In the Beginning: A God Who Rests

Alright, this is God's word. Genesis 2:1-3.

Thus, the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host 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.

That's God's word. So, again, we're going to look at God's sabbatical. We're going to look at ours and we're going to look at Christ. That's our outline if you're taking notes.

God's Sabbatical

So, to begin, let's look at God's sabbatical. Now a couple of weeks ago, Jeff talked about the six days of creation and the poetic structure that Genesis kind of lays out, right? And for those of you who may have missed it or if you don't remember, three of the days correspond with three of the other days, right? There are three different locations and then three different rulers of those locations, right? Culminating in the creation of mankind who's kind of the preeminent ruler that God creates, okay? And then, the poem continues. It doesn't end in chapter one. It continues through this first part of chapter two and the culmination of the poem is God stopping.

Now, the first thing we gotta talk about is why? Why does God stop? You know, if you know nothing else about God, if you've never read any other part of the Bible, you might be convinced that he was tired. I mean, he'd done a lot in six days, right? It's like, I've created everything and I'm spent, right? But that's not what's going on. In fact, the rest of scripture is emphatic that God doesn't need rest. Over and over, it stresses how we can rest in him because he's always at work. Psalm 121, for example, says:

He neither slumbers nor sleeps.

God doesn't get tired. So, why does he stop? Why does he stop? It's my contention that the reason that God stops is he stops to celebrate. He stops to rejoice, to bask in what he had done.

Now, I'm not a very good painter but every now and then, I get a good one. And it's usually around because I start painting when the kids go to bed. It's usually like around eleven or twelve at night when I finish up. Katie's asleep. Everybody in the house is asleep and it's just me and that painting and sometimes, I just sit there and I look at it. Most of the time, I look at it and I go, ugh. But every now and then, I'm like, hey, that's a good one. I'm hanging on to that one.

God had painted a good one, right? Everything God does is good. And He had completed every aspect of creation and even along the different days He pauses to celebrate. It was good. It was good. It was good. And then it was very good. But that's not enough for God. That's not enough celebrating for what he had done, right? He pauses everything on the seventh day and says this is a day to celebrate. I'm going to stop.

And it's important to note a couple of things about this celebration. It's active, right? When I was writing this sermon, I often listen to music when I'm writing sermons and every now and then a song comes on that just eerily fits. And so I was working on this point of the sermon and as I was working on it, no kidding, Louis Armstrong's "It's a Wonderful World" comes on. And I just pictured God basking in His creation and Louis Armstrong singing "I see trees of green, red roses too, right?" Like, that's what he's doing. He's basking in it.

And another thing to note about this is in poetry, and Jeff talked a lot about it, he's an English major. I was a history major, so I'm not as confident talking about poetic structure. But in Hebrew poetry, the number seven is incredibly significant. Now you could argue that it's incredibly significant because of this, right? But for whatever reason, the number seven throughout all of Jewish literature is symbolic of completeness, wholeness, and a word we like to use a lot around here, shalom. Peace. Everything is full. God stops, right? Because there's nothing else to do. He's done it. It's perfect.

Imagine that. In my painting, right? I said that a lot of times they're bad. A lot of the times the reason they're bad is because I overworked them. Katie will actually go to sleep sometimes and I'll be working on a painting. She'll be like, that's pretty good and then she'll wake up the next morning and she'll go, what happened? God doesn't do that. He stops when it's complete and he celebrates because it's perfect. Everything he had done was good and perfect.

Now, here's the thing. I want you to think about this. How often do you celebrate creation? How often do you remember that you're a part of creation and how often do you think about the fact that God celebrates that? I think in these challenging times, it's easy for us to kind of start to lose some of our self worth, right? We talk about being made in the image of God.

God celebrates that. When you come into worship, do you think about the fact that God is celebrating you in a sense on the Sabbath? I hope you do, because that is a part of how this was created. It's supposed to be a party, right? This is supposed to be something that we're excited about doing and something that makes us go.

