THE DAY OF REST Genesis 2:1-3
All of us are trapped in days that last for exactly twenty-four hours. One cannot cry out, “I shall live in terms of a 40 hour day to give me more time to make money.” That is chronologically impossible. The prisoner cannot make the decision to cut his days down to 16 hours in length to get his sentence over. Twenty-four hours is the period of time for the earth to rotate on its axis, and all mankind has to fit its life into such a length of day. We are all structured to work and to rest within every single day. There are other daily rhythms that are essential for the natural functions of the bodies which God has created out of the dust of this world.
Without Gen 1 how would anyone explain a week? One dictionary says it is a period of time longer than a day and shorter than a month! We can relate a day to the earth rotating on its axis, and we can relate a year to the period of time in which the earth completes a single revolution around the sun, consisting of 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds of mean solar time. The week of seven days has to be connected to how God made everything. He worked in terms of six days and then he took a day of rest. There have been attempts to lengthen the week. Human bodies function in a sabbatical structure; they needed rest every seven days.
1. When GOD was done with His six days He made a day of rest to worship.
Gen 1 has told us that God did not only create the universe but that he created time too. He spread it out over six whole days in order to tie us to our Creator with the loving bonds of the Sabbath. What did God do on the seventh day of creation week? Our text uses several words to describe the rest and the activity of God. 1st, he did no more work; 2nd, he rested; 3rd; he blessed the day; 4th, he made it holy. All the divine work ended after six days. Of course God continued to uphold everything he had made. The movement of the atoms and the stars had their being in him, but there was no new creative activity. God rested from all of that for a day. God resting? That is a peculiar idea isn’t it? Certainly Omnipotence doesn’t grow weary. On this seventh day he was engaged in a different form of existence. The Father could take delight in the Son and the Son delighted in the Father, and both in the Spirit and he in them. Eternity had always been an existence of blissful joy. It was not from loneliness or frustration that God created the world and it was not from tiredness that God rested. Then we are also told that God blessed this day of rest. How do you bless a day? Sometimes we limit blessedness to a feeling of happiness. Well, then we have to ask the question once again, how do you make a day happy? I think it is better to think in terms of asking what the opposite of ‘blessed’ is and that is ‘cursed’. To be cursed by God is to be out of his favor, outside his friendship, subject to his judgment, whereas to be blessed is to be in a special relationship with him, to be the subject of his love and grace. So God made this day a blessed day, one that was uniquely related to himself. He made it a good day; Sundays are great days. Our Sabbath day has been blessed by God. It is creates happiness. “What a day to be living in!” From the biography of the missionary James Paton, “There were eleven of us brought up in a home and never one of the eleven, boy or girl, man or woman, has ever been heard or ever will be heard saying that Sunday was dull or wearisome for us, or suggesting that we have heard or seen any way more likely than that for making the Day of the Lord bright and blessed alike for parents and for children. But God help the homes where these things are done by force and not by love!” So God blessed the day. Sundays have been days to meet with the Lord Jesus Christ, for the children to put on something attractive; to hear the most fascinating truths one will ever hear; to sing the praises of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; to gather with our friends; to put our lives back on track again; to be given new motivation and determination to live lovingly with kindness and patience.
For twenty-four hours each week without fail this world is the special receiver of God’s saving work. God has blessed this day. Also the Lord made the day holy. Gen. 2:3 “And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from his work of creation.”
Everything that belongs to God is in a sense holy, the whole creation is holy, and yet God separates some things to himself. He is going to have a holy people, and a holy land, and a holy city, and a holy temple, and holy garments and vessels. “Then have them make a holy place for me, and I will live among them.” Ex. 25:8. It was a holy place. Every day belongs to the Lord, Monday is his day, Tuesday is his day, and Wednesday is his day, and so on. Surely that is so and let us glorify God in all we do every day of the week, but even so God set apart one day for special use. Every seven days there is a day for drawing close to God and honoring him.
