The Rest of God | Genesis 2:1-3
Brian G. Hedges | May 15, 2016

Perhaps some of you have heard the ancient legend of Sisyphus, the Greek god who was condemned to an eternal existence of misery as he would push a rock up to the top of the hill, only for it to roll down again, and then have to repeat that task over and over and over again. I wonder, have any of you ever felt like Sisyphus?

I wonder this morning if any of you have come into this service feeling tired, or overworked, overloaded, overwhelmed? You feel weary, you feel burdened. You feel a deep need for rest. Both physical rest—perhaps just the deep need for sleep—but maybe also a deep need for a rest in your spirit, a rest in your heart, a rest of soul.

Do you feel restless?

Do you find that even sometimes in the down time that you have, the occasional day off, maybe the occasional vacation, that there is a deep restlessness in your soul, in your heart, that keeps you from really being at peace?

George Herbert, a great Puritan poet, once wrote a poem called The Pulley. And the poem is about how God had given to human beings a number of different gifts, but he withheld from them one gift. And withholding that one gift was meant to drive them to himself.

This is how the poem goes:

When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) pour on him all we can:
Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.

Now Herbert’s point is simply this: that in our lives, when we have so many blessings, when we have so much prosperity, when God gives us so much, and yet there is this deep, abiding restlessness of soul, that restlessness is itself an index to our condition. And it shows us the great need we have for the rest of God. For rest in God himself. In other words, restless lives mask restless hearts. When we’re restless in our lives it masks an inner restlessness, an inner longing for something more.

That’s why St. Augustine was right in that famous sentence (that I’m sure I’ve quoted tens, if not hundreds of times), “Lord you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

So this morning, if you find yourself restless, the word of God speaks to us in that restlessness. And I want you to turn in your Bibles to Genesis 2:1-3. This is a part of our continuing series on the early chapters of Genesis. So far we have spent three weeks in Genesis chapter 1, looking at the character of God himself—God who is the creator, the maker of heaven and earth; and then looking at God’s work of creation; and then, last week, at the apex of God’s creation, as he created man, in the divine image.

And this morning I want us to just focus on the seventh day of creation, in Genesis 2:1-3. It’s interesting that the way this is even worded in Genesis 2 sets this day apart from all the rest. Kent Hughes, in his commentary says: “the seventh day stands apart in solitary grandeur as the crown to the sixth day of creation. This indicates not only immense literary craft but deep theological significance.” [R. Kent Hughes, Genesis: Beginning and Blessing (Wheaton, IL: Crossway) p. 42]. And this morning we are going to look at that theological significance. The theological significance of the seventh day—God’s day of rest.

So let’s read the text.

Genesis 2:1-3: Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 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. 3 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.

This is God’s word.

Now you read that passage and there’s almost a poetic cadence to the words. Three times that phrase “the seventh day” is repeated. The passage tells us that God did four things. Four actions are ascribed to God on the seventh day. He finished His work in verse 2. He rested from his work, also in verse 2. That’s repeated in verse 3. Then He blessed the seventh day in verse 3. And he made it holy, or he sanctified it.

So this day has great significance. It’s the only day of the seven days that God sanctified. It’s the only day that God blessed. God had previously blessed the living creatures, and he blessed man and woman made in his image. But now God blesses a day. He sanctifies a day. And this day is the seventh day.

So this morning I want us to think about this pattern that we see in Genesis 2, as we look at God’s rest on the seventh day. And I want us to think about the implications for us and the application for us in our own spiritual lives. And so, part of what I want to do is trace this theme of rest as a thread through scripture and see how this theme kind of runs through part of the Old Testament and finds its culmination in the person and work of Jesus Christ. But I also want to try to be practical—because my sense is that many of us are in deep need of rest, both on a physical and emotional level—by developing some practices of rest that perhaps are missing from our lives. But also rest in a spiritual sense. That is finding our rest in Jesus.
And so here is my approach this morning. I want to look at three things with you.

I. The Nature of Rest
II. The Source of Rest
III. The Practice of Rest

I. The Nature of Rest

The word (rested - yishebot) that’s used here is a Hebrew word that essentially means “to cease.” So when it says that God rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done, what it means is that God stopped working. He ceased. He stopped doing something. Okay. Now it wasn’t as if God was tired. So God is very different from us in that sense. God doesn’t need to sleep. The Psalms tells us that “He never slumbers or sleeps.” God doesn’t get tired. He doesn’t get weary. God is omnipotent. He has all power. So he doesn’t lose anything by his work. He doesn’t exhaust his resources. He doesn’t get depleted. God never has to refuel his tanks. But he stopped. He ceased working. And the reason he ceased is because he had completed the work.

