important as the creative activities. This parallels previous separations: light from dark, waters above and waters below, and the dry land of earth from waters that covered it. The creation week is a program of not just creating entities, but also separating them to give them a distinct place and function. Each created item is separated, specified, and assigned a role or place. Day Seven introduces a larger and somewhat abstract teaching: the separation of creative work (activity) from rest (non-activity). God’s rest gives relief and perspective to God’s work. If the text only recorded “work” as a unilateral condition, then we couldn’t consider it work, as it would be a constant state with no opposite or contrast to give it definition. Thus, the rest on Day Seven gives definition to the activity of the preceding six days. Obviously God didn’t rest because he got tired, or because he had finished creating all he could create. However, he did finish what he needed to do for his purpose, and then made that clear by concluding with a day devoted to non-creation.

What God did on the Sabbath

Even though the Sabbath is counted as the seventh day, its verbs set it apart from the six days of God’s work. None of the four verbs of God’s activity on Day Seven has as its direct or indirect object any part of the creation. The first two verbs state that God did no work and the last two report what God did to the day itself, not to the creation. God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. He did not bless any part of creation on this day, as he had done previously.

What does it mean to bless a day? What does sanctifying actually entail? Their meanings intertwine to give a picture that God set this day apart in the same way that he set the humans apart from the other animals. The two ideas put forward are completion and sustenance. The meaning of “sanctified” denotes being set apart, typically for holy purposes. Day Seven represents both the celebration of the completion of a full work of creation and also the continued presence of God as still involved with that completed work.

The idea of sustenance is implied in the fact of a day devoted to closure. God didn’t cease his involvement; he continued his presence with the creation.

Jesus’ teaching on the Sabbath

New Testament evidence for God’s sustenance is direct, conclusive, and deeply instructive. It arrives in the context of Jesus’ use of the Sabbath as he encounters the Pharisees, and counters their legalistic notions about what this day meant. Jesus has several confrontations with the Pharisees on the Sabbath. In each case he choose to cure someone with a chronic ailment. He could have easily waited until sundown to effect healing and not drawn any attention to himself. However, he selects the Sabbath day on which to cure chronic conditions such as lameness and congenital blindness. In so doing, he demonstrates that the holiness of the Sabbath does not imply a day of protecting oneself from any possible interpreta­tion of “work,” but a day in which God’s healing power continued the work of sustaining the creation.

Jesus’ proclamation, “My father is working still, and I am working” (John 5:17 RSV), tells us that God continued to work on the Sabbath. His abiding presence with creation tended to its needs, all the more as humanity developed in all of the attendant frailties and needs of mortal, sinful human life. The work of forgiveness and providence attends us daily, as it has from the beginning.

The ultimate Sabbath

Although Genesis records a sanctified day of no work, it does not establish the Sabbath as a commanded day of rest. It does not become legally encoded as a day when people should cease from their work until the Decalogue (Exod 20:8-11), but the principle upon which the Sabbath became sanctified refers to Day Seven (Exod 20:11). By citing the original creation reference (or the Exodus attestation thereof), the letter to the Hebrews hangs the Sabbath argument on a sturdier peg. It connects the ultimate Sabbath rest with not only the law, but also its Genesis precedent.

The letter to the Hebrews encourages believers to continue living under grace and not to relapse into the law. This epistle focuses on the role of the high priest as an example of the vast difference between the limitations of the law and the abundance of life available through faith in the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. Before the high priest contrast, however, the text visits the issue of the Sabbath.

Hebrews offers considerable detail of how the high priests’ sacrifices had to be repeated, serving only as a reminder of sin, but not really doing anything to ame­liorate sin’s effects or remove sin’s root cause. In the case of the Sabbath, the letter reminds us that Scripture points to another Sabbath to come (Heb 4:3-5) with extensive quotations from Psalm 95, especially the key verse, 95:11 “they shall never enter my rest.” The argument in Hebrews rests on the fact that if another rest remains, then the original is inadequate. This parallels the Scriptural usage and logic of the High Priest argument; if another high priesthood (Psa 110:4) remains to be filled, then the original is found wanting.

The metaphorical “Sabbath rest that remains” in Hebrews 4, yields two further meanings derived from the original Genesis treatment of the Sabbath as a day with its own rightful place in the creation week. The two themes announced in Hebrews are the rest from works and the ultimate Sabbath rest that is the Kingdom of God. Jesus invited those weary with the vain attempt to live by laws and rituals to come unto him, “all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28). Hebrews says the stiff-necked Jewish nation “shall never enter my rest” (Heb 3:11). Never, that is, under the terms of the Old Covenant, the covenant of law, the paradigm of rituals, and the ineffectual animal sacrifices. But God, through the grace offered in the covenant of faith based on the greater sacrifice of his Son, our Lord Jesus, gives rest.

Those who abide in his grace await his coming and his kingdom — the “day” of restoration, of healing, of renewal. The now blighted Earth, a place of corruption, violence, pollution, filth, pain, disease, misery, hatred, strife, and ungodliness will return to its pristine Day Seven state, and God will again pronounce it “very good.” This ultimate Sabbath will restore the magnificence of the creation.

The Sabbath rest of the kingdom provides a thoughtful reason for according a calendar day to the cessation of God’s work. Furthermore, unlike the six days of active creation, the Sabbath day does not conclude with “there was evening or morning.” Like Melchidezek, it has no beginning or end, and thus points to an eternal fulfillment.

  1. The oddly placed chapter break severing the Sabbath Day (Gen 2:1-3) from the first six days unnecessarily disturbs the Sabbath’s position in the creation week.
  2. Many of the passages are as translated by Bro. David
  3. The LXX translators evidently thought that if God ceased on the seventh day, he was still actively working up until that point. That implied the Sabbath wasn’t a full day of rest, so they changed this sentence to read (literally) “And God finished on the sixth day his works.”
  4. The Hebrew word for “completed” in Job 31:40 is the same used at the beginning of the book to describe Job’s complete (legalistic) righteousness (1:1). It is an iconic use of the common Hebrew literary device of repeating a key word for emphasis. The end of Book II of the Psalms uses the same word as Genesis 2:1, with the same nuance of “completed,” not just “ended.”