He Rested From All

So, I had to take a double look, asking myself why the writer was being so repetitious. Verses 2 and 3 seem as though he is saying the same thing. Now Moses does not stop and tell me why he said it twice, so the next part is mine. I read it as intentional, and I read him as emphasizing what he needs us to see, and it is beautiful.

The Finished Work

On the seventh day God ended His work, and He rested from all. And there is a whole study just in that word ended.

In the Hebrew the word is kalah, and it does not mean He simply stopped in the middle. It means He finished, He completed it entirely, He brought it all the way to its end. Nothing was left half done, nothing was left waiting to be added later. The work was carried the whole way through, and then it was finished.

And the word rested is not what we think either. We hear rested and we think tired, like a man who worked hard and needs to lie down. But the lexicons give the Hebrew as shabath, to cease, to stop, to lay the work down. This is the word your Sabbath comes from. So God did not rest because He was worn out. And that is not my opinion, Isaiah says it.

Fainteth not, neither is weary. So He ceased because there was nothing left to do. The work was complete, so He laid it down.

And then it says He rested from all His work. That little word all is the word kol, and it means the whole of it, the entirety, nothing excepted, nothing left over. From all. Not from most, not from the hard parts, from all.

So here is what verse 2 is telling us, and hold it, because everything after leans on it. The work was finished, wholly, completely, nothing left. And because nothing was left, He ceased, and He did not cease and then find something He forgot. He ceased because there was truly nothing more, kalah, the whole thing carried to its end, and He rested from all of it.

Nothing left, remember that. And here is what I take from it, and it is mine. When God finishes a thing, He finishes it, and there is nothing left hanging over it. The day He is about to bless is a day that sits on top of a finished work.

What He Saw Over Each Day

And before we go on, lay the days out and look at them, because the seventh is not more of the same. It is a different word altogether. Day one, verse 4. God saw the light, that it was good.

Day two, verses 6 to 8. Nothing. No good recorded over it at all.

Day three, verse 10, the dry land and the seas, good. And again in verse 12, the grass and the herb and the fruit tree, good. Twice on that day.

Day four, verse 18, the sun and the moon and the stars, good.

Day five, verse 21, the whales and every living creature in the waters and every winged fowl, good.

Day six, verse 25, the beasts and the cattle and the creeping things, good.

Six times, on five days, and none on the second. Then comes a seventh, and it is not over one more thing.

Every thing that He had made. That is not a seventh item added to the list. He steps back and looks at the whole of it together, and what He sees over all of it at once is very good.

So the making got good six times, one thing at a time, and the whole work got very good once. That is what He saw over the making. Once the making is done, He does this.

Blessed. And sanctified. And let me say exactly what I mean by that, because God does bless during those six days. He blesses the creatures in verse 22 and He blesses the man and the woman in verse 28.

What He never does is bless a day. Not one of the six. The seventh is the first day in the account that God blesses, and sanctified is not said of anything at all before it.

And notice which verb goes with which. Good is what He saw. Blessed is what He did.

Six times He saw a thing and it was good. Then He looked at the whole, and behold, it was very good. That is a verdict, and it is passed on the work.

Blessing is not a higher grade of good. It is another action altogether.

And read the reason the verse gives for the blessing, because it says why. Because that in it he had rested. In it. The day holds something, and that is what it holds.

Not a making. A ceasing. The six are given to me through what He made in them. The seventh is given to me through His resting from it, and that is the day He blesses.

The Day He Blessed

In verse 3 God does this. He blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it. And I want you to see something, and He did not bless the work. He blessed the day.

Let me tell you how I imagine this day. God steps out from eternity into time, in the form of a circle, and like in those modern movies, He spreads His hands and a screen comes up all around Him, and He sees everything He had declared good over those past six days, gathered before Him, drawn into this one day. The other six were for the doing, this one He stood still, and beheld it all.

The word blessed is barak. It means to lay favor on something, to speak good over it, to set good upon it. It is the same word used when God blessed the living creatures, and when He blessed Adam, and later when He blessed Abraham. Now the same word does not have to mean the same blessing, and I am not going to say it does, because a blessing on a creature and a blessing on a day cannot be the same thing in every part. What I can say is that it is the same word. But here is the wonder. Every time before this, God laid that blessing on something living. Here He lays it on something that is not living at all, not a creature, not a place, not a thing you could touch. He lays it on a day. On time itself, the very thing all living things move through.

