Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Genesis 2:1-3 | Date: August 1, 2021 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

The Capstone of Creation

Genesis chapter two, verses one to three. We’ve just had the creation account that we worked through last time, and now we come to the seventh day.

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the hosts of them. And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”

All right, we come to Genesis 2:1–3. We clearly come to the capstone of the creation narrative. I think I’ve mentioned before, and I’ll show it again, that the creation of man is the climax of God’s creative work, but the climax of the narrative is here in the seventh day, chapter two, verses one to three that we’ve just read. I would actually like to have already treated chapter 1, verses 26 to 28 in more detail. That is the creation of man—man and woman, male and female, the creation mandate, and all of that. But I have decided to put that off for a couple of weeks so that we can deal with it in the context of chapter 2, where some of the details are filled in for us there.

So today, verses 1 to 3: the capstone of the creation narrative, Divine Rest. In verses 2 and 3, we have mentioned for us the seventh day. The seventh day. It’s mentioned actually three times in three sentences of verses 2 and 3. So we have three sentences, and the seventh day is mentioned in each. And in fact, in each of these three sentences in the Hebrew, there are seven words. “God blessed the seventh day and he made it holy,” verse three. There’s a sense of climax in that. God has spoken the whole world into being. He’s clothed it with beauty and grandeur. He has supplied it with inhabitants and what is needed for those inhabitants. Now he’s finished the work, he tells us, verses one and following. And as it stands in its completeness, it’s done; God sits back and rests, looking at his creation. Verse three again: “he rested from all his work that he had done in his creation.”

Now, in fact, of course, God never gets tired. And God doesn’t need to sleep and recover from work in that sense like we do. And I think the idea here pretty clearly is it’s the rest of completion. His work is done. It’s finished. He sits back, as it were, and takes pleasure in the work that he has done. If we can take our cue from Psalm 19, “the heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows His handiwork.” And from other places, like in Romans chapter 1, where the created order displays the glory of God. Well then, and we’ve seen that in chapter 1, then in chapter 2, verses 1 to 3, God resting is God noticing that about His work and taking pleasure in it. God is looking at what He has done and he says, “This is really good.” That kind of rest—a rest of refreshment in that broad sense. In Exodus 31, where it mentions the Sabbath for us, the seventh day, you keep it because on that day, God rested and was refreshed. That word “refresh” means to breathe in. And again, I don’t think it’s that God needed that kind of rest. But it’s God just saying, “This is good.” Rest of refreshment. And this is, as we’ll see a little bit later, what’s referred to in Psalm 95, and again in Hebrews chapter 4, as God’s rest.

Questions About the Seventh Day

Now some questions are left open here about this seventh day. And I’ll mention a few of them here.

One, why does the creation narrative climax in God’s rest? What’s the point? What’s so important that he mentions this for us? In what way is that significant?

Another question: why is there no closing formula for day seven? You remember day one? Morning and evening were the first day. Day two, morning and evening were the second day. Morning and evening were the third day. Morning and evening were the fourth day, fifth day, sixth day. And we don’t have that now when we come to the seventh day. The implication seems to be that the seventh day remains open. We’ll see more of that as well. And as I’ve already mentioned, in verses two and three, we have the seventh day as a matter of emphasis. It’s mentioned three times, each in a sentence composed of seven words. So why? Why the bother? He’s carefully constructed the sentence. What’s important about the seventh day? Why does he want to focus on this? Clearly there’s some significance to the seventh day. What’s going on here?

Another question: verse three, “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it.” What does that mean? He set it apart for some good purpose. For whom was this day made sacred? He sanctified it. So Moses here has constructed the passage about God’s rest to give us some sense of a high point now of the narrative. This is where creation was heading. Creation is heading to God’s rest. What’s the point in all of that?

And then another question comes up with that. Was this rest that God is enjoying on day seven intended to be enjoyed by God alone? Or was there a sense in which the created order was to enjoy this rest with God? In particular, was humanity to enjoy this rest with God? Is this maybe a pointer ahead? Remember we’ve seen the word “protology”? Do you remember that word? I threw it in one time. It’s the word that tells us at the beginning—”pro,” at the beginning—he gives us a study of the beginning that points ahead to what we have in eschatology. It points ahead to—we get a picture here of what’s going to happen in the end. Is that what’s going on here? That here we have the goal of history: to enter into God’s rest? Is that the significance of it all?

