Genesis 2.1-3
Messenger Dox
Call to worship / Old testamenT reading:
dr. brett eckel
Exodus 20.1-17
New testamenT reading:
pastor bobby owens
Matthew 12.1-8
song:
How firm a foundation
Historical reading:
pastor andrew loginow
Apostles Creed
song:
I stand amazed
Confession & Pardon:
pastor michael champoux
song:
King of kings
Sermon:
dr. alex loginow
Genesis 2.1-3
Introduction
When I was in my doctoral program at Southern Seminary over the course of 2 years I travelled to Louisville every 6 months for 1 or 2 weeklong seminars. On one such drive to Kentucky I was extra excited because I was going to treat myself to some Chik-Fil-A upon arrival. This may not seem like much of a special treat now since we’ve got Chik-Fil-As at Somerset and on Hall Road and Gratiot but back in those days we didn’t have Chick-Fil-A in these parts. So I’m rolling into Derby city and I call the queen B to let her know I’ve arrived safe and to tell her my brilliant plan so that she had the opportunity to share in my joy. So when she answered I told her, “I’m at 265 and I’m super excited because I’m gonna go to St. Matthews and get some Chik-Fil-A.” Her response was devastating. She said, “It’s Sunday.”
Sabbath
I feel like many modern Christians are confused about the Sabbath – is the Sabbath Saturday or Sunday? Is the Sabbath just an Old Testament mandate or does it apply to the church as well? If so, what are we supposed to do or not do on the Sabbath? Reformed Christians have always agreed that the Sabbath is a universal principle, though there has been disagreement about how to apply the Sabbath. But our text here in Genesis 2.1-3 reveal to us that the Sabbath is not merely an old covenant mandate that disappears in the New Testament; no the Sabbath is grounded in creation itself.
But before we explore the heart of these verses I want to help you see the structure and connection to chapter 1. Even though in our Bibles this short pericope is the 1st 3 verses of Genesis chapter 2, grammatically this section belongs with chapter 1. It’s good to remind ourselves that while chapter and verse divisions in Scripture are helpful for study, they are completely arbitrary – the Holy Spirit did not inspire chapter and verse divisions. The chapters were divided up about 500 years after the Bible was finished and the verses were added about 500 years ago. So even though this section starts chapter 2 in our Bibles, it’s a bit misleading; that might lead us to believe Moses is moving to a new topic, or section, but Genesis 2.1-3 is the ending or summary of everything we’ve read so far in chapter 1.
There are 2 grammatical clues that Genesis 2.1-3 wraps up chapter 1: (1) Moses mirrors the phrase the heavens and the earth (הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ); and (2) Moses mirrors the word created or creation (בָּרָא). Why does this matter? Good question – while the chapter and verse divisions don’t make much of a difference theologically, sometimes they do and it is good for us to develop an intimate knowledge of God’s Word and recognize organic transitions. When you can learn to do things like that you find yourself closer to the original autographs and it’s like reading Scripture in color instead or black & white.
Sabbath of God
Now that we’ve seen that Moses is concluding this creation week with Genesis 2.1-3, what does Moses tell us? The creation account has been building, hasn’t it? We’ve seen in days 1-3 that God forms His creation and then in days 4-6 God fills His creation and now on day 7 God finishes His creation. And how does God finish His creation?
On day 6 we saw God create man in His image – the crown jewel of His creation; humanity, male and female, in His own likeness and image! What could possibly top that? The answer is nothing – God does nothing; on the 7th day God rested from His work of creation. The creation was complete.
What does it mean that God rested? Was God tired? We know that’s not true – God is almighty; He is omnipotent. Does God’s rest mean that He backed away from his creation and left it to function on it’s own; is He a hands-off God like Deism teaches? Scripture gives us a resounding no there as well. God providential cares for his world; God upholds the world and directs the world. So what does it mean that God rested?
Keeping in mind that these verses really belong with chapter 1, Moses continues the temple theme we saw 2 weeks ago. Genesis 1 is showing us that God is building his cosmic temple in these 6 stages and then He places His image in the midst of the temple. It was common in the ancient Near Eastern literature of Moses’ day that once a temple was complete, the god of that temple would rest in the temple to recognize it’s goodness. Here on the 7th day God rested upon completion of His cosmic temple. And unlike days 1-6 Moses does not say that there was evening and morning on the 7th day because Moses is not primarily concerned with the age of the earth or the nature of these days, he’s teaching the Israelites in the wilderness that the 1 true and living God created all things and that God is present in and with His good creation.