2. The day of rest and worship is one of God’s ‘CREATION REGULATIONS.’
There are certain patterns which God our Creator has built into all his creatures, and responding positively to those patterns is vital if we are to be real men and women of God. Even if Adam and Eve had never sinned they would have kept ‘creation regulations.’ What are these? There are three;
1. Marriage. The world that God made was ‘very good,’ but one thing was not so good and that was man being alone. Adam needed someone to relate to emotionally, intellectually, psychologically and physiologically. Not one animal could be that; none of the wonderful birds and mammals surrounding Adam could help him, so God built a suitable helper for him. That was the foundation of marriage.
2. Labor. Before Adam fell into sin God told him to subdue the earth and have dominion over every living thing. God put him in the garden “to work it and take care of it”. God didn’t put him in a university, or a library, or to be entertained by angels, but to take care of a garden, to get dirt under his nails, and expand his own creativity in how he replenished the earth. Adam was not lying on his back in the Garden with his mouth open waiting for a grape to obey the law of gravity and drop in. Eden was not a place for Laziness. So there was the rule of labor, of achieving a good day’s work.
3. The Sabbath. God made the creation over a period of six days, steadily, step by step until it was all made and then taking a whole day off from labor. “That is the pattern for you,” God was saying to all mankind. “Enjoy my blessings and share in my life.” God gave man a sacred place, the Garden of Eden, and he gave man a sacred time, a weekly Sabbath, and he gave him a sacred Friend to walk with in the Garden. Even if man had never fallen and the world developed in ever increasingly sinless beauty there would still have had to be marriage and work and a special day each week. But what do unbelievers today? It is the ‘week-end’! Max Gunther wrote a book over 40 years ago “the variety of things that people get up to over a week-end. Then he asks the question, “What went wrong? Didn’t they have fun? Didn’t they spend enormous sums of money, travel endless miles to and from crowded beaches, lakes, mountains, give and attend big, noisy parties, endure hours of tough sports, and raise countless blisters tinkering, painting, fixing, building, and gardening? Yet none of this mad activity yielded that sweet, sweet feeling of peace.” Many people spend Sunday spending sums of money watching sports. They read the Sunday papers play some golf and finally watch television, and they do this year after year, and do they ever wonder why there is no satisfaction in life? A ‘week-end’ does not replace a Day of rest. Man needs a day to meet with the living God; a day of worship; a day of prayer; a day of hearing the Word of God, a day of awakening to confess once more our faith in Jesus Christ. We need a celebration of faith every week in which we rejoice because of God’s salvation. We need a day when we meet with other Christians to find out how they are coping, to experience our common love for one another, and bear something of the others’ burdens. Sunday is a creation ordinance.” “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.”
3. GOD”s Day of rest and worship was put IN THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.
In the 4th and longest of the Ten Commandments God says, EX 20:8-11."
He says we are to “remember this day!” It is one of the two positive commandments of the ten. “Remember!” it cries. It looks back; it assumes that the Sabbath was already in existence. Moses didn’t invent the Sabbath day. There is a blessing described in Exodus 16 when God fed his hungry people in the wilderness with bread from heaven, manna. On the sixth day of every week they were to gather enough for two days. The Sabbath was already being kept. So while a lot of the legislation Moses gave the people was new, much that was connected with the ceremonies surrounding building the Tabernacle, this Sabbath commandment was already being put into operation because it went back to creation itself. “Please don’t forget it,” was how the commandment was structured.