Well, that’s too much to say yet, maybe, from chapter 2 verses 1 to 3, but there are some hints in that direction, and I think what we’ll find is that the Bible does, in fact, take us to that point. So, will man enter into this rest? It seems to be a rest in which creation will have a share, and that seems to be the goal of creation—for creation to enjoy God’s rest with him. That could be hinted at, or we could find clues of that back in chapter 1. God blessed, God blessed, God blessed. He blessed his creation with a purpose of blessing it. Chapter 2, verse 3 climaxes in the narrative as God’s rest; is the message then to be that there’s a rest to be enjoyed with this God?

Well, in fact, we come to the New Testament. Mark chapter 2, verse 27 is an important verse in this regard, where Jesus says that the Sabbath, the seventh day, “the Sabbath was made for man.” Well, that’s interesting. There’s an interpretive comment on Genesis 2:1–3. Why was the Sabbath? Well, it was made for man. Well, in what sense? How is man to enjoy this rest? And as we’ll see in a few minutes, Hebrews chapter 4 picks this up and not only links it to Genesis chapter 2 but to Psalm 95 and some other places—that we are indeed meant to enjoy God’s rest with Him.

Rest and Restlessness

So little information is given yet in these three verses, but I’ve pointed you ahead already to where I think they’re going in the rest of the Bible. Chapter two in the following verses fills in more details for us of the creation of man, the location of Eden, and those kinds of things. And we get a picture in chapter two of this harmonious created order. But there is in chapter two also, remember, a warning, a caution. “I’ve provided all of this for you. You can eat from all the trees of the garden everywhere. Eat them all, but not that one. And the day you do that, you will die.”

So chapter two is beautiful and it’s harmonious, but there is a caution. And then you come to chapter three. Of course, there’s the test that is given, the failure of the test. Man is in rebellion against God. That rest with God that man is intended to have has been forfeited. Man is expelled from the garden out of the presence of God. And now the resulting state is that of a curse. And we could call it restlessness. And I think I have some other warrant later in scripture to call it that. And so enjoying God’s rest with him is now, after chapter three, only a memory.

So the question then becomes, if we look at this in terms of not just chapter two verses one to three, but at the end of chapter three as well, the question now becomes: how will humanity again enjoy this rest? And the answer, of course, is only redemptively. We don’t know yet at this point how that’s going to happen. But somehow God’s got to make a way, if it’s going to happen at all; it has to come from God’s side to restore man so that he can enjoy God’s rest with him. And so in Genesis 3:15, we read of a promise of a champion who will come and defeat the tempter. The implication is he’ll fix this mess that the tempter has brought into humanity. And then in chapter 3 verse 21, God goes back to work again. He makes these coats of skin for Adam and Eve and He clothes them. So now he’s back to work. He’s resting on his Sabbath, but he’s going to work in another way. In fact, Jesus picks this up in John 5, verse 17. He says, “My father has been working until now, and I am working.” So God is in his rest—that is, he’s resting from the creation that he’s done. That’s finished. He’s told us that. But he’s working now in another sense. He’s working to restore the rest for the people of God.

So Genesis 2 and verse 1, the work of creation is finished. And then after chapter 3, God is going now to another kind of work. So it’s not just Genesis 3:15 that sounds this note of the Bible’s salvation story. But in a sense, we can go before Genesis 3:15 and that promise, to Genesis 2 verses 1 to 3, to see what the story of the Bible is going to be about. It’s a salvation story: restoring rest, bringing humanity to enjoy the rest of God. And as I’ll show in a minute, Hebrews chapter 4 makes exactly that connection.

Okay, so Genesis 2 verses 1 to 3 is the beginning of a developing theme of rest that goes through the entire Bible and, in fact, carries the entire Bible story. Now, if you can remember a couple of years ago, I went through that long series of messages on the Bible story of salvation. Presently, we’re doing the Bible doctrine of salvation, but you remember we had the Bible story of salvation. One of the things I emphasized was that there are any number of themes in the Bible that carry the whole story. Creation, new creation—this is one of them. Rest, rest regained. Paradise, paradise lost, paradise regained—that’s the whole Bible story. You have the idea of God’s son, Adam, who is an unfaithful son pointing forward to the faithful son who comes. And the scriptures work out these themes in that way. This is one of those whole-Bible themes that’s introduced for us already in chapter 2 verses 1 to 3.

