A few noteworthy points on the surface and structure of the Genesis 2:1-4 passage.

First, the chapter divisions are of medieval origin, and given the subject matter here, a good case can be made that Chapter 1 should have extended to the end of our text today. One argument against that and for the break that we have is that the Sabbath is a creation ordinance, like labor and marriage, and so it is better grouped with what follows.

Second, absent here is the repeated formula, “There was evening and there was morning” (1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31). There is simply the description of what happens on this seventh day.

Third, the same Hebrew word for “day” (יוֹם) is used in 2:4 as had been used previously, and this time it is used in a figurative manner to summarize the whole of ‘the generations of the heavens and the earth’ that had just been described. This latter use has been described as communicating “the event of the divine act,”1 and it should be pointed out that the idea that the seventh day is a longer period does not necessitate that the others are. For instance, John Murray took the position that the creation days are literal and the seventh is ongoing.2

Fourth, about that expression—‘the generations of the heavens and the earth’  (v. 4). The word תּוֹלְדָה is used for the origin of anything, especially of main things (not only living things). This is the first of the eleven uses of this expression toledot in the book of Genesis. These mark off divisions of some new dealing or chapter of God’s activity at the beginning of history.3

• The Creator’s Repose

• The Old Creature’s Rest

• The New Creature’s Renewal

Doctrine. “God’s rest” is the end of works for the old man and the renewal of work for the new man.    

The Creator’s Repose.

The text shows us three divine actions here: God finished … God rested … God blessed. The first two deal directly with what I am calling the Creator’s repose.

First, ‘God finished his work that he had done’ (v. 2). But how can it be said that God finished working? Doesn’t Jesus say, “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (Jn. 5:17)? Yes, He does. But the Genesis account is specific to the original works of creation. It does not deny the works of providence, for example.4 What is the difference between these two? The Westminster Shorter Catechism has a question about both:

Q.9. What is the work of creation?

A. The work of creation is, God’s making all things of nothing, by the word of his power, in the space of six days, and all very good.

Q.11. What are God’s works of providence?

A. God’s works of providence are, his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions.

Now, of course, this doesn’t even begin to address other works of God, such as those that issue forth into the salvation of His people. But this is sufficient to meet the difficulty.

Second, ‘and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done’ (v. 2).5 Let me go right to the point. God doesn’t need rest! Theologians have used a word for this. That word is REPOSE. What is it and what is the difference between this and the kind of “rest” we think of? This is not a physical or creaturely need of relief from strain or exhaustion, but rather a way of communicating to our finite minds that God was beholding the greatness of all He had made. His “contented satisfaction,”6 as Hughes puts it. Or as Kinder says, “It is the rest of achievement, not inactivity.”7

The Old Creature’s Rest.

I mentioned there was a third divine action. We saw that God finished and God rested. But thirdly, God blessed this day: ’So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy’ (v. 3). To “make it holy,” or to sanctify it, means to set it aside as special. That’s really what the command is to human beings. Set it aside. Treat it as a special day. Treat it as a holy day. To repeat, the first audience of this was Old Testament Israel entering the Land. Therefore there is certainly an “Israel-shaped” dimension to the Sabbath.

“And the LORD said to Moses, ‘You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, ‘Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the LORD, sanctify you’” (Ex. 31:12-13).

But as with other commandments, so here—just because there was an “Israel-shaped” element does not mean that there is not also an “image of God shaped” element. The very first and most obvious rationale here is rest, which all human beings require.

The word in Hebrew that was previously used for God “finishing” His works is actually “ceased from” (שָׁבַת), which is the root of the word for “sabbath.” Man needs rest. The most obvious form of rest that he needs is from his physical labors. When we ask the question: Does the New Testament reaffirm this commandment as moral law? We unfortunately tend to only mean: Does the New Testament reaffirm this—in the sense of recommending it in the explicit imperative? But actually, the case for it is much stronger. What if the New Testament talks about it precisely as moral law? What if it addresses the command as something that was designed for man as man? This is exactly what Jesus does:

“And he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath’” (Mk. 2:27-28).

