Clough Genesis Lesson 9
The seventh day; God rested – Genesis 2:1-3
Turn to Genesis 2; we have finished the six days of creation and now we are dealing with the last, the seventh day, a day in which God rested and because this is so we are once again faced with one of those new ideas that the Bible presents in the ongoing progress of revelation; the idea of rest. What does rest mean? We, as finite creatures, think of rest because we’re tired and because we run out of gas and have to recuperate. But God, being omnipotent, did not have to rest for that reason. And this introduces a whole new idea of what really is the origin point of the concept of rest. The way we’ll do it this morning is look at Genesis 2:1-3, which is the end result of the passage we’ve been studying, because Genesis really ought to be studied from Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:3 and this whole thing is a unit. So we’ll finish that unit, looking carefully at each of the last three verses. Then after we get through that study we’ll look at some of the New Testament citations of the New Testament text because we always are interested in watching how the New Testament authors interpret this text. Then when we finish that we have a film on some aspects of the creation which will fit with what we’re doing, but remember, our objective in the Sunday morning series is to teach, not only what theologians call special revelation, that is, what God speaks to man, but we also want to teach what God has built into the creation, the structure because the same God who wrote the book wrote nature and we want to watch how the two harmonize and so we’ll do all those three things.
First we’ll look at Genesis 2:1-3 and study this closely. “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. [2] And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and H rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made. [3] And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it, because that in it He had rested from all His work which He created and made.”
Once again we’re back up to the antonymic word pair, “heavens and earth.” This word pair is the most powerful set of nouns that the Hebrew language can get in order to convey to us what we mean when we use the word “universe.” There’s just no other way in the Hebrew language of getting this all encompassing nature together, so they use this, what we call, antonymic word pair.
Okay, “heavens and earth,” then; the heavens and the earth were finished. Now this mirrors, in Genesis 2:1, this mirrors what’s going on in Genesis 1:1. Remember in Genesis 1:1 it said, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” and at time I said that what we have is there a title and the title is describing the work of God in between an interval. The interval is called “the beginning.” So the beginning there isn’t absolute beginning point, it includes that, yes, but it also includes the work of the six plus days of creation. That being the case, when we come to Genesis 2:1 and it says God finished it, we want to draw some conclusions.
The first thing is, in the previous verse, the last verse of chapter 1 which in the Hebrew is the same chapter, “God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Now this is where creationism and evolutionism conflict because if we’re going to be consistent creationists we have got to say that the universe, when it left the fingertips of God was without evil. There was no sin, there was no disorder, there was no death. These were all things introduced later by God’s curse on the system. So God looks upon it and he evaluates it as very good, and this evaluation includes everything that’s included in Genesis 2:1, the whole thing, “the heavens and the earth,” there is no sin in the system at any point.
Now let’s look at what we’ve concluded here and then go on with our study. The first thing we’ve seen in Genesis is that the earth is pictured as covered with water, the watery mass in verse 2; this watery mass can be looked upon, not necessarily as a result of God’s judgment on a previous world but it can be looked upon as the debris around a new construction site, that God has not constructed it but the bricks are lying there, the lumber is lying there, the concrete forms are lying there, and it’s all laid out, in disorder because it’s not put together yet, but the pieces are all there, or as I use the example, the tinker toy in the living room. There is it, all the parts, spread from one length to the other.
Then what happened is that God created an expanse and it moved this water out, and reading it just prima fascia value now, reading it just as the text reads, without ram new ideas or modern ideas into it, the picture there is God expands the heavens; not in the sense of the expanding universe of 20th century physics but in the sense of an instantaneous creative expansion. God creates the heavens, and then days 1, 2 and 3 are finished. These first three days of creation give the environment, that is, the areas where life is going to occur. Then in days 4, 5 and 6 we have God fulfilling His environment. So on the fourth day God fills the heavens with stars; on the fifth day He fills the seas with fish, He fills the air with birds, on the sixth day He fills the dry land with animals and man. So there’s a distinct order in the narrative.
And we’ve watched that order, and now when we come to Genesis 2:1 we say that that whole thing is now finished; immediately a conclusion follows. The conclusion is that any scientific investigation is automatically cut off that side of Genesis 2:3; the reason for that is that no scientist can study processes that are not going on today. And by all the rules of grammar, even a simple reading of verses 1, 2 and 3 here indicate that God has finished the creative processes. So since those processes are no longer going on, it must necessarily follow that I can’t get a handle on them with any scientific control, because I can’t see the processes operate and I can’t describe them; mathematics or no mathematics, I still can’t describe things that I can’t see and check. So when someone comes to you and tries to criticize the book of Genesis on the basis of (quote) “scientific principles,” they’ve put the cart before the horse for the reason that the principles going on in Genesis aren’t open to scientific investigation. So therefore we deny the legitimacy of scientific investigation ahead, or behind this verse.