Now the word “Sabbath” is not mentioned here in verses one to three specifically, just the verb: God rested. That’s what Sabbath means—rest. And just the verb form is here: God rested. And now we have then pointing forward to the whole course of human history. The goal of human history is to reenter God’s rest or to be restored to God’s rest. Now with that, we have a corresponding theme of humanity in its unrest or in its restlessness. So chapter three, verses 16 and 17, we have God pronouncing a curse in judgment against the created order. And upon humanity specifically, toil is imposed because of Adam’s sin.

Another interesting one, if you’d like to look over, look at chapter 5, verses 28 and 29. We’re looking at a long genealogy here, which we will get to, Lord willing, eventually. I have a book at home called Enjoying the Boring Parts of the Bible. And one of the chapters is on genealogy. I haven’t read it yet, but we will get there. And hopefully it won’t be boring. Genesis 5:28–29: “When Lamech lived 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying, ‘Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us rest (or relief—could translate it rest) from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.'” Now there’s an intended pun here in the Hebrew. Noah is the name, and the rest that he gives is—it’s Noach and Naham. It’s an intended pun. It’s just that this word “relief” in our translation is the verb form of the name Noah. So there’s an intended pun. Noah’s going to give rest, and so let’s call him Rest. That’s his name.

So again, the idea of the humanity and its restlessness and its sin. We come to Exodus. We have the opening chapters there telling us of the people of Israel in bondage and toil under a Pharaoh who couldn’t care less about them. We come to Numbers; we have the people in the wilderness, no place to call home. We have the historical books of the Old Testament. We have the enemies of Israel. We have continual threats against Israel. We have wars, restlessness in that sense. One book of the Old Testament is given to the restlessness of humanity theme, and that’s the book of Ecclesiastes. “Vanity” is the word it uses there. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. I’ve tasted everything that life has to offer under the sun, and it just doesn’t pay off.” Restlessness of humanity. Paul picks that up in Romans chapter 8 as well. The whole creation groaning. And we groaning with it. Even us who are redeemed. Groaning with creation. Waiting for a better day.

This restless theme is dominant. We find it in the prophets as well. We have the raging nations and the oppressions. We have Israel in exile. In fact, in Lamentations, which we’ve been studying in our Wednesday night prayer group together, Lamentations twice actually uses this word to describe the condition of Israel. Lamentations 1 verse 3: “Judah has gone into exile because of affliction and hard servitude. She will dwell now among the nations but finds no resting place.” Lamentations 5 and verse 5: “Our pursuers are at our necks. We are weary. We are given no rest.” And again, it’s that Noah word that’s being used there. So we have this broad theme of the restlessness of sin, the restlessness of suffering, the restlessness of death. Yes? Yes, very good. I didn’t think to mention that. Thank you. Very good. And then we come to the New Testament and we have Israel in its own land, but it’s languishing under the Roman rule and chafing under the oppression there. Everywhere then we find this portrayal of sickness, suffering, death, injustice, restlessness, the unrest of humanity.

The Development of the Rest Theme

All right, that’s the backdrop of it. But with all of that, we have this developing theme of rest. And the next time it crops up really in the Old Testament in a significant way is Exodus chapter 16. You’ll remember there that the Israelites, from the wilderness of Zin and just prior to going to Sinai, they’re complaining to Moses and Aaron, “We’re hungry, we don’t have enough food to eat, we should have died back in Egypt. If we’d have stayed in Egypt, we wouldn’t have died; we’d have had food to eat at least,” and griping and complaining to Moses. And you remember how God responds to that. He said, “I’ll give them this manna”—this “what you call it?” That’s what the word means. “What is it?” Yeah, that’s what it is. “What is it?” That’s what you call it. It’s manna, we call it. That’s kind of a transliteration. That’s how God gives that.

