THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL: MAN IMAGES GOD

Our essential identity is image of God. We are created replicas of the Creator God, constituted with personal being, given regal priestly status, and made to be like God. As image of God, we enjoy a filial relationship to our Creator-Father as His creature-sons. To be created in the image of and made in the likeness of is language describing a relationship of sonship (cf. Gn 5:1-3; Lk 3:38). A more noble identity for man could not be conceived. Man is himself a revelation of God. He is not God, he is image of God, designed to be Godlike in God’s creation. He is to represent God and function as God functions, ruling over creation and working in creation so as to bring creation into God’s promised rest. As image of God, man is not only a form of revelation himself, but is capable of perceiving and receiving God’s deed and word revelation.((Waltke, op. cit. 65. “Being made in God’s image establishes humanity’s role on earth and facilitates communication with the divine.” “A human being is theomorphic, made like God so that God can communicate Himself to His people.” “Understanding that we are made in the image of God is essential for understanding our destiny and relationship to God.” 63.))

Adam’s behavior was determined by God’s behavior in that Adam was made to image God. Being image of God constituted Adam’s, and our, ethical nature and obligation to God as His creature-sons. “Image is ethics.”((Greg Nichols Lectures On The Doctrine of Man (Trinity Ministerial Academy, Trinity Baptist Church, Montville, NJ. 1984). Pondering this pregnant phrase has opened panoramic vistas into anthropology, ethics, Christology, soteriology and eschatology.)) Ethics is not, foundationally, a matter of obedience to legal command. It is rather profoundly ontological and inherent in our being image of God. We are theological beings: theomorphs. Man is made to correspond to God as a son corresponds to his father. Ethics is essential to man’s ontological sonship. Man “must” be like God by ontological necessity, which warrants giving him the moral obligations of commands. We are called to be obedient because of who we are ontologically. Our very being obligates us to God and to the responsibilities entrusted to us (creation ordinances, moral law, and New Testament imperatives). “Image is ethics.” Paul states this ontological ethic in Eph 5:1, Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. The ethic is not so much “obey this law,” (although obeying law is integral to the biblical ethic), but “love your Father and be like Him.”

What this means is Adam understood((Kevan, Ernest. Moral Law (Escondido, Calif.: Den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1991), 30. “The Law of Nature reveals itself in the common religious impressions which are found in all men everywhere. Like the first principles or axioms of science, no reason can be given for them: they are acknowledged to be self-evidencing. It must be recognized, however, that the Law of Nature existed differently in Adam and in his posterity. In Adam it was perfectly known, but only a mere shadow of it is found in men today. The whole Law of Nature, containing perfect awareness of the will of God, was given to Adam at the first; and though there was the subsequent gift to him of a positive Law, to test his obedience, this in no way invalidated or detracted from the worth and significance of his original endowment with the Law of Nature. At the very beginning Adam was made after God’s image, in righteousness and holiness; otherwise he would have been destitute of the light of reason and without a conscience.”)) and would have behaved responsively to God’s blessing and sanctifying the Sabbath day. “God’s sanctifying the day is equivalent to His commanding men to sanctify it.”((Bush, Ibid. p.48. “It is by this term that the positive appointment of the Sabbath as a day of rest to man, is expressed. God’s sanctifying the day is equivalent to His commanding men to sanctify it.))

“God’s mode of operation is the exemplar on the basis of which the sequence for man is patterned. There can be little doubt, therefore, that in Gen 2:3 there is at least an allusion to the blessing of the seventh day in man’s week; and, when we compare it more closely with Exo 20:11, there is strong presumption in favor of the view that it refers specifically and directly to the Sabbath instituted for man… In the light of Gen 2:2,3; Exo 20:11; 31:17, we must also suppose that the archetypal pattern provided by God’s own action in the realm of his own working and resting would have regulated Adam’s labor and rest in the realm of his activity. How Adam had been informed, or how he would have been informed, we do not know. The most reasonable assumption is that the revelation to Adam took the form or would have taken the form of the data expressed in Gen 2:2-3… It is inconceivable that Adam would have been ignorant of the fact that in six days God made heaven and earth and on the seventh day rested… If so the pattern for man’s life implicit in that sequence must have been recognized by Adam… First it would advise him that his life in this world was patterned after the divine example. The reason for the cycle of labor and rest is that God himself followed this sequence. The governing principle of this ethic is not merely the will of God but conformity to the pattern of the divine procedure. In this particular Adam was to be a son of the Father in heaven… We may sum up our conclusions as follows. The weekly Sabbath is based upon the divine example; the divine mode of procedure in creation determines one of the basic cycles by which human life here on earth is regulated, namely, the weekly cycle; this sequence of six days labor and one of rest would have applied to Adam in the state of innocence and in a state of confirmed integrity in the event of successful probation; and the most reasonable supposition is that the revelation to Adam would have taken the form of the revelation we possess in Gen 2:2,3.”((Murray, John. Principles of Conduct: Aspects of Biblical Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 31-34.”))

