Genesis 2:1-3
Much of life, especially rest, is about three things: relationship, time, and place. Those three components can make or break us. You can recover from a rough day by coming home to safety and family. I have strangely fond memories of trying to put a transmission into a car, drenched in oil, and laughing with the friend I was helping. On the other hand, being in a beautiful place on a good day can be tarnished by bad company. It can be hard to rest even in a good place with good people if it’s the wrong time, like when work is left undone. Today, we’re looking at God’s institution of the Sabbath on the 7th day of creation, and it’s about a time, a place, and a relationship.
I should say at the beginning, this is a massive topic. Many full-length books have been written on it, so we won’t be covering everything, but hopefully this will give you a working understanding of God’s Sabbath in the stages of history and how it points us forward to the end.
Creation Sabbath
As we have worked through the first chapter of Genesis, we saw God create matter and molecules, planets and parameters. God formed Kingdoms and creatures to fill them. He crowned His creation with man, formed in His image to exercise dominion and give intelligent worship. We watched six days of work on the cosmic scale performed by the Divine Word effortlessly speaking all things into existence and form. As Gen. 1:31 tells us, it was very good.
Now our text opens with the statement that the heavens and the earth were finished. Creation in its actuality and even its potential are included. The animals may have not yet filled the earth, and humanity certainly hasn’t, but everything was on its course.
We have the creatures here described as hosts. The angels fill God’s throne room, as the planets fill space, birds the air, fish the sea, and animals the land. Hosts is not a reference to hospitality, but to ordered armies, rank and file. At a word God made them, and at a word He commands them. We see this with the locusts in Joel. LORD of hosts is a frequently used title for God. Matthew Henry said, “The creatures made both in heaven and earth are the hosts or armies of them, which denotes them to be numerous, but marshalled, disciplined, and under command.” And Luther writes, “…God calls Himself the God of the armies or of the hosts, that is not only of the angels or of the spirits but of the entire creation, which carries on warfare for Him and serves Him.”
On that seventh day, God finished His work. As Bede explains it, “One may understand this correctly as ‘on the seventh day God completed the work he had done,’ in the fact that he blessed and sanctified that very day.” And so God rested, God ceased, or more literally, God sabbathed. As we’ve seen along the way, God shows the work of creation to be easy for Him, not even lifting an anthropological finger. Isa. 40:28, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.” And as Bede put it, “…in actuality his true rest is always in himself without beginning and end…”
So why is God resting here? It is for our sake. Like a loving father laying down beside his child to soothe them to sleep, God takes rest to set the example for us. But this rest doesn’t mean that God takes off to vacation in another universe or stop all activity. God, specifically the Son, upholds the universe by the word of His power, as we see in Heb. 1:3, and Col. 1:17 tells us that all things hold together in Him. John 5:17, “But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working.’’ So God is resting from creation, but not His providence and blessing, and in doing so, further emphasizes the goodness and sufficiency of His work.
One important thing to note is that we don’t have the mention of “evening and morning” as with the other six days. Part of this is because it’s a perpetual Sabbath. God doesn’t go back to creating on day 8, because it was all very good. He did it right the first time.
God blessed the day and made it holy. He made it a joyous thing and set it apart for Himself. Calvin said, “Thus we may be allowed to describe the day as blessed by him which he has embraced with love, to the end that the excellence and dignity of his works may therein be celebrated.”
But Luther makes an interesting claim here, “Early in the morning of the seventh day, which had been sanctified by the Lord, God speaks with Adam, gives him directions concerning His worship, and forbids him to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is the real purpose of the seventh day: that the Word of God be preached and heard.” While it’s more likely those specific things took place on the sixth day, we can say that Adam spent that first Sabbath in communion with God.
So what is the time, place, and relationship of the first Sabbath? It is the seventh day of creation with however many days until the fall, it is in the garden of God’s planting where Adam had unbroken, untainted communion with his creator. Adam was created and the very next day brought into the Sabbath of God’s creation. Adam had not been laboring for six days; he was literally born yesterday. Yet he was privileged to rest in God’s work.
