So Genesis chapter 2, we're really still in the first week of creation, and you could argue that these first few verses of chapter 2 actually kind of belong to chapter 1. So I kind of treat them that way, that they still are kind of part of 1, but we really are in chapter 2. And we have now another, again, a familiar passage, and yet I do believe that it's worthy of our contemplation. And so, let's read the first three verses of chapter 2 of Genesis. and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended 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 sanctified it because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. So, you can see our subject this morning is the seventh day of creation. And it begins with this little word, thus, at the beginning of verse 1. Thus, the heavens and the earth were finished. And this is a word of conclusion. We're coming to the conclusion of the creation week. And as the seventh day begins, we are concluding the creation week. To quote a scholar on this, he said, this little word thus, which is the same word as the word and, but it's in a different grammatical form. It's a word that indicates a final summation. of a preceding narrative and it should be rendered thus." So this is a very good translation of it into English. It means what all came before is now going to be summed up in conclusion as we get to this verse here. And so, what is important to me at least, and I hope to you as well, is that as we study God's Word, even though the passages are familiar and it's verses that we can almost quote by heart because we know them, we've heard them our whole Christian lives, but every word is important to our understanding and we should treat the Word of God that way, that every word is inspired by God in its original language. And I am reminded as I look at a passage like this of what David said in the Psalm 119 when he said, oh, how I love thy law. And of course, when he was referring to the law, he was referring to the first five books of Moses, the Torah. Oh, how I love thy law, it is my meditation all the day. And so I think it's worth meditating even upon these very familiar passages like we have here. And so what we have with this seventh day of creation, we find that God is establishing a seven-day week for the entire world, actually, because the creation included all of mankind in its instructions, not just the people of Israel and not just Christian people. And so we have the seven-day week established here, And it did not begin with Moses, and we still to this day, of course, look at a seven-day week. It's the only time frame that we use that's not based on astronomical movements. It's purely established by the Word of God. And just as a little word of note, you may or may not know this, but the French Revolution, which was very anti-Christian, they were rebelling against the Catholic Church, but they were also very anti-biblical, anti-Christian. They actually tried to change the seven-day week. Were you aware of that? They tried to make the week an eight-day week. because they just were trying to rebel against everything biblical and anything related to the Catholic Church. But you can see that that was not successful. We all still use a seven-day week, and I believe God would have it so. So as the seventh day begins here in these verses, we are reminded that God had now completed all his work of creating and making all things. And so we get this nice summary of it in verses 1 through 3. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished. as it says in verse 1, and all the host, or all the inhabitants of them. In other words, the heavens and the earth, which you may recall from previous study that that's a phrase that really means the entire universe, the heavens and the earth. Not only were they finished, but all the inhabitants of both the heavens, meaning the sun, the moon, and the stars, and all the inhabitants on the earth. including man, were finished." Now, let me just add this quickly here. This is not really part of what I had prepared, but I'll just say this. Some people think that Genesis 2 is, quote, another creation account. I don't think you have that here at all. What you have is in chapter 1, a very brief summary of all of creation. And then when you move into chapter two, you find an explanation, an expansion of everything that occurred, particularly on day six. So it's not another creation account that we will begin in chapter two, but it's an explanation and it's a further exploration of what occurred in the first six days of creation. So keep that in mind as we move along here. So it's clear that the phrase the heavens and the earth here refers to the work of the first two days of creation when God created the heavens and the earth, and that the inhabitants or the host of them is referring to days three through six. And so we have the whole completion of creation summed up in verse one. Now, as we move into verse 2, we're going to notice that, well, what did it mean when it said that God rested? Because we know that God has no need of rest. He never tires. And so, what does it mean when it says that He rested on the seventh day? And why did He do so? Well, what we find here is that I believe we could say that God was fully satisfied with the completeness of His creation and the perfection of His creation. There was nothing more to do. He had done it all at this point of creating His entire creation. And so He rested, as we read here, So on the