And he tells them, he says, you can gather one day’s worth. So you can do that. People, of course, got it for two days and brought it, and it didn’t work out. But now on a sixth day, you can gather for two days. That way you have it for the seventh day. Because you can’t gather on the seventh day. Seventh day you just rest. And so God gave them double on the sixth day so they have the seventh day to rest. So God is supplying for Israel, and that’s the way he supplied for them for the 40 years through the wilderness wanderings. God raining bread down on them each day, except the seventh day; he provided for that on the sixth day, so that on the seventh day they could rest. Now that’s not yet the Jewish Sabbath that we’ll find in Exodus chapter 20. It’s much less restrictive than the Jewish Sabbath that comes under Mosaic law in Exodus 20. The only restriction is, at this point, don’t gather the manna. But it’s preparation for the weekly Sabbath that is to come and be articulated in other ways. So here we have, in Exodus 16 already, some idea of God providing rest for the people in his grace, and a weekly reminder that God is the one who provides rest.

I’m having to run through these, but each of these we could stop and develop further, but I want you to see this theme of God providing rest developing. Then we come to Exodus chapter 20, and we have the fourth commandment. Keep the Sabbath day holy. The seventh day, keep it holy. We come to Exodus chapter 31. We are told this is the sign of the covenant. So in one sense, this is the most important of the commands to Israel, the Sabbath day, because it’s the covenant sign. And that’s why you have expressions like in Exodus 31: “above all, above all, above all, keep my Sabbaths.” This is the heart of the covenant. This is the sign of the covenant. No work. Only rest. No plowing, no harvesting, no carrying of burdens, no gathering sticks. You don’t light a fire. You don’t cook in the oven. You just rest. That’s what this day is about.

And the significance of the Sabbath is stated for us in Exodus 20, verses 8 through 11, where he tells us you keep the seventh day holy because—because why? Because in six days the Lord made heaven and earth. So this rest of God set the template for the rest that Israel is to enjoy. And the specific reason for this Sabbath rest now imposed in the Mosaic code is it’s to be commemorative of God’s rest—reminiscent of God’s rest in Genesis chapter 2. And you have this weekly reminder of Genesis 2 verses 1 to 3 that God made us for rest. And there’s this weekly reminder of that, at least if they’re thinking carefully. So in a sense, the Mosaic command to keep the Sabbath weekly is both commemorative, looking back to creation, and in that sense, if you were interpreting it rightly, it’s prospective as well. It’s looking back to what God did and established and prospective to what he will do again—the rest that he will give us once again redemptively.

Now we come to Deuteronomy chapter 5. This redemptive significance of the rest of the Sabbath command is stated. He says, Deuteronomy 5:15, “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. The Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” Don’t you see that now in Exodus 20? The reason stated for keeping the Sabbath day, the seventh day, is God’s creation rest. In Deuteronomy 5, the reason stated for keeping the Sabbath is because God redeemed you. And I think built into that, again, is this idea of prospect, looking forward, being reminded that God has created us for rest. And in fact, he’s redeemed us for just that purpose. And so we have this rest theme tied here explicitly in Deuteronomy 5 to the idea of redemption. This rest is for fallen humanity under a curse. Rest for fallen humanity is redemption.

Now, this Sabbath command, this weekly Sabbath in Exodus 20, becomes, in the Mosaic law in Leviticus, the basis of other holidays—holy days—that were given to Israel to observe. So, in Leviticus chapter 16, you have the Day of Atonement. That is a Sabbath to be observed. In Leviticus chapter 23 you have the Feast of Trumpets, the Feast of Tabernacles, the Sabbatical Year, the Year of Jubilee. All of these are Sabbaths that are given to Israel and all of them, notice—the Feast of Tabernacles, Trumpets, Sabbatical Year, the Day of Atonement, particularly Jubilee—they just shout of the idea of rest, freedom, restoration. And so you have the solemn reminders in Exodus and Leviticus: “keep my Sabbaths, keep my Sabbaths.” And all of these are in some way reflective of the rest that God established in Genesis 2. And then there’s this idea of anticipation or prospect built into it.

Now all of that, in turn, is of very strict covenantal importance. Remember Exodus chapter 31. God imposed the Sabbath on Israel as the sign of the covenant. The Noahic covenant, the sign is the rainbow. Abrahamic covenant, the sign is circumcision. The sign of the Mosaic covenant is the Sabbath, and so it becomes very important. And so you have, for example, that man in Numbers chapter 15—on the Sabbath day, he’s out gathering sticks. You remember what happened to him? Put him to death. Why? He’s violated the heart of the covenant. This is the sign of the covenant. Don’t you dare violate that. We come to the prophets, and we have the prophets urging the people of Israel to keep their Sabbaths, warning them that if they do not keep their Sabbaths, God will be angered. And then we have exile of Israel, which was specifically because of Israel’s failure to keep their Sabbath years.