So they were finished, “and all the host of them.” That means everything in them that was finished. Why do we say something about “host,” what’s “the host of them.” Well, men have noted over many generations of Bible study that Genesis 1 in no place depicts the creation of angels. This is kind of interesting. The rabbis, before the time of Christ, made note of this and they insisted, various schools of the rabbis did, that there was one of two places in Genesis 1 where the angels could have been created. One place was on the first day, when God said, “Let there be light.” The other candidate for this was the fourth day when God put the stars of heaven in the heavens, and the reason for that was that in the Old Testament, the phrase “the stars,” or “host” of heaven is used of angelic beings as well as what we call the stars of heaven. They seem to be used interchangeably.
If you want to see a passage where this
occurs, turn to 1 Kings
Now today you can walk out here and you need a telescope, unless you’re a real sharpie, you need a telescope to find Saturn. Why then, for centuries in ancient history did men fear Chronos and Saturn? Again, you can go out here and have trouble if you don’t know a star chart where Jupiter is; how come in the ancient world for centuries men feared the planet Jupiter. Why was this fear of what we think are just pinpoints of light in the sky. There are those who think that in ancient times they weren’t pinpoints of light but were as brilliant as the sun. We don’t know that, that’s speculation, but we do know that the stars were idolatrously worshiped in ancient history and the Bible fluidly moves from angelic beings to the Bible and back again. If you have time some time you might like to look up Luke 2:13, [“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, [14] Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men”]. This is one often cited at Christmas time, when the shepherds are in their fields and the virgin Mary has had her announcement that she will now bear the Messiah of the world, and what happens? The heavens open and the shepherds hear the host of heaven singing, and in extra biblical tradition the shepherds supposedly said, we can’t for sure tell that this is what the shepherds said but it shows you the ancient way of thinking, they said it was like the heavens opened with a curtain and the music fills the entire sky; it wasn’t that the music was coming from a point, it was that the music was coming as though you had speakers all around you, 360 degrees, that’s the sound effect that the shepherds supposedly told their peers, who later on told men who wrote apocryphal literature.
Well, the host of heaven were finished, going back to Genesis 2 we see that it was only at that time that God rested, and here we have the idea of the theology of rest. What is rest? Well, we know that if God has this character, that God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, He’s omnipresent, omnipotent, immutable and eternal, some of the attributes of God, we know that God, therefore, cannot be tired. After all, He’s omnipotent, and omnipotent means that He has an infinite source of energy. If an infinite source of energy exists it can’t be depleted, so God never gets tired.
Well then why does God rest? The answer is given in the context; Genesis 2:1-2 insist that God’s rest is not due to being tired, God’s rest is simply due to the fact that the work is finished; that’s the theology of rest, you rest when the job is done, an elementary lesson that few in our own generation understand because people today like to start this and like to start that and never finish, and then they wonder why it is that when they physically sleep they mentally can’t sleep. Well, the reason they can’t mentally sleep and mentally relax is they got things on their mind. What have they got on their mind? Unfinished tasks. And here there’s a deep truth about resting. God rests because everything that He can create has been created and He rests. This becomes the model for real rest. No matter how much you try to rest physically you can’t rest while there’s something pressing on you and it bothers your mind. This is just the way we’re made. We understand this is the way we were made because we are made in God’s image, we are a finite replica of God, and as God patterns His work and finishes it and rests, He made us to do the same thing. So one very easy present day application of this idea is that people who never finish anything really never can relax, they never can rest, they’ve got too much on their mind.
Well God, then, uses this in conclusion in Genesis 2:3, the seventh day, the last thing that He does to the universe is He blesses it. [“And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it, because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made.”] And we said elsewhere by comparing the word “blessing” as it is used in the Bible that blessing would have the idea in mind of causing it to function. What He says is He’s got all the animals and the plants and this biosphere and the interlocking relationships and so forth, and he says function, you have My blessing, be fruitful, multiply fulfill the job for which you were designed. And with that God rests.