Now you see that in verse 1 and verse 2. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished (v. 2) on the seventh day. God finished the work he had done, and he rested. And so it’s because God completed his work and finished his work that God rested. But that gives us the essential nature of rest. Rest isn’t primarily taking a nap. Rest is stopping. Rest is ceasing. Rest is to cease doing what one was doing before.

Now the implications of this are significant for us. I want to read to you a paragraph from Gordon Wenham in his shorter commentary on the book of Genesis. Wenham says: “A dramatic change of pace and style highlights the distinctiveness of the Sabbath. The seventh day is not called the Sabbath here, but it is alluded to, for he rested could be paraphrased ‘he Sabbathed’. Furthermore, the seventh day’s importance is underlined by God blessing it and making it holy . . . Here, God is described as resting on the seventh day, but the narrator clearly implies that mankind, made in the divine image, is expected to copy his Creator. Indeed, the context implies that a weekly day of rest is as necessary for human survival as sex (1:27–28) or food (1:29)” —sex, obviously, for procreation and reproduction, and so the continuance of the human race. And food for their sustenance. [see G. Wenham, “Genesis” in New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition (Downers Grove, I: IVP), p. 61]

We can actually say that rest is one of the gifts that God seems to have given to human beings here in the initial days of creation. It’s one of his provisions. God gave man the land. He gave man the earth. Provided it, tended it, preparing it to be a hospitable place for him. God provided food necessary for physical sustenance. God provided relationships, as we will see next week, it was not good for man to be alone, and so God made a helper. He made the woman and instituted the first marriage, the first family, the first home, and the basic building block of society. And God gave man work, as we will see, thus giving our lives significance. He gave us a task, He gave us something to do. Again, we saw last week, that God’s purpose for human beings is to reflect his glory in the world and to extend his kingly reign in the world. That’s what it means to be fruitful and to multiply and to exercise dominion over the earth. But among these gifts of food and the earth as a home, and relationships, and marriage and family and society—among the gifts that God has given to us, He gave us the gift of rest.

But unfortunately, this is a gift that many of us never take time to open. It’s a gift that many of us never take time to enjoy, because we haven’t learned to stop. We haven’t learned to cease. Now when we continue reading in the Old Testament, we find that the significance of this actually grows, as God communicates more and more with his people Israel. We don’t have much—I don’t guess we have anything else said about rest in the book of Genesis—but when we get to the book of Exodus, this becomes very important. In fact, one of the Ten Commandments has to do with this rest, it has to do with the Sabbath day. And we see this in Exodus 20:8-11 and then again in Deuteronomy 5:12-15. And I just want to read each of those passages, because they are slightly different. These are the two different versions of the Ten Commandments, but they are worded in slightly different ways, and I think thus highlight the significance of the Sabbath day for God’s people in the Old Testament in two different ways.

Here is the reading from Exodus 20:

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

So there you have one of the Ten Commandments, where God commands his people to remember the Sabbath day and to keep it holy. And the reason is because God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day and then blessed and sanctified that day.

In Deuteronomy 5:12-15, it reads a little differently:

“Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. 15 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”

Now did you catch the difference? In Exodus chapter 20, the reason to keep the Sabbath is because God created the world in six days, rested on the seventh, sanctified and blessed that day. In Deuteronomy chapter 5, the reason to keep the Sabbath is not creation. It’s redemption. It’s because God had set his people free from slavery in Egypt. They were no longer to slave away every day of the week, as they once had. They weren’t to live as slaves anymore. They had been liberated from this. They had been freed from this. And therefore they were to observe the Sabbath.

That’s why Mark Buchanan, in a very helpful book on rest and Sabbath, called The Rest of God, says this: “Exodus grounds Sabbath in creation. Deuteronomy grounds it in liberation. Exodus remembers Eden. Deuteronomy. Egypt. In Exodus, Sabbath-keeping is about imitating divine example and receiving divine blessing. In Deuteronomy, it is about taking hold of divine deliverance and observing divine command. Exodus looks up. Deuteronomy looks back. Exodus gives theological rationale for rest, and Deuteronomy historical justification for it. One evokes God’s character, the other his redemption. One calls us to holy mimicry – be like God; the other to holy defiance – never be slaves again.” [Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007) p. 87].

Now here is the main application point that I want you to get from all that I have just said. To rest is to cease from work. That’s the nature of rest. And the reasons to rest are both an imitation of God and because of God’s liberating grace. But to never rest means that we’re still slaves. To never rest means to live in a kind of slavery. And when our lives are characterized by ceaseless work, rather than by a rhythm of work and rest, work and rest, work and rest, we are very likely slaves to either our occupation, our job, our ambitions, or to something else.

