The Liturgy of Creation: The First Sabbath Text: Genesis 2:1-3
Introduction: The Goal of the Grind
We live in a restless age. Our culture is defined by a frantic, buzzing anxiety. We are driven by the tyranny of the urgent, the endless scroll, and the perpetual grind. We work to get ahead, we hustle to keep up, and we distract ourselves to forget that we are falling behind. Even our rest is restless; we call it "entertainment" or "distraction," and it is usually just another form of consumption, another way to numb the ache of a world that has forgotten what it was made for.
The modern secular man, having thrown God out of the cosmos, cannot find a reason for any of it. He works without a goal, and so he rests without a purpose. His work is a Sisyphean curse, pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down. His rest is a frantic attempt to forget the meaninglessness of the work. He is a hamster on a wheel, and the only way to get off is to die. This is the bleak end of all idolatry. When you worship the creature rather than the Creator, you get a world without a point.
Into this desperate exhaustion, the Word of God speaks a foundational, world-shaping truth. God did not create the world as a chaotic, pointless machine. He created it as a temple-palace, a place for His presence and a project for His people. And He did not just create it and walk away. He established a rhythm for life within it, a rhythm of work and worship, of labor and glorious rest. This rhythm is not an arbitrary rule; it is woven into the very fabric of the created order. It is the goal of the grind.
Genesis 2:1-3 is the capstone of the creation week. It is the grand finale. The six days of forming and filling were not an end in themselves. They were all pointing to this moment. God's work was aimed at His rest. And in a staggering act of grace, He invites man, created on the sixth day, to enter into that rest with Him. Adam's first full day on the planet was a Sabbath. He began his life not with work, but with worship. He began with a gift. This is the grammar of the gospel, written on the first page of the Bible. We do not work in order to rest; we rest in order to work. Our labor flows from a state of grace, not toward it.
The Text
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts.
And on the seventh day God completed 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 on it He rested from all His work which God had created in making it.
(Genesis 2:1-3 LSB)
Creation Perfected and Arrayed (v. 1)
We begin with the magnificent summary statement in verse 1:
"Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts." (Genesis 2:1)
The word "completed" signifies that God's work of creation was perfect. It was not a rough draft. Nothing was missing, nothing was out of place, nothing was defective. It was a fully furnished world, a perfectly functioning cosmos. This is a direct assault on any notion of theistic evolution, which posits a world full of death, struggle, and imperfection for millions of years before man ever arrived. The Bible says the world was "completed," and at the end of chapter one, God declared it all "very good." Death is an intruder, the wages of sin (Rom. 5:12), not the engine of creation.
But notice the second phrase: "and all their hosts." The Hebrew word for hosts, tsaba, is a military term. It refers to an army, arrayed for battle or for a grand review. It is also used to refer to the sun, moon, and stars as the "host of heaven." What this tells us is that the creation was not just finished in a utilitarian sense, like an assembly line shutting down. It was arrayed in glory. It was a majestic, ordered, beautiful army standing at attention before its King. The sun, moon, and stars were set in their ranks. The fish, birds, and animals were deployed in their domains. And man, the vice-regent, stood ready to receive his commission. Creation is not a random collection of stuff; it is a glorious, marshaled army, ready to advance the kingdom of God.
The Royal Rest of God (v. 2)
Verse 2 introduces one of the most profound concepts in all of Scripture: the rest of God.
"And on the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done." (Genesis 2:2 LSB)
We must be careful here. God's rest is not the rest of exhaustion. The prophet Isaiah tells us, "The everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, does not faint or grow weary" (Isaiah 40:28). God did not need to catch His breath. This is not the rest of inactivity, but the rest of accomplishment. It is the kind of rest a king takes after a great victory, when he ascends his throne to enjoy the peace he has established and to rule over his new kingdom. It is a celebratory rest. The work of creating was done, and now the work of ruling and delighting in that creation began.
This sets the pattern for our own rest. Sabbath is not meant to be a day of pious boredom or mere inactivity. It is a day for celebration, for delighting in God's finished work of creation and, as we shall see, His finished work of redemption. It is a feast day. It is a victory celebration. God rested, not because He was tired, but because His work was perfect. He sat down on His throne, as it were, to enjoy His handiwork.
