What is Meant by God’s Resting on the Seventh Day of Creation

by: John Bigelow, LL.D.

The faithful student of the Bible may ask, How can one reconcile this theory of sleep with the second of the commandments delivered to Moses, in which we are told that on the expiration of the six days in which God created the heavens and the earth, He rested the seventh day? If God rested, why should not man rest?

This question might be best answered, perhaps, by another. How can a being of infinite power be conceived of experiencing fatigue, or needing rest in the sense implied in this question? Such a notion of God is not only inconsistent with the necessary and indisputable attributes of the Supreme Being–the Causa causans; but, worse than that, it imports either polytheism or atheism.

It was one of the reproaches which the pagans made against the early Christians that they passed every seventh day in effeminate idleness, in imitation of their wearied God–a reproach which is not without point, if the God they worshipped was subject to fatigue.

Claudius Rutilius Nmatianus, author of an elegiac poem in two books, describing his trip from Rome to Gaul, 416 A.D., speaks of a charming country place he visited on leaving Falerie, the manager in charge of which was a querulous Jew:

“Namque loci querulous curam
Judæus agebat,”–

who scolds him for disturbing the shrubbery and wasting the water.

“We rebuked him” [he says] “as his ignoble race deserved–a shameless people whose practice of circumcision is the root of all absurdities of this ignoble race, who celebrate with all their soul their stupid Sabbath, but with a soul more stupid than their religion, and pass in shameful idleness every seventh day in effeminate imitation of their wearied God.”1

Another answer to the question may be found in the second and third verses of the second chapter of Genesis, where we are told that “God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And god blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”

1 “Reddimus obscenæ convicia debita genti
Quæ genitale caput propudiosa metit,
Radix stultitiæ, cui frigida sabbata cordi,
Sed cor Frigidiius religione sua:
Septima quæque dies turpi damnata veterno, Tanquam lassati mollis imago dei.”

Rest in its ordinary acceptance implies exhaustion of force; a feebleness which if not reinforced must result in death–a condition not thinkable of our Creator. In the case under consideration it could mean nothing of that kind because another and very different reason was distinctly assigned; it was because God had distinguished that from other days of creation by blessing and sanctifying it.

In blessing and sanctifying rest, God certainly did not bless and sanctify idleness, and interruption of growth, a suspension of all productive activities, a temporary death. These are not qualities that merit or invite sanctification, any more than omnipotence is susceptible of fatigue. It is clear that this discrimination of the Sabbath from other days was not to secure physical repose and recuperation, the antithesis and commonly received antidote to fatigue.

It was, as we are assured by the divine record, because the people of Israel had been slaves in Egypt–that is, in bondage to sinful habits, propensities, and passions, an inordinate and debasing selfhood from which the Lord had emancipated them. The Sabbath was to be kept to remind them of their great deliverance and of the duties and obligations which that deliverance imposed. It was a new provision for the new spiritual condition to which they had been advanced.

If mere physical repose and functional recuperation is not meant–and such it certainly could not have been–we must look elsewhere for the true significance of a practice or ceremonial of which our Father in heaven set the first example and which He requires all his children to follow.

Happily, Paul the Apostle has thrown some light upon this question, though it was not precisely the subject of which he was treating at the time. In his Epistle to the Hebrews, third and fourth chapters, he says:

While it is said, To-day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation.
For some, when they had heard, did provoke: howbeit not all that come out of Egypt by Moses.
But with whom was he grieved forty years? Was it not with them that had sinned, who’s carcasses fell in the wilderness?
And to whome sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not?
So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.
Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it.
For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.
For we which have believed do enter into reset, as he said, As I have sworn in my wrath, if they shall enter into my rest: although the works were finished from the foundation of the world.
For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all his works.
And in this place again, If they shall enter into my rest.
Seeing therefore it remaineth that some must enter therein, and they to whom it was first preached entered not in because of unbelief:
Again, he limiteth a certain day, saying in David, To-day, after so long a time; as it is said, To-day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day.
There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.
For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from h is own works, as God did from his.
Let us labor therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief.1

Here it is distinctly stated that the generation which Moses led out of bondage in Egypt was not permitted to enter into God’s rest–First, because they do always err in their hearts; secondly, because they have not known God’s ways; thirdly, because they had sinned; fourthly, because of unbelief.

Then Paul adds that he and his followers which have believed do enter into rest, and that there remaineth a rest to the people of God “for he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from h is own works as God did from his.”

