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Six Days and One: The Structure of Creation
Sometimes God has to shout to get our attention. But we’re so busy and so frazzled it might be hard for us even to hear a shout.
Here it is Christmas season. I bet many of you right now are going over in your minds all you have to do this afternoon, this week, all you have to do to get ready for Christmas. We give ourselves Christmas ulcers year after year. But it's not just Christmas that has us on the treadmill. We run the treadmill every day, every week, every month. We are neurotically busy.
If we take a few moments to be honest with ourselves, I think we might just admit that all of our busyness and activity has not made us better human beings. We are not healthier. We are not more productive. We are not kinder. We are not more at peace. We certainly are not closer to God, and not more likely to be able to hear Him and listen to His word and will.
We say that we don’t like being so busy, and that we’re trapped. I wonder…
I admit, this is a really hard matter for many of us. Part of this dilemma of frantic busyness is due to the physical separation of the workplace from the homeplace and the need to drive everywhere. Part of this is due to ever demanding employers wanting more and more of our time. Part of this is due to the structure of an urban/suburban life. Part of this is due to the pursuit of affluence. Part of this is due to the automobile, to telephones, to issues of safety for kids where we can't just send them out the door and say be home at dinner, but instead have to drive them everywhere.
This frantic busy tiredness is the plague of modern urban/suburban life in a technologically advanced society. I have often wondered if Camus were to write his book The Plague today, if he might not choose this plague, the plague of busyness, which has spread like a deadly virus and which has most of us in its grip.
Much about modern technological life is good. Charlie Liebert wouldn't be with us today if not for the blessing of angioplasty. Yet a lot about this modern life is bad, and bad for us. And I believe we are not all mere victims. We are also willing participants, co-conspirators. The pattern and structure of things and our participation in it effects our minds and hearts. It subtly causes us to think a certain way, to act a certain way, to be different than we would otherwise be.
Certainly one of our biggest needs is for a slower pace of life, more time to be with loved ones and friends without our to do list’s running through our heads, more time to stop and just think about our lives and set our focus, more time to take in the world around us.
Yet, in truth, we don't need more time to do things. There is never enough time to do things. All of us have more to do than we can ever do. We don't need more time to do things. Even if by a miracle we could add, say, twelve hours to each Thursday to get more things done, we still wouldn't get things all done. Time in our modern world is a vacuum. It invites activity. More time creates more expectation. More time creates more activity.
No, we don't need more time to do things. We need more time not to do things. But this can't be a kind of time that waits until we have done everything. The one who waits to rest until all is done will never rest.
You may notice that I have not yet even mentioned the Bible. I haven't even mentioned Christ. This is on purpose. You see, you don't have to be a Christian, you don't even need revelation from God to realize the mess we're in with our busyness and superficiality. It's as plain as the nose on our face.
When we start to consider, however, the revelation we have received from Scripture, when we start to consider our needs not simply as human beings in a busy urban world, but our needs as God's creatures, and as His redeemed children in Christ new creatures who nonetheless still as human beings in a real physical world, then the need to stop and cease and be quiet and step out of the rat race becomes even more real, and more essential.
This brings us to one of God's blessed and beautiful answers to our dilemma. This answer actually has to do with learning from God Himself how He has made and how He has structured His world. But this answer also comes by way of His word of command, His shout to us to stop, to cease, to rest and be refreshed. Isn't it odd that He has to tell us to do this? You would almost for a second think we would just want to. But we are a little too caught up in things to hear Him.
You know that I am talking about Sabbath. But before I actually get to the Fourth Commandment itself, I want to look at this issue from two other angles. Why? Because in one sense we are no longer bound today to obey the Fourth Commandment as written. We are not Israel, and we are not bound by the covenant between God and Israel. We are not Old Covenant Jews. If we were, we would be resting and worshipping on Saturday. If we were, we would be remembering our deliverance from Egypt and still awaiting the coming Messiah. But Messiah has come, the Lord Jesus has come, and a new order of things has been established, a New Covenant between God and His people. The Sabbath law itself, we learn in our New Testaments, was a shadow, a type, a foreshadowing of a greater truth, something which has been fulfilled and achieved in Christ.