There's one other thing I want to pull out from this text that I want you to notice poetically. There's only one day that doesn't have a morning and an evening, and it's this one. There's a sense in which the writer is hinting at the fact that this rest of God is eternal and everlasting. He was done and he created this moment of rest, this glorious celebration, and it's something that's meant to go on and on and on. No morning, no evening—eternity. Brothers and sisters, when we glimpse at these first few passages of Genesis chapter two, we're gazing at the eternal celebration that we are headed towards and we're gazing at the eternal celebration that mankind was created into. You've gotta keep that in mind for how we celebrate.

The Royal Nature of God's Rest

There's another thing I want you to see from this: the royal nature of this celebration. Remember the poetic structure of the six days, right? Space and then ruler. Space, ruler, space, ruler. And then in the seventh day, we get the ruler of all.

There are a couple of other places in scripture where it talks about God resting, and you know where those are? It's when it talks about him on his throne. His throne is in heaven. His footstool is earth.

Isaiah 66

He rests on that throne, right? It talks about the temple and the tabernacle where he rests, where he resides, where he rules. So there's a sense in which the seventh day, in addition to being a celebration, is a royal celebration. It's almost a coronation, right? God who has created all sits and rests and rules over everything.

But this isn't a royal celebration for just the Godhead. It's not just the Trinity that's enjoying this royal celebration. All of creation is invited in, right? Do you see that? His co-rulers, if you will, his vassal rulers—mankind—are a part of the celebration. This is a royal celebration that includes all that he's created and the rulers that are ruling over different parts of creation that he's set up.

Now, to the original audience, this would have been really stark. The ancient gods were kind of like superheroes who randomly did things. And as a history major, I can be confident. I studied ancient history. I know about ancient religions. The Sumerians—you know how they viewed their gods in the Middle East? They were slave drivers. That's how they viewed their gods. And the way they viewed the afterlife was like this eternal dusty world where you dwelled working for the gods forever.

The Israelites had experience of the Egyptian gods, who were not gods overall, right? Notice God is God overall. This introduction of him on the throne of all creation would have been a stark contrast to the Egyptian gods who were like gods over a little separate things—like the Nile, the sun, the sky—the different kinds of gods, right? He's bigger. Notice that. But notice also, like those Egyptian gods, they too were slave drivers. They worked for their purposes, and humanity existed to serve them at their own cost. "We made you," the god said, "to be for us."

In this picture, we have a God who is joyfully celebrating with his people. This is radically different than anything else in the ancient Near East, and I think it's radically different than any other religion that the world has ever seen. Because here is a God who creates rest, a big party, and invites everyone into it rather than making a party for himself and having everyone else be the servant. He's essentially giving rest to everyone.

Now, as we go forward in Genesis, we're going to see in the next section that God gives mankind a job. There's work, right? But that work comes out of that rest. It's not like there was something that was hinged on them, something dependent upon them that they had to do in order to make it work. They were working out of the complete rest of God. That's this moment. That's Genesis two.

But that's radically different than what we experience when we experience the Sabbath, because there's this big event that happened between then and now, and that was the fall. And I want you to see that as we move through Genesis. We'll talk more about this, but if I can, for just a moment, I want to frame the fall in light of the Sabbath. I want you to see that what Adam and Eve did in sinning—that original sin—part of what they did was they overworked the painting. God stopped because it was complete. Everything was good.

Satan slithers in and he suggests to Adam and Eve, "Maybe it's not all that good. Maybe if you did a little bit more than what God has appointed for you to do, maybe if you took matters into your own hands, you could make it a little better. You'd be like God." And so there's a sense in which the original sin was overworking, not resting.

There's a sense in which the curse very poetically follows the nature of that sin. If Adam and Eve overworked the painting, God condemned them to death by overworking. He curses them to toil—and that's starkly different than the work that Adam and Eve are given in chapter two. It's suddenly like this is going to be frustrating for you. There's going to be all this pressure on you. You're going to have to take matters into your own hands. Well, here you go. Try doing it on your own and see how that goes. And you'll turn back into dust. That's the curse.

