Creation
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The Sabbath has a special part in the creation account. It’s the goal of the whole creation – to get to Eden’s Sabbath experience, the crescendo of God's creative movements. A few aspects of the story show us this.
The narrator stops using the end-of-the-day sign off for the Sabbath day (it was morning, and it was evening, day completed), implying this was God’s intended eternal condition: a forever ‘Sabbath day’ environment.
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That God planned to imprint this on humanity’s mind seems to be intended. He created humanity on the 6th day, after creating the remainder of the animals. Then He walked Adam over to the garden of Eden, for the 7th day Sabbath. It’s like God wanted Adam to see the contrast between the barren world and the bountiful garden: this garden was specially prepared for you! This is humanity's identity.
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Can we call Eden the Sabbath Garden? God intended humanity to stay there, with lite work to care for the garden. An ancient Middle Eastern garden was an orchard. Trees are low-maintenance plants, very long-term, abundantly fruitful.
The Fall resulted in the creation of the Sabbath’s contrasting condition – work by the sweat of your brow to grow your food in the ground instead!
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The idea that the Sabbath was the end goal is not hard to imagine. God's creation followed a purposeful pattern. When you look at it from humanity’s cut off from God in Genesis 3 it becomes extremely meaningful. The cutoff creates the need for salvation, which God prophesies as He tells Adam and Eve their new condition problems. The weekly Sabbath became the ongoing remnant of our pre-fall condition. It embodies grace and remains the fullness of salvation's grace message. It maintains God's version of hope in us. It helps us resist the urge to build false hope idols, like Egypt, who enslaved Israel to build their false hope, their false 'Sabbath salvation' paradigm.
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God's observation of the condition of His creation, as He completed the Sabbath on the seventh day, was that it was 'very good'. In the Hebrew language this was almost perfection. His comment on the previous days was that it was 'good'.
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God used another literary technique to hi-lite the point of the creation was to create the Sabbath condition. The number seven is used both to structure the creation story in seven parts--that is, according to the seven days of creation--and to relate many details of the story. The creation story is arranged in seven sections, each divided by the recurring sentence: "And there was evening and there was morning, one day . . . a second day . . . a third day." The climactic moment is the seventh day, which is repeated three times (Genesis 2:2, 3) to emphasize its function as the goal, conclusion, perfection of the whole creation.
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Several details of the creation are also given in seven or multiples of seven. For example, in Hebrew there are seven words in Genesis 1:1 and 14, with twice seven in verse 2. The name of God (Elohim) occurs 35 times; that is, 5 times 7; earth (eres) 21 times; that is, 3 times 7; light (or) occurs seven times in the account of the fourth day (Genesis 1:14-18); the expression "It was good" also occurs seven times (the last time is "very good": Genesis 1:31).
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I think we can clearly see that God's point in the creation was to end the process with the Sabbath day as it's exclamation mark. He then uses this same approach in the creation of salvation's history. God outlines it's key steps in an annual cycle of seven Holy Days, each with a Sabbath day. He further works grace into Israel's culture by making every seventh year a year of release, as well as an agricultural rest for the land - no farming allowed! Those who sold themselves into servanthood to pay off debts were released to return to their own land and manage it again after completing seven years of servitude. And the grand finale was the year of Jubilee. Every fifty years, after seven cycles of seven years, the nation returns almost all property to it's original families, erasing the decades of accumulated poor choices. In a sense, the nation was born again every fifty years. Such great grace! Sabbath rest par excellent!
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