Hello friends, thanks for joining us again on The Methodist Voice. We're currently in a series called Primeval where we're walking through the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis together. These chapters provide us with the foundational information upon which the rest of the entire Bible is built. Because they're so ancient or primeval, they're very hard to understand.
Hence, we're now in our tenth episode of this series and we're just now starting with Genesis chapter two, which is what we're going to be covering today. So let's jump in, Genesis chapter two verse one, we'll start reading. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished His work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work that He had done.
So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all His work that He had done in creation. Now the word used for rest here is the Hebrew word Shabbat, from which we derive the word we use Sabbath. So obviously that's a big topic in scripture as it's included in the Ten Commandments, right? It's designating Saturday as a day of rest from labor for the Jewish people. So let's start with parsing the word translated rest, Shabbat, what it means.
Some people take it to mean that after God's work of creation He needed a nap, or somehow that a grandfatherly God entered into some permanent retirement, letting God the Son and God the Holy Spirit do all the work from here on out. Just let the kids do their work. And then He sat down on the couch and binge watched Fox News for the rest of all eternity. Obviously that's not what it means, right? So let's look at Strong's definition for the Hebrew word Shabbat.
It means first to cease, to desist, to rest, as in to set down your instrument after you've finished playing it. I'm going to rest my instrument. It doesn't mean God needs a nap. God doesn't get tired. Psalm 121,4 says, Behold, He who keeps Israel will neither sleep nor slumber. God doesn't need to take a rest in that sense. It simply means that God was finished. God was finished and so He ceased from the particular work of creating the physical universe.
God created everything that He was going to create and it was good. It was complete, completed project. That's it. Obviously it doesn't mean that God's going into retirement because He immediately gets very busy right here in chapter 2 and He relentlessly works on the redemption of humanity for the entirety of Scripture even to this day. And we're all grateful for that.
So that's important to remember because when we look at the idea of Sabbath and what that means for us here and now, it really has more to do about redemption than it is about kicking back and taking it easy. And so let's start in kind of unpacking this with the idea of the concept of Eden which is going to be introduced here in chapter 2. So let's continue reading. Let's get down to verse 8 of Genesis chapter 2.
And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east and there He put the man whom He had formed and out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant in the sight and good for food. And the tree of life was in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So just real quick, God Himself made the food spring up. Humans didn't have to work for their food. That was provided. And not only were they good for food, they were beautiful to look at.
So the environment provided for all of their needs. It was beautiful. It was luxurious. The tree of life there which is symbolic of human beings having access to eternal life. They would never die. And the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which represents a choice. Human beings can remain obedient to God or they can choose to be disobedient to God and go and do their own thing and they can learn about the consequences of evil.
So I'm going to speak to you from John Walton's book on Genesis chapter 1. John Walton is an Old Testament scholar and professor at Wheaton College. Here's what he says about Genesis chapter 1 and then we'll follow that up with some more comments from Dr. Heiser, Dr. Michael Heiser and his book from the Unseen Realm. Just kind of unpacking what this idea of Eden represents, what it means in the text. Remember this is ancient text written thousands of years after the events actually happened.
And so these are stories being told with mythological language. Genesis 1 is describing the creation of the heavens and earth in the same mode, this is John Walton speaking here, in the same mode as the building and sanctifying of a temple. Because that's what God's temple is. It's on earth. It's in Eden. This is where the creation episode ends because God has now taken up his residence on the earth in his temple, which is Eden.
The cosmic mountain, the dwelling place, the divine council, Yahweh's abode. And that became the template idea for rest, for temple, for God's dwelling, for the place where God runs his affairs. It's tied into creation and it's tied into his establishment of the temple, the reestablishment of the place where God will come to earth and will dwell with human beings. So now let's take a more extensive look from Dr. Michael Heiser, his book The Unseen Realm. I'm going to read to you from chapter 6.
The title of the chapter is Gardens and Mountains. His point is that Eden is referred to in scripture, again, as the place where God dwells. Sometimes it's referred to as a garden. Sometimes it's referred to as a mountain, like Mount Zion, the mountain of God. And so I'll begin reading from chapter 6 of The Unseen Realm. Eden was God's home on earth. It was his residence. And where the king lives, his council meets.
As modern readers, we don't see how that thinking is telegraphed in the biblical text. Ancient readers couldn't miss it. Eden can only be properly understood in light of the worldview of the biblical that the biblical writers shared with other people of the ancient Near East. Like Israel, the people of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example, also believed in an unseen spiritual world that was governed by a divine council.
The divine abodes of gods, the places they lived and where they met for governing the affairs of the human world. They were portrayed in several ways. Two of the most common were gardens and mountains. Eden is described as both in the Old Testament. Ancient people thought of their gods living in luxuriant gardens or mountains for simple reasons. It made sense that the gods would have the best lifestyle because, well, they're gods. Cosmic celebrities can't possibly live like we do.
