Themes From Genesis with R. C. Sproul, “Sabbath Rest,” 3

As we study the book of Genesis, in the very first chapter we encounter a difficulty that has caused an enormous amount of controversy in the history of the church and particularly in our day. The controversy focuses on the fact that the order of creation is described for us in terms of a sequence of days.

All the transpowers in the work of creation takes place within the framework of a six-day period. And as I say, this has caused no small amount of consternation because of the issue of what is meant by the word day.

Are we to suppose, after reading the Scriptures, that the entire ordering of this planet was accomplished in six 24-hour periods? Is the earth very recent in origin, or has it been here for millions of years?

And the debate goes on, now even carrying over into the law courts and into the school systems as to the dispute of whether or not the biblical account of creation is a viable account of the earth's origins and beginning in light of the scientific theories that stand over against them.

Well, immediately as we encounter the question of the days of creation, we recognize that the Hebrew word that is used here for day, the word yom, is capable of more than one way of being treated. It does at certain times in the Scriptures refer to a simple cycle of the 24-hour period, but also it is used to be translated for eons or epochs in a certain time period without any specific reference to chronological dimensions of time.

And so the debate goes on as to whether or not we have here an order of creation that takes place over thousands and thousands of years, or is it one that takes place in 24 hours? I frankly don't know the answer to the question, but one of the most significant questions that we can look at with respect to this opening chapter of Genesis is the theory that recent scholars have put forth coming out of continental Europe that really the word day is used not as a temporal distinction, but as a literary structure.

That is, that the narrative of creation is communicated to us in seven scenes, just like a seven-act play, not that it is a play, not that it isn't concerned with real history and real truth, but the idea is that the order of creation is set forth for us in a literary fashion following seven sequential stages.

That theory is called the framework hypothesis, that each day introduces a new dimension of the work of creation. The theory has some attractive elements to it, and I just set it forth to you for your consideration, but what I'm most concerned about here are not the issues of time sequence, but rather to understand what the Jew had in mind by setting forth the order of creation in the way that it occurs.

What is he trying to communicate to us? Notice that we read in verse 31, the very last verse of chapter 1, this statement,. And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day.

And so we see the creation of man on day number six, and yet as we look at the whole pattern of the narrative, the author of Genesis is concerned to give us a structure that covers.

Seven days.

Now what's the significance for that? Well, as soon as we're involved with the question of numbers, we enter into a sphere of interpretation of the Bible that becomes very, very difficult. We do know that the Hebrews had a system of numerology, sort of a science of numbers, and that at certain places in Scripture, numbers take on a particular significance.

You see, for example, the 40-day period, or 40 years in the wilderness, 40 days and nights of the flood. Jesus spends 40 days in the temptation situation exposed to the assault of Satan. We see that the number 12 is significant, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 disciples, 12 apostles, and so on.

The number 10 in the ancient world carried with it the idea of completion or perfection, and we have the Ten Commandments. The number 3, the number 4, combinations of it. Some have argued that what we find in Hebrew numerology is a strange relationship between the numbers 4 and the numbers 3.

4 plus 3 gives us 7, 4 times 3 gives us 12, 12 times 12 gives us, what, 144, and we think in the book of Revelation of the 144 ,000 faithful who are redeemed. And the problem is, now I don't know of anybody who has really, for sure, cracked the code.

We're still somewhat puzzled by this whole phenomenon of the use of numbers, but certain things do emerge and certain things are clear, and that is that the number 7 is used in some holy sense of completeness, and that the number 6, which indicates one short of seven, symbolizes in this Hebrew pattern imperfection.

In fact, when we turn to the New Testament, to the Apocalypse, we find that the number of the Antichrist, who is the quintessence of evil, is the number 6 elevated to the third or to the superlative degree so that the number on the forehead is, what, 666, again the elevation and intensification of imperfection or of evil.

So isn't it strange that in the order of creation, man is created on the sixth day rather than the seventh day? Well, I don't want to make too much of that because obviously the author in describing for us the order of creation is trying to show an ascending pattern of creation, that the simpler things are created first, and that man's creation is seen as the crowning act of God's work, that it is the glory of God, the image of God, which reaches its culmination on the sixth day.

But the story of creation doesn't end there, and the thing that I want us to notice that's vital here is the difference between what is ultimate and what is penultimate. Penultimate means that which is just short of the ultimate but not quite ultimate.

Now if we look at the order of creation, we see that the creation of man is penultimate, not ultimate. I raise that because we've been seeing throughout this examination of Genesis the conflict that exists between the classical Christian view of man and that which is found in secular theories of man, most notably within humanism.