This verse also contains a beautiful paradox. God "completed His work" on the seventh day by resting. This means that the rest itself was the final, crowning act of creation. The Sabbath is not an appendix to the story; it is the climax. The goal of all the divine labor was this glorious, holy rest. The universe was made for worship. The six days of work find their meaning and purpose in the seventh day of rest.
The Sanctification of Time (v. 3)
In verse 3, God does something remarkable. He reaches into the flow of time and sets one portion of it apart from all the others.
"Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on it He rested from all His work which God had created in making it." (Genesis 2:3 LSB)
This is the first thing in all of Scripture that God "sanctifies," or makes holy. To sanctify something is to set it apart for a special, divine purpose. God did not sanctify a place, like a mountain or a temple. He sanctified a time. He built a cathedral in time, not in space. This means that holiness is not something we escape to; it is a rhythm we live in. The Sabbath principle is woven into the created order from the beginning, long before the Law was given to Moses at Sinai.
He "blessed" it and "sanctified" it. To bless it means He filled it with His favor and made it a source of goodness and fruitfulness for His creatures. To sanctify it means He set it apart as unique, for the special purpose of communion with Him. The Sabbath is therefore a gift. It is a blessed time, a holy time. It is the day when heaven and earth are meant to draw especially near. It is the weekly reminder that this world belongs to God and that our lives are to be oriented toward Him.
The reason for this blessing and sanctification is explicitly tied to God's own action: "because on it He rested." Our rest is a participation in His rest. When we honor the Sabbath, we are reenacting the creation week. We are confessing with our time that God is the Creator, that His work is perfect, and that we are His creatures, dependent upon Him for all things. To neglect the Sabbath is, therefore, an act of profound arrogance. It is to declare that we are autonomous, that we are the masters of our own time, and that our work, not God's, is ultimate.
From Creation Rest to Redemption Rest
Now, we cannot stop here, in Genesis. The entire Old Testament is a shadow, and the reality is Christ. The creation Sabbath of the seventh day was a type, a foreshadowing of a greater rest to come.
The reason the Fourth Commandment is grounded in creation in Exodus 20 is to remind Israel that they are to live as God's creation-people. But in Deuteronomy 5, the reason for the Sabbath is grounded in their redemption from Egypt. The pattern is the same, but the reason is amplified. Rest is not just about creation; it is about salvation. It is about God's mighty act of deliverance.
This all points forward to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:28). He declared that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, rescuing it from the clammy hands of the legalists who had turned it into a burden. And then, He accomplished a new creation. Just as God worked for six days and rested on the seventh, Jesus Christ worked His entire life, culminating in the ultimate work on the cross where He said, "It is finished." He rested in the tomb on the Sabbath, and then on the first day of the week, He rose from the dead, inaugurating the new heavens and the new earth.
This is why the Christian church, from the very beginning, has gathered for worship on the first day of the week, the Lord's Day (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2). We do not do this in disobedience to the fourth commandment. We do it in fulfillment of it. The resurrection of Christ was an act of re-creation so stupendous that it shifted the cosmic calendar. We no longer look back primarily to the old creation's completion; we now celebrate the new creation's inauguration. The old Sabbath commemorated a finished creation. The Lord's Day commemorates a finished redemption, which is the foundation of a new creation.
The pattern is gloriously inverted. In the old covenant, you worked for six days and then you rested. It was a pattern of law. In the new covenant, we begin our week with rest. We gather on Sunday to feast on the finished work of Christ. We are declared righteous, we are fed at His table, we are blessed by His Word. And from that position of gospel rest, we go out to labor for the next six days. Our work does not earn our rest. Our rest fuels our work. We work because we are saved, not in order to be saved. We were made on the sixth day and our first full day was a Sabbath, and in Christ, we are born again and the first thing we do is enter His rest. The gospel is written into the structure of our week.
Therefore, let us not treat the Lord's Day as a burden, or as an inconvenient interruption to our real lives. It is the axle on which the whole week turns. It is the gift of rest, the celebration of victory, the foretaste of the eternal Sabbath that remains for the people of God (Hebrews 4:9). On this day, we delight in our Creator and our Redeemer, and we are recalibrated to live our lives in His world, on His terms, for His glory. It is the liturgy of creation, and the rhythm of the gospel.