As image-sons of God, we are constituted as communicating beings, able to both receive communication from God and to communicate to God. It is crucial to understand that Adam was not only able to understand God’s verbal communication, but he also immediately and accurately understood God’s non-verbal communication. Adam innately, accurately interpreted both the behavior and the words of his Creator-Father as ethically normative. He understood, not only God’s verbal communication of “The Dominion Mandate” (Gn 1:26ff) and the verbal command concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gn 2:16-17), but he also understood how to act in response to God’s actions. When God put him in the garden (Gn 2:15), he understood God’s purpose in that divine act. He imaged the Creator-Worker who completed creation projects over the course of sequential time. God’s behavior established the moral standard for man’s labor. Adam innately knew by the nature of his being and relationship to God that he was to cultivate and keep the garden just by the fact that God placed him there (Gn 2:15). We see the same dynamic when God brought the animals (Gn 2:19) as well as his helper (2:18ff) to the man. Like his Creator-Father who called and named what he created Adam, when faced with the unnamed, imitates God: he calls its name.((God’s work of creation is accomplished by His speech and deeds. God said (“amar”) and by fiat, brings creation into being ex nihilo. What He then created, He named, called (qara). Adam does not “amar” but, like his Creator-Father, he does “qara” when he names both the animals and the woman.)) This is an immensely significant act of “headship” by Adam, but our interests concern the Sabbath. What we see here is that Adam acts uprightly by imitating the actions of God when God places him in corresponding situations in which man images God. He works in a garden and names the unnamed.

Man, because of his ontology is by definition, ethical.((I’m using “man” in a gender inclusive manner as does Moses in Gn 5:2 He created them male and female, and He blessed them and named them Man in the day when they were created. (NASB))) But his being is more than ethical, his ontology is theological. He is image of God, not “image of Law.” His ethical functions emerge out of his theological identity. Adam innately knew his ethical purpose because it was the expression of his theologically defined nature. As image of God, the Man was made to be and act like God and enjoy a relationship of sonship. Yes, he needed to mature as God’s “priestly vice-regent,”((Beale, G. K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (New York: InterVarsity, 2004), 68.)) but there was nothing obstructing God’s communication to His image and nothing in the man that misunderstood or rejected what God communicated. In the matter of the Sabbath, is it crucial to concur that God’s acts were revelatory along with His words.

Certainly God is omnipresent and Adam would have consciously lived before the eye of God through the course of his “work week.” By his labor, he would be intentionally mimicking his Creator-Father who labored during the Creation Week. Everything Adam touched already had His Father’s “thumb-prints” on it, and it all revealed His Father’s invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature which Adam saw clearly and understood through what has been made (Rom 1:20). But His Father had made something else, after He finished His work of creation. He made sanctified time. God made one day holy time by His special, personal presence. When God made the Sabbath for (the) man (Mk 2:27), He made time to be with man. He gave man time in His personal presence. Tim Keller refers to an illustration used by John Frame “to explain the difference between corporate worship and ‘all of life’ worship. If you serve the king in his palace, you are doing so all the time. Yet certainly when the king himself comes into the room where you are working and has a conversation with you, ‘your service takes on a different character… becomes somewhat ceremonial. You bow, and you remember as best you can the language of homage… Something like this happens in our relationship to God. All of life is worship… but when we meet him, something happens.'”((Keller, Timothy J. “Reformed Worship in the Global City” D.A.Carson ed. Worship by the Book (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 205.)) This is what happens on the Sabbath. We are admitted into the King’s presence. On the Sabbath, God Himself comes to commune with man. His coming to us is to be met in our imitation of Him((Calvin, Jean. Calvin’s Commentaries. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1979), 106-107. “First, therefore God rested; then he blessed this rest, that in all ages it might be held sacred among men: or He dedicated every seventh day to rest, that his own example might be a perpetual rule… no slight stimulus is given by God’s own example, and the very precept itself is thereby rendered amiable, for God cannot either more gently allure, or more effectually incite us to obedience, that by inviting and exhorting us to the imitation of Himself.” I am aware that Calvin is inconsistent in his written views on the Sabbath. (Cf. Gaffin, Richard B. Calvin and the Sabbath. Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor, 1998.)) , our responsive coming to Him.