seventh day, God, actually at the conclusion of the sixth day, God ended his work which he had made and so he rested on this seventh day. We also read that God blessed the seventh day in verse 3. So this passage emphasizes the completeness I believe, of God's creative work. There was no more work to be done in creating. Now, that doesn't mean that God doesn't have a continuing work. We'll talk about that here in a moment. There is a continuing work of upholding His creation, but as far as creating it in the first place and making it in the first place, it's complete, and I believe this passage emphasizes that. You'll notice that four times it's emphasized that God had finished His work. It uses the word finished in verse 1. It uses the word ended in verse 2, on the seventh day God ended His work. And by the way, those two words are related. There's some subtle difference in the Hebrew, but the finished and the word ended are essentially the same word in Hebrew. And we also find that it says He rested. Twice, it says that in verses 2 and 3. It uses the word he rested. And we also find there's three times in which it is emphasized that this includes all his work. Again, verse 1, all the host of them. In verse 2, we read from all his work, which he had made. And again in verse 3, from all his work, which God created and made. So, there's this emphasis on completion and an emphasis on everything was completed. So, obviously, as I just mentioned a moment ago, it was not that God was weary and He needed to rest. and be refreshed as we do. We certainly need rest from work, but God did not. And what's important to realize here is that the primary meaning of the word here used that is translated rested, it's the Hebrew word, and I'll give you my rough pronunciation, which is obviously I'm not a scholar, I don't know, but Shabbath. which you may notice that's a lot like Sabbath or Sabbath. It's Shabbath. And it literally means not to rest, like to recover from being tired, but it means to cease or to desist. It literally means just to stop. Not because he was tired, he just decided to stop and to cease from what he was doing, to complete the work he had done. And so to desist from any further work. The work that he desisted from is described by the Hebrew term melechah, which has the meaning of a special task. It was something important to him, and it was special, and it was a task he had set for himself. Is there a popping sound? Okay. It's a little bit annoying. I'm not sure what that is. I'll move this down. Maybe I'm bumping it, is what I'm doing. So thus God desisted from His work of creation on the seventh day simply because no more work was required to be done. There was nothing more to be completed. The creation was completed at this point. You know, Hebrews 4.3 kind of makes an allusion to this. If you go to Hebrews 4.3, it's in a context, so we won't cover the entire context, but I will just mention the last phrase of... Do I have that right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay, I was looking at the wrong verse. Okay. Let's just read the final phrase that says, all the works were finished from the foundation of the world. If I could add one little word there to make it clearer. although all his works were finished from the foundation of the world. That's kind of the reference there. The point of it is, and it's explaining the Sabbath rest there, but the fact is when God ceased and he decided to rest on the seventh day, all his works were finished from the foundation of the world is what that's referring to there. So God was not weary, but he decided that he didn't need to do any more at that point. So then we come to verse 3 which says, and God therefore blessed the seventh day and sanctified it or set it apart as a holy day and as a commemoration of the completion of his work of creation. He is the one who decided to set apart the seventh day and make it special, a special day. This seventh day became known as the Sabbath. The Hebrew word is Shabbat, which is very similar to that other word for rested. They're slightly different, but they're very similar. They're derived from the same primary root word. And so the name of the Sabbath day came from this idea of God ceasing from his work. Now, I think we would all agree, and I said this a moment ago too, that we all need a day of rest. However, God didn't. And we need this day of rest as the pattern that was set here every seven days. We need a day of rest. And it's even built into some of our laws. For instance, I work in a field where there's a rule that I have to have 24 hours off every seven days. It's built into the law. It cannot be violated. I'm sure any transportation workers or maybe workers in other fields have to, maybe people like nuclear power plants and such, they probably have to have a day off every seven days. You know, some people try to work every day of the week. Have you ever known anybody to do that, try to work every day of the week? And I don't know how long they last, but my guess is they can't do that for very long. You might recall that Jesus in the New Testament said that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. It was made because we do need a day of rest, and it's for our benefit to have a day of rest. Now, let me just say this quickly, too, so I'm not misunderstood, that the Sabbath day is not for us, though, because it's under the law of Moses. But I do believe the principle remains with us, the principle of one day off