The Seventh Day
The keeping of the Sabbath made Israel distinct, but the Creation account tells us clearly that the Sabbath day actually precedes Israel: there is a Sabbath from the very beginning of everything.
The Sabbath does not depend on a celestial calendar; the cycles of the moon or the stars have no bearing on the Sabbath: it just comes every seven days, no matter what.
On the Sabbath, the people of God rest, because God rested, and when the people of God rest, they are showing with their lives that they trust God to provide for them. Every seven days there is a reminder: God provides, and he can be trusted.
Keeping Sabbath Today
There is much more to discuss about this topic than I have time for in this post, but I would like to say something provocative: I’m beginning to think Christians should keep the Sabbath today. I don’t think Sunday worship is the same as Sabbath, and though I understand why the early Christians got away from the Sabbath—they wanted to show that a person is saved because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and not in the keeping of the Jewish Law—I think we should think hard about reclaiming it.
In practice, keeping the Sabbath would mean that Christians would deliberately structure their Saturdays to be about family and friends and celebration. No work would be done—no emails, no shopping, no yard work, no tax returns. Instead, we would have folks over for dinner, go to the park, read, play board games, go for walks, etc.
Can you imagine how America would change for the better if the Christians started keeping Sabbath?
Just as an experiment, why don’t you try it this Saturday?
Let me know how it goes.
Today’s Scripture
The Sixth Day
In Genesis 1, something is “good” when it is fit for its purpose and able to function properly, or when it is complete. Therefore, the seas are not declared good on Day Two because God isn’t finished with them until Day Three, when, after they are gathered together and the dry land has been uncovered, he declares them good.
On Day Six, after God has created everything, we read:
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” [Genesis 1:31]
All of creation is “very good” because every part works together—it is complete. I like how Umberto Cassuto puts it:
“An analogy might be found in an artist who, having completed his masterpiece, steps back a little and surveys his handiwork with delight, for both in detail and in its entirety it had emerged perfect from his hand.”
—Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part 1: Adam to Noah, 59
However, as I pointed out on Sunday, man himself is NOT specifically declared good after his creation on Day Six. Why? Because he is not yet complete or fit for his purpose.
I would like you to reflect on what Leon Kass has to say about this. It is dense, but worth it.
“A moment’s reflection shows that man as he comes into the world is not yet good. Precisely because he is the free being, he is also the incomplete or indeterminate being; what he becomes depends always (in part) on what he freely will choose to be. Let me put it more pointedly: precisely in the sense that man is in the image of God, man is not good—not determinate, finished, complete, or perfect. It remains to be seen whether man will become good, whether he will be able to complete himself (or to be completed).
“Man’s lack of obvious goodness or completeness, metaphysically identical with his freedom, is, of course, the basis also of man’s moral ambiguity. As the being with the greatest freedom of motion, able to change not only his path but also his way, man is capable of deviating widely from the way for which he is most suited or through which he—and the world around him—will most flourish.
“The rest of the biblical narrative elaborates man’s moral ambiguity and God’s efforts to address it, all in the service of making man ‘good’—complete, whole, holy.”
—Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, 39
Now, go back and read that long quotation again. It’s important.
It is precisely our freedom that makes us incomplete. Unlike all the other creatures, we are free to choose good or choose evil, and, left to ourselves, we will inevitably make the wrong choice. We are not yet fit for our purpose, i.e., to rule over the earth and to reflect God’s image.
The rest of the story of the Bible is about how God plans to fix us.
Today’s Scripture
The Fifth Day
The NIV translation lets us down a bit in its translation of Day Five. In v. 21 in our translation, we read of “the giant creatures of the sea.” However in Hebrew, the text literally speaks of “sea monsters.”
Why does this matter? You and I know that what ancient peoples called “sea monsters” are only the marvelous and mysterious creatures that God put in the deep seas—whales and the like. The Israelites were not a seafaring people, and were terrified of the Deep, but even ancient mariners had only the briefest of glimpses of these majestic animals. The nations surrounding Israel spoke of dark powers at work in the seas and sacrificed to the sea monsters to keep them safe on their maritime voyages.
