Notes on Sabbath #2: The first day and seventh day compared
In a previous post, I gestured at some lines of enquiry that I would want to pursue to develop a theology and praxis of the Lord’s Day in modern life. While I haven’t any grand plan for how I will write or publish these, it seems appropriate to begin with Scripture itself, and to begin with the beginning of Scripture.
The creation narrative in the first chapter of Genesis is arranged in such a way that we can see associations between various parts of the creation, and even between the days themselves.
For example, on the first day, God created light. The creation light then allowed for a distinction between the time when light shines (which he called Day) and the time when the light withdraws and darkness returned (which he called Night). Then, on the fourth day, God set luminous bodies in the heavens to be the rulers of the day and the night. We should not suppose, as some do, that the light preceding the sun, moon and stars represents an embarrassing oversight by the writer; rather, there is a theological point being made: on the fourth day, God installed an order of subordinate rulers within the cosmos to exercise a delegated rule over the times and seasons. The God who dwells in unapproachable light in the highest heavens, grants to the sun, moon and stars to dwell in the firmament-heavens as the governors of day and night, and to shine light upon the earth as his vicegerents in the skies. (God did something analogous with the creation of man on the sixth day, who was to represent him on the earth with a delegated rule.)
For our purposes here, the most notable association is that between the seventh day, on which God took his rest from all his works, and the first day of the week, on which he first shone light upon the world and established the rhythms of earthly time. The first day is, of course, the day on which the Lord Jesus would later rise from the dead, and so also it is the day on which the church formed the practice of regular meeting to commemorate that resurrection. I strongly suspect that the move from the seventh-day Sabbath to the first-day Lord’s Day is not an arbitrary move, but rather something grounded in the relationship between the first and seventh days already presented in Genesis.
How do the first and seventh days relate to each other? For one thing, they are the bookends of the week of God’s creation work. We begin on day one with anticipation for what is to come; we arrive at day seven with the completion of the heavens and the earth behind us.
Secondly, the Sabbath is the climactic instance of the separation work that God has been doing throughout the previous six days. In the first six days, God made various separations and distinctions throughout the creation: he separated the waters above from the waters below, the dry land from the sea, and so on. These all follow that first distinction established on the first day: light-time and darkness-time. On the seventh day, however, God distinguished one of the days from the others: “So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy” (Genesis 2:3, ESV). The Sabbath Day is to the rest of the week as Day is to Night: it is the Day of Days, and it perfects what was anticipated on that first day of creation.