The Goal of Human History

All right, so what’s that all about and where’s it going? And how’s it significant in the larger biblical story? Well, we have actually some further developments of the rest theme in the Old Testament. And it becomes increasingly obvious that Israel’s rest was to be enjoyed not simply in a day, but their rest was to be observed in the land that God had given them. Their land is their rest. And so Joshua led the people of God into their rest. That becomes a very important issue. We’ll see that in a moment in Psalm 95. David, as king over Israel, fights off all their enemies, defeats them all, and gives his people rest. So they’re dwelling in their own land, dwelling securely. There’s more key terminology that’s carried in with this: given peace in their land, they’re in security, dwelling securely in their land—just any number of passages that deal with that. Along with that, when Israel is in her land—this is true in the case of Joshua, Judges, as well as later—when they’re delivered from their enemies, the result is they were given rest. There’s that word again, cropping up.

David was a man of war. And because of his successful military campaigns against the enemies, he brought rest to his people. That’s 2 Samuel 7 verses 1 and 11, if you would like. He brought rest by his military conquests. And then, if you’d like, go ahead and look at 1 Chronicles 22 verse 9. Another occurrence of this that I think is interesting. And we’ll notice here that the word “rest” becomes coupled often in the Old Testament with “peace.” Well, if you have rest, you have peace; you have peace, you have rest—you can see how they’re related. Not linguistically, but conceptually, these terms are related. And we find that showing up here in 1 Chronicles 22—I’ll begin with verse 7:

“David said to Solomon, ‘My son, I had it in my heart to build a house to the name of the Lord my God. But the word of the Lord came to me saying, “You have shed much blood and have waged great wars. You shall not build a house to my name because you have shed so much blood before me on the earth. Behold, (here’s our verse) a son shall be born to you who shall be a man of rest. (There’s our Noah word again.) He’ll be a man of rest. I will give him rest from all his surrounding enemies. Why? For his name shall be called Shlomo, because I will give him Shalom.”‘”

Shalom or peace. His name means peace. “I will call him peace because he will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days.” So here we have this rest theme cropping up again. Solomon is going to be a king over which Israel will have rest in their land. We can’t track it out in any more detail, but in the prophets we have the same kind of thing. In Isaiah in particular, we have salvation promised. And the salvation to Israel that’s promised is couched often in the terms of giving them rest. Rest from suffering, rest from their enemies, rest from sickness, giving them safety. So this rest theme is important in the prophets as well. And it of course points to the time of the messianic age when the Messiah will come. He’ll establish God’s rule and God’s kingdom on the earth and it will be a time of rest.

Now I’ve mentioned—wow, time is going. I want you to see Psalm 95. Psalm 95. Here we have a psalm of praise. And in this psalm of praise, we have an invitation to come and worship. He’s Lord over the earth, and He is the one before whom we must bow and worship. So let’s pick it up. Psalm 95 verse 6: “O come, let us worship and bow down.” Some of our contemporary praise songs you’ll hear here. “Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker. For He is our God. We are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. Today…” Notice that word, “today.” I’ll get back to that. “Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, and at Massah… when your forefathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For 40 years, I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people who go astray in their hearts. They have not known my ways.’ Therefore, I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.'”

So he’s talking about that first generation that came out of Egypt, complaining against God, murmuring all the time. God says, “I loathe those people.” That’s why I didn’t let them into the rest. Joshua led the people of God into the rest. But not these people. This generation had to die off first. So we have this invitation here to come and worship God and enjoy the blessedness of being his people. And he compares it to the rest that is enjoyed by the people of God. And that with a caution, verses 7 to 11: don’t be like them. They blew it and they couldn’t enter into the rest. The implication is today you can enter into this rest as you bow before this maker. So there’s some sense, he’s telling us here in Psalm 95, some sense in which Joshua’s rest did not exhaust God’s intended rest for his people. There’s something more. So we have the psalmist coming hundreds of years later after Joshua saying, “Today, you can enter that rest.”

Now, Hebrews will pick that up in a minute. Before we get there, let me note just a couple of other things. Matthew 1, verse 21. You remember the name given to Jesus. You will call his name Yeshua. Now, in Greek, that’s Iesous, or Jesus. In Hebrew, Yeshua, Joshua. So we have a new Joshua coming to lead the people into rest. Well, you’ll call his name Yeshua because he will save his people from their sins. You see these themes coming together?