A Gospel Message Woven Into Creation

But there's also, in addition to the curse being framed in death by overworking, a gospel message that comes right away, and that's the Sabbath. God doesn't take it away. He hardwires it into all of creation. Try going without sleep for any amount of time. He builds that need into creation. Why? So that he can point back to the rest that we were created in.

Not only that, when he brings his people out of slavery—out of literal slavery—he gives them this fourth commandment about honoring the Sabbath. He makes sure that they're going to give themselves one out of seven days to rest, and not just themselves but others. Not just one day out of seven, but once every seven years they're going to rest the land, and once every seven times seven years, there's going to be this glorious year of Jubilee where they celebrate and everything returns back to the way it was. All the land reverts back to its original owners. The slaves are set free. Debts are canceled. It's a big party.

Can you imagine? I'm ready for a year of Jubilee. After the years we've had—the last year and a half feels like fifty years. Are you ready for a year of Jubilee? Ready for things to go back to the way they were?

God built this into the rhythms of his people so that they would remember where they came from and they would remember where they're going. It was a promise. Just like when God said, "One day, Eve, you're going to give birth to a kid and he's going to stamp on the head of that serpent," there was this promise given to Israel that rest would be theirs again.

Rest After the Fall

Now, celebrating that kind of prescribed rest in light of the fall is different, isn't it, than what we see in Genesis 2? It's a little harder.

You guys did a great job the last three months of shielding me from all kinds of concerns. Elizabeth and I were just talking before the service and she said, "Welcome back. Just so you know, there's still a pandemic." We were planning on having it all gone by the time you got back, but that didn't work out. But you guys did a great job. Nobody contacted me with lots of needs. I kind of traipsed into the summer—I was footloose and fancy for three months. So thank you for that. That was really, really nice and that was a gift. I know that wasn't easy.

Because here's the deal: it's hard to rest in this world, isn't it? Because there is a pandemic. There is lots of tension. There's stuff to do. There's stuff we gotta get done, and it's challenging to rest. No longer is our rest a rest of "ah." Often it's a rest of "ah." And that's okay. It's meant to be a relief. God has given us this as a way to essentially take a break from the toil, the curse of the fall.

It's okay to come in here tired and sad and exhausted and not feeling like celebrating. Even though the Sabbath is about celebrating, it's meant to be a relief to you. It's okay to come in and remember the promises of God and not immediately jump up and down, but to just sigh and relax.

But that rest is meant to be restorative. It's meant to give you that sigh so that you can get to joy. It's meant to restore you just like sleep restores your body. When you come in to worship, we're meant to reassure each other, to remind each other of where we were created and where we're going, and that is meant to restore our souls, to enliven them, to take them from their place of pain and hurt and suffering. We hear the promise that God is taking us somewhere, and it revives us back into a worshipful, celebratory kingdom under the great King. We're meant to get revived back to our royal status—ready to party in eternity with our great God of the Sabbath. It's meant to be restorative.

You know, a lot of us don't do it though. It's hard, right? When everything's pressing in on you. I think about the Snickers commercials. Do you remember those? Where people get grumpy and all of a sudden they turn into different people and then they have a Snickers bar and they're back to normal, right? The Sabbath is supposed to be like that. But when we're hangry, oftentimes the last thing we think about is eating.

Someone told me recently, they said parenthood—Bronze, this is for you—parenthood is eighteen years of convincing someone that they need a nap. Sometimes I feel like pastoring is that. Wonder if God feels like that. It's like all this time of trying to convince us that we just need to rest in him.

Another thing I think that you've gotta think about in terms of the restorative nature of the Sabbath post-fall is that it's not just for you. I remember being in seminary and we were having lunch, sitting around with a group of other seminary students. We're all Pharisees in training. So we're having a conversation about what exactly is lawful on the Sabbath, right? I mean it was like straight out of the gospels. Like, do you eat out? Only at Chick-fil-A, right? That kind of stuff.