The Scripture says He rested in it, in it. So I see God standing within the day, and without Him the circle is just a circle, an empty round of hours. But God standing there, being holy, made the whole day holy. He dresses the day with His presence, and I read that as the day being made holy.

And now I am going to build something, so let me say plainly that I am the one building it. Genesis says God blessed the seventh day. It does not say He blessed all time, or everything living in time, or every person living in it. Moses stops at the day. Here is my reasoning, and all of this next part is mine. I picture the six days as gathered into this one, and everything He made lives in time. So when He blessed that day, I read the blessing as reaching beyond the day to those who would live their lives within time, us included. Genesis does not say that. It stops at the seventh day. He did not sanctify man that day. He sanctified the seventh day, and I read that sanctified day as saying something about the time man lives in and about the blessing reaching man through it. And this next verse is not about the seventh day at all. Jeremiah is not writing about creation. But it is where I see the same faithfulness landing on us morning by morning, and I am the one holding them together.

Morning by morning, new mercies. Time carries the mercy of God, and our whole life, counted in time, is carried on His mercy, handed to us one morning at a time.

Sanctified, Set Apart Unto Him

And the word sanctified is qadash. It means to set apart, to consecrate, to mark a thing off as holy, separated unto God for His own. And here is a thing worth stopping for. This is the first place in Scripture where this holy word family appears. God sanctified the seventh day. And it is not a place. It is not a mountain, not an altar, not a temple. It is a day. The first place that word lands in the Bible is on a piece of time.

Now I had to test this word against another Scripture, because in the New Testament we are told we are sanctified too, and I wanted to see if it was the same thing.

Now that verse says clean. It does not say sanctified, so let me not swap the words. Here is the one that puts them side by side, and it was not on this page, and it should have been.

Read how Paul says it. Sanctify AND cleanse. Two words, not one, and he does not tell me sanctifying just means washing. What he does tell me is that where we are concerned the two came together, because we came with the dust of sin on us and had to be made clean.

But the day was not dirty. And let me be careful how I prove that, because I nearly proved it with the wrong verses. First let me be exact about the six days, because it is easy to say this loosely. God said good six times across those days, at the light, twice on the third day, at the lights, at the fish and fowl, and at the beasts. And then very good at the end of the sixth, which makes seven times He spoke over that work. There is no good said over the second day, so it is not one on each day. But at the end He looked at every thing that He had made and called it very good, and that gathers the whole six. Now here is the part that matters, and it is what I was getting wrong. Not one of those declarations is about the seventh day. Genesis never calls the seventh day good at all. It says He rested in it, and blessed it, and sanctified it, and it says nothing else about it. So I cannot prove the day was clean out of the six days, because those verses are about the work, not about the day that came after it. What I can say is this. There is no sin anywhere in that account. Man had not yet fallen, nothing had gone wrong yet, and there is nothing said of the seventh day that would need washing off. So the sanctifying of the day is not the same as the sanctifying of you and me. The day was set apart, and it needed no cleansing, because it was never unclean. We are set apart, and we did need cleansing, because we were unclean.

And that difference is mercy, when you see it. God set apart a day with nothing against it, easy to sanctify, nothing to wash. But you and me, He set us apart the hard way, by washing us clean, doing for us what the day never needed. And when I say in His word and in the blood, the word part is Ephesians, and the blood is from elsewhere in Scripture and not from either verse on this page. The day was made holy freely, and we were made holy at a cost.

And because God is holy, when He calls a thing holy it bears great weight, and it is not to be taken lightly. So sit in that a moment, the day is time. And our whole life is time, we move in it, it governs our days, we are counted in it. So when God laid His holiness on a day, He was showing that time is weighty to Him. Our life is time, and time matters to God. So do not take your days lightly, they are the stuff your life is made of.

Now here is the question that will not let me go. God made everything by His word, and His word is holy. So in a sense every day came from that same holy word. Yet He did not call anything He made holy. He said good, and very good. But this one day, the seventh, He set apart and called holy, and He made a point of it. Why this one? What was He implying?

I believe He was saying, this one is Mine, this day I keep for Myself. The six days of work were given to the making, given toward the world, toward the man who would work his six days. But the seventh He did not give to the work. He set it apart unto Himself. It is the day that points not to the work but to the Worker, not to what was made but to the God who made it and now rests. So of all creation, He reached down and marked one day and said, this is Mine, this belongs to Me.