Sabbath of God’ People
Moses is also teaching the people a way in which they are to image God, to follow God’s pattern of work and rest – God worked for 6 days in creation and rested on the 7th; so Israel would work for 6 days and rest on the 7th. The word rest in Genesis 2 is the Hebrew word שָׁבַת, which we transliterate as Sabbath. This was not the 1st time the old covenant people heard the word Sabbath. Pastor Andrew called us to worship today with our Old Testament reading from Exodus 20 – the 10 Commandments. We’ve noted before that the 10 Commandments, the Decalogue, the Law of God was the 1st ever written Scripture – written by the finger of God himself, so when Moses tells them that God took Sabbath on the 7th day, they were long familiar with the idea.
The notion of Sabbath was absurd, even offensive to the mindset of the ancient Near East. In an agrarian world where working every day meant eating every day, not working, or resting, 1 day was unfathomable – that would mean 1 day without food! But God teaches them (& us) that we are not divine, we are creatures – we were created for a pattern of work and rest. God is teaching them to trust Him. They are not the providers for themselves; God is their provider.
Christ the True & Better Sabbath
And so for hundreds of years God’s old covenant people practiced the Sabbath – they practiced the discipline of resting for their work on the 7th day to trust and worship God. But in their sin they also began to abuse the Sabbath by adding rules that God never commanded. It’s easy to understand their urge to fence the Sabbath – God is very serious about the Sabbath. Under the old covenant breaking the Sabbath was punishable by death. So Israel began to add a bunch of extra rules about what one could or could not do on the Sabbath just to make sure no one breaks the Sabbath.
That’s why when we get to the pages on the New Testament the Jewish leadership is incensed with Jesus that he is breaking the Sabbath. Of course, the Lord Jesus never actually broke the Sabbath – he kept the Sabbath perfectly in thought, word, and deed, but Jesus was breaking all of Israel’s extra rules they added to the Sabbath. In our New Testament reading this morning Pastor Bobby read about one such time when the Jewish leadership confronted Jesus about breaking the Sabbath Jesus reveals that he is Lord of the Sabbath. In this statement Jesus is simultaneously pointing us backward and foreword to the Christocentricity of the Sabbath.
By using the term Lord about himself Jesus reveals that he is yhwh of the Sabbath. Jesus is the God who rested on the 7th day, but he’s saying more than that because Jesus also tells us that Sabbath was created for man, not man for Sabbath. Jesus is the only man who has ever perfectly kept the Sabbath. Jesus is the last Adam, the true Israel, who remembers the Sabbath day to keep it holy. The 7th day of creation and the 4th commandment were both kept and fulfilled by Jesus alone.
But Jesus is also pointing us forward to his death and resurrection. You see the Sabbath is ultimately about the gospel. Moses tells us in verse 1 that the heavens and the earth were finished. Jesus came and did the work of redemption through his sinless life and as he died on the cross Jesus said, it is finished. The word finished in LXX of Genesis 2.1 has the same root as the renown τετέλεσται! The unity of Scripture declares to us that Jesus Christ took the true Sabbath. For 3 days Jesus rested his dead body in the tomb recapitulating the silence of the 7th day of creation. The very last old covenant Sabbath was Holy Saturday.
Because on the 3rd day God said let there be light on the new creation as Jesus walked out of the tomb. The gospel of Jesus is the meaning of the Sabbath – he is our true and final rest. Ever since Adam’s fall in sin every person has been, in one way or another, working for his or her own righteousness. Throughout history people embraced false religions or followed false gods because even though they reject the 1 true God, we still feels this need to be cleansed of our guilt, to be declared righteous. People today may think if their good outweighs their bad, or if they take up political causes, or all sorts of other means that they will cleanse their guilt and feel righteous but the gospel invites us to Sabbath – it invites us to give up our efforts to work for our salvation and to rest in the person and work of Jesus Christ alone.
This is what we mean by faith. The Reformed tradition defines faith in light of 3 facets: knowledge, assent, and trust. To have faith in Jesus means to know Jesus – to know who he is what he did through his death and resurrection. Faith then moves from knowledge to assent. Assent means that you acknowledge the validity of the gospel – you confess it and do not deny it. And finally faith means you not only assent to the good news of Jesus but you trust in the good news of Jesus – you rest in the good news of Jesus. Just like Israel had to do the work of not working on the Sabbath you must do the work of not working in your heart and mind and trust that Jesus did the work for you.