Where did He come? To the garden (Gen 3:8). “The Garden of Eden was the first archetypal temple in which the first man worshipped God.” Gregory Beale correlates the Garden and the Temple. “Israel’s temple was the place where the priest experienced God’s unique presence, and Eden was the place where Adam walked and talked with God. The same Hebrew verbal form (stem) mithallek (hithpael) used for God’s ‘walking back and forth’ in the Garden (Gn 3:8), also describes God’s presence in the tabernacle (Lev 26:12; Deut 23:14[15]; 2 Sam 7:6-7).” Adam’s labor in the Garden was a priestly labor. The word cultivate by itself does refer to agricultural labor, but the coupling of cultivate and keep describes Israel’s “’serving’ God and ‘guarding [keeping]’ God’s word, or priests who ‘keep’ the ‘service’ (or ‘charge’) of the tabernacle (see Num 3:7-8; 8:25-26; 18:5-6; 1 Chr 23:32; Eze 44:14).” It is significant that God put the man into the Garden. Moses does not use the usual word for “put” (‘sum) but the Sabbatarian term “to rest” (nuach). This term carries the idea of being placed and situated securely and is later used of the Lord placing Israel in the Land. The security of that place is not due to its geographical location, but to the presence of the Lord who dwells with Israel in the land. The location of His covenant dwelling was the temple, God’s resting place (Psa 132:7-8,14; Is 66:1 where the term is found in noun form.) It would seem that Adam worked in the Garden to prepare it for the arrival of His Creator-Father, who, when He came, would take Adam up into communion with Himself, into a time now sanctified by His presence, in a place prepared by man’s priestly-princely labor: the Garden-Temple of God. Adam’s hope was to be obtained upon the completion of his mandated labor when he had transformed the entire creation, through his priestly, vice-regency labor, into God’s Garden-Temple. In that Garden-Temple, God Himself would dwell with men and by His presence, the time there would be ipso facto, sanctified time, eschatological time, the time of divine rest and refreshment.

Adam was to move through linear time, incrementally accomplishing God’s mandated task, and on each weekly Sabbath he would enjoy a foretaste of what lay before him. Once each week, he turned from his usual labor and entered into sanctified time in the presence of God and enjoyed His benedictory words of blessing. This gift of the Sabbath grounded Adam in his created identity as image of God and obligated him to act like God acted through the course of Creation Week. Sabbath gave him a presence experience of God Himself. But Sabbath also pointed to a promised time, an unending day of sanctified time in an elevated intimacy with God when the entire cosmos would, by Adam’s priestly reign, become God’s temple. “God rested from His labors, and it was now Adam’s duty to follow his heavenly Father’s example, by performing his own labors of the covenant of works, by multiplying the image of God, by extending the temple to the ends of the earth, and by entering into the rest of God.”

Here then is Adam’s, and our, Sabbath blessing: life lived with God. Like God, we work so as to bring God glory in our labor, but when God Himself comes to give us time with Him, we are to turn from our labors to be with God, to worship Him and enjoy Him, to receive His words of Sabbath blessing and peace, to be refreshed by Him, enlivened and enabled to then live for Him and image Him in His creation as His beloved sons. This is what we were made for and why the Sabbath was made for [the] man, and not [the] man for the Sabbath (Mk 2:27). This is what we are saved for by the Lord of the Sabbath who gives us Sabbath blessing by giving us Himself.