every seven, one day to rest. Now, I'll get into this again more in a moment, but for us, that's not the seventh day of the week, but the first day of the week, the first day of the week. So we have a day set aside for rest and also for worship on the first day of the week. But looking at a little more history of this, one of the things I think I want to keep in mind as we look through Genesis 2 is that all of this is so important because these are the foundational principles and words that carry on throughout the entire Bible in so many ways. Now, looking at the Law of Moses, how this carried into the Law of Moses, let's look at Exodus chapter 20 beginning in verse 8. And we'll see that this is kind of restated as part of the law of Moses as the basis of the fourth commandment. Exodus 20 verse 8 says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work. 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 strangers that is within thy gates. And then key verse here, verse 11. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day. That's pretty plain. He did all the creative work in six days and then he purposely rested the seventh day. Wherefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Another way of saying he sanctified it. He set it apart, made it a special day. And for Israel, they had to honor this by the letter of the law. So God's words here echo the text of Genesis 2, verses 1 through 3, our text this morning. Would you agree with that, that they echo? I mean, it's like plainly taken from Genesis 2, 1 through 3. So the whole basis of the Sabbath day for Israel was God resting on the literal seventh day. It is patterned after God's creative work over six days when he made heaven, earth, the sea, and everything in them. He then ceased from his work because it had been completed, and so he consecrated that seventh day as a day when Israel likewise would not work but cease from their regular labors. And of course, we know there are a few exceptions to that. works of mercy, works of necessity, even that was allowed in Israel. The priests, of course, always worked on the Sabbath day. But the Sabbath was instituted here as a commemoration of creation. It's marking the end of God's creative week. and the whole basis of the seven-day week we still abide by. And let me just add here, though, something that I've mentioned a time or two, and I might even just mention more so as we talk about this further, but we now, as Christians, do we commemorate the seventh day? No, we commemorate, again, I know I just asked you this, but go ahead. The first day of the week, right? The first day, however, if you think about it, is not only the first day of the week, but it's also, quote unquote, the eighth day, right? The day after the seventh day is the eighth day. So we now commemorate not the original creation, which Israel did by commemorating the seventh day, we commemorate, I believe, the new creation. on the eighth day of the week or the first day of the week. I think you see that pattern, not only is the pattern set forth in the New Testament, and we could go into the details of those verses, in the New Testament you have clearly Christ and the apostles and the early churches all worshiped and set aside the first day of the week. That's very apparent. But the types for this eighth day, I believe, were also incorporated into the feast days of Israel. If you look at the book of Leviticus, particularly chapter 23, and I'll just mention one right now off the top of my head, the day of Pentecost. The day of Pentecost took place how many days after? It's actually 50. It means 50. Yeah, 50 days. But it's 50 days starting when? It was 50 days from the weekly Sabbath that took place during the Passover week. And it was 50 days. That meant it always fell on the first day of the week. The day of Pentecost always fell on the... If you take 50, that's 49, that's plus 1, right? So 49 is 7 weeks times 7 days. So you have seven cycles of seven, and then you have one more day, which always put it on the first day of the week. So it was an eighth day or a first day of the week. And so it was a foreshadowing, I believe, of the Christian commemoration of not the old creation, but we're commemorating the new creation. I know I'm stretching. I'd have to explain that further to you, but I mention all that to try to let you think about that for a while. Yes, ma'am. He stayed on the earth 40 days. You were right about that before. Yeah. Yeah. But Pentecost was 50 days and that would have been for the 40 days was from his crucifixion. But the 50 days, if you look at the law of Moses, it starts with the weekly Sabbath during the feast of first fruits, which was immediately following the Passover. Well, even as you read the book of Acts, in the beginning of the book of Acts, there's a few days there where he's not around, right? Jesus ascended before the Holy Spirit descended. So, I don't know if it was exactly ten days, I can't say, because I don't know exactly, you know, did the weekly Sabbath fall right on the Passover day or not, I don't know. But I'm just gathering that from the book of Leviticus. And you know I taught it here, but I may teach just that portion of it again, just to point that out to you again, how... So anyway, I believe this eighth day... There's a lot of other eights, by the way, in the Bible. I'll just mention them quickly. Israelites were circumcised on what day of the week? Or what day after their birth? The eighth day. They officially became members of the nation of Israel on that eighth day when they were circumcised. That was their new birth. in a visual typical form. 06.20 How many people came out of the ark? 06.21 Eight. 