Sunset to Sunset: God’s Sabbath Rest:(Continues) The Sabbath: In the Beginning in our lives and the lives of all humanity. God intended that the Sabbath be observed as a reminder of that fact. God revealed the Sabbath day by miracles The significance of the Sabbath was evident before God gave the Ten Commandments to the nation of Israel. For example, a few weeks earlier, after the crossing of the Red Sea, when the Israelites witnessed the destruction of Pharaoh’s armies, Israel entered the vast desert wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. Within a few days the Israelites’ food supplies, brought with them from Egypt, were exhausted. “You have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger,” they cried to Moses (Exodus 16:3). However, God was already a step ahead of them. He promised to send manna, a miraculous substance to nourish and sustain them for as long as they were in the wilderness (verses 4, 15-18). But God imposed a condition. He would provide the manna only six days out of every seven. On the sixth day there would be twice as much as usual, but none on the seventh day (verses 5, 22). Moses explained to the people what God had told him: “Tomorrow is a Sabbath rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord . . . Lay up for yourselves all that remains, to be kept until morning . . . Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, which is the Sabbath, there will be none” (verses 23, 26). But some didn’t listen and went out on the seventh day to gather, but they found none” (verse 27). What was God’s reaction? He said: “How long do you refuse to keep My commandments and My laws? See! For the Lord has given you the Sabbath; therefore He gives you on the sixth day bread for two days. Let every man remain in his place; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day” (verses 28-29). Here, several weeks before He spoke the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, God said the Israelites were refusing to keep His commandments and laws! He also said, “The Lord has given you the Sabbath.” He didn’t say “is giving” or “will give”; He had already given them the Sabbath, to be observed every seventh day! When God commanded Israel, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8), and told the Israelites they were refusing to keep His commandments and laws by violating the Sabbath before they arrived at Mount Sinai (Exodus 16:28), He pointed them back to the original creation week. God set apart the Sabbath day In the book of Genesis we read of God creating the earth, then filling it with plants and animals and forming it into a dazzlingly beautiful home for the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. Here we read of the real origin of the Sabbath: “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made” (Genesis 2:2-3). This day was different from the other days of creation week. God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. The word sanctify means to set apart as holy. God specifically set apart the seventh day, making it holy. We read three times in these two verses that God did not work on this day. The emphasis is that this was His day of rest. It was God’s Sabbath rest. Some people dispute this interpretation, saying this was not the origin of the commanded day of rest, noting that the word Sabbath isn’t mentioned here. However, the Hebrew word translated “rested” is a form of shabath, the root word for “Sabbath.” Shabath means to cease, or rest, and it is from this that the Sabbath gets its meaning as “a day of rest.” To paraphrase the account in Genesis 2, “God sabbathed on the seventh day from all His work.” The Hebrew language is clear and unambiguous in its intent. Amen
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 00:35:27 +0000
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