In Luke chapter 4, one of my favorite scenes in the Bible—one of those “I wish I could have been there” moments. Jesus is at the synagogue in Nazareth. It’s on the Sabbath day, and he asks for the Isaiah scroll to be read. And he unrolls it, and he gets to what for us is Isaiah 61, where it’s speaking of the servant. “Spirit of the Lord, God is upon me. I’ve come to proclaim good news to the poor, to give healing, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” What’s that? It’s the year of jubilee. “I’ve come to proclaim jubilee, this great rest enjoyed by the people of God in the Old Testament. I’ve come to tell you what it’s all about and what it’s really pointing to.” In other words, he’s filling it with what we would call redemptive-historical significance. It was pointing ahead to me.

In Matthew chapter 11—I’d love to spend an hour on this. Jesus and his disciples are walking past a field of grain. And the disciples take a few heads of grain, pop it in their mouth. It’s a Sabbath day. Pharisees are all over them. “Ah, you’re harvesting on the Sabbath. It’s a violation of the law.” And Jesus did not respond to them the easy way. He could have said, “Come on guys, get off it. Moses didn’t forbid this. In fact, Moses’ law especially provided for walking past—you can grab it to eat if you’re hungry. That, what they did, is not what Moses was forbidding. End of discussion, over.” That’s not what Jesus did. Instead, Jesus turns the whole episode to an occasion for a Christological manifesto. “I’m an exceptional case. And by extension, they’re an exceptional case.” You know, they didn’t like that. And he gets through with it and he says, “Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath.” Oh, what does that mean? Lord of the Sabbath. Well, it means he can do with it what he wants. Well, just what is he going to do with it? Well, we turn the page. That’s chapter 12. Turn the page back and what do you find? The very previous words before that episode. Jesus says, “Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Filling the rest theme again with more redemptive significance.

John chapter 5, Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath. That’s a violation of the Sabbath again, as far as the Pharisees are concerned. And Jesus responds by what I said earlier: “My father has been working until now and I have been working.” So he links his work with the work that God resumed or took up in Genesis chapter 2. After he’d finished his work of creation, he took up another work. God the Father has been working until now, and I have been working. In other words, I’ve been with Him doing His work all along. And so in some sense now, there’s something about Jesus’ healing of this man on the Sabbath that’s particularly appropriate. Again, I’d love to expound that passage, but that’s another time.

More specifically, we come to Colossians chapter 2. Well-known verse, I’ll just read it for you, where the Apostle Paul gives us an explicit interpretation. “Let no one pass judgment on you in question of food and drink, or with respect to a festival, or a new moon, or a Sabbath.” Why? Let no one judge you about keeping a Sabbath. Why? “These are shadow of things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.” That is to say, if you were reading your Bible correctly, all of those Sabbath things cropping up—they were pointing ahead to Jesus and a rest that he gives; that’s where it’s going. These are shadows. So just as Jesus is the prophet, just as Jesus is the priest, just as Jesus is the king, he’s the tabernacle, the temple, he’s also the rest—the Sabbath. It pointed forward to him. There’s a prophetic note to the Sabbath intended all along. So we were right, evidently, in sensing some note of anticipation back in Genesis chapter 2. That’s where the rest of the Bible takes us with it.

And then we come to Hebrews chapter 4. I don’t have time—our time is going to be up if I take time to read the whole passage. But here, the writer to Hebrews—chapters three and four actually, but the early verses of four especially—here he links this idea of rest both to Genesis chapter two and to Psalm 95. And he zeroes in on that “today” in Psalm 95. And he reasoned like this. He says, “Now, wait a minute. Well, think about it. If the Psalmist coming around hundreds of years later said, ‘Today, don’t miss entering into this rest,’ and that’s hundreds of years after Joshua led the people into rest, evidently what Joshua did wasn’t the big thing. There’s a bigger thing to come.” And of course, Hebrews interprets that for us in terms of the rest that Jesus gives and the rest that we will enjoy eternally in Christ.