06.21 Eight souls came out into a brand new world 06.21 after the old world had been judged. 06.21 It was a new beginning, a new creation I would add. So there's other indications of that, I believe, in the Bible as you go. I may be off base. And if somebody can show me I'm off base, I'm willing to listen. But anyway, I say that only, hopefully, to inspire you to see that there are great truths and great mysteries in the Bible that it's worth our time exploring to as much depth as we can find. Mark, when you talk to us about this conversation with children, Oh, OK, well, I'm sad you missed it. Maybe I'll teach it again one of these days, if I ever get through the book of Genesis. I'll probably never get it. I'm going to take this coat off so it stops popping, I think. Let's turn to one of the passages in Leviticus, because these instructions are repeated in another place. In Exodus 31, I think I said Leviticus, I meant Exodus 31, and we have an additional comment on this passage. In Exodus 31, beginning in verse 13, We read there, speak thou, and this is the Lord speaking to Moses, speak thou also unto the children of Israel saying, verily my Sabbaths you shall keep. For it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations that you may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you. You shall keep the Sabbath therefore for it is holy unto you. Everyone that defileth it shall surely be put to death. Aren't you glad we don't live under that law? For whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his people." Now, note particularly these two verses, verse 15. Six days may work be done, but in the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord. Whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death. Wherefore, the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations for a perpetual covenant. 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." Now, that kind of troubled me. I go, wait a minute, God wasn't tired. He didn't need to be refreshed. And then I found a commentator who kind of explained this. And he said it this way. He said, this seems here to be an anthropopathism. In other words, it's a way of God describing to us in a way that we might understand what He was doing. A figure of speech that attributes human emotions and feelings to God Himself. Not that God really had this feeling or emotion, but it's a way of helping us. One scholar put it like this, quote, this is something like the satisfaction that comes from accomplishment, from the completion of a task. It's based on the word itself there, the Hebrew word. It's not that God was refreshed and that he was tired and he got rested up. It's that God felt this great sense of accomplishment, the satisfaction of completing his creative work. That's only for us to understand. I'm sure God doesn't have those kinds of actual feelings, but he's so far beyond us. But it is a way of us understanding it so that we might understand that when we do our labor for six days and we rest on the seventh day, we can look back on that six days and feel good about what we did, feel satisfied about the labor we've accomplished. We're further told that God not only gave us these instructions through Moses, but that he also wrote these words with his finger on stone tablets. Do you recall that? It's in the next verse, verse 18. And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone written with the finger of God." Now again, there's an anthropomorphism. God doesn't really have a finger because he's a spirit. But that's a way of describing that God wrote these tablets himself. Moses wasn't up there chiseling the Ten Commandments into the tables of stone. God put the words into the tables of stone. And this is a way of demonstrating the great authority these Ten Commandments had, that they came from God himself. He didn't just speak it, but he literally wrote it onto tables of stone. So how could any biblical scholar possibly deny that God's instructions to the children of Israel, how could they deny that, that they were referring to six literal days of work and a seventh literal day of rest, when God both says and writes with his own finger the identical to the six days in which he made everything? Now, I'm trying to quote and misquote somebody at the same time here. If the days of creation in the Genesis account are merely allegorical or represent long periods of time, these kind of passages, like what we just read, would not make any sense. Remember, it says back in verse 15, six days may work be done, but the seventh is the Sabbath of rest. If the pattern is to be for Israel here, and I believe even for all of mankind forever, then how could it make sense if the original seven days were not literal? It wouldn't make any sense. Does anybody want to comment on that before I conclude here? Okay. My last point is this. The question is, is this seventh day a literal day? The seventh day, is it a literal day? And another way of phrasing this question, because there's an idea out there that the seventh day is continuing until now. So, the question then is also could be put this way, does the seventh day continue until now? Is the seventh day an ongoing eternal day or an ongoing day of the ages that we live here on this earth? Some think that the