THE SOTERIOLOGICAL: SANCTIFIED SONS OF GOD
Salvation was typified in the experience of Israel. Old Covenant Israel, as a nation, was brought into a relationship with YHWH God that paralleled that of Adam. The analogies are many; but that Israel was given the adoption as sons (Rom 9:4) is germane to our Sabbath concerns. As Adam, the created son of God was given sanctified time with God, so too Israel, the national son of God, was given sanctified time with God. The soteric blessing given to Old Covenant Israel was the presence of the Lord Himself, living with them as their God. His presence was especially communicated through the temple cultus on prescribed Sabbath days. The regulations for the Old Covenant cultus and especially the arrangement, furniture, and décor of the tabernacle and later the temple, were reminiscent of God’s created cosmos and His Garden-Temple. The Lord’s covenant presence was located in the Holy of Holies, above the propitiation seat, between the bowing Cherubim. It was His presence with Israel that marked them out as a peculiar people. The blessing of life lived with God was underscored in that the Lord made the Sabbath the sign of the Old Covenant (Exo 31:13). God’s Sabbath presence was the heart of Old Covenant blessing and hope. My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest (Exo 33:14).
When YHWH issued the fourth commandment, He essentially told Israel to do what He designed Adam to do: imitate God as His image-son and enter into sanctified Sabbath time in communion with God and enjoy His blessing. The fourth commandment was again a summons to God’s son to do what God does and be with God. The deeds of God in Creation (Exo 20:11) and Redemption (Deu 5:15 ) formed the behavioral paradigm for Israel to image YHWH as His national son. “The principle underlying the Sabbath is formulated in the Decalogue itself. It consists in this, that man must copy God in the course of life.” It is a tragedy that so much of the discussion concerning the fourth commandment centers on what is entailed in the supportive clause: sin days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work. The fixation on what it means not to work has obscured the central imperative, and essential privilege, of the commandment: Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. When YHWH told Israel to keep the Sabbath holy, He is saying, in effect, “Image Me. Do what I do during this sanctified time of blessing. Meet with Me. Live with Me. Be like Me, son.” He is calling Israel to do what He called Adam to do: enter sanctified time with God. Hamilton comments on the grammar of Gen 2:3 when God sanctified the seventh day. “I take the Piel of qadash as a factitive Piel as in Exo 20:8, ‘Remember the Sabbath day to make it holy.’” God made the day holy in Creation; now Israel is to make the day holy as God did, by entering into His blessed covenant presence. The Sabbath was given to bless and sanctify God’s sons.
Sanctified Sabbath blessing is brought to its New Covenant fulfillment in the Son of God Himself: Jesus Christ. Prior to Jesus’ resurrection, He revealed the inbreaking of divine, heavenly, Sabbath-quality life. Not only do we see Sabbath-quality in His ministry, but He Himself, in His being and person is the visitation of Sabbath-quality life to men. As the pre-existing Son of God, He “comes from above,” He “is not of this world,” He is the heavenly Man come to earth from that Sabbath rest which God entered upon completion of Creation. He Himself is the truth and the life (Jn 14:6). Vos explores the meaning of Jesus as the truth, the true bread, the true vine (Jn 6:32-33; 15:1). It is not as if other things cannot be true, or that other bread or vines are “false,” but “the difference comes in through an appraisal of quality. The technical term in John to mark the contrast is that of aletheia ‘truth.’ The things in the supernal world possess the quality of ‘true things’… The true things in this specific Johannine acceptance have the truth inherent in themselves as an objective characteristic. They are true intrinsically. The intrinsic truth residing in them is just the specific character they bear as part of the supernal heavenly sphere.” The “heavenly sphere” is synonymous with the eschatological life that has eternal Sabbath-quality. Vos calls it “the supernal sphere.” “The adjective that is used in such statements is not the ordinary form ‘alethes,’ but the stronger form ‘alethinos.’ One might say that the entire supernal sphere is made up on ‘alethinities’. The objectivity of the concept becomes most apparent by observing that this heavenly truth is, as it were, condensed, incorporated in the heavenly Logos: He is the truth, not, of course, because He is veracious and reliable, but simply, because He has the reality of heaven in Himself.” “Heaven” here is synonymous with “Sabbath.”
Since the Fall, Sabbath is now, until its consummation in the next age, a redemptive blessing. The eschatological Sabbath precedes (Gen 2:2-3) and now conditions the soteric Sabbath whereby God gives Himself to sinners as their Savior. Sabbath eschatology has primacy over soteriology as soteriology is the saving grace of God whereby He brings His people, in Christ the second Adam, back into alignment with His creation purpose of glorifying Himself in His Son in a state of perfected immutable eternal Sabbath life. Every aspect of soteriology is therefore eschatological, a bringing of the heavenly Sabbatical life of God to man. The eschatological nature of soteriology is most evident in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In union with Christ, we are already given Sabbath-quality life: our regeneration is a birthing from above (Jn 3:3); our justification is already our eternally legal status of righteousness accomplished in the resurrection of Jesus (Rom 4:25); our definitive sanctification (we are saints) and our progressive sanctification is the manifestation of the presence and power of the Spirit enabling us to bring eschatological life to bear upon the abiding creation ordinances and our stewardships in this age. Holiness is by definition rooted in that original sanctifying of the Sabbath (Gen 2:2-3). Where there is holiness there is Sabbath-quality of eschatological life. We, like Jesus, in Jesus, are sons of the Most High God (Lk 6:35), new creations (2 Cor 5:17), who in the likeness of God, have been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth (Eph 4:24). We are alive in Him who is the image of God (1 Cor 4:4), the first-born of all creation (Col 1:15). We are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit (2 Cor 3:18), and just as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly (1 Cor 15:49).
“Already” we, in union with Christ by the life and power of His Spirit, through faith, live with God! We “already” experience a genuine down-payment of Sabbath quality life. But we have “not yet” come to the end of this age. We are “not yet” resurrected, glorified, nor have we obtained the fullness of our promised inheritance as sons. As yet creatures of time and space, we live lives still conditioned by the realities of the original, albeit salvaged, creation. We are “not yet” in the resurrection when marriage will be done away (Mt 22:30) and when we will have entered into the, not sanctified, but glorified time of the eternal Sabbath Day. Until that time, we still live in original creation time. It is a time that moves linearly toward the goal of that appointed time when Jesus will return (Hab 2:3), and liberate this creation into the glorious freedom of the resurrected and glorified sons of God (Rom 8:19-23). This all means that we must locate ourselves on that schema of history which is still moving toward the Eschaton and as it moves, it is still given the blessing of God’s presence as He communes with His gathered people during the sanctified time of the Lord’s Day Sabbath.