The ancient Near East was primarily an agrarian culture where most people subsisted day to day, hand to mouth. The few who didn't live that way were kings or priests. In thinking as the ancients did, those few had been chosen for that elevated status by the gods. The environment was hot and arid. Life depended on finding water and harnessing its power. That's why the world's first civilizations were founded along rivers, the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates.
Surely the gods lived in a place where water was abundant, where life-sustaining vegetation and fruit grew everywhere, where an abundance of animals were nourished to fatness. The gods lived in places where there was no conceivable lack. Paradise. Mountain peaks were the domain of gods because no humans lived there. Ancient times were not like modern times. People didn't recreationally climb mountains. They had no equipment with which to get very far if they tried.
Mountains were remote and forbidding, the perfect places for gods to get away from pesky humans. Mountain peaks touched the heavens, which was obviously the domain of the gods. This sort of thinking in part explains why Egypt's temples are carved and painted with the imagery of luxurious gardens, or why pyramids and ziggurats were built. These structures were mountains made by human hands, which served as gateways to the spiritual world, the realm of the gods.
In life or in death, they were metaphors in stone. Now that's important to remember. That's the end of the excerpt from chapter 6 that we're going to read. But that's important to keep in mind when we get to Genesis chapter 11, the idea that pyramid building functioned as metaphors for a gateway to the gods. So I'm going to read another excerpt from Dr. Heiser. This is from chapter 7. The title of this chapter is Eden, Like No Place on Earth. Here's what Dr. Heiser says.
In Genesis chapter 1 verses 26 through 27, God made humankind as his imagers, his representatives in this new domain. This functional view of the image becomes clear in the commands of verse 28. And God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every animal that moves upon the earth. Notice that verse 28 says that the earth needed filling. This does not refer to Eden.
Eden has not even appeared yet in the Genesis story. Its first mention comes in Genesis 2, 8. And Yahweh planted a garden in Eden in the east and there he put the man whom he had formed. The garden of Eden is said to be in the east. The directional word informs us that there were other parts of the earth. God planted this garden. We know from Genesis 1 that the dry land called earth already existed. It had to in order for God to plant a garden in it in the east.
Genesis 2, 15 is also of interest. The man God has made is put in the garden for a reason and Yahweh took the man and set him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and to keep it. The man's job is to take care of the garden. Earlier in Genesis 1, 28 his job was to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule. Of course the man needs a woman for that. But she hasn't even been created yet in Genesis 2 when God puts the man in the garden.
Cultivation of the garden and subduing the earth are not the same tasks. Genesis 1 and 2 aren't intended to be chronological in their relationship. What they reveal is that man's original task was to care for the garden where he lived. After he gets a partner, God says to both of them, the commands are plural in Hebrew, to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth, to subdue it and to rule over its creatures.
We can see that the tasks of humanity taken in tandem with the earlier observations that require Eden and earth to be distinct, distinguish Eden and the earth, it makes no sense to subdue the garden of God. It's already what God wants it to be. There's no place on earth like it. If it needed subjugation, that word would imply imperfection. That's something that cannot be said about Eden. But it's true of the rest of the world. For sure, God was happy with the whole of creation.
He pronounced it very good. But very good is not perfect. Lastly, Eden and earth must be distinct since after the fall, Adam and Eve are expelled from it and have to live somewhere else. Unless you believe that they were sent into outer space, you must acknowledge Eden and earth are distinct. Observing this distinction affects a range of biblical concepts and provides solutions to a few thorny theological problems. But I'm only concerned with one issue here.
The distinction helps us to see the original task of humanity was to make the entire earth like Eden. Adam and Eve lived in the garden. They cared for it. But the rest of the earth needed subduing. It wasn't awful. In fact, Genesis one tells us that it was habitable. But it wasn't quite what Eden was. The whole world needs to be like God's home. He could do the job himself, but he chose to create human imagers to do it for him and I would add with him. He issued the decree.
They were supposed to make it happen. They were to do that by multiplying and following God's direction. Eden is where the idea of the kingdom of God begins. And it's no coincidence that the Bible ends with the vision of a new Edenic earth. In Revelation 21 and 22. That's the end of the excerpt from Heiser's book, the unseen realm chapter seven. So we can deduce a few things about the original rest of God and the rest that humans enjoyed in their untarnished relationship with God.
Eden functions as a metaphor for the particular place in the physical universe where God decides to live with his human family members on the earth. And a home is where one ought to be most at ease from the stresses and pressures of the outside world. It's where one can let their hair down, so to speak, and feel totally free to be yourself without fear of negative judgment from others. Not that you won't receive negative judgment from your family members. We do all the time, don't we?