seventh day still continues, that it didn't end in Genesis 2, going back to our text. For instance, they make note of the fact that what we read in verses 1 through 3, there is no mention of evening and morning. Remember how critical that was in Chapter 1? There was evening and there was morning, the first day there was evening, there was morning, the second day, et cetera, et cetera. Well, here we don't have an evening and a morning. And so some scholars have suggested that the seventh day continues and therefore it cannot be a literal day. That's the reason I bring this up. Is it a literal day or not? But notice that the Bible does not say that he is now resting on the seventh day, but it says that he rested in a past tense, a past tense that's completed and done on the seventh day in verse 2. He rested on the seventh day. And also verse 3 says that as well. And back in Exodus 31, we were told that he rested and was refreshed. His work was finished, but that does not imply that He failed to continue with the other aspects of His continuing work, such as the maintaining of His creation. We read in the New Testament in Colossians 1 that He is sustaining His creation, that Christ is the one who created all things and He's sustaining all things. We also know that God had His work of redemption. There's an interesting little just phrase in John 5, kind of implying this, John 5.17, and it's a little awkward in our translation, but some of the other translations make it a little clearer. John 5.17 says, "...but Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." The implication there is that God the Father is working always to work out his plan of redemption. He's always working the plan of redemption. And Jesus himself is working to complete the plan of redemption is some of the implications of that verse. So when we say that God ceased his creation, it does not mean that he is not working in other ways within his creation. The Creator, the author of the Bible, is not the God of the deist. Everybody know what a deist believes? that God created the world, He set it up, He wound the clock up, and now He just stands back and lets it unwind and lets just whatever happened happen. He's just watching it from afar. God is not the God of the deist who winds up the universe to set it running and then takes His hands off of it and shows no further interest in it. As we will continue to read on in Genesis and of course the rest of the Bible, we read that God is an active God. He will have fellowship with Adam and Eve. He will speak with them. He will pronounce judgment on them when they sin. He is intimately involved in everything He's created, including every man and woman ever been alive, and the operations of the world as a total. And what we will see later in the book of Genesis as well is just how involved God is when He judges the world for sin with the flood of Noah. and which is a lesson to all people that He will one day judge the world again with fire. So God is not the God of the deist, He is the God who's intimately involved in all that He's created, even though He wrested from His creative work on the seventh day. So I believe we can accept the Genesis account as a strict and factual reporting of what actually transpired on those days. This is not some allegory devised later on by some priests or something of that nature, trying to convey truth of God's creative work in some general basic thoughts that are figurative. I believe this is literally what happened the first seven days. To quote Andrew Snelling, who's one of the books I looked at for this, he says, to the contrary, contrary to the idea of this being just allegory. He says, to the contrary, the creation account as it stands expects the impartial reader to accept it as entirely literal and historical. There are hundreds of references to this Genesis account found throughout the rest of the Bible. I've actually referred to a few of them here this morning. It runs throughout the entire Bible many times over again. And each reference treats Genesis as sober historical fact. The value of the Genesis account of creation lies both in its basic truths and in the details of those truths. The details are truthful, exact, and essential. being in all their parts proof that God did indeed create everything in six literal days and then rested on the seventh day because His work had been completed. And so I hope you see that, that if we just take it for what it says, you can't help but come to that conclusion. Yes, ma'am. Yes, they do. And I've had discussion a few times with men who do that, and that's kind of why the eighth day always seems so important to me, because I've tried to point them to the fact that, and all you can do is look at the example of the New Testament, that the first day of the week was the day of the week they worshiped and set aside for that. But I do believe it was even foreshadowed in the law of Moses as well with the eighth day. Now next week we're going to come to verse 4, and I'm sorry, next week, I will be gone the next two weeks. Sorry about that. But the next time we come together for this study, we will see in verse 4 what's called the Toledoth. I've mentioned this in the past, and it's a phrase that repeats throughout the book of Genesis that kind of breaks the sections into their prospective parts. And it's the phrase, these are the generations of. That's the phrase that keeps coming up. And so we'll talk about that some the next time we come together.