If God has given you the gift of faith, if the Holy Spirit has shed God’s light on your heart, your response will be to repent of your sin. Repentance is the fruit of God’s gift of faith. To repent means to confess your sin and turn from your sin. You must confess your sin – you must acknowledge that you break God’s Law in thought, word, and deed, and you are guilty and deserve eternal conscious punishment in hell. And then you must turn from your sin. You must turn away from your self-righteous work and rest in the death and resurrection of Jesus alone.
Christian Sabbath
This is your only hope because the resurrection of Jesus is the turning of the ages, on that very 1st Easter weekend God’s creation experienced 2 Sabbaths back-to-back – the last Saturday Sabbath and the 1st Sunday Sabbath. Because of the resurrection of Jesus Sunday, the 1st day of the week, the Lord’s Day is the Christian Sabbath. For the last 175 years or so Dispensationalism has created confusion about the Sabbath because this theological framework wrongly disconnects the Old and New Testaments. So some people have embraced the lie that because the 4th commandment isn’t explicitly repeated in the New Testament that there is no longer a requirement to keep the Sabbath. This is wrong – it’s bad hermeneutics and it’s bad theology.
The Sabbath is intrinsic to the creation and to the Law of God. The Sabbath is ingrained in creation on the 7th day – before there is even a nation called Israel God established Sabbath. What’s more is that God’s Law, the 10 Commandments, do not become void in the New Testament, God’s Law is eternal. Jesus came to fulfill the Law, not abolish it. In fact, every ethical command or rebuke in the New Testament is literally an exposition or application of 1 of the 10 commandments. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is an exposition of the 10 commandments. The Sabbath exists forever because it’s grounded in creation and the Law of God.
So what we have in the New Testament isn’t an abolition of the Sabbath but Christ-centered adjustment of the Sabbath because of the resurrection of Christ. In the old creation the Sabbath was the last day, Saturday, because God and His people worked toward rest, but when Jesus rose from the dead He inaugurated the new creation and the Christian Sabbath became Sunday, the 1st day of the week. Now we don’t work toward our rest but we work from a place of rest. All of the good works that we do, Christian ethics, obeying God, these works do not earn our rest but we can do good works from our staring place of rest in Jesus.
So if we’re required to keep the 4th commandment, if we must keep the Sabbath, then what does that mean? Does that mean we aren’t allowed to do anything on Sunday? We mentioned earlier that Reformed Christians have disagreed throughout the centuries about how the Sabbath is kept but one thing that all Reformed Christians have agreed upon is that we keep the Sabbath by gathering for worship with the church every Sunday around the Word and sacraments. We keep the Sabbath by going to church.
Of course there are occasions when we are providentially hindered from coming to church – you may be sick, or out of town, or have an out-of-the-norm work circumstance. But we break the 4th commandment when we make a habit of missing church. If you have a job that causes you to miss church regularly, you probably need a different job. If you constantly have your kids in activities that keep you away from church, then you probably need to teach your kids that Jesus is more important than sports, or music, or whatever they’re doing. If you stay away from church because you’re mad and boycotting, or because of some cultural pressure, or any other reason you are breaking the 4th commandment and you need to repent.
We’re tempted to neglect Sabbath because we think we know better than God. We think the 6th day has the final say, but Genesis 2.1-3 tells us that on the 7th day God has the final say. We want to make it all about us, we want 6 instead of 7 – 666; man, man, man. But the Sabbath calls us to reject 666 for 7; to repent of our self-righteousness and to rest in Jesus; to trust Jesus even when the world says that Sunday is better spent on work, or sports, or relaxing, or anything – we must reject that lie and rest in Jesus through His Word and sacraments.
Conclusion
Hebrews 4 tells us that the church is the beginning of the eternal Sabbath that we will experience in the new creation. When Jesus returns to raise the dead, judge the world, and make all things new we will live in a world that is at peace for the 1st time since the fall. We will live in a world where the cosmic temple is restored – heaven and earth reunited. We will live in a Sabbath world without sin and death. And we get a little glimpse of that every Sabbath, every 1st day of the week, every Lord’s Day – it’s Sunday.