The passage that most clearly informs us of our progress towards God’s promised Sabbath rest is Heb 3 and 4. Here is the only place in the New Testament where Gen 2:2 is cited (Heb 4:4). The promised rest held out before us is none other than God’s original Creation Sabbath rest. The author informs us that Israel failed to enter God’s rest when they were on the verge of entering the Promised Land in Num 14. David, writing Psalm 95, is quoted to show that God’s rest was yet unentered in his day. But Jesus has entered that rest. He has gone before us and we now are to follow Him, running our race looking to Him (Heb 12:1), keeping a Sabbatarian cadence for there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God (Heb 4:9). By holding before us the prospect of entering God’s Creation Rest, once again the rationale for the fourth commandment (Gen 2:2-3) is endorsed. The verb used in Heb 4:9 is a hapax legomenon in the New Testament, but is used four times in the Septuagint to mean “observing the Sabbath day” (Exo 16:30; Lev 23:32; 26:34-35; 2 Chr 36:21). Hebrews tells us that we too, in our New Covenant wilderness journey to the Promised Land of God’s rest, must make the journey employing the better blessings of the New Covenant: its priest, sacrifices, temple – and its Sabbath: the first day of the week. The passage is a summons to persevere and, like Jesus, to run our race and enter into God’s rest. Jesus is the One who has entered His rest [and] has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His (v10) Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest (v11). Once again, we are motivated to Sabbath observance by the action of God in creation and now by God the Son in His work of atonement. As God completed His creation work and entered His rest, so too Jesus completed the work of atonement (It is finished! Jn 19:30) and has entered into His rest in resurrected victory now enthroned in His heavenly temple. We are summoned to persevere by faith and complete our course and, like Jesus who has gone before us, we too will enter God’s rest. And I heard a voice from heaven, saying, “Write, ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on!'” “Yes,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow with them (Rev 14:13). Essential to a life of good works that evidence living faith is the keeping of the Sabbath. Here we see the indispensible necessity of worship while en route through this wilderness. We are not to forsake our own assembling together (Heb 10:25). When? The Lord’s Day Sabbath.
If we are still given sanctified time for New Covenant worship, do we also have sanctified space? Where do we assemble? We do not approach God as did Old Covenant Israel, at Sinai. We have come to Mount Zion… the heavenly Jerusalem… to Jesus, the mediator of the New Covenant (Heb 12:18-25). The heavenly temple is the sanctified place of worship into which we enter each Lord’s Day by faith in Jesus. As the light of the Lord’s Day Sabbath breaks across the world, believers assemble and exercise their New Covenant priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices of praise (Heb 13:15; 1 Pt 2:5), rendered acceptable by the mediation of our Great High Priest, Jesus (Rev 8:3-4). Voices rise first from the living temples in New Zealand and Australia. Soon a chorus of praise bursts forth from the oppressed believers in Indonesia and the underground church of China. Russian voices then mix with those from central Asia and next come the praises ascending from Europe and Africa. A lull is heard as the day advances over the Atlantic, but then come the praises of Brazil, South America, Canada and the Eastern seaboard of America. Soon the mid-West and the Western States join the throngs of those who have worshiped and are still worshiping the Lamb upon His throne (Rev 5). On the Lord’s Day Sabbath we enter holy time and in Christ Jesus by faith, our worship is accepted in holy space: the heavenly palace of the King of kings and the Lord of lords – the Lord of the Sabbath.
This Sabbatical cadence of worship will continue to the end of the age (Mat 28:20) until Jesus, by His Spirit, has completed building His church. Then Jesus will come to us and by the power of His omnipotence, He will rescue His lamb-like two witnesses (Rev 11), resurrect us, and transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself (Phi 3:21). Paul would have us know that our resurrection bodies will far exceed this fallen, death-cursed body: a perishable body, sown in dishonor, and weakness, a natural body. The resurrection body will certainly exceed the body of this death (Rom 7:24) this outer decaying man (2 Cor 4:16). It will be raised an imperishable body, in power, a spiritual body (1 Cor 15:42-44). We can readily conceive of the resurrection body as more glorious than our present, earthly, natural bodies. What is inconceivable, however, is the fact that our resurrection bodies will be more glorious than Adam’s unfallen, original body. The glory to which Jesus brings us will far exceed the Sabbath glory that Adam, even had he not fallen, would have been able to bring his race. After contrasting the resurrection body with this natural body, Paul then compares the resurrection body with the unfallen body of Adam and asserts that, in Jesus, we obtain an even more glorious state than could have been possible through Adam. So also it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living soul.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit (1Co 15:45). The body of His glory is more wondrous than the body God originally formed from the dust of this earth and animated with the breath of life (Gen 2:7). That vivifying work of God constituted man as a living being: alive with the vitality of this creation order of life. But the body of the resurrection will be far more glorious. It will be of an elevated, superior order – life-giving spirit – imbued with the vitality and presence of God the Spirit fit to dwell in a resurrected cosmos, God’s eschatological Garden-Temple , in which God will be all in all (1 Cor 15:28). In the glory of resurrection life, we will enter God’s rest and the Father will forever be glorified in His Son and His bride (Eph 3:20-21).
“If Christ placed us back there where Adam stood in his rectitude, without sins and without death, this would be unspeakable grace indeed, more than enough to make the gospel a blessed word. But grace exceeds still far more abundantly than all this: besides wiping out the last vestige of sin and its consequences, it opens up for us that higher world to whose threshold even the first Adam had not yet apprehended. And this is not a mere matter of degrees in blessedness, it is a difference between two modes of life; as heaven is high above the earth, by so much the conditions of our future state will transcend those of the paradise of old.”