So as I was preparing this message I asked are there other references to the Sabbath during the lives of the patriarchs or when Israel was in Egypt, throughout all those centuries described in Genesis 2 right through to Exodus 15. “Where is a mention of anyone keeping the Sabbath?” It came to me that the other creation ordinances such as laboring were observed throughout this period, and also marriage. I also considered that there are no references to Israel’s obedience to the commandments neither to refrain from idolatry nor to misuse the name of the Lord God during those centuries? Those commandments were being honored in Israel throughout that time though there is not one reference to those activities, long before those commands were written on Sinai’s tablets of stone. All the first three of the commandments could have begun with “Remember!” Remember to have no other gods before Me, nor make an idol, nor misuse his name. Remember also the Sabbath day. To keep it holy was set by God. It is the Lord’s Day; it is not our day; it is not the family’s day; it is his day, the day of the God who is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable. He is so tremendous that it is not enough each day to be giving him some time in the morning or the evening. We have to devote to him one whole day every week. We are going to spend eternity in his presence; we are never going to be out of His presence and that will help us to be holier every day. “Keep it holy,” is the command. It means, guard it, preserve it because there is going to be a fight over this day. Satan wants to destroy this day because he knows how much God’s blessing on this day can revive and encourage the people of God. If we are to keep the day holy there may be some gates we will have to close, things we will not look at which are right on other days, things we won’t do on the Lord’s Day. The Day of worship is a wonderful day for the family because of the fact that it is a holy day to Jesus Christ. Holyoake, an atheist, wrote in 1857, “Whether Englishmen know it or not, it is Sunday that has made and keeps England great. If you would kill Christianity, you must first kill Sunday.” The Day of rest is a weekly change from all weekly dealings so that we may be engaged in wonder, reflection, praise and service. It is a day that looks ahead to the great day to come when we will enter into our real and enduring rest of satisfaction and celebration
4. GOD CHANGED THE DAY of rest and worship FROM THE SEVENTH TO THE FIRST.
God could not rest on the first day of creation; he had to devote himself to creating in order to rest from his own labors, and so the initial order was after labor comes rest. One day in seven is to be a day of rest; after six days there is a special day; that is the principle. When the Son of God became incarnate he met plenty of disputes concerning what was right and wrong conduct on the Sabbath day. He pronounced by his own authority that the Sabbath was made for man. Jesus told them that he was the Lord of the Sabbath. It is a day which hereafter has his name attached to it.
1. On the first day Jesus rose from the dead. 2. On the first day Jesus first appeared to his disciples. 3. On the first day Jesus met with the disciples at different places and repeatedly. 4. On the first day Jesus blessed the disciples. 5. On the first day Jesus imparted to the disciples the gift of the Holy Spirit. 6. On the first day Jesus commissioned the disciples to preach the gospel to all the world. 7. On the first day Jesus ascended to Heaven, was seated at the right hand of the Father and was made Head of all. 8. On the first day many of the dead saints arose from the grave. 9. The first day became the day of joy and rejoicing to the disciples. 10. On the first day the gospel of the risen Christ was first preached. 11. On the first day Jesus explained the Scriptures to the disciples. 12. On the first day the purchase of our redemption was completed. 13. On the first day the Holy Spirit descended. Pentecost was on the 50th day after the Sabbath following the wave offering. Thus Pentecost was always on a Sunday. There is a great phrase in all the gospels naming the day that Jesus Christ rose as the “first of the Sabbaths” literally, “the first day of the week of days”. Just as the last day of the week marked the completion of creation so the first day became the completion of redemption. The resurrection of Christ is the reason for our faith; it is the ground of our hope that because the Lord lives we shall live also; it is the pledge of our personal salvation, he was raised for our justification, and it is a display of his ultimate power over creation, the devil, disease and death itself. Little wonder that this first day became the new Sabbath day. On the first day of the week the apostles met with the Church. Of course many of the first Christians were converted Jews and they couldn’t give up a tradition that was hundreds of years old, keeping the last day of the week as a special day. So these first Jewish converts would have kept two days special each week, the cultural seventh day Sabbath as well as Sundays, but steadily the seventh day declined as increasing number of Gentiles were added to the church. For almost three centuries before the Emperor Constantine legislated in protecting the rights of Christians to meet on the first day of the week the early Christians met on Sundays, the Lord’s day.
Examine Your Habits: God said, 2 Kings 17:34 “And this is still going on among them today. They follow their former practices instead of truly worshipping the Lord and obeying the laws, regulations, instructions, and commands he gave the descendants.” Understand this; any habit you feed will strengthen its grip on your life. Ask anyone recovering from addiction; we only become willing to change when we hit the bottom. Prodigals don
