The Pharisees loaded the Sabbath with untold stupid laws and turned it into a day of fear and misery. Jesus now recovers it. For he is the Lord of the Sabbath. He is the God of the seven days of creation. He was the one who created the world and who rested on the Seventh Day.

My good friend has a heart problem. Sometimes it races uncontrollably, and dangerously. He’s a very busy man, with lots of plates in the air. The doctor says he has to slow down: “There needs to be time each day when you end up saying to yourself, ‘What shall I do now?’” Times of boredom are highly recommended. Does he ever find such times? I doubt it.
Our pace of life is frantic, perhaps especially if you have some kids running around. And then there’s our mind. There’s a three-ring circus going on up there: action, anguish, anger, drama, dismay, debate, and more action. “When I lay me down to sleep” is exactly when the circus of the mind is unmasked, “with inward furies blasted.” It can take a while to find sleep, and when you wake in the night, it begins again.
Whenever do we find rest for our bodies and minds? Rest from our worries? Rest from our financial obligations and strains? Rest from relationship clouds and puzzles? Above all, rest from sin? From relentless nagging temptation? From failure? From guilt and shame? When will we be able to look at one another with a placid conscience? When will we be able to look full into the awful and holy face of God without flinching with the shame and guilt of a sin-stained soul?
Rest is right here. Right here in the first three verses of the second chapter of Genesis.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. (Gen. 2:1)

Moses pictures completed creation: light, firmament, verdant land, sun, moon, stars, birds, fishes, and the mighty creatures of the ocean deep, the land animals—domestic, wild, and swarming—as a mighty and splendid army, a great host arrayed before her general. And we, male and female in the image of God, are at the head of that array, made by God to enjoy, subdue, and govern it all for the mutual benefit of humanity and creation.
God finishes what he starts.
God was thus successful in his work. This is emphatic—both verses one and two begin in the original language with the verb “finished.”
How many times do we start something that we never finish: War and Peace, a home-project, learning German, or writing a piece of music? And we fail so often to complete far more important things: we pull out of a friendship, we give up on parenting, or even a marriage. Why do we fail? Sometimes because we lack the strength and ability: we thought we could write an EP, or build a greenhouse, but we just can’t. More often we get bored, or we simply lack the will to stick with what we promised to stick with. God set out to create the universe, with humanity as his leading image-bearers; and lacking neither the power, ability, or will, he completed his work.

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. 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. (Gen. 2:2-3)

Work is good.
God worked. Work is good. We were created to work. Work is not the result of the curse any more than childbirth is the result of the curse. It is the difficulty and frustration of work that came as part of the curse, just as it is the pain of childbirth—of bringing a child into a world of war and disease and evil—that was curse-caused.
The great goal of many in the West is retirement from work: endless summers of eggs Benedict, country drives, and barge tours down the Rhone. Work is painful and frustrating. Who does not want to be freed from that? But our Maker works (“My Father is always at his work to this very day,” John 5:17), and he made us to work. Work is good, and it is sin to want to have no work and responsibility. To get old and frail in body and mind, where we can no longer do as much work, is a sadness. We should look forward to those new bodies that are promised to Christ’s people, so that we can get back to work! What we need is not the absence of work, but the redemption of work.
Yet on the Seventh Day of creation week, God stopped working, and rested. Work is good, yet work is not an end itself. It is done to make something good, to achieve something worthy, and then after completion there is rest and the enjoyment of what is made. It is very bold of Moses to say that “God rested,” and even to say that he was “refreshed” on that day (Exod. 31:17). The idolatrous mind, always hankering to belittle God, instinctively seizes at his phrase: “Who is this god who is so wearied by his exertions that he needs to rest? Is he really almighty and self-sufficient?” Genesis 2 doesn’t say that a tired god needed to stop. This is God’s way: he works, and then he ceases from work and rests.
God’s way: work, and then rest.
This is likewise to be the way of God’s image-bearers. For God “blessed the seventh day, and made it holy.” When God blesses, he turns his face towards someone or something, communicates his goodness to that thing, and bestows function. (Thus, God had blessed the birds and fishes, land-animals, and humanity [Gen. 1:22, 28].) The Seventh Day alone is blessed, to reflect the face of God and all his goodness. The Seventh Day will carry a special function: God makes it holy—distinct, life-imparting, and good.
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Jesus says of the new earth, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). This means he will restore creation to its former pre-curse glory, and likely give it greater beauty and wonder than the original. We, and the new world, will become far better and in that sense far different. But we will be the same people, without sin; and it will be the same world, without evil and suffering. All will be made glorious.