Mosaic Sabbath
After the fall, we don’t hear about Sabbath for awhile. There is no explicit mention of it before Noah or even in the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The first real mention is in the wilderness journey. Ex. 16:23, “he said to them, ‘This is what the Lord has commanded: “Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord; bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over lay aside to be kept till the morning.”’”
But the fuller Sabbath command comes in Ex. 20:8-11, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 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.” And you can see there how it’s anchored in the creation ordinance. This command gets repeated several times with different emphases. Ex. 31:17, “It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.”
It’s helpful to understand the context in which this command comes. When Israel is at Sinai, God gives them a law and economy that taught Israel key principles about morality, God’s holiness, man’s sinfulness, and the way of salvation. Paul talks about this, especially in Gal. 3, about how it was a teacher but not able to actually save sinners. Part of the moral imperative, alongside not lying and not murdering, is to keep the Sabbath holy unto the Lord.
In Lev. 23:3, before they’ve left Sinai, God tells them through Moses, “Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, a holy convocation. You shall do no work. It is a Sabbath to the LORD in all your dwelling places.” This one is particularly important with the texts that follow it on the feasts. The Sabbath was a convocation, a sacred assembly of the people for the worship of God. Even as early as Sinai, the Sabbath was explicitly about resting from worldly labor for the sake of worshipping God. In these convocations, as we see through the rest of the Old Testament, the people gathered for the reading of God’s Word, the singing of songs, prayer, and especially the sacrifices. After the exile, these principles of Sabbath would become clearer in the synagogues, local buildings of worship for wherever Jews had gathered abroad.
Ex. 23:10-11 prescribes a sabbath year for the land to rest, and there’s a Jubilee year that ties in as well, where captives are freed. There is a whole component of 8th day consecration set out in the Mosaic covenant and economy as well. Firstborn sons, oxen, and sheep were set apart to the Lord on the eighth day of life, Ex. 22:29-30. The cleansing of lepers culminated in an 8th day sacrifice, Lev. 14:10, and it was the same for bodily discharges, Lev. 15:14, 15:29. There was even an 8th day Sabbath for the feast of booths, Lev 23:36.
This Mosaic Sabbath was a mandatory rest, enforceable by death. It served multiple functions. It taught the people their dependence on God. Ceasing from labor meant trusting in God to provide and bless the work of our hands. God said in Isa. 58:13-14, “If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly; then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
But it also had a component of conviction. They labored to obey God for 6 days and then stopped working. Their work, unlike God’s, was not “very good.” So after they sat down in their tents or houses and thought about what they did and didn’t do for a whole day, they had to go back to work. If you’ve ever had one of those surprise phone calls that someone is coming over, you know what I’m talking about. You rush to clean up, and once the doorbell rings and you’re seated with your unexpected company, you can’t help but see what was left undone.
Throughout this era, the time of the Sabbath was the 7th day, but it was interrupted by a return to work the following day. The place, for most of the Old Testament, was the promised land of Canaan. The relationship is of a people striving and failing to fulfill God’s law as they cling to promises, shadows, and types of grace in a Messiah.
New Covenant Sabbath
In the fulness of time, Christ came to fulfill the law on our behalf. In Matt. 5:17, Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Gal. 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’” Gal. 4:4-5, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”
During His earthly ministry, Jesus denounced men’s additions to God’s law, even as He upheld the true nature of Sabbath. He showed how Sabbath was about teaching and healing. Mark 2:27-28, “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.’” When Christ was crucified, after He declared His fulfillment of the Law, “It is finished!”, He kept the last Saturday Sabbath as He rested in the tomb. It was a fitting Sabbath for a creation dead, defiled, and dying.
Then, on the first day of the week, Jesus rose from the grave as first-fruits of the resurrection, inaugurating the first Sunday, Christian Sabbath. He met with His disciples on Sunday. John 20:19, “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’” Christ ascended into heaven, and intercedes for us there, but takes a kind of Sabbath rest. Heb. 10:12, “But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.”