Such is the first three verses of Genesis 2; now we want to go to passages elsewhere in the Bible where these verses are quoted. Remember the Bible is a unit and one of the proofs for its inspiration is the fact that wherever you dip into the Bible you will find a consistent expression of its ideas. So when we go, for example, to Exodus, the second book in the Old Testament, we come to Exodus 20, the place where the Ten Commandments are given, we find in verse 11 that these commandments, in the middle of them have a sign. Now what is this sign? The sign of God to the Jewish race was given officially in the Mosaic Law as the sign of the Sabbath; yes, the sign of the Abrahamic Covenant was circumcision but the sign of the Mosaic Covenant was keeping the Sabbath. And in verse 11 we read, remember now this is very close, written by the same man who edited Genesis, so instead of trying to ram and cram our own ideas into the Genesis text, let’s just relax and let’s just listen to how Moses interprets his own writings.
Here in Exodus 20:11 Moses says, he’s repeating what God’s saying but nevertheless Moses is the writer, “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth; the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore, the LORD blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.” So therefore God demanded that His chosen people, Israel, mirror in a finite way the work pattern of God, and therefore the Hebrews for six days would work, the seventh day they’d be off; six days they’d work, the seventh day they’d be off; six days they’d work, the seventh day they’d be off; and this went on week after week, month after month, and you know the Jewish people were laughed at in the ancient world. You can read articles by Romans who said Jews are lazy; they get a day off every six days, what’s the matter with these Jewish people. But it’s an interesting fact of history, who produced more, the Jew or the Roman pagan? It was the Jew because in those six days he could accomplish what the ever working pagan couldn’t accomplish in seven. Our bodies are made this way. Now true, we’re not under the Old Testament Law today but our bodies are made to function and then rest; function and then rest; function and then rest. You can’t burn a candle at both ends and expect yourself to maintain your health; you can’t do that.
So there’s a lesson here. “God rested,” He has deliberately forced an
entire national entity to adopt His work pattern. Notice in verse Exodus 20:10, who had to
rest? [“But the seventh day is the
Sabbath of the LORD thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy
son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor
thy stranger that is within thy gates.”] The men had to rest, the women had to
rest, thy son and thy daughter, the children had to rest, the manservant and
the maidservant had to rest, and even the cattle in the field. Now I imagine they still milked their cows on
the Sabbath day but still, the cattle could not be used, like oxen for plowing
and so on; even the animal kingdom had to rest.
This is a pattern and God demands it.
So Exodus
Exodus 31:17; in Exodus 31:17 is an answer to those who would argue that the seventh day is not literal like the first six, because they say look, at the end of the first six days we have and it was evening, and morning, day one, it was evening and morning day two, and then when you get to the seventh day it doesn’t say that. So, these people argue, ah, the seventh day is an indeterminable period and if the seventh day is an indeterminable period then we can find indeterminable periods for day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six, but in Exodus 31:17 God says “It is a sign between Me and the children of Israel forever; for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day He rested, and was refreshed.” And the verb there doesn’t say He has been resting, with the idea the seventh day goes on forever and ever. It just says “He rested,” it’s kind of a punctiliar type of view of the verb. He rested and that was it for the seventh day.
One New Testament passage where Genesis 2 is cited and that’s in the book of Hebrews; the author of Hebrews uses this and introduces us to another application. In Hebrews 4:3 the author of Hebrews says that when God finished the work He had built into history all the potential variability, everything that He would need to in providence bring history to a conclusion. Notice in Hebrews 4:3, “For we who have believed do enter into rest, as He aid, As I have sworn in My wrath, if they shall enter into My rest; although the works were finished from foundation of the world.” “…the works were finished from the foundation of the world,” and then verse 4, to prove that he says, “For He spoke in a certain place on the seventh day [in this way], And God did rest in the seventh day form all His works.” So the author of Hebrews insists in verse 3 that everything has been finished, that nothing that God used later on in history had to… oops, I forgot something, I’d better put a new part, none of that.
Let’s take some example, make sure we understand this. Take the origin of sin; now when the sixth day was finished God pronounced everything very good, there was no sin, there was no need of redemption. But God had built in the woman’s womb to become the vehicle of the virgin birth. This was built into the creation structure, the woman would have to be acted upon by the Holy Spirit but basically she had the equipment to bring forth the Savior, that was all in there even before sin started. So you see, God built ahead of time complete potential to work out in history the things He needed to work out; that’s what Hebrews is telling us.
So all of these New Testament references build on a literal Genesis and they draw upon this rest of God; God finishes, He rests because His work is finished.
Now what we want to do is see if we can draw some implications. I have said again and again as we studied Genesis, you as a Christian ought to be able, not just to read the Bible, but you ought to be able to go through the Bible reading it as a book written by the Creator of the universe and the external world, you ought to be able, so to speak, to close the book, remembering what’s in it, and walk outside and see truths in nature around you that point back to the truths of the Bible.