Resurrection — Christ’s and ours — is a cornerstone of the Christian faith. Yet how many of us ponder what our resurrected selves will be like? You might think Scripture doesn’t say much. In fact, it tells us a lot, and gives us solid reasons to deduce much more.
For instance, Paul wrote, “[The body that] is sown is perishable; [it] is raised imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. . . . It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). The term “spiritual body” doesn’t mean an incorporeal body made of spirit — there is no such thing. Body means corporeal: flesh and bones. A spiritual body will still be a body. But it will be spiritual, under the holy control of a redeemed and righteous spirit.
God made Adam from the earth to live on it, not float on the air. He joined spirit and body to make us completely human. He did not design us to be disembodied spirits as Plato taught, yet sadly, many Christians believe just that. To be with Christ in the present heaven is better by far than living on earth under the curse. But Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 15 that we will not be eternally complete until our resurrection.
Was Jesus Only a Ghost?
“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). Christ’s post-resurrection actions offer us a preview of what resurrected people will do — including preparing and eating meals, conversing, and traveling. If Jesus had been a ghost, we would become ghosts. More importantly, if Jesus had only been a ghost, redemption wouldn’t have been accomplished.
The risen Jesus told his disciples,
“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. . . . [Then] he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them. (Luke 24:39–43)
Jesus didn’t just say he wasn’t a ghost; he proved it. Likewise, he “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). Whatever else a glorified body is, it is first and foremost a resurrected body.
In Acts 1:11, an angel explained, “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way. . . .” The resurrected Jesus who lived among them forty days before ascending is the same Jesus in soul and body who will return to raise his people’s bodies from the grave. Why didn’t Jesus immediately ascend to heaven? Perhaps partly to show his design for resurrected people to live on a physical earth.
You Will Still be You
Bible-believing Christians often ask me, “Will we become angels when we die?” Somewhere they have gotten the idea that whatever we may be after death, we won’t really be human. No wonder so few Christians look forward to heaven. Humans are not drawn to the idea of becoming inhuman.
Scripture portrays resurrection as a matter of continuity from our present into our future lives. The Westminster Confession says, “All the dead shall be raised up with the selfsame bodies, and none other . . . united again to their souls forever.” Selfsame and none other unequivocally mean we will still be us.
When I became a Christian in high school, my mother saw many changes, but she still recognized me. She said, “Good morning, Randy,” not “Who are you?” My dog never growled at me — he knew exactly who I was even though I was a new person in Jesus. Likewise, this same Randy will undergo another significant change at death, and yet another at the resurrection.
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The earthly man’s perspective is not the perspective of our Lord. Man wants to get ahead, wants to work hard and build one’s own dream. And this mentality of being a self-made man, a hard man, a person of prominence, is always threatening to creep into the Church—and does creep in! But Christ calls his followers to reject the ways of the world and the means of the world, and instead adopt his posture of service and humility.

We live in a time where it is thought that strength must be shown for it to be “strength”. Arguing online is the norm. Brash politicians are lauded. The bolder the talking head, the better. For men to be men they must be strong and commanding. Pastors must be firm and charismatic leaders if they are to generate a following. And for the church to “truly” stand against the rising tide of the culture, it must be boisterously staunch and outwardly superior to combat the evil of our day. But is this what Christ would have for us to demonstrate that we stand with Jesus—is this what the Lord had in mind when he called his followers to be like him?
Biblical Testimony
Throughout the whole of the scriptures, God describes himself as the God who cares for ones who cannot care for themselves. A small sampling is all that is needed to demonstrate this point. Psalm 10:17-18, “O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted…to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed”, Psalm 72:12-14 “he delivers the needy when he calls…He has pity on the weak and the needy, From oppression and violence he redeems their life”. In Ezekiel 34, when God lambasts the false shepherds of his people, he condemns them for caring only for themselves and for, horrifically, feeding themselves on the Lord’s sheep! To such an inversion of God’s desires, he promises to care for his sheep himself (vs. 15) and to set up the one true Shepherd in the line of David (vs. 23). This shepherd is One after the Lord’s own heart (Jer. 3:15) who will not take advantage of those under his care, but feed and provide for them. This is the very tender compassion of our God—this is how he chooses to make himself known! Our God is a God who uses his strength to serve.
The Worldly Alternative
The opposite is true of the world. Worldly men, as described in the scriptures, think only of themselves. Jude 12 says they “shepherd only themselves.” Philippians 3:19 captures the selfishness of these enemies of the cross as those “whose god is their bellies”—they only care about satisfying self. And Jesus said in Matthew 20:25-26: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant.” Jesus distinctly calls us to fly in the face of the world’s typical standard of “always look out for number one.” The world’s default perspective is who else is going to look out for me, if I don’t? In the corporate world, climb the dogpile faster than the competition. In the financial sector, make as much as possible—personal greed is the ticket! In social settings, put others down so you look good. In any sphere of authority, make sure people are serving you.
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