And so Sunday became the day of worship for Christians. Acts 20:7, “On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the next day, and he prolonged his speech until midnight.” 1 Cor. 16:2, “On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that there will be no collecting when I come.” Rev. 1:10, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet…” The Lord’s day became a common term for the day of the week on which Christ was raised from the dead: Sunday.
And returning to the old sabbath system of Israel was forbidden. Col. 2:16-17, “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.” In fact, all the way back in Hosea, God had said He would bring an end to Israel’s Sabbaths, but there’s multiple layers to that passage.
Today, believers in Christ cease our earthly labors and strive to rest, oxymoronic as that sounds. We force ourselves to leave off from investing in the things that are passing away and declare our trust in God to provide for us. We invest our hearts, time, and energy in eternal matters, things not passing away. We give our most precious resource, our time, to God to declare that every day is a gift from Him. It is important to remember that it is the Sabbath day, not the Sabbath hour. And practically speaking, we are still creatures that grow weary. We still need a day of physical rest.
But most importantly, the Christian Sabbath proclaims the Gospel. We begin the week resting, resting before we work. Why? Because all the work, the fulfillment of God’s law necessary to make us righteous, is already completed by Christ. By resting, by sabbath-ing on Sunday, we declare that Jesus satisfied the Law in His life and death. We worship on the day of His resurrection. We do all the Sabbath things: pray, hear God’s word read and preached, sing, eat at the Lord’s table, all except sacrifice, because Christ’s sacrifice was once for all.
And when the day is done, we enter into a week of good works and labor, not to earn heaven, but to glorify God in love and gratitude, knowing that Christ has already purchased our eternal inheritance. As David VanDrunen said, “We are still image-bearers of God, thus we are still Sabbath-keepers by nature. But we no longer bear the image after the pattern of the first Adam but…Christ.” (1 Cor. 15:47-49; Rom. 8:9). We keep the Sabbath in a way that shows that the true rest has already been attained. We rest by free grace, and only then do we work.”
The Old Testament Sabbath was a creation ordinance, but the Sabbath we keep as Christians is a new-creation ordinance. In every day, secure in Christ, we taste of Sabbath by resting in Christ. Matt. 11:28, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” The 4th commandment calls us to find our rest in Jesus.
So that relationship to God through Christ as our Savior is the relationship of this Sabbath. The time is the first day of the week, even though it overflows into the rest. The place? It is wherever the church has gathered to worship in spirit and in truth. Heb. 4:9-10, “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.”
Eternal Sabbath
From that first Sabbath day, the concept of Sabbath has pointed forward to a rest that is complete and final, renewed and refreshed and unbreakable. It promised an eternal Sabbath. We taste of this every time we gather as God’s people. Thomas Watson once said of Sunday, “This is the day wherein Christ carries the soul into the house of wine, and displays the banner of love over it; now the dew of the Spirit falls on the soul, whereby it is revived and comforted… This day of rest is a pledge and earnest of the eternal rest in heaven.”
What is that time? It is eternity. There will be no evening and morning to mark a singular day, because the sun and moon will be no more. Our Sabbath will be in the light of our God.
What is that place? It is the New Heavens and New Earth, beyond sorrow, disease, and death.
What is the relationship? It is the church with her God, Christ with His bride, united and consummated. It is a return to unbroken communion between creator and creature. That Sabbath, the ultimate Sabbath, is for sinners saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
Rev. 21:3-7, “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’ And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ And he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son.’”
There is no Sabbath rest outside of Christ. There is no true rest for the wicked in this life, and there is certainly no rest in the eternity of condemnation. As my co-elder Shorty once said, hell is a place with no chairs and no beds. The only way to find rest is through forgiveness in Jesus, by repentance and faith. Come to Him, all you who are weary, for only He can give you rest for your soul today and the fullness of rest in eternity.

Chris J. Marley is the pastor of Miller Valley Baptist Church in Prescott, AZ. Chris has a BA in Theatre, an MDiv from Westminster Seminary California, and a certificate from the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies. He is the author of Scarlet and White and Cow and Cog.
