A New Testament Reality
Exodus 20:8-11 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt do no work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gate: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
"God is not a man, that He should lie," or need a rest in the sense that a man needs rest to cure fatigue. The rest God took was the close of a parenthesis, the conclusion of a phase of creative work, and a celebration of accomplishment.
In our New Testament Age, keeping a sabbath, or, observing a day of rest, is more than commemorative. It is meant to be restorative and contemplative: a chance to take stock of how deeply or shallowly we have walked in faith and ackowledged God's provision and care in the preceding six days.
Colossians 2:16-17 Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.
Past, present, and future are provided for in God's sovereignty. The feast days, rituals, observances and commandments laid down for the children of Israel in the Old Testament past foreshadowed things to be fulfilled (New Testament future) in Christ Jesus. So if you like, we are the future, the Church made up of Jew and Gentile so that these designations are no longer relevant: "the righteousness of faith by Christ Jesus is unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference" (Romans 3:22).
This state of reunification, of all humanity being able to come to God through faith in Christ, and Israel's role as revealer of the Christ, was future for the Old Testament, is past and accomplished for us, and has always been present to the eternal, almighty Father.
The body is of Christ, and as God foreknew, foreordained, and anticipated this,...He did the most reasonable thing of all in establishing clues of encouragement for us along the way. Days to observe, ways to live, all spoke in the past of holiness to be achieved; and they speak now of holiness attained.
Genesis 2:2-3 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
One of my most annoying hobbies is grammar. Before you groan, try to appreciate how the details of language can enhance our spiritual understanding.
God blessed (perfect tense = action completed in the past) the seventh day, because He had rested (pluperfect tense = action completed further in the past) from the creative phase of His work.
The whole purpose of God's work, His goal, was to enjoy an atmosphere of rest with His people. In our temporal life, we bless ourselves with some sort of break or leisure activity at the end of a period of work -- knowing that we will be working again. But in addition to His works, God blessed the rest He had adopted after that work. If we are to be imitators of Christ, we will live our lives in the New Testament reality which was purchased for us: It is finished, and the life that we live, we live through Him, learning to be content in whatever state we find ourselves.
Abundantly Provided
Genesis 1:5&8 And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning wer the first day...And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
The whole parenthesis for the creation is established, to be filled in over the remaining four creative days with all of the infinite variety of flora and fauna, mechanisms of wind and water, arrangement of heavenly bodies, that make up our unique temporal home.
We have tried to reinvent all the wheels, in our societal philosophies, out of not accepting the abundant provision of God. Rejecting the love of a Creator God, we came up with Deism. Rejecting the balance of nature that God installed, we posit ourselves as predators and rapists of the natural world, and adopt policies to keep from overpopulating the world. Think about that: the exact opposite of God's command, "be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it," is birth control. The opposite of stewardship is legislation that keeps people away from large tracts of land, which normally ends up with dangerous imbalances and resultant problems. At the other end, people are so crowded into smaller, urban areas, where they cannot stand to get along together, and crime is the only thing that is multiplying successfully. We got off on the wrong foot, there in the garden, doubting that God really has provided, all that we need.
God Rested
Genesis 1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
Genesis 1:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
Isaiah 40:28 Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding.
On this group of verses, I charge the reader to meditate. God established the world and its workings, He spoke well of what was done, blessed it all, and He works to maintain it, having anticipated all that would unfold, until the end of the Age.
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