This is the foundation of the idea of moral law—as opposed to the ceremonial law or civil law of Old Testament Israel. Here we are talking about the orders of creation and the nature of man as man. And any reading of Genesis 2:3 and Exodus 20:11 demands it. Murray explains from the word “wherefore” in the command—

“Here there can be no doubt that the blessings of the sabbath day and the sanctifying of it has direct bearing upon the seventh day in the weekly cycle ordained for man … the sabbath of God’s rest is the reason given for the sabbath of man’s rest, the recurring seventh day of the week.”8

Going back to the word HOLY in God setting it aside. This suggests not merely rest in the sense of ceasing, but of focus or concentration.

Calvin explains that,

“This is, indeed, the proper business of the whole of life, in which men should daily exercise themselves, to consider the infinite goodness, justice, power, and wisdom of God, in this magnificent theater of heaven and earth. But, lest men should prove less sedulously attentive to it than they ought, every seventh day has been especially selected for the purpose of supplying what was wanting in daily meditation.”9

Speaking of special graces, it is not only that God was looking after man’s physical needs, but also the spiritual needs that would otherwise be distracted and under-employed.

The New Creature’s Renewal.

Before getting into the theology of this, let’s bring in the help of a passage from the book of Hebrews that proves that the new creation was “on God’s mind” in this aspect of the old. And in doing so, we also have to reconcile what we read here with this idea of Sabbath as moral law.

“For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his” (Heb. 4:9-10).

This is something that has divided even the Reformed. What all parties have to agree on about the Hebrews passage is that it at least teaches an eschatological Sabbath—meaning a “rest” that is ultimately fulfilled in Christ’s work and finally fulfilled in the saint’s everlasting rest. The only question is whether or not the observance of a specific mandated day for corporate worship remains, which I will come back to. The more important point here is this: How is the gospel embedded in this seventh day from the very start? The other clue that the Hebrews text gives us is its opposition of our works to God’s rest. Everywhere else in the New Testament, the meaning of that dichotomy is clear.

There is a massive clue when we compare the rationale of the fourth commandment given in the Exodus 20 texts versus the Deuteronomy 5 text. There is a historical context difference between those two “givings” of the law. Of course, Deuteronomy, which word means “second law” is not an actual second—in the sense of “different”—law, but rather a restatement of the law to the second generation that is getting ready to enter the land. And both of those generations were the immediate, first audience of the book of Genesis, remember. The first generation received the fourth commandment on Mount Sinai; the second generation on the plains of Moab looking into the Promised Land.

“For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Ex. 20:11).

“You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day” (Deut. 5:15).

So what do we have here? Or, on what basis does God have His people observe this rest—the Old rest or the New renewal? It’s both. It’s both because God created the old world and ceased those works and because Christ redeemed His people out of the house of slave works into His gracious house of good works.

How is this new work accomplished?

First, by the Son copying the Father (or “imaging” the Father) in the work-rest pattern, “For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise” (Jn. 5:19). The author of Hebrews uses the language of being “seated” which is essentially the same as “rested” or “ceased from.”

“After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1:3).

“we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven” (Heb. 8:1).

“But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God” (10:12).

Second, the work of Christ brings about the work of the Spirit. What is this work? It was to bring the work of the new creation into our time—that is, the New Creation is already growing in the middle of the Old Creation: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17).