So salvation then is the rest. This is the Bible story—this taking us from rest to unrest and restlessness to final rest again. And of course, that’s our testimony, isn’t it? This is not just theoretical teaching. This is our testimony. We labored under sin, under conviction. In Jesus, we found rest. Conscience is at rest. At peace with God, we found rest. And by the way, this deals with the heart of the covenant. Don’t you dare pick up a stick. Don’t you dare add an element of your work to this. This is Jesus. He established this rest for us.

So we have rest now; it’s been realized in Jesus. And yet, more of this “now and not yet” that we keep seeing in the Bible. And yet, there’s still a sense of restlessness about us, isn’t there? Paul takes it up in Romans chapter 8; we’re groaning with all of creation, waiting for the redemption of our bodies, the full manifestation of our sonship. There’s still this restlessness. Let me jump through a lot here and go to Revelation chapter 14. I’ll just read it for you. It describes the glorified state of believers in just these kinds of terms: “Those who have followed the Lamb will enjoy rest from their labors.” That’s just a wonderfully suggestive thing, isn’t it? What’s the eternal state going to be like? Well, one answer to give is it’s going to be rest from our labors. I don’t think that means we’ll sit around on a cloud and play a harp and be bored. I think there’ll be work in some broad sense to do. We’ll talk about that a little bit later in the series. But rest from our labors is what we’re given in the eternal state.

And by contrast, Revelation 14 verse 11 speaks of the destiny of the wicked. “They will have no rest day or night forever.” Revelation 21: this rest will be in the very presence of God. There’ll be no temple there because God and the Lamb—they are its temple. No sun there because they’ve got God and the Lamb; that’s the brightness of the place. And the scene is all described, as you know, Revelation 21 and 22 in terms reminiscent of Eden. There’s the river of life and there’s the tree and delivering its fruit every month. And this is the “back to Eden and beyond” theme that we come to in the end of the book of Revelation.

So creation narrative—the creation narrative climaxes in God’s rest. And so then history itself will climax in an enjoyment of God’s rest by the people of God. So when we read Genesis 2:1–3, we are to see that the Sabbath points forward to the rest giver. This works just like all the rest of the Old Testament works with so many different themes. It points us ahead to Jesus, who delivers the rest through his redemptive work.

The Weekly Sabbath Command

Now one question that comes up and I’ll just—I got one minute or so to deal with that. And it’s not enough. But I think you can see the answer pretty clearly. And that is: what about the weekly Sabbath command? Is that still a binding command on Christians today? And I think you can see already then that that’s just not how the New Testament treats it. It takes us in a different direction. It tells us that it pointed ahead to Christ and the rest that we enjoy in Him. And in fact, we have several passages in the New Testament that indicate exactly the opposite. Romans chapter 14: it’s the weaker brother that observes days. Colossians chapter 2: these are shadows; don’t let anybody judge you in those terms. Galatians chapter 4: Paul’s wondering about the Galatians’ reality of their faith because they’re observing Sabbaths.

Many in the reformed tradition—and here we go quite against the reformed tradition—but many in the reformed tradition have argued that Sabbath keeping, resting on the seventh day, was a creation ordinance. That is, just like marriage: creation ordinance. Work is a creation ordinance. So also keeping the Sabbath is a creation ordinance. That’s their argument. I think the response is to say that, number one, there’s no indication of that in Genesis 2 anywhere. No indication that it was set aside for man. No command to observe. No evidence that anyone did observe it. And it was not imposed until Exodus chapter 16. So there’s no hint of that as a creation ordinance. It was a sign of the old covenant. It would have been binding so long as that covenant was in force. And then we come to the New Testament and Jesus and his apostles both take it in a different direction. They take it in a redemptive-historical sense, pointing ahead to Jesus and the rest that we have in him.

Now there’s much more to say there. The question then comes up: what about church attendance on Sunday? And there are lots of reasons to attend church on Sunday, just not Sabbath reasons, okay? This is the day that commemorates the resurrection of Jesus. This is the example of the early church meeting on the first day. And if you don’t have anything else, we’re commanded to do it, to meet together in Hebrews chapter 10—don’t forsake the assembling of yourselves. There are lots of good reasons to attend church; they’re just not Sabbath reasons, except in its redemptive-historical sense that we come to commemorate our Sabbath. But the Sabbath is not the seventh day. The Sabbath is the seventh day. Our rest is in Jesus and we meet on the first day to commemorate his resurrection.

All right, that was a lot. I wanted to run through it all at once. If you have a quick question, we can do that, but that’s all.