Now, here is my caveat. I know that there are seasons of life where getting the kind of rest we might desire is very difficult and maybe even impossible. It’s really hard for moms of preschoolers to get rest. Okay? I know that. It’s hard if you’re maybe doing a residency as a physician. It’s hard to get good rest in that period of time. There are seasons in our lives that are really hard to get rest. And I understand that. And so I don’t want you to hear anything like condemnation this morning. In fact I’m going to nuance this just a bit. There is a distinction between the Christian’s observance of rest and the Jewish Sabbath. We are not under the law; we’re under grace. Don’t feel like there is anything legalistic about this, this morning. I’m not imposing any kind of particular program for you.

But what I’m saying is this: if your life is characterized by constant work, constant activity, you are very likely a slave, rather than free. Because, often, the constancy of always going, always doing, is really a mask for the deep restlessness of our souls, and the reason we keep doing that is because we’re trying to prove something, or we’re trying to earn something. We are trying to prove something to ourselves or to others. We are trying to earn something. Were trying to justify our existence by what we do. And that is a very deadly place to live.

What does it mean to rest? What’s the nature of rest? It’s to stop. It’s to cease. And to never stop, to never cease is to live in a kind of perpetual slavery like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill.

So then, what is the source of rest?

II. The Source of Rest

If the nature of rest is to cease, to stop, what’s the source of rest? Where do we get rest? And this is where I want us to just move forward to the New Testament for a few minutes. Because by the time we get to the New Testament, God’s people had actually turned the Sabbath itself into a legalistic monstrosity. The rabbis had added rule upon rule upon rule the things you could do and the things you couldn’t do on the Sabbath day, so that it was a burden.

When Jesus comes on the scene, he comes bursting the old covenant wineskins with the new wine of the kingdom. He comes healing on the Sabbath, violating Jewish Sabbath laws, and claiming Lordship over the Sabbath. He even says the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath. And these are hints that Jesus was coming and fulfilling something.

The Sabbath day was a pointer. It was a pointer to something in the future. It was a pointer to the rest that could be given to God’s people in Jesus. When Jesus comes on the scene, Jesus transcends the Sabbath laws, and Jesus claims to be the fulfillment of those laws (see Mark 2). A fulfillment of the signs. A fulfillment of those pointers. So there are hints here that a change is coming.

Then it is interesting when you get into the letters, Paul’s letters especially, it becomes pretty clear that Sabbath keeping, along with circumcision, and food laws, and the Jewish festivals, were simply shadows pointing to the reality of Christ. And therefore Christians do not need to feel under bondage, under obligation to keep certain days, including Sabbath days. I think that is the only reading of Colossians 2:16-17 that really makes sense. In those verses Paul says: “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”

So understand that the Sabbath in the Old Testament was a sign. It was a pointer. It pointed forward, and it pointed forward to a reality that was brought by Christ. But what is it that Christ brought? What is the reality he brought? And what he brought was deep and true rest for the soul. Deep and true rest for man. He was the Lord of the Sabbath.
And one passage that I think makes this especially clear is the great invitation that Jesus gave in Matthew 11:28-30. Hear these words. These may be a balm for your burdened heart this morning: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Now what is this? This is an invitation to discipleship. It’s an invitation to come to Jesus in faith. And it’s an invitation to lay down a burden—to stop working and to cease from all of our self-salvation projects.

There is a great old hymn called “It is Finished!” by James Proctor. And there are a couple of lines that go like this:

Weary, working, burdened one,
Wherefore toil you so?
Cease your doing; all was done
Long, long ago.

Cast your deadly “doing” down—
Down at Jesus’ feet;
Stand in Him, in Him alone,
Gloriously complete.

The source of rest is Jesus Himself. And in our lives, the inability to ever take time off and rest is an indicator, perhaps, that we haven’t really tapped into that deep source of rest.

I think this can be a temptation for all of us. I don’t know about you, but I can be tempted to work too much. I can be tempted to work too long. I can be tempted to neglect other needful things in order to do things that seem very important and very urgent. After all, it’s the ministry! What can be more important than meeting with people, and praying for people, and preparing sermons, and studying the Bible?