When Paul here speaks of himself and his followers entering into rest he says that “they ceased from their own works,” not as a ploughman does at shut of day, but “as God did from his.” Paul was never more active, never more zealous in the calling wherewith he was called, than at that period of his life when he was indicting these lines in commendation of the rest into which he and his followers had entered.

When we regard–as enlightened theologians usually do–the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt, referred to in Paul’s exposition, as a bondage to sin, and their deliverance from it as the beginning of the process of regeneration, we then begin to comprehend the necessity for the prosecution of the work of regeneration represented by the forty years’ struggle with trials and temptations in the wilderness, and for a periodical withdrawal from worldly cares and from exposure to worldly temptations, and for the consecration of a portion of our time and thoughts to the entire exclusion of those distractions.

The Lord, in excusing Himself for what He had done to and for the children of Israel in leading them out of Egypt and giving them his statutes and judgments, “which if a man do he shall live by them,” added:

“Moreover, also, I gave them my Sabbath to be a sign between me and them that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify them.”

Sanctification, not idleness, was the great and the exclusive purpose of the Sabbath and its rest. Is not sanctification the purpose of all rest, and is not all rest a detachment from the world, which is only complete in sleep and in death?

Again, in the twenty-eighth verse of the fortieth chapter of the same prophet, he says:

“The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary. There is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to him that hath no might he increaseth strength.”

1 Paul to the Hebrews iii. 14.

In the fifteenth verse of the thirtieth chapter of Isaiah, the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, is reported as saying:

“In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not.”

The most compact definition of the rest which the Sabbath was intended to secure perhaps is given in the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, the spirit of which will be found in the following verses:

“If thou turn away thy foot from doing thy pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of Jehovah honorable; and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: then shalt thou be delightful to Jehovah the Lord, and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob.”

And here we are confronted by a serious and pregnant inquiry. Is not every incident of our lives which detaches our affections from this world or diminishes the value of all selfish pleasures in our eyes part of that rest which the Sabbath was intended to secure us?

Nothing happens by chance. Nothing is accidental. Neither can we conceive of any waste of divine energy. everything that occurs we must presume is working the purposes of divine love and wisdom. What, then, is the sanctifying purpose of the innumerable interruptions, disappointments, and defeats of which the earthly lives of the wisest and best, as well as the weakest and basest, experience?

What is the compensation we are to expect for our ever-recurring hunger and fatigue, for the pains, the illnesses, disasters in business, involuntary idleness, unwelcome and inconvenient claims upon our time, and unprofitable distractions which we can neither avoid nor enjoy? What else but what our Father in heaven meant when He said of the Israelites to the prophet:

“Moreover I gave them my Sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord; that I sanctify them.”1

What are they but Sabbaths designed to weaken or break the hold of the world upon us; to impair our natural confidence in our self-sufficiency; to give us his rest from labors that are too engrossing and which prevent our knowing the Lord who is sanctifying it? All trials and tribulations are messengers from heaven sent in love and mercy. All of them, from the least unto the greatest, tend to weaken this world’s hold upon us. Do they not all, then, perform, in a degree and more or less frequently, what is manifestly the one great function of sleep?

The Lord has assured us that He is always knocking at every one’s door and waiting to be asked to come in and sup with him. What are any of our tribulations but his knocks at our door; his Sabbaths that He wishes to sanctify to us? We are prostrated by disease, with alarming uncertainties as to its final result.

How rapidly all our worldly interests sink in value as those uncertainties increase; how soon all our worldly ambitions pass from our thoughts like a vision of the night; how readily would we exchange all our wealth or honors for the robust health of the coal-heaver or the hod-carrier.

The world’s pomps and vanities shrink under trials only less than in sleep, when they entirely disappear for a season; or in death, when they disappear altogether.

1 Ezekiel xx. 12.

May it not be fairly questioned whether the perusal of a fine poem or romance, or the contemplation of a masterpiece of art of any kind, has ever a loftier mission than to release us for a time from this thralldom of our daily cares; to supply us with new and captivating ideals, and make us realize our capacity for the enjoyment of higher modes of existence and nobler pleasures? In other words, are they not handmaidens of sleep? But more on this subject presently.

Before leaving this subject I ought to add a citation from the Bible, that makes still more clear the distinction I have attempted to trace between “rest,” in the Scriptural sense, and idleness.

We read in the 40th chapter of Isaiah, 28 to 31:

“Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary; there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to him who hath no might he giveth strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

About the Author

John Bigelow, LL.D.