We were talking about that and sitting next to us at a table by himself was an esteemed professor of ours. Won't say who because he'd be embarrassed and he'd be mad at me for telling about him. But we said to him, "Doctor, what do you do on the Sabbath?" And he goes, "Well, the Sabbath is the day that my wife and I go over the catechism questions with the homeless people living with us." And we all just went silent. To this day, I'm not sure if he was kidding.

Think about that year of Jubilee. Think about the restorative nature of the Sabbath. It's not just an individual thing. The prisoners were set free. In both accounts of the fourth commandment, it says you shouldn't work, but neither should your manservant nor your maidservant, right?

Because you know what it's like to be slaves — Deuteronomy

So don't enslave other people. This is why we're big on talking about justice. It's not because it's like a buzzword recently. It's because this is hardwired into the Sabbath reality we came from and the Sabbath reality we're going to. It ought to be a part of our discussion at that seminary table—like, what are we doing in order to ensure others can rest?

Often we don't think about that, and that is a part of Sabbath rest. It's figuring out how we collectively rest, all of us. How do we give that to the world? It's a picture, right, of what God's doing. So that ought to be part of the discussion.

Sabbath as an Act of Faith

Last thing that I want to say in terms of God's rest in the context of the fall before we look at Christ is how it's an act of faith. It is an act of huge faith. In fact, I think it takes so much faith that I'm confident saying I can't do it. Faith is really hard. We like to think of faith as really easy sometimes, but it's really hard to believe. And it is really hard in the middle of a workday when you've got so many things pressing in on you to stop working. You only do that if you believe that there's a sovereign God that's in control of everything and he's got it. And often we don't. Often we think we got it. Often we want to overwork the painting. We're gonna keep going.

Elliot Grudem, who's pastor here, used to be senior pastor, has preached a sermon here at this church I think three times on Mary and Martha. And I'll never forget the first time he preached it. I was working at Saint David's School and I was overworking every painting. Like I had just started there. I was gonna prove myself to everybody. I was there until all hours of the night. Meanwhile, we had our first baby. I was going hard and heavy. And Elliot said as part of that sermon, I'll never forget this question. He says, "If you get to the end of the day and you feel like you don't have enough time to do all the things that God's called you to do, maybe he hasn't called you to do all of them."

Almost every day I ask myself that question at the end of the day. Has God called me to do all of this? Because he's the God of the Sabbath, right? But it takes incredible faith to think that God doesn't work through me.

One of the things that I was talking to this older pastor about this summer—we were talking about different callings that he'd had. He was called to this, called to that. How did he know he was called to do this versus called to do that? Don't you have those discussions, right? Isn't that what's frustrating about that question about, you know, did God call you to do all of this at the end of the day? You're like, well, maybe some of it. I don't know.

I was asking this guy about that. I was like, how do I know if I'm called? He was telling me stories about things that he was called to. He told me this one story about this Bible study in New York City. They called him up and had him teach and he apparently went really well because they called him back and said, "Hey, we really need you to come up here and start a church." And he felt very strongly that he wasn't called to New York City. And so he said no, but he said, "You know, I know this guy in Virginia. You should talk to him." That was a guy named Tim Keller. He went on to start Redeemer, write a lot of books. Some of you have heard of him because we quote him in about every fifth sermon or so, right?

I was talking to this guy and said, "Do you realize that you may have uttered the no that God used the most in our generation?" And I don't mean that to be offensive to him. He's a great pastor. But he's like, "Yeah, I know." Why don't we celebrate the people who step back as much as we celebrate the people who step forward? I think we ought to. I think we ought to because our God is a God of rest and he works through lots of people and it doesn't always have to be you or me or us. We can rest in him. But that's hard.

Jesus and the Sabbath

I want to conclude by looking at Jesus. It seems like a good thing for a Christian pastor to conclude with. Jesus is in the passage, by the way, right? It's the triune God who creates and rests. So he's in there. I want to kind of project to his ministry though and think about how that connects to this passage because it does very clearly.