Well, I’ll tell you what’s more important. What’s more important than all of that is finding my rest in Jesus. Because those things can become task masters in my life, where I’m enslaved to trying to do better, trying to do more, trying to impress people, trying to earn my keep, trying to be sure that I’m meeting everybody’s expectations. And that’s a miserable way to live. But we can all do that in our vocations. We can all do that in our lives. We can do that even if you don’t have a full time job. You might be a stay at home mom. But whatever your vocation is in life, if you look to what you do to be the source of rest for your soul, it will always elude you. What we need instead is to look to what Christ has done, not what we do. “To lay our deadly doing down. Down at Jesus’ feet.” And recognize that Jesus is the one who has done what needs to be done to give rest to our souls. To be willing to cease from the normal routines. To take time to be rested and refreshed, and to recalibrate our hearts, to reorient our hearts towards the Lord.

So the nature of rest is to cease, to stop working. The source of rest is Jesus himself. He advises us to come to himself and find rest for our souls. Finally…

III. The Practice of Rest

Now, as I said a few minutes ago, there is a shift that happened when Jesus came. And so, as believers, we are not under a Sabbath law. We’re not under a Sabbath law. I think that is clear from Colossians 2 and Galatians 4 and other passages as well. So there is nothing legalistic here, in the sense that you must take one day off out of seven, in order to keep your covenant with God. We’re not under the old covenant law, and so I don’t think that’s true. Nevertheless, there is an abiding principle that is relevant to our lives today.

There was a rhythm. A pattern of work and rest that was established in creation prior to the giving of the law. God rested on the seventh day, blessed that day, sanctified it, set it apart. That pattern was not only sanctioned by God’s law, it pointed to something even better. It pointed to this gracious reality of rest given in Christ. And though that law of Sabbath is fulfilled and though Jesus is our true Sabbath, he is our rest, we are still creatures, and we still need the rhythms of work and rest, work and rest. So how do we put it into practice?

And what I want to do here as we move to the end is give you a golden rule; and then I want to give you three components to the practice of rest. These are the three things that need to be built into your life with some kind of regularity, some kind of rhythm that will help us to rest in all of the dimensions that we need it – physically, emotionally, mentally, as well as spiritually.

So here is the golden rule. This, again, comes from Mark Buchanan’s helpful little book. He says the golden rule of Sabbath keeping, the golden rule of rest is: “Cease from what is necessary, embrace that which gives life.” So that’s the first thing. We’ve just got to establish that, we’ve got to stop working, not punch in the clock, and embrace life-giving things into our rhythms, into our routines.

Now what makes this particularly difficult is the technological revolution. The difficulty now is that I have a phone—an iPhone that’s sitting right there—that will get email and text messages twenty-four hours a day. And you probably have these infernal little devices too! And they can make it really hard to stop. So some of what we have to learn how to do is to choose the times when we’re going to work, and choose times when we’re going to rest, and keep those times distinct and separate. That’s one of the things we have to do.

Essentially, we just need to cease. We need to stop doing the normal routine and embrace things that are life-giving.

And then three components to balanced rest. And I’m drawing these from a helpful sermon by Tim Keller. He says that we need three things for balanced Sabbath keeping, if we want to call it that. (1) We need avocation. (2) We need contemplation. (3) And we need inaction.

(1) We need avocation. Now avocation is to be distinguished from vocation. Vocation is that which you do for a living. Right? It’s what you are called to. It’s what you do for a living. It’s your normal work. An avocation is something you don’t do for a living. It’s something that you do that’s different. So it can be a hobby. It could be some kind of a restful activity. I think we should think in terms of genuine re-creation. Those kinds of activities that are genuinely life giving in our hearts and lives. It’s something like sanctified play. An avocation. So for example, if your vocation is fishing, like if you are a fisherman—I don’t suppose there is anyone here that fits that category this morning. But if it was, if your vocation was to be a fisherman, don’t fish on your day off. But for anybody else, if you like fishing, and that’s a life-giving thing, that may be a very helpful thing to do on your day off. All of us need something, some kind of avocation, some kind of activity, some kind of respite from the normal routines that will help rejuvenate and refresh us physically, mentally, emotionally. That’s the first thing.

(2) The second thing is contemplation, and this is where the element of worship comes in. It’s not enough to simply stop working. We have to embrace that which is really life-giving. But what is most life-giving of all? Well, what is most life-giving of all is our relationship to the Lord Jesus. It’s the gospel. It’s worship. It’s recalibrating our souls to Him. So in our rest, there needs to be this element of reorienting ourselves to the Lord. Because if you never do that, no number of days off is going to meet the deep restlessness of your soul. Only reorienting your heart to Jesus is going to do that. So there’s got to be that element of contemplation, of devotion, of worship.
Now that’s something that we can do in a corporate way when we come together on the Lord’s Day for worship. But it’s also something that you and I need to be doing privately. We need to be doing devotionally, on a regular basis—turning our hearts towards the Lord and finding our rest in him.

