Genesis 2:1-3 and Psalm 95
An interesting facet of the seventh day is that it’s not closed off with the “evening and morning” motif as the other six days are. In the ancient synagogues the Hebrews would read the account of the seventh day in Gen. 2:1-3 together with Ps. 95,{ii} which warns its readers not to rebel against God like the Exodus generation did and quotes God as saying, “So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’” The fact that they read these passages together implies that the ancient Hebrews understood that God’s Sabbath rest (as described in Gen. 2:1-3) is the same rest that the Exodus generation failed to enter (as described in Ps. 95); and since the readers of Ps. 95 were warned that they could fail to enter this rest as well, it was an event continuing up to the present time.
Hebrews 3-4
When we get to the New Testament, we find this connection stated more explicitly in the epistle to the Hebrews (3:12-4:11). Here, the author expounds upon Ps. 95 by reiterating that the Exodus generation failed to enter into God’s rest, and that this applied to the Hebrews living at the time Ps. 95 was written as well (King David’s time). According to the author of Hebrews, this means that the rest God offered them was not simply entrance into the promised land of Canaan, because when Ps. 95 was written the Jews had been living in the promised land for many generations (4:7-8). The author further maintains that the promise to enter into God’s rest (and the potential for failing to do so) applies to us today (4:1), and that this rest began after God finished creating the universe, thus demonstrating that this rest has been going on for all of human history (4:3b), and is still continuing to the present (4:6). And just in case this isn’t clear enough, the author of Hebrews refers to this rest as the seventh day, and quotes Gen. 2:2 to emphasize the point (4:4).
John 5:17
Jesus expressed a similar idea when he was accused of violating the Sabbath by healing people. He responds by saying “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.” His defense is that he can work on the Sabbath because God has been working until (heos) now; but why should God not be working until now, and why would this justify Jesus working on the Sabbath? Jesus’ argument only makes sense if God’s Sabbath rest (remember, he’s only resting from creating new types of physical things) has been continuing “to this very day,” but he is still at work. In other words, since the Father is still active on God’s Sabbath day, so Jesus can be active on man’s Sabbath day.
This conclusion can also be determined through the contemplation of the nature of God’s Sabbath rest itself: since the Hebrew word for “rest,” shabath, means to cease from some kind of activity, as long as God is experiencing his Sabbath rest, he is in a state of cessation. If his Sabbath is over, he is not in a state of cessation, by definition. But since what God is ceasing from is the activities described in Gen. 1 (namely the creation of new physical types), and since Gen. 2:1-2 says that God completed or finished these acts of creation, he is necessarily still experiencing his Sabbath rest.
Exodus 20:9-11
One possible loophole to all of this is that in the Ten Commandments, God states, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. … For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” This, it is claimed, seems to identify the length of God’s workweek and Sabbath day with ours.
There are several responses that can be made to this: first, God’s workweek and Sabbath are being appealed to as an archetype for our own. But it just does not follow from the fact that God’s workweek is the model for our six days of work and one day of rest that his workweek is temporally identical to ours. The point is the six-plus-one pattern, not how long God’s days are. In fact, when we remember that Moses himself wrote that “For a thousand years in your [God’s] sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night” (Ps. 90:4), it would appear fairly obvious that God’s experience of time is radically different from ours, and this should influence how we understand God’s Sabbath day. So Exod. 20:9-11 is an argument from analogy, not an argument from identity.
[This objection] is not quite conclusive in itself, for one could respond that the readers were aware (from a careful reading of Gen. 1-2) that the days there were unspecified periods of time, and that the Sabbath commandment merely told God’s people that, just as he followed a six-plus-one pattern in creation (six periods of work followed by a period of rest), so they were to follow a six-plus-one pattern in their lives (six days of work followed by a day of rest; also six years of work followed by a Sabbath year of rest, as in Exod. 23:10-11). In fact, in the very next sentence of the Ten Commandments, “day” means “a period of time”: Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you (Exod. 20:12). Certainly here the promise is not for “long” literal days (such as twenty-five- or twenty-six-hour days!), but rather that the period of one’s life may be lengthened upon the earth.{iii}
Moreover, as was just noted, God commands humankind to honor another Sabbath rest by not tilling the ground, and this Sabbath is to be one year out of every seven (Exod. 23:10-12; Lev. 25:1-7). Again, the temporal length is not what parallels God’s week; the six-plus-one pattern is. The number seven is one of the “holy” numbers, in that it represents something divine, and appears an inordinate number of times throughout Scripture.{iv} Of course, the land’s Sabbath rest is never described as a “day,” so the parallel between it and God’s Sabbath is not as direct as that between man’s Sabbath and God’s.