In humanism, man is seen as the ultimate movement of creation. But in Hebrew categories, the creation of man takes place on the sixth day, and it's the seventh day where the climax of creation takes place.

Now what happens on the seventh day? Let's turn now in our text, if we can, to the first part of chapter 2. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. And by the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.

Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. Now those few verses there have a hint of mystery to them. Certainly the seventh day is the day that God rests.

Does that mean that then God ceases all activity? Jesus corrected that misunderstanding by saying that my Father has worked and is working. It's not that God created the world in six days and then went to sleep, and then stopped all divine activity, as if the work of creation took place in six staccato beats, and then there was a rest, a pause, and a cessation of divine care and consideration.

Such views have been presented to us in past times. I'm thinking again here of the idea found in eighteenth-century philosophy and theology under the rubric of the word deism, where deism was an attempt to produce a natural religion to strip Christianity of any kind of an idea of a God who intrudes into the space order continuum.

The idea of deism was this, that the universe is like a giant clock, a very intricate mechanism with each part fitting closely together, and that it was fashioned and designed originally by a God, but that what God did was that He built the clock.

He put the parts together, and then He wound up the clock and put within the clock fixed, immutable, mechanistic laws by which the clock would operate, and so that human history and time is simply the expression of the unwinding of the clock.

But the axiom here was that once God creates the universe, He steps out of it and is never again involved within it. Now we have people in our society today who say, yes, I believe in God. In fact, the vast majority of people in the United States, according to the polls, over 95 percent of people in the United States say that, yes, they believe in God.

Yet belief in God seems to have very little impact upon how we live our daily lives. And so we have to ask the question, what kind of a God do we believe in? Are we still living within the framework of deism, where we believe in some higher power, some cosmic force that started it all, but then stepped out of the picture and left the universe to operate on its own?

We live in a mentality of anti-supernaturalism that though the God hypothesis is still allowed to start the universe running, the idea of a God who is intimately related, intimately concerned, and daily involved in the lives of people is pretty much absent from the mainstream.

Of our culture.

In a word, what we have is theoretical atheism, but practical I'm sorry theoretical theism, but practical atheism. We live as if God did not exist, or if He did exist, He was so remote from us that He has no relevance to our daily lives.

That's the atmosphere that our contemporary culture breathes, and many believe that we live in a fixed mechanical universe where God is absent, so that He worked for six days and then went on vacation, and has been on vacation ever since.

Well, that is utterly foreign to the biblical understanding of creation. In fact, if we go right back again to verse 1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, we see that the Hebrew word there for creation is the word bara.

Now in the Hebrew concept of creation, in the word bara is contained the idea not only of a once-for-all staccato-like work of creation, but that the idea of bara carries with it that God not only creates suddenly, but that whatever He creates, He continues to sustain, to hold, to maintain, and to care for.

In fact, we could use some illustrations here from the world of music, and we see that in the Hebrew concept of creation is built into it the idea of providence, the idea of sustenance, that what God creates, He sustains.

Now those of you that play the piano or sing, you know the difference between a staccato note and what's called sostenato, or to sustain a note. If you have a piano and you want to play staccato in a short-clipped little beat, you touch the keys very quickly and abruptly, and you'll have beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

That would be a staccato type of beat. But if you want to play legato or sostenato, you play the note and you hold it, and might even use the foot pedal to sustain it. And so that when you play that note, it goes beep.

Well that sustaining action is what is built into the word bara. So the one thing we don't want to do when we look at the seventh day of creation is to assume that God has worked and now quits and moves out of the picture.

But you see, that which He created on day one, He sustains on day two, and what He makes on day two, He preserves on day three. What He makes on day four, He holds onto on day five, and everything that is created in those first six days is still held together and maintained throughout the seventh day.

God is resting, whatever that means really. That is, He has completed the stages of creation, but the rest cannot be interpreted to mean that He then steps out of the picture. The God that is revealed in Genesis is a God who is committed, who ties Himself to the daily continuity of our lives and of our planet.

Now what are the implications of that?

The implications of that are that the universe is not left on its own. We see and study the universe, and we say through the law of thermodynamics that the amount of available energy is running out, and the universe is kind of slowing down, and it's going to run down, and we can project into the far distant future the idea where the universe sort of stops and disintegrates.

Such a projection can't be made from Genesis because it would presuppose that the God who creates and sustains will someday run out and pass away. Now what we have then is this conclusion that not only are we dependent upon God for our origin of human existence, but for the very fact that we could continually live from day to day, we are dependent upon God.

That is, man's original existence and man's continuity of existence both depend on the sustaining power of this God who creates. There's another dimension here with respect to the seventh day that's very important.