(3) And then the third piece of this is inaction. Now what’s that? That’s just unstructured, unhurried time, to just “be.” Sometimes you just need to “be,” you just need to be home, or you just need to be in nature, you just need to have a period of time where you’re not really focused on doing anything in particular, you’re just being. And maybe this is the most challenging thing of all, because so many of us are prone to fill up our days off with other things that need to be done. So perhaps what we need is some simplification of our lives so that there is less to be done, so that we actually can stop and just “be”.

There is a great little passage in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. If you’ve read those books or seen those movies, remember these hobbits that are journeying to Mordor to destroy the ring, they have a respite in Rivendell, which is this kind of forest village, where the elves live. And there is a wonderful passage where Tolkien describes the effect of this extended stay in Rivendell, on the Hobbits after the arduous journey that they’ve been on. It reads like this. “For a while the hobbits continued to talk and think of the past journey and of the perils that lay ahead; but such was the virtue of the land of Rivendell that soon all fear and anxiety was lifted from their minds. The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.” (Quoted in Buchanan, The Rest of God, p. 125)

Now I don’t know about you, but I read that, and I feel a certain amount of longing and also remember times where that’s been the experience. Have you ever been there, where you’ve stopped long enough that you can take pleasure in the meal? You can take pleasure in every word and every song, where the future doesn‘t loom over the present, it doesn’t dominate the present. You’re able to simply “be” and to enjoy the present moment—God, those around you, the situation you’re in—and let tomorrow’s burdens stay in tomorrow. That’s what we need. And I think the only way to get that regularly is to embrace some kind of rhythm where work is punctuated with rest, where we stop, where we lay aside the urgent things, and we pay attention to that which is so important.

So the nature of rest is to stop, to cease. The source of rest is Jesus himself. The practice of rest involves this pattern of ceasing our work, and embracing these life-giving things in our lives.

Let me close this morning with these words that we sang a few moments ago. And I’ve found these helpful. To be honest, coming into this morning and into this service this week, I have felt anything but rested, and anything but the kind of rest that I’ve described. It’s kind of an ironic thing, and I think I need this as much as anybody. It was a crazy week, with extra things on my plate. And there is a certain amount of nervousness and tension, even as I was standing here a few minutes ago, but when we sang that song, there was some release in just reading some of these words.

Jesus, I am resting, resting,
In the joy of what Thou art;
I am finding out the greatness
Of Thy loving heart.

O, how great Thy loving kindness,
Vaster, broader than the sea!
O, how marvelous Thy goodness,
Lavished all on me!

This is what helped me:

Yes, I rest in Thee, Beloved,
Know what wealth of grace is Thine,
Know Thy certainty of promise,
And have made it mine.

You know what that means for me? It means that no matter how good or bad this sermon comes across, the promise is mine, and I can rest in Jesus.

Simply trusting Thee, Lord Jesus,
I behold Thee as Thou art,
And Thy love, so pure, so changeless,
Satisfies my heart;

Jesus, I am resting, resting,
In the joy of what Thou art;
I am finding out the greatness
Of Thy loving heart.

Let’s pray.

So, Lord Jesus, we thank you that we can come to you even when we’re weary and burdened, and in coming to you and yoking up with you, there is rest for our soul. And Lord, I don’t know where everyone is this morning. I know where my own soul is, and I know that I need these regular periodic times of reorienting, of refreshing, of stopping, of ceasing, and then embracing you in a fresh way. And for anyone else who needs that this morning, I pray that you would grant that. I pray that you will provide the time for it. And that you would grant us the grace and the discipline to shut off the devices, to lay down the burdens, to stop the routine, and to spend time in your presence, to spend time in your creation, to spend time with those we love, and to find our souls refreshed and rested in you. Thank you for the good news of the gospel. Thank you that our work does not determine our eternal future but what Jesus has already done for us does. Thank you that the gospel is not “do;” the gospel is “done.” Thank you that just as you finished the work of creation and rested on the seventh day, so Jesus declared on the cross, “It is finished,” and the work of salvation is complete, and therefore we can enter by faith into the eternal rest that is given to us through Christ, who is our Sabbath. We thank you for all this, and we give you praise and worship. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Brian G. Hedges

Raised in a pastor’s family, Brian was graciously drawn to Christ as a teenager and began preaching when he was 18. Brian became our Lead Pastor in 2003. Brian is married to Holly, who works in administration at a local Christian school. Brian and Holly have been married since 1996 and have four children. Brian is the author of numerous books, enjoys reading, working out, being outdoors, and playing golf.