Before I go on to lay out many of the important things associated with the concept of ceasing, of resting, of stopping, of being refreshed one day in seven, I want to establish the reason why this obligation to cease still has bearing upon us. I would like for you to understand the Fourth Commandment in light of other Scriptures which point to its real meaning. That is what I am going to do the rest of this morning.
Turn if you would to Genesis 1:26. We are in the middle of the sixth day of creation. In the account, God has made the creatures of the ground, and now He is getting ready to make man. Let me say that what I am going to say from here has bearing regardless of how exactly you view the days of creation. Follow along while I read starting in verse 26:
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground--everything that has the breath of life in it--I give every green plant for food." And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning--the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
As we read over this passage we notice that it has something to say about three very important creation ordinances -- marriage, work, and sabbath. First, about marriage it says in verse 27 and 28:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number;
Second, about work it says in verse 26 and 28:
and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground
Third, about the rhythm of the week, and about ceasing one day in seven , it says in verses 2:1-2:3:
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
Before I comment on the Sabbath passage, let me note that if Scripture said nothing else anywhere on the subject of marriage, work, and sabbath, we would be under obligation as creatures in God's world to consider and obey these creation ordinances.
These ordinances predate the covenant with Abraham, the covenant with Israel, the covenant with David, and the coming of the Lord Jesus. We are still made in God's image, we still are called to care for and have dominion over the earth, we still are called to be fruitful and multiply, and we still live in a world structured after the pattern of six days and one.
Other Scriptures in the Old and New Testaments shed much light on the details. But these passages that we have just looked at from Genesis One and Genesis Two already tell us much about who we are as human beings and what we are to be about as creatures in God's world.
Lets look in more detail at the institution of sabbath.
As the account reads, God has finished His work on the sixth day. He looks out over His world and pronounces it very good. I get the sense that He is positively enjoying what he has created. It is beautiful. It is an expression of His own love and goodness. There is fullness and wholeness and completeness. God is satisfied with His work.
It must be something like how you feel after planting a garden on a beautiful Spring day.
But the week of creation has not yet reached its climax. The best is yet to come. The sixth day comes, and the sixth day goes. The sixth day gives way to the seventh day.
By the seventh day, God has finished all of the work he had been doing. So, on this seventh day, He ceases from his work. The climax of the week of creation is God ceasing from His work. The Hebrew verb translated here as "rest" in the NIV is the verb "shabath," which means "to cease" or "to rest" or "to stop." God "shabathed," that is, He ceased from all of His work.
And so this pattern of six and one is rooted in the nature of things, in the structure of creation. This alone, this structural pattern of six days and one, tells us something important in itself. But there's more to the specialness of the seventh day than just the bare pattern of six days and one. It says in verse 3 that God did two very special things to this seventh day. He "blessed" the seventh day and He "sanctified" it.
In blessing the day He gave to it His own special favor.
In sanctifying the day He set it apart as different from then other days.
Why did He do this? For Himself? No, God doesn't get tired. He didn't need a break. He could create a thousand worlds without exhausting His energy. No, God set apart one day, not for His sake, but for ours. He did it for the sake of His creation, and especially for man, His most special creation.
Remember in Mark where Jesus is going through the grainfields with his disciples, and as they walked along the disciples picked some heads of grain off the wheat for food. The Pharisees as you remember took issue with this, believing this to be forbidden on the Sabbath. Well, Jesus goes on to give them a little lesson from the Old Testament, and then finishes with these words, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
Now literally Jesus words could be read, "the Sabbath came into being for the sake of man." Jesus here, in conflict with the Pharisees, appeals back to the very institution of the Sabbath day in the beginning. Sabbath came into being for man's sake! Sabbath is for the good of man and the good of creation. And so God made, blessed, and sanctified the seventh day not for Himself, but for man.
