What Is The Sabbath / Does It Matter? - Part 5

When Will God “Break” His Rest / The First Week?

This is another question that I struggled with for awhile. God will break His rest when He once again creates the world in six days and rests the seventh day. Don’t misunderstand…..we know that for man, the Sabbath has an evening and a morning, a beginning and an end. But this first week was God’s week. It was God’s experience and creation. He worked six days and rested the seventh, and He is still resting because He has created no more. And when He finally breaks that rest to create this world again, He will work six days and rest on the seventh, just as He did at the very beginning. I can’t wait for that day!! However there is a key Bible text that we need to clear up that is found in John 5:17-18. Jesus Himself said in these verses that His Father had been working until now, and that He was working. Well the answer is that Jesus is not talking about the works of creation in that verse. The work being spoken of in that passage is the work of sustaining and upholding the universe, and the work of redemption. Just before making this statement, Jesus had restored the legs of a man who was paralyzed….to what they should have been in the beginning. But when Jesus restored that man’s ability to walk, He wasn’t doing the work of a new creation. He was upholding and restoring that which was already created. And the work that He spoke of just after this miracle was not a new work of creation, for that had been finished from the foundation of the world. It was the work of redemption.

But while for God there was no evening and morning to the seventh day, because God is still resting from His work, there was and is an evening and a morning for us humans. We know this because God told us to work six days and rest the seventh on a weekly cycle basis, and on the seventh day, the sun still rises and sets. We also know that God told us to keep the Sabbath “from evening to evening” according to Leviticus 23:32. Once God gave the week to man, then the seventh day had and evening and a morning.  God doesn’t need a week so as I have already mentioned God made it molded it to give to man. This explains the reason why Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” – Mark 2:27. Like the Sabbath, the week originated at creation, and it has been preserved, and brought down to us through Bible history. God himself measured off the first week. So what did God do that first week? He measured it off as a sample for successive weeks to the close of time. Like every other week, the first week consisted of seven literal days. Six days were employed in the work of creation and when coming to the seventh God rested and then he blessed this day and set it apart as a day of rest for man. God is saying that our rest will not be continual or without interruption, but after we rest on the seventh we will work six again, and then rest on the seventh again, in a continuous weekly cycle.