Genesis 2:2 Commentary and Bible Study

Moses now addresses another subject: the sanctity, the set-apart character of the seventh day. Had man not fallen – though we should not really speculate like this – one imagines that in the perfect earth there would always have been the sabbath, and the special remembering and worshipping of God for his creative activity. Evidently Adam understood that the six days of creation and the sabbath rest was a weekly pattern for all mankind, and therefore Exodus 20:8 says ‘Remember the sabbath’, referring back to this original creation ordinance, which had been in force from the beginning and did not just begin at Sinai. Of all creatures made on earth, only man is capable of keeping the sabbath, for ‘the sabbath was made for man’ after his creation, freeing him legitimately from his normal work to spend a day exclusively in the worship of God.Let us understand ‘on the seventh day’ to mean ‘by the seventh day’. Again, people say, O, there’s a contradiction here: you have six days of creation and now you have a seventh. It is perfectly obvious, I would think, to anyone, that not even the most elementary writer would make a mistake as big as that and contradict himself in the space of just a few words. No, we are obviously intended to understand that by the seventh day all was done: no contradiction with the previous sentences that the creation is chronicled over six days, and then God finishes his creative work. He rested, so it is said. God, of course, does not need to rest – he is inexhaustible; he is eternal power and energy and action. He does not need to rest, he is giving an example of something. God has stopped his created activity and he's given himself a Sabbath, an intermission, a rest as an example and as a type, a foreshadowing of something. He continues to work in the sense of sustaining the universe and developing it, but he rests in the sense that he ends his creation-from-nothing work. His rest marks his perfect satisfaction with all he has made so that he did not feel it necessary to change anything or add anything. He has made a perfect world: no thorns, no briars. In chapter 3 verse 18 they are there introduced: ‘Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee’, but they were not there before. There were no predators, there was no death – that is clear from verse 17 of this second chapter. Death comes with the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. How different is God’s work from man’s work: all that the Lord does is perfect from the first! He does not need to reconsider or try another time as we do.