Last week we showed you the yucca plant and the yucca moth to show you the synergism, the mutualism, between the moth and the yucca plant, and to show you that there is a case where the creation structure shows so clearly that how can you ever believe that that thing evolved because you have to have a separate evolution on the plant side, and you have to have an evolution on the animal side and they both have to keep in phase while they’re evolving. Our attempt, then, is to take you to the realm of general revelation, or nature. We don’t usually do this in our teaching, but for Genesis we are doing it.
So before we get to the film this morning, it’s on a point of general revelation, we want to bridge this idea of God’s rest, God finishing His creation and see if we can predict certain patterns in the animal/plant kingdom outside so if we take our camera outside and take pictures we will see in those pictures the same principle the Bible is talking about. Let’s start building the little bridge.
We have said that when God finished His work He allowed for variability within limits. You remember, God made the plants to reproduce after their kind; God made the animals to reproduce after their kind; and God made man to reproduce after his kind. Always the text says these animals and these plants reproduce after their kind, so we say there is a micro evolution of sorts, a variability within boundaries and so when someone says well, I believe in evolution because of the chimney moths in England, after the industrial revolution and we cite evidences of the shift in color of the moth population, therefore that’s evolution, the creationists respond no, that’s not evolution, that is variability and adaptation within limits, after all, after the black moths become white or the white moths become black, is it not true they’re still moths. When we discuss the penicillin resistant bacteria we can discuss the shift in the resiliency against the penicillin and the bacteria population but after all is said and done, don’t we still have bacteria. The moths aren’t evolving into birds; they’re simply changing their colors in response to an environmental shift, or an environmental pressure. And so the creationists can permit these variations but he says that the variations are limited, they fit within certain kinds.
Now we can show many, many case of this in the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom and man; after all, look at the races of man; some men are short, some men are tall, some men are heavy, light, different racial features and so on. All these, we believe, are variations built into Adam and Eve. Remember, if you had a photograph of Adam and Eve don’t think of them in a Nordic sense. Every race prefers to think of Adam and Eve in their own race. Just don’t think that way; we don’t know what Adam and Eve… they looked human, they didn’t hunch over and carry clubs but Adam and Eve looked like a normal human being but they contained within their bodies genes, the variability of all the races. So man too reproduces after his kind.
Now, interesting, but when we come to man something else varies and this isn’t
true of the plants and it’s not true of the animals. Man’s nature is he is made in the image of
God, that’s what separates him, that’s what’s wrong with evolutionary thought
that makes man an ape without hair. Man
is more than that; he has a definite change because his human spirit is made in
God’s image and that means that he has a conscience, he can understand the Word
of God. Yes, you can build computers
that think, can think faster than man and you can interface the computer with
man but I dare you to produce a computer that will discuss moral absolutes and
discuss questions like this. They won’t;
computers aren’t concerned if it’s right or wrong, the computer is only concern
is that if you tell it to do this with this amount of data, then it gives you
this but it doesn’t morally judge what it’s doing, only man does that. So man has this moral side to his
character.
But the moral side of man’s character is peculiar. Let’s look at man, the first one, Adam. Here he is, neutral in the Garden of Eden. He is given a moral test, to obey or disobey. We don’t know what would have happened had Adam and Eve obeyed but conceivably, from what we learn in 1 Corinthians 15, conceivably had Adam and Eve obeyed themselves and done what God told them to do, that God would then have translated them in sort of a rapture into their resurrection bodies, maybe; speculation because it’s one of those what if questions. Well we know what happened; Adam and Eve fell. When they fell, man varied this way, notice the variation is the same, they still are man, they still are people, but man falls and he becomes totally depraved and it’s an irreversible reaction; it’s like a chemical reaction that you drive only one way and you can’t get it back going the other way. You know, after gun powder explodes you have massive oxidation. Now try to get rid of all those oxygen atoms that just hooked on. See, we’ve got a little problem because you’ve got basically an irreversible reaction. All right, this is what happened morally in man; it was an irreversible reaction; man went on negative volition and boom; so he self-destructed. But what did Hebrews say? God rested the seventh day from all His work, and all the works had been finished from the foundation of the world. That means that God had provided man with all the processes that would self-destruct.
To see this, let’s turn to the New Testament, Romans 1; this is a very critical passage, coming up for renewed discussion daily, as we seek to deal with the modern idea of what homosexuality is. But Romans 1 shows that the human being has great potential, but he also has a system whereby he will self-destruct. And after we’re through this this morning I hope to build up, teach you what to look for in this film, and when we’re done maybe some of you will walk out of here for a renewed appreciation for a symbol that the Bible uses for salvation again and again, and it maybe never dawned on you why God’s Word uses this; hopefully we’ll learn it this morning.
