Genesis 2

Genesis 2

Sunday Morning Bible Study

November 12, 2006

Introduction

Show “The Watchmaker” animation.

:1-3 The Seventh Day

:1 Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished.

:2 And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.

God didn’t rest because He was tired. God rested because He was finished with His work of creation.

:3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

This seventh day of rest would be the foundation of what the Bible calls the “Sabbath”. Keeping the Sabbath was the fifth of God’s Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:8-11).

The Sabbath was specifically for the nation of Israel (Ex. 31:16-17)

Keeping Saturday as a day of Sabbath rest was supposed to be one of the ways that people could see the Jewish people honor their God.

One of the reasons the Jews were carried off to Babylon for seventy years was because they had neglected the Sabbath. God told Jeremiah that the seventy years were to make up for all the missed Sabbaths (2Chr. 36:21).

The Gentile church adopted Sunday as their day of worship.

There are folks who feel that true Christians must also worship on Saturday rather than Sunday.

But we are not Israel. We are the church.

From the very earliest days of the church, Christians practices gathering together on Sunday rather than Saturday (1Cor. 16:2). They did this in honor of the resurrection. Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week (John 20:1).

Paul wrote,

(Rom 14:4-5 NKJV) Who are you to judge another’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. Indeed, he will be made to stand, for God is able to make him stand. {5} One person esteems one day above another; another esteems every day alike. Let each be fully convinced in his own mind.

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you worship on Saturday or Sunday. In fact, you could worship God every day.

Lesson

The Sabbath rest

Jesus was often challenged with His concept of the Sabbath. The Jews in Jesus’ day had developed a very strict understanding of what it meant to “keep the Sabbath” and Jesus would break their rules by doing things like healing people on a Sabbath day. That might seem silly to us, but to the Pharisee, Jesus was a heretic. Jesus taught:

(Mark 2:27 NKJV) And He said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath

I think that for us Gentiles, even though we don’t have church on Saturday, we still ought to consider the importance of the principle of the Sabbath. There seems to be two principles within the concept of the Sabbath.

Holiness – “keep it holy”

Going to church on Sunday is a part of that concept.

But it goes beyond church. It carries the idea of honoring God on the Sabbath.

Rest

The dangers of our busy society – Last week I was at a meeting of pastors where we heard a message by Dr. Archibald Hart, clinical psychologist, dean of psychology at Fuller Seminary, often heard on Focus on the Family, and a very Biblically grounded Christian. He talked about a new book he just finished, “Thrilled to Death”, where he discusses the new phenomena in our society called anhedonia (“no pleasure”), a rising problem in the population where people are not able to experience pleasure. The problem seems to be that we’re simply overloaded. People are addicted to adrenaline, always looking for some new thrill. We multi-task, we carry our cell phones everywhere, we are trying to cram more and more things into our lives. People can’t drive in the car without turning on a radio. We can’t live without having a TV making noise. Some churches feel that to keep people coming to their church they have to keep coming up with more elaborate productions. The music has to be louder and faster. The message has to be shorter.

The problem is that we don’t leave any time for silence and reflection.

And we wonder why we have a hard time hearing from God.

When the prophet Elijah was running for his life, he ended up in a cave in the middle of nowhere. And he had an encounter with God.

At first Elijah felt a strong wind, then an earthquake, and then lightning. But God wasn’t in those things (1Ki. 19:11-13). It was with a “still small voice” that God spoke to Elijah.

If we’re expecting God to speak in a loud voice, we just might miss it.

God often speaks with a “still, small voice”. We need to learn to be quiet before Him. We need to give Him time in our lives to hear His voice.