All of creation is to benefit from man's resting. The land, the beasts, the animals. All that we as human beings impact is to have a rest from labor.
In the Sabbath Commandment as given in Deuteronomy we find that all of creation is to share in man's rest one day in seven:
"Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the LORD your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor the alien within your gates, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
So we see that even the beasts are to know the blessing of Sabbath rest.. Sabbath is for man, and also for the rest of creation.
Later in the Torah we learn that the land itself was to know rest. Every seven years Israel was not to till its land. The very timing of the exile was to make up for the Sabbath rests which the land had not experienced. Today we see the effects of land that never rests. Important trace elements that our bodies need are gone form the soil. We till and fertilize, fertilize and till, and the soil becomes barren. Even the land needs its rest.
And so, as I said, God doesn't get tired. God doesn't need to rest. God isn't bound by the time scale and time rhythms of His creation. We cease from work in order to rest and be refreshed. He ceases in order to set a pattern so we can rest.
The very pattern of six days and seven is for man. But it's much more than simply being for man's physical rest.
I mentioned that God was satisfied with His work after the six days of creating. After each of the first six days of work He pronounced His work good. But after the sixth day he pronounced it very good. It was all done. His most special creation, mankind, had been made and commissioned to rule over the earth. And so He pronounced His work very good.
God delighted in mankind. And He set the seventh day aside so that mankind could properly delight in Him.
It seems as though the seventh day was designed for fellowship to take place between God and his most special creature, made in His image. The seventh day is a day for God and man to delight in their relationship together and in the world God has made. Work is important, and it can and must be done unto the Lord and in His presence, but the setting aside of the seventh day says that work isn't the final word as to what we're about as human beings.
Remember, the ceasing day was made for man, not man for the ceasing day.
Our God delights in us. We are made in His very image. And he sets a special day aside not only for us to rest physically, but for us to get our bearings, to remember who we are, to have a chance to sit back and take delight in Him. In a sense this day is set aside so we can both pray with and play with God.
People sometimes ask the question, "Why did God create the world?" No one has the perfect answer. I will tell you what I believe. I believe that out of His great love, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit desired to share His bounty, His love, His goodness, and His glory, not because He is lonely has some "need" to share, but simply because He in His nature delights to bring good, to share His bounty and the glory of His being.
I think of the pattern of the six days and one, the blessing and sanctifying of the seventh day, as His way of achieving that end. In the seventh day rest we not only have more opportunity to fellowship with, participate with, and enjoy God, we also have more opportunity to enjoy the rich blessing of His creation. This day allows us to share in His love and His glory and goodness, which I believe is why He made us in the first place.
How sad it must make Him when so many things are more important to us than Him. Do you think God really cares whether you get your list done today? God wants you to delight in Him, to be refreshed in Him. He knows you have a lot to do. So He gives you six days to work hard. Even during these six days of course we are to work for and unto and even with Him. All of our lives are to be lived before Him. He gives us six days to work hard, and then one day He gives us not to work at all, but to be refreshed in Him, in our essential relationships, in our families and friends and loved ones, to do good to those in need -- but mostly to delight in Him, to get to know Him, to enjoy Him and His world.
The pattern of six days and one is like a special gift that God has carefully planned, wrapped up, and presented to us as His creatures. It flows from His goodness, His love, and His grace. And yet we are often like ungrateful children who tear open the package, look at the gift, and toss it into the corner. This must grieve the heart of our good and gracious Creator.
We are going to go on and talk abut the details. We are not going to be narrow or legalistic about how we keep the seventh day. In fact, I don't want to give you a bunch of rules. I want you to see the beauty of this gift from your God, and then come to grips as to how you should enjoy it. For now, let us simply rejoice in His great goodness in his provision of the seventh day.
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