In Romans 1:21 we have man; remember Paul is writing this to the Roman pagans who do not have the gospel, and he’s answering the question—what about those that haven’t heard. And in verse 20 he just answers that question by saying, “so that they are without excuse,” meaning that all men everywhere have ample amounts of general revelation. If they would but respond to that then God would bring the gospel to them so nobody is going to plead ignorance. All right, so men turn away from God, in particular the Romans in this letter, verse 21, [“Because, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became fain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”] And in verse 23 they “changed the glory of [the incorruptible] God into an image,” so there is a spiritual shift in their heart, which leads then to three give ups, notice verse 24, “God gave them up to uncleanness;” verse 26, “God gave them up” in this case to homosexuality; verse 28, “God gave them up” to a completely shifted thought pattern.
This is interesting because a man at
Turn to Romans 11:10 and you’ll see a
familiar way the Bible has of speaking of this.
In Romans
Now if that’s the case, I ask this: is there some place that we could go in the animal kingdom where we could find God having designed animals to illustrate for us, besides the text of the word, illustrate for us this process of adaptation to darkness. Well, I found a film, after much searching put out by the same people that did the film I did the day when I talked about the creation of man, the National Geographic Society put out a film called The Incredible Machine, one of the most fantastic pictures of the inside of the body and it’s functioning; the tragedy was the version you saw was so highly abbreviated. But they’ve also produced another one, The World of Dark, now some of you women may be a little squeamy because there’s creepy crawlers in this film and this is to show you how God has in general revelation permitted animals to adapt to darkness. This is a mirror of man adapting to darkness.
As you listen to the film here are some things to watch for. First of all, being a produce of the National Geographic Society you can expect the usual evolutionary propaganda. But you are mature audience, hopefully by now, that can stand X-rated theology and have discernment in seeing the difference. So when you hear the word “evolution” don’t get quivery, sometimes the guy is using the word evolution to mean that there’s variation occurring and we would go along with limited variation. But here’s some things spiritually to watch for. Now as you view these animals that creep around in the darkness, ask yourself, why has it always been in the history of man that tribes of men have always worshiped and feared these kinds of animals; the cat, for example, was worshiped in Egypt; the bat, particularly the vampire bat, has always been pictured as the picture of the demonic. Why is this? Is there some, in other words, intuitive link in our soul that says yes, general revelation does mirror the depravity of man. We’re not saying those animals, necessarily are evil, we say they form a picture in their behavior pattern of what man looks like when he self-destructs. So watch for the kind of animals and ask yourself, how many of these animals have you seen worshiped in the cultic circles.
Second, watch for the animals in this film
who have lost their eyes. One of the
most graphic illustrations is the
Turn to John 1, and I hope that at least through looking at some of the adaptability that God has built into His creation, remember in Genesis man was told to go out and subdue the earth; he was told to go out and subdue the creation and part of this included naming it. Remember, what did Adam do when he was looking for his wife? He named the animals, the first study of zoology. Now the purpose of all this is that man, by studying the zoology, will know more of the Creator who made them and this is why when man self-destructs and man goes into the world of darkness, it’s an irreversible reaction; through negative volition into darkness, he can’t come out unless God breaks Sabbath rest. And so this is why in John you get this imagery; notice in John 1:3, “All things were made by Him,” talking there of the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, “All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made,” including those vampire bats, incidentally, that you just saw. [4] “In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.” We know what men did, they turned from the light. But now John adds in verse 5, “The light,” in the Greek present tense, “keeps on shining in darkness; and the dark has not overwhelmed it.”
And so Christ is always pictured as breaking into the cave of darkness; man is accustomed, like those creatures you saw living in darkness; that’s a picture of our depravity, picture as those animals become used to living, they had lost their eyes, man has lost his spiritual eyes, and we, like them, become blinded by the light. It’s a picture of God seeking out with His light, just like those guys in the cave, it’s a picture of Christ coming to reveal light. And unless God changes the human heart men just flee to a darker part of the cave; increased light drives men away from the gospel unless their hearts are changed. And so hopefully some of these images, as we continue to study the book of Genesis, will fit together in your thinking and you’ll be able to go to the text of the Scriptures, you’ll be able to go out and use illustrations, particularly with some of your children and get them to tie all their knowledge together as Christians under the dominion of the Word of God.