Now how is this a renewal in the present? A massive set of clues comes in the Gospels. Let me give you a list of verses to study on your own: Matthew 12:1-14, Mark 2:23-3:6, Luke 6:1-11, 13:10-17, 14:1-6, John 5:1-18, 7:22-23, and 9:13-16. These are all texts that have three important things in common. Not only did Jesus perform some sign on the Sabbath, but in each case there was an accusation that he was breaking the Sabbath, and in each case, the “work” performed was either a miraculous healing or else an allowance to eat. These are initial kingdom signs which echo down through the ages on the Lord’s Day among His people. Through ordinary means of grace, Jesus is renewing the new man and new woman. Another commentator speaks of the blessing of this day, that it “gives the day, which is a day of rest, the power to stimulate, animate, enrich, and give fullness to life.”10

PRACTICAL

Use 1. Instruction. It is often asked: How can we maintain that the Sabbath belongs to moral law and yet change as to the day of its observance, from Saturday to Sunday? The doctrinal foundation for it was that whole third point, but if I could summarize it more concisely in five points:

(1) the Sabbath in the OT was both a creation ordinance (Gen. 2:3) and a gospel sign (Heb. 4:9-10, Mat. 11:28);

(2) that implies that it was always destined as a celebration of Christ’s work of creating a new world (Rev. 21-22);

(3) which new work began in his resurrection (Jn. 20:1),

(4) Pentecost was celebrated on the first day of the week. The word means “fiftieth,” and was to be celebrated following the seventh seven. The other meaning of sabbaton is “week.” So it was not merely that our Lord rose on the first day of the Jewish week but also that he poured out his power upon the church, calling the first New Covenant church on that Sunday.

(5) We call Sunday “the Lord’s Day,” following the Apostles’ authoritative example (1 Cor. 16:2, Rev. 1:10).

Use 2. Correction. One of the odder battles I found myself fighting in the early years of church planting was against a group that used the concept of sabbath in opposition to church activity. As I always say, Every lie is a twisted truth. There is such a thing as burning out on work, and there is a way to do that with church service as well. No argument there. But with this group, the very presence of church growth—regardless of how well-distributed the work load was—was on a collision course with rest. Murray explains another dimension of Genesis 2:3.

“We have found already that God’s own rest on the seventh day is not to be construed in terms of cessation from activity but in terms of cessation from one kind of activity, the work of creation. In like manner, the sabbath in man’s week is not to be defined in terms of cessation from activity, but cessation from that kind of activity involved in the labours of the others six days.”11

There is no coincidence at all that when Jesus spoke of His Father working until now, and Him copying the Father, in John 5:17, it was on one of those occasions of the Pharisees accusing Him of “not resting” on the Sabbath.

Use 3. Consolation. About that absence of the “morning and evening” formula in Day 7, we can be too time-bound about that. I don’t just mean our inquisitiveness to settle the exact age of the earth. I mean in terms of our anxieties which are always watching the clock. In his Confessions, Augustine prayed,

“O Lord God, grant us peace, for all that we have is your gift. Grant us the peace of repose, the peace of the Sabbath, the peace which has no evening. For the worldly order in all its beauty will pass away. All these things that are very good will come to an end when the limit of their existence is reached. They have been allotted their morning and their evening.”12

Keeping the Sabbath above all means keeping the gospel first and foremost as a regular, weekly rhythm. It is to constantly feed our hope in the Lord rather than in our own labors. The God who completed His work from the beginning will complete it in the end, and so His work upon us. As the Apostle Paul said: “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phi. 1:6).

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1. David Atkinson, The Message of Genesis 1-11 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 44.

2. John Murray, Principles of Conduct: Aspects of Biblical Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), 30.

3. Thus, some, like Hamilton, take 2:3 / 2:4 to be the natural break, where “2:3 concludes the first unit of Genesis and 2:4a begins the second unit” (The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17, 151).

4. This was Calvin’s focus as well, concluding that, “this language is intended merely to express the perfection of the fabric of the world” (Commentaries, I:104).

5. In Genesis 2:2, “finished" (כָּלָה) might better be rendered “to be complete, at an end, accomplished, or spent”; not that he was doing the same work of six days on that seventh. The Hebrew past tense there just means past tense.

6. Hughes, Genesis, 41

7. Kidner, Genesis, 53.

8. Murray, Principles of Conduct, 31.

9. Calvin, Commentaries, I:105-06.

10. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 172.

11. Murray, Principles of Conduct, 33.

12. Augustine, Confessions, XIII.