Another scriptural example of an archetype can further illustrate this point: the Feast of Tabernacles (or booths). This was an eight-day long event during which the ancient Hebrews were to live in tents to commemorate the Exodus wanderings (Lev. 23:33-36, 42-43). But it would be absurd to maintain from this that, since the representation is eight days long, the archetype (the Exodus) must also have been eight days long. Obviously, the archetype and the representation are different from each other. The archetype is the “rubber stamp” and the representation is the mark or symbol made by it. The celebrations of the Feast of Booths, Sabbath years, and Sabbath days are supposed to represent events, without regard to their temporal duration.{v}
Sabbath rest vs. Sabbath day
Another possible loophole may be to make a distinction between God’s Sabbath day and his Sabbath rest. That is, maybe the seventh day of creation initiated God’s Sabbath rest, but is not identical to God’s Sabbath rest. Thus, the seventh day of creation was a 24-hour period, but God’s Sabbath rest could be an ongoing event spanning thousands of years.
My immediate response to this is that Heb. 4, in reference to God’s Sabbath rest, quotes Gen. 2:2 which refers to God’s Sabbath day.
Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said,“So I declared on oath in my anger,And yet his work has been finished since the creation of the world. For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: “And on the seventh day God rested from all his work.” And again in the passage above he says, “They shall never enter my rest.”
They shall never enter my rest.”
So Scripture explicitly identifies God’s Sabbath rest with his Sabbath day, and applies it to the exodus generation, King David’s time, and the first century AD when the epistle to the Hebrews was written.
However, one could argue that Heb. 4:8 states that if Joshua had given the ancient Israelites rest (by bringing them into the land of Canaan), “God would not have spoken later about another day.” Since this later day is identified with God’s rest, and since it follows the entrance into Canaan, it can’t be referring to the seventh day of creation which preceded Canaan.
But neither of the “days” in this latter verse refers to the seventh day of creation. They refer to the “day” when the Israelites entered Canaan, and the “day” of King David. They are referring to moments in human history. There is nothing here which would contradict the notion introduced a few verses earlier that God’s Sabbath day overarches all of human history. Not to mention the fact that both of these “days” refer to periods longer than a mere 24 hours.
Typology
A third potential loophole is to note that the letter to the Hebrews uses quite a bit of typology. Roughly, this refers to the way some parts of Scripture can foreshadow other parts, or the Christian life. For example, the priesthood of Melchizedek foreshadows Christ (7:1-22); the sacrifices of the old covenant foreshadow Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross (9:11-28); etc. To apply it to the issue under discussion, the seventh day of creation foreshadows our weekly Sabbath rests, the Hebrews’ rest upon their entrance into Canaan, and the rest the believer enters upon accepting God. To clarify this, I'll call God’s Sabbath rest “a”, our weekly Sabbath rests “b”, the Hebrew’s rest upon entering Canaan “c”, and the rest the believer enters upon accepting God “d”.
The problem with this scenario is that Heb. 4 doesn’t compare the rest believers enter (d) with God’s Sabbath (a); it identifies it with God’s Sabbath, and as taking place on the seventh day of creation (4:4). These two things are one and the same: a = d. The Hebrews’ entrance into the promised land of Canaan, and the Sabbath celebrations are parallels of this rest, and so a/d foreshadows b and c. It should also be pointed out that the day-age view allows us to understand Genesis and Hebrews literally, while the calendar-day view requires us to take Hebrews metaphorically at this point.
Objections and responses
Objection: Maybe the seventh creation day is a long period, but the other six are calendar days.
Response: I would suggest that if the author wanted to communicate this, he would not have used the same terminology (yom) to describe the seventh day as he did for the prior six days. The absence of the “evening and morning” motif only differentiates the seventh day from the other six by not closing it off, but doesn’t set it up as an entirely different entity.
Objection: Gen. 2:1-3 says that God rested not that he is resting; it’s a past tense verb, and thus can’t be referring to an ongoing event.