It's just that you don't have fear of negative judgment because who cares what your big sister thinks, right? And so God was at rest, a particular rest, from an adversarial relationship with his human and non-human children. That's very important. There is a particular rest represented here. It is a rest from an adversarial relationship with both his human and non-human children. Everyone enjoyed being on good terms with one another.
They all enjoyed the unlimited provision afforded with being family members of a royal household and what that would entail, which is in this instance, it included not only luxurious material provisions but also eternal life. What the rest described clearly does not mean is that both God and his family members were somehow inactive. There's lots of activity going on in this scenario.
God's rounding up animals and trotting them before Adam and he gives Adam the responsibility of naming the animals. In addition to God's mandate to fill the rest of the earth and subdue it, Adam had to use his God-given creative energy and creative will to produce something as an assignment from God. All of this is very important because it provides us with a clue as to what God has in mind in the eternal state, which is described throughout scripture as a new heaven and a new earth.
Just like we've stated in previous episodes, there is no plan B. As we close out this topic, it's important to keep in mind when we interpret some passages from the New Testament in particular that refer back to this concept of rest, like Hebrews chapter 4. The entire book of Hebrews describes entering into the rest of God through believing faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ provides the particular finished work, just like God was finished on the seventh day with creating the physical universe, Jesus Christ was finished at his resurrection from the dead with making peace between God and man. Jesus Christ provides the particular finished work of being at rest from an adversarial relationship with God. We are at peace or at rest with God.
We don't have to earn our way into his favor through the works of the Old Testament law anymore, which never worked anyway. It does not mean that God intends life here and now, nor in the future, to be some permanent vacation. That is not what it means. It can't mean that because it never meant that. So let's look at this statement from Jesus himself, just to wind things up. This is from Matthew chapter 11, starting in verse 27. Now think about what's being said here.
All things have been handed over to me by my father, and no one knows the son except to the father. And no one knows the father except the son, and anyone to whom the son chooses to reveal him. So there it is. We come into a relationship with God. We're at peace with God through the person of Jesus Christ. Then verse 28, and you'll know this passage, come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you what? Rest. And then Jesus is going to describe what that means.
Verse 29, take my yoke upon you. Now let me ask you a question. Let's stop there. What is a yoke? What does a yoke function to do? Most of you will know this in case you don't. A yoke in the olden days is a tool with which they would harness an animal, usually an ox. The horses could also take a yoke. You would put it on an animal so that the animal could do what? Work for you. Jesus is saying take my yoke upon you. Jesus has work for you to do. That's what that means.
It can't mean anything else. I've got work for you to do. He says take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for what? Your souls. The rest isn't for your mind and body. It's for your soul. You will find rest from an adversarial relationship with God. Verse 30, for my yoke, the work that I have for you is easy and my burden, my burden is light. So God has a yoke for you. He has work for you just like he gave Adam responsibility.
He intends to give you responsibility but the responsibility isn't burdensome like life under the hot sun in this world. God intends for us to receive a yoke of responsibility which will carry for all eternity but it's going to be light. It's going to be life giving. It's going to be joy giving. It's going to be meaning giving. It's a good plan. It isn't like life under this cursed world which is under the curse of sin and death right now. It's not like that.
It's going to be something completely different. So the idea of rest is a particular rest. It is rest from an adversarial relationship with God through faith in the work and person of Jesus Christ. The work of bringing peace between God and man was finished just like God's work was finished of creating the physical universe on the seventh day. Jesus' work of creating peace between God and man was finished at his resurrection from the dead.
By the way, I'm not going to belabor this point but this is why Saturday is technically the seventh day, the Sabbath, but Christians worship God on Sunday which is typically the day which church tradition holds Jesus was raised from the dead. I'm not interested in getting into the debate about whether or not Jesus was raised on Saturday or Sunday. I don't care.
The apostle Paul says in Colossians 2, 16, let no one judge you by what you eat or drink with regard to a feast, a new moon, or a Sabbath because these are a shadow of the things to come but the body that casts it belongs to Christ. Jesus Christ is our Sabbath. I'm in a permanent Sabbath rest through faith in the work and person of Jesus Christ. And so I'm free from all those rules and laws and regulations and I'm grateful for that and you ought to be as well.
And all of this that we're reading is really pointing to the person and the work of Jesus Christ through whom through faith in him and loyalty to him we are in a permanent rest in a relationship with God and we look forward to a new Eden that God is going to establish on the earth where we will be resurrected and placed to do the exact same thing that God mandated to Adam and Eve. So we have that to look forward to. It's going to be amazing.
This message ought to inspire us with great hope and confidence in what we're about here on the earth here now. We are here training in godliness to assume that role at some point in the future as a member of God's family. So with that being said, thanks for joining us. We will continue our study next week and hope to see you there. Be blessed. God bless.