And the rest and the setting apart are not two things, they are bound together, they fire together, gun and bullet. He ceased from the whole finished work, and in that ceasing I see Him as keeping the day for Himself.

The Day Was Made a Servant

Now here is a thing Jesus said that turns the whole matter right side up.

The day was made for man, and not man for the day. That is the direction of it, out of His own mouth, and it is the only thing that sentence gives me. Everything after this is my picture, so take it as a picture. Jesus does not call the sabbath a servant, He does not say man is to instruct it, and He does not call it the greatest thing. I am saying all of that. So the day is not a master standing over me, crushing me under its weight. To me the day is a servant, given to me, made for my good, a gift to serve man, for man to instruct. Do you hear that? The first thing God calls holy in the Bible is a day, and it is set to serve man. And that is the very heart of God as I have come to know Him.

And a servant waits for instruction, so getting up and just watching my day will do me no good. The day is standing there like a servant, waiting to be told where to go, what to carry, what to do. If I lie there and watch it, the servant stands idle and the hours slip by unused. He gave me the day to use, not to waste.

We Do Not Command the Day, We Instruct It

There is a line here I must not cross. I do not command my day. To command the day would be to say the day is mine, I am its lord, I rule it out of my own authority. That belongs to God alone, hear how God answered Job.

Hast thou commanded the morning, and the answer is no, and Job never made one sunrise. No man has ever commanded a morning to come, or told the dawn where to take its place. And if I never made the morning, I am in no position to command it. David says something about what is and is not in his hand.

My times are in His hand, not mine. And the lexicons give the word David uses there as a different word from the one for a day. It carries a man’s occasions, his appointed times, the moments things fall out in. So he is not saying God holds the hours. He is saying God holds when.

And that is enough for me. I did not make the morning, and I do not hold my own occasions. So I cannot command the day. God alone has authority over it. What is left to me is not authority but stewardship. I do not command my day, I instruct it. I take the day He has given me as His, and I direct it, steward it, and keep it moving under God. To command is to claim the day as mine and rule it apart from God. To instruct is to take the day God gave and lead it under Him, in His favor. Command is His throne, instruct is my stewardship. I never made a morning, but I can receive the morning He made and walk it for Him.

And here is a story I keep beside this, though it is not a model and the text says so itself. When Joshua needed more daylight to finish the battle, he could not stretch the day himself. So he spoke to the LORD first, and then he spoke to the sun.

I nearly said more than that verse says. Joshua spake to the LORD, and then he spoke to the sun. It does not say God told him to. And the sun standing still is what the text gives me, not time itself stopping, so let me not add a mechanism nobody wrote down. And there is one more verse here that I had left off, and it is the one that carries the whole thing.

The LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man. So the power was never Joshua’s. And read what the verse says about it, there was no day like that before it or after it. Joshua does not give me a practice, and I am not going to take a day the text calls one of a kind and make it a thing I do every morning. What it shows me is that God heard a man, and God fought.

Job shows me I have no authority of my own, for I cannot command the morning. Joshua shows me God hearing a man. Neither one gives me the instructing, and the instructing is my own picture. Authority is always His, the service is ours. And I do it while it is day, no less, no more.

While it is day, and Jesus lived by that same measure. The day is given, and the day has an evening, and when the night comes the working is done. So He gave me the time to use and to instruct, while it is day, nothing less, do not waste it, nothing more, do not claim it. I rise, I receive the day as His, this is the day the LORD hath made, and I send my steward-day out under His hand.

Seven, the Number of Completion

Genesis does not stop and tell me what seven means, so this next part is mine. The meaning we give the number today, completion, I trace back to right here, in this seventh day. This is the first place I find seven standing on a thing that is finished. God finished, and rested, and kept the day for Himself, blessed it, and made it holy.

So look at what we have seen. The very first thing Scripture records God sanctifying was not a place you could visit, it was time, a day. And your life is made of that same time. So let it change how you hold your days.

The rest itself, what it meant to God and what it is and is not, how Israel was the model for us afar off, how we enter it now by faith in Christ, and how it all points to the walk God has always wanted with us, is a whole study of its own.

Read the companion teaching · The Sabbath →

So, family in Christ, let us enter into His rest, and behold what He has prepared for us.