How foolish, says Genesis 1—everything in the seas was made by God, even the sea monsters. Don’t worship the sun, and don’t worship the sea monsters, says the Bible.
God is so creative: He even made the whales!
Today’s Scripture
The Fourth Day
The sun (and with it the moon and the stars) is not created until Day Four. But, how can this be, since we’ve already had light and morning and evening since Day One (not to mention plant life since Day Three)? Isn’t the sun required for these things to take place?
Ancient peoples knew more from personal experience about the sun, the moon, and the stars than we do—the movements of the heavenly bodies were part of their intimate, daily experience, whereas we spend very few nights of our lives out of doors—and they certainly understood that you can’t have morning and evening without the sun. The strange detail of God waiting to create the sun until Day Four is yet another indication that Genesis 1 is not trying to give us scientific knowledge as to how things were created, other than to say that God is clearly the cause and Creator of everything. Rather, one of the things Genesis 1 is trying to tell us is that nothing in all of creation is divine, and therefore nothing in all of creation should be worshipped. The sun has been worshipped widely since the earliest days of humanity; Genesis 1 makes it clear that this is foolish idolatry: only God is worthy of worship.
I doubt very much that any of us literally worships the sun, but I am certain that many of us struggle with idolatry, which is the sin of thinking that the things God made (money, sex, power, possessions) are more important to our lives than God himself.
Today’s Scripture
The Third Day
As we read yesterday, on the Second Day God separates the upper waters from the lower waters, but the day ends with the lower waters still covering what will turn out to be the land. On the Third Day, God commands all of the lower waters to be gathered into one place; the gathered waters are called “seas,” and the exposed ground is called “land.” Imagine holding in your hands a plastic basin, halfway filled with water, and then tilting it slightly so that the water moves toward one end of the basin, leaving the other end high and dry. This is what’s happening here on Day Three.
Then, once the dry land has been uncovered by the waters, God commands it to be fruitful and it begins to produce seed-bearing plants and fruit-bearing trees. The reason the seeds and fruit are mentioned is because these sorts of plants can continue to reproduce and perpetuate themselves on their own, without requiring cultivating by humans.
Jesus told his followers to “consider the lilies.” I wonder today if we should take him literally and really contemplate the flowering plants and fruit trees (or their produce) that will come across our paths today.
If you come across an apple or an orange or a tulip today, really look at it and then praise God for it. It will be good for your soul to do so.
Today’s Scripture
The Second Day
When God begins to create, all that’s there is a watery mess of nothingness—chaos. So, after he creates Light on Day One, God begins to bring order to the waters of chaos, and he does so by first separating the waters into upper waters—”sky” or “heavens”—and lower waters, which (we learn on Day Three) are covering the land. He separates the waters above and the waters below with a “firmanent”—a strange Hebrew word that means a hammered-out, flat, hard thing. (Think huge manhole cover or piece of hard glass, like a gigantic car’s windshield.)
So, the ancient Israelites believed that the sky was this hard firmament which got its blue color from the waters above it. From time to time, the firmament’s windows would open and would release the waters above onto the land below (which is uncovered on Day Three)—in other words, rain.
Now, we “know” that the sky is not hard, and that the space beyond our atmosphere is not actually liquid, but Genesis is not trying to provide a scientific understanding of reality, but a moral and theological understanding. So, think about it: the amazing thing about the universe is not only that it exists, but that is has a form and a shape and is intelligible—it has meaning. That’s what God did—he made something out of nothing, and gave it a meaningful order. Today, no matter where you are in the universe, the laws of physics still apply. That consistency and intelligibility doesn’t have to be there, but that’s how God made things to be.
Today, he still does that. Why not pray that God makes this day meaningful to you?
Today’s Scripture
How to Make the Rest of 2019 the Best of 2019
We’re halfway through 2019. Want to make the rest of the year the best of the year? Here’s how:
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