Response: This objection betrays a somewhat simplistic understanding of the Hebrew verb system. As mentioned in chapter 1, while the Hebrew perfect mode is often translated into English as past tense, it’s much more flexible than this. Remember that prophecies of future events are often stated in perfect mode because there is no chance that they will not take place. The fact that Gen. 2:1-3 describes the seventh day in perfect mode reflects the fact that the subject (God) will unquestionably bring the action to completion (Rev. 21:1-6).
Objection: Gen. 1 is functioning as a prototype not as an archetype; that is, it’s uniqueness lies in its coming first, but in every other aspect it’s the same as humankind’s workweek.
Response: First of all, if it were a prototype, then it wouldn’t function appropriately in reference to the Sabbath year. Second, it doesn’t work to try to understand the days of creation as a prototype of the ancient Hebrews’ workweek (and thus as 24-hour periods) because they’re dissimilar: the Hebrews’ days concluded at evening (Exod. 12:18; Lev. 23:32; Neh. 13:19; Ps. 55:17), whereas the days of creation conclude with the statement “and there was morning.” They are to rest for one day, whereas God’s Sabbath rest continues on for thousands of years (Heb. 4:4). The first day of creation consists of a period of darkness (Gen. 1:2), followed by a period of light (1:3-5a), followed by another period of darkness (from evening to morning, 1:5b);{vi} etc. These discrepancies may seem insignificant in one sense, but they make it very difficult to maintain that Gen. 1 is a prototype rather than an archetype. If the days of creation don’t even parallel the Hebraic concept that each 24-hour period runs from evening to evening, it’s obviously not meant to be understood as referring to the same thing.
Objection: God refers to the Sabbaths that human beings are to celebrate as being His Sabbaths (Exod. 31:13; Lev. 19:3, 30; 26:2; Ezek. 20:12-24; 22:8, 26; 23:38; 44:24; Isa. 56:4). Therefore, they cannot be considered different from the seventh day of creation, since it is also His Sabbath.
Response: But they are His Sabbaths in a different sense than the seventh creation day is His Sabbath. The former are the days which he assigns for others to rest, while the latter is the day in which God himself rests. This is evident from the context of these passages which refer to them. Most of them take place in the books of Leviticus and Ezekiel,{vii} which were written primarily to the priestly class, and are surrounded by references to His laws, which obviously refer to the laws God has assigned for human beings to honor.
Objection: When someone becomes a Christian, he or she is a “new creation” in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). Therefore, it is false to say that God is currently refraining from creating new types of things.
Response: The claim is that God is currently refraining from creating new types of physical things. Gen. 1 is concerned with the creation of the physical universe, and so God’s rest means that he is no longer engaged in this activity. Now, of course, the believer is a physical being. But what is “new” about them is not physical. It’s spiritual.
Objection: There is no hint in Exod. 20:9-11 that God’s days are temporally different from our days.
Response: This is true, of course; what I’m claiming is that this distinction is made elsewhere in Scripture (Ps. 90:4; 95; Jn. 5:17; Heb. 4; 2 Pet. 3:8-9), and that it does not contradict Exod. 20:9-11; it simply adds an element to it that is not explicitly there. If someone were to read the Ten Commandments with the presupposition that God’s Sabbath day is a long period of time, they wouldn’t think Exod. 20:9-11 contradicts it. Scripture tells us that many of the institutes of ancient Israel, such as the law and the sanctuary, are shadows of heavenly realities (Heb. 8:5; 9:23-10:12). In fact it specifically states this about Sabbath days (Col. 2:16-17), although this context isn’t about their temporal length. Regardless, it is clear that the things of God are different from ours, and the seventh day of creation is God’s Sabbath; therefore there’s nothing particularly unusual in claiming that it may not be a 24-hour period.
Notes:
{i} BDB, 991-2; TWOT, 902-3 (2323); GHCL, 804.
{ii} William L. Lane (1991), 100; Ismar Elbogen (1931), 110, 115.
{iii} Wayne Grudem (1994), 296.
{iv} “Seven” (1998).
{v} Gleason Archer (1984), 329.
{vi} Assuming for the sake of argument that the phrase, “and there was evening and there was morning,” should be understood as referring to the onset of darkness and light respectively. I contest this in chapter 2.
{vii} The exceptions are Exod. 31:13 and Isa. 56:4. Leviticus has three occurrences of this phrase (19:3, 30; 26:2) and Ezekiel has ten (20:12-24; 22:8, 26; 23:38; 44:24).