We have to ask this question, what else does God do on the seventh day? And perhaps even a prior question, why did God create man in the first place?

Why are we here?

Why does God bother to set man on this planet? Well, we notice that in verse 3 of chapter 2 the following words,. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which He had created and made.

Now you would think that if the sixth day is the pinnacle of this seven-day period of creation, that if the sixth day is the ultimate day of creation, the day where the crowning act of glory is brought to pass with the creation of man in God's own image, well, it's the sixth day that we would expect, at least I would expect, that that would be the day that God would bless and hallow and sanctify.

That's the day that the humanist hallows and sanctifies because there they see that the highest end of creation is man, and so the ultimate accent for the humanist is placed on the sixth day. But that's not where the Old Testament places the accent.

The blessing, the consecration, the hallowing takes place on the seventh day. Now, what does that mean? Herbert Richardson, late of Harvard, very important American theologian, postulated the theory that I think has some merit to it, that what the author of Genesis is saying to us with this structure of seven days is that the goal of creation is not simply the existence of man, but that the goal, the ultimate goal of creation is what Richardson calls Sabbath holiness, that man is created for holiness and for rest.

That is to say that the future of humanity, the destiny of man is found in holiness and in rest, not that our future is moving towards taking a nap, but rest from uncertainty, rest from inner turmoil, rest from the elusive pursuit of peace, rest from what the existential philosophers call that built-in problem of anxiety that plagues human existence.

Again, twentieth-century psychologists and twentieth-century existential philosophers say that man's existence is defined by what the Germans call angst, anxiety, a sense of lostness, a sense of meaninglessness, something that begins to eat away at us as lost people.

It was Augustine in the fourth century who said in the beginning to his classic work on the Confessions in that prayer, he said, O God, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.

Weaving that together, what Richardson is saying is that man was not made for restlessness, but he was made for that inner peace and stability and quietude that comes from the fulfillment of man's nature as it relates to God, but that there is a link between rest, that is freedom from anxiety, freedom from this haunting loneliness, this awful empty feeling of anxiety that buffets us every day.

There's a link between that rest, that Sabbath, and the purpose for which we were created, which is holiness. Again, we were made in the image of God, and we were made to have fellowship with God, and we were made to mirror and reflect the character of God.

In a word, we were made for holiness. We go back to the text, and we see that the New Testament makes much out of the institution of the Sabbath in creation, that the Sabbath day is not something that just pops up later on in Israel's history at Mount Sinai where the law is delivered and God requires that one day in seven be set apart and consecrated for religious devotion and cessation from worldly activities.

But the New Testament, particularly the author of Hebrews, sees more in this institution of the Sabbath day, that the Sabbath that we celebrate even today points to the future destiny of the created world, that every Sunday or every Sabbath day there's a sense in which we are to stop from our normal activities, stop from our labor, come into the presence of God, worship that God, contemplate that God, and then think of the promise of the future that has been stored up for us.

There is a Sabbath rest that awaits the people of God. The destiny of the Christian is Sabbath holiness, the end of human anxiety, the end of human conflict, the end of warfare as we enter ultimately into the peace and permanence and stability for which we have been created.

But that can't happen until all remnants of sin are removed. That's why we look to heaven to our future sanctification and glorification whereby we will in fact have the mirror restored, and we will live in harmony and in beauty and in holiness in the presence of God in our future Sabbath.

In the Presbyterian church, they have a catechism called the Shorter Catechism in which young children are asked questions, what is sin, and then the child has to give the response. Sin is described by the answer, but the very first question in the catechism is this, what is man's chief end?

That's the question. As we look at the beginning of man, we want to know right away, all right, here's the beginning, but for what purpose is man created? What is the end of man? What is the design for man?

Why did God create man? What is man's chief end? And when I was a little boy and I had to memorize the answer to the question, I was a little bit befuddled by it because the question that we recited was this, or the answer that we gave was this, man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

I couldn't put that together. I was intelligent enough and knowledgeable enough when I was twelve years old to understand that to glorify God had somehow tied into obedience and to a life of holiness, and that meant that I would have to restrain myself from doing certain things that I wanted to.

Do.

So how could I glorify God and have joy at the same time? But the point of the catechetical question was this, that man's ultimate joy, his ultimate fulfillment is found in the seventh day, in the pursuit of holiness, in the pursuit of the glory of God, to glorify God, to manifest His greatness, to mirror and to reflect His character.

That is the reason for our existence. That's man's raison d 'etre. That's the reason why God placed us here, so that we see that the world was not created.

Just for man.

It doesn't end on the sixth day, but it's the seventh day that God blesses and hallows. It's that day He sanctifies to tell us that our origin and our destiny is in holiness.