Indeed, these are things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him (1 Cor 2:10). And yet (v11), to us God revealed them through the Spirit!

These are the realities that we taste when we gather to worship on the Lord’s Day Sabbath. Jesus established that first day as the day in which He, with resurrection victory and grace, came and still comes to His disciples who, by faith, gather and call upon His name. His presence constitutes the time as holy, sanctified time. His word of blessing is proclaimed. His supper is eaten. His people are aligned with God’s creation purposes as they learn to work and rest in that very good (Gen 1:31) order in which they were made to image God. But as sanctified sons of God, recreated in Christ and bearing His image in redemption, His people now taste of the age to come and learn to orient all of life to that eschatological goal which God has appointed: the return of Jesus and our entrance into His Sabbath rest. The search for explicit command to thereby obligate the church to meet on Sunday is a superficial approach which fails to tap into the profound ontological reality of who we are as image of God. God comes to us and by His covenant presence, He sanctifies time and admits us into holy, heavenly space. God comes to live with us and earth is transformed into the temple of God, inhabited by the sanctified sons of God. In view of these ontological and eschatological realities, how is it that we would not desire to observe the Sabbath to keep it holy?

Here is our delight. If because of the Sabbath, you turn your foot from doing your own pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable, and shall honor it, desisting from your own ways, from seeking your own pleasure, And speaking your own word, then you will take delight in the Lord ,and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; and I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken (Isa 58:13-14). Here is our hope. Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He shall dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be among them (Rev 21:3). He who overcomes shall inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be My son (Rev 21:7) He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming quickly.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus (Rev 22:20).

Alan Dunn, © 2013

The Foundations of the Sabbath Part 1
The Foundations of the Sabbath Part 2

Notes for The Foundations of the Sabbath Part 3: