Beginnings: A Perfect Design

 

The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. Genesis 2:1-2

 With the benefit of hindsight, we, as humans, can see all that had to go into making creation possible. God knew exactly what had to be done, and in what order, to make it work. He couldn’t create the elephants before the land or the trees before the sun. Each thing had to be done in a particular order so that it could succeed. This is the greatest argument I’ve ever heard against spontaneous evolution. So many things had to come together all at once in order for life to happen. A creature would have had to develop lungs to breathe, vessels to move blood and a heart to pump it, not to mention a brain that could control all of those functions, simultaneously. That just can’t happen friends. I’ve heard some embrace an idea that God created the world through evolution, guided its development, and that the days of creation actually represent millennia. Maybe? I guess I could support you in that, but that’s just not how I read the creation account. For me, this is pretty literal. I love that our God is a God that brings order out of chaos, creation out of a formless void.

 And then, after all this, God rested. Did he rest because he was worn out and needed a break? No! God is all-powerful (Psalm 147:5)and never sleeps (Psalm 121:4). What He does know is that his creation, us, need to learn from example. He thought that rest was so very important that He would demonstrate it for us. There are very few things that God demonstrates personally that we should definitely pay attention here! Just like everything else God teaches us, man has felt the need to create a lot of rules and structure around it. I don’t think this serves us well, or was what God intended for us or else He would have created that structure Himself. Yes, in the ten commandments God includes the admonition, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns,” [Exodus 20:9-10 NIV]. Did God say you couldn’t push a button on an elevator because that is work? No. No He did not. We did that though! People felt the need to define what “work” is and what “rest” should look like. The reality is I think this is different for everyone and we need to honor what God has impressed upon us individually. For a long time my husband would honor the Sabbath by not doing his job on that day. He would still mow the lawn or do the dishes or any of a myriad of other undertakings, but he didn’t feel like they were work because they were not what he was paid by his employer to do. I, on the other hand, felt like I wasn’t supposed to do anything , since everything I did was work. This would get complicated in that we needed to eat, but if we went out so that I didn’t cook, then we were causing others to have to work. I justified that by saying we could all take our Sabbath rest on the day that worked best, but let’s be honest, I was just justifying my desires. I went through a long period of study on the Sabbath and trying to understand what, exactly God commands it to be. I read every scripture in the Bible on the Sabbath and multiple commentaries on them as well. I read books, I particularly recommend this one*, as well, attempting to break down the specific requirements and expectations of this institution. After many months of study, I landed on the understanding that God is about relationship, not regulations. He told us to rest because that was what was best for us, not so that He could control things or have us jump through hoops. As Jesus said in Mark 2:27, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Here's the Thing: God created us because He is good and He loves us. Because of both of these things, He wants what is best for us. That’s why He designed the world the way He did, and demonstrated for us the value of rest. Let’s get to know Him better and learn about what His rest looks like!

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