Here are some things to consider about Jesus and the Sabbath. Did you know that Jesus's public ministry began on the Sabbath? Right? He stood up and he reads from the scroll in Isaiah. This is Luke chapter four and this is what the scroll says. See if you pick up on any Sabbath themes.

The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to set at liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. — Luke 4

That's another word for the year of Jubilee. Jesus shows up and he says, "I'm ushering in the Sabbath of Sabbaths. I'm here. I'm coming to do that."

And in three different versions of the gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the synoptics—all three of them make a point of this exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees where he proclaims himself Lord of the Sabbath. Now, when you're just reading the gospels, you can feel like, okay, well, what he's saying is, "I'm the one who's in charge of what's permissible in the Sabbath, right?" But I want you to think back to Genesis two in the throne room. Who's the lord of the Sabbath? Right? You've got the lord of the heavens—the stars and the moon—right? And you got the lord of the air and the sea—the birds and the fish. And then you've got the lords of the land and the air and the sea, mankind, right? And then you finally have sitting coronated on his throne above all of it. Who is it? It's the Lord of the Sabbath.

That is absolutely, positively a claim to divinity when Jesus says, "I am the Lord of the Sabbath." The Pharisees knew it. They freaked out, right?

So Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath. He shows up and he says, this is me. And I want you to notice also that his passion week follows the same pattern as creation, right? It's six days of hard work, of suffering, heading towards the cross. He dies. What time? On Friday at 3 PM, before the sun would have set, right? That's because the Jewish Sabbath begins at sunset. So on the Sabbath, Jesus rests in the tomb and then he rises gloriously on the eighth day in a garden. That's why we celebrate on Sunday, brothers and sisters. We celebrate on Sunday because of that resurrection, that eighth day where he rises. We celebrate on Sunday because our rest has been achieved by Christ. We're no longer working towards it. Just like Adam and Eve, we're working out of it, right? Because of all that he's done.

You think about all of that. You think about the fact that the curse really was a poetic kind of punishment for overworking. And what are we called to do in order to be saved? We're called to rest, to trust and rest in the one who rested perfectly. He followed all of God's commands. He did exactly what the Lord said. He didn't overwork the painting of redemption. He did it exactly right so that we can bask in the beauty of what he has given us.

So poetically, undoing the curse is a kind of the opposite, right? Of how we got into this mess. So if you're not a Christian and you're here, you want to know what Christianity teaches? It's different than everybody else.

It's not all this stuff you gotta do. It's just rest. And if you're a Christian and you're here, and I know a lot of you are Christians, can we just rest? Can we remember that that's the gift that Christ gave us?

And that doesn't mean that we've stopped doing what we're doing. That doesn't mean that we're not called to do good works. It means that the work is finished and we're invited into it with no pressure, but only with joy. We get to rule and reign alongside of Jesus. We get to be a part of this not because it's necessary, like he needs us and the pressure's on and you better do it—slave, get to work. No. Sons and daughters. Come join the family business. The business of resting and rejoicing and celebrating for eternity. That's what we're called to, CTK.

So this Sunday, and another Sundays, I hope that as you think about these things that maybe you can get a little bit of what I got this summer. Because that was an incredible gift—a gift from you and a gift from the Lord. But he gives us that every week, every day. So rest in him, will you?

Prayer

Lord Jesus, you are the Lord of the Sabbath and we come to you as Lord, as the Sabbath, needing to rest. It is a hard time with a lot of pressure on us. Lord, will you restore our souls? Will you help us as a community to be a light to others, to be a place of resting, to proclaim your rest to the world, to work so that others may rest as you work so that we might rest?

Lord, may we be people of the Sabbath, underlords of the Sabbath, if you will, who go out proclaiming it and spreading it to everyone. But Lord, help us not to do that work out of our own strength but rather to work out of the rest you've given us. Fill us with joy and faith that it's not up to us. And Lord, you who are always at work do amazing things through us above and beyond all we could ask or imagine. We ask this in your name. Amen.