Jon Collins

I mean, these are the basic subterranean ideas at work in the creation story.

And just as creation itself is both separate from God, but then also meant to be unified and connected with God.

And so there's this period of laboring, but then that laboring culminates in this great seventh day rest where you stop and you enjoy the goodness of all that results from that.

And what's interesting, and all the way back in our series on the Sabbath,

years ago, the way that the six days are marked, each day opens with, and God said, and God is making or doing something, and then it ends with saying, and there was evening, and there was morning, the X day.

One, two, three, four, five, six, and that little signal for the ending, it never happens with day seven.

It's the day that doesn't end.

So...

I quoted then in that series, and I'll quote again now, a great little book on the concept of Sabbath and Jubilee in the biblical story by scholar Richard Lowry.

He puts it this way.

He says, "...the seventh-day account does not end with the expected formula, there was evening and there was morning."

That phrase concluded days one through six.

And so breaking the pattern in this way emphasizes the uniqueness of the seventh day, and it opens the door

to, and he calls, eschatological interpretation.

Literally, the sun has not yet set on God's Sabbath.

So I think what he's saying is the seven-day creation narrative is trying to tell us about the foundation of the cosmos we inhabit, therefore pointing to the past.

But it's also open-ended in the fact that the seventh day has no end.

It's ongoing.

which opens the door to say, well, perhaps the seven day narrative is also a way of thinking about all of history.

And that all of history is on this arc of separating but gathering up towards this grand unification.