The very end of God’s week does not start until Genesis chapter 2. It is a very simple day in which God does only one thing.
Genesis 2:1-3
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
On this day, God’s work is completed. There will be no more striving with man. There will be no great plan to work through. God blesses this seventh “day”: this word he gave to the light on the first day of creation, and to whom he gave authority over to the greater light on Day 4 which we have identified as the Holy Spirit. And God sanctifies the day. The word sanctify means to set apart as holy. This also means that according to all the scriptures that follow Genesis 1, God will deal with man according to the word He gave Adam.
When God told Adam he would surely die, he immediately sacrificed an animal to provide a temporary atonement for Adam because even though God had given the command, and the outcome was irrevocable, God still desired to provide Adam and his descendants with life without end. Our guilt is not so much the things we do(as these are merely the symptoms of sin in our lives), but the guilt of our ancestor Adam and the decision he made to disobey God. His singular act was so great, that it condemned himself and his offspring, so that all are fallen short of the glory of God.
But then the Greater Light came and ruled over the Day, likewise Jesus came and with his coming dawned a new era. If you divide the week in half, you fall somewhere on Day 4 and it is the latter half of Day 4 when the greater light, Jesus Christ, finally appears. As we have seen, the Jewish calendar begins with evening on the prior day and continues on through to early evening on the following day. What this means is that if we were to treat God’s seven days as a week, then the first half of the week is ruled by the Night, while the second half of the week is ruled by the Day.
Jesus is the light of the world and he came to become a second Adam. By this the scriptures mean that Jesus’ act on the cross, a tree, was so great, just as Adam’s act with the Tree of the Garden was so great, that all who believe in him will be saved, just as all of us who were begotten by Adam were condemned. Adam ate the fruit of the forbidden tree and died. If we eat the fruit from the tree of life, that is Jesus Christ’s death upon the cross, then we live forever.
The reason this is important is what happens on the 7th day of God’s week of creation. When he rests, he will quarrel with man no more. This means something has happened to those who remain degenerate under Adam’s curse. Like men who fail to reach out for a life preserver, the inevitable outcome is that they sink beneath the waves of the sea and are lost.
Go back and read through the first chapter of Genesis. You will notice that in every day of the six days of creation God ended with “and there was evening and there was morning, the Nth day.” But when we get to Day 7, there is no similar statement concluding the day. The reason for this is plain: Day 7 has no ending, thus there can be no beginning of a new Day or era after Day 7. It points to a time that will go on indefinitely; never transitioning to another era or part of God’s plan because all of God’s work with man will be finished and He will rest in the “very good work” of His beloved son Jesus Christ.
But the biggest joy of the Sabbath Era is that it will be characterized by rest. Rest not just for God, but for all of us who are found in Jesus Christ.
For those not found in Jesus Christ, their story is no longer part of God’s story when Millennial Day 6 ends. As much as men contend their desire to exist without God, no man has truly experienced the separation of God from his life. We live in a world fashioned since the beginning of Genesis according to God’s plans and designs. Every good thing we’ve found came first from him, including the life we live. He has no desire to cut us off from his story, but unless we choose to take hold of the light he created for us in Jesus Christ, we remain under the curse of our ancestor Adam.
If you are not a believer, whatever sins you think you are guilty of cannot exceed the first sin committed by Adam. Human beings tend to assign values to sin as we do with committed crime, but to God, one sin is equivalent to another. Which means adultery is the same as murder, giving a false testimony is the equivalent to the genocide of a people, robbing a bank is the same as hating your neighbor. There is no distinction in God’s eyes; there is only sin that must be paid for. Either the insurmountable cost of sin is paid for through our own life or it is paid for through the righteousness of Jesus’ sacrifice.
The choice is entirely up to us.
Closing Remarks
While driving along a winding mountain road, when you see a road sign warning of possible danger, do you proceed recklessly or do you slow down and drive cautiously, with greater apprehension and better awareness of your surroundings?
Genesis Chapter 1 is typically the first written word men read when opening the Bible. Over the course of human history it has been studied, revered and ridiculed, but as has been shown, the scripture has more teeth to it than the skeptic can fully extract himself from.
But God’s first chapter is not a threat to the human race. It is a road sign written for a people who would one day look upon his word as nothing more than myth, or irrelevant sacred texts. When we fail to take God’s word seriously we fail to hear what God is really saying to us. It is like seeing a warning sign on the side of the road and ignoring it. But the authorities that place those sign do it for our benefit, that we might have life and have it abundantly, and not at the cost of what dangers naturally lay ahead for us. Just because our government places a “Falling rocks ahead” sign does not mean government agents are in the mountains ahead waiting to push those rocks down upon us. They simply have knowledge of the natural mechanisms in play and have placed these signs to prevent our harm.
Likewise, the terrible things some people have perpetuated about what God plans to do to the world have been misunderstood. God defined the consequence for Adam’s disobedience prior to Adam ever having eaten from the tree. Just as with all God’s word in the first six days of creation, God need do nothing more than speak for His will to manifest. In essence, God can walk away from the whole of the human race and we will naturally die as a result of Adam’s sin without God ever lifting a finger against us.
What God is interested in, is not in man fixing the problem. Through the Israelites He has demonstrated that, in and of ourselves, man cannot earn his righteousness. Instead, God wants us to repent, which literally means to change one’s mind. God wants you to change your mind, both about him and about your situation. The first step in AA also happens to be one of repentance, it is changing one’s mind about oneself in that the individual admits he or she is powerless over alcohol. God wants the exact same thing, our acknowledgement that we can do nothing about the sin nature we inherited from Adam, it is part of us, and not even our strong will is able to remove that which is so embedded within our nature.
His offer to save us is not an offer for us to work at saving ourselves, and while it cost His son everything, it costs us nothing to receive. Religions made by man can be safely ignored, but a scripture that foretells events beyond the scope of the scripture are not so easily dismissed. The first five millennial days have passed; the sixth is nearing its end. No one knows the day, nor the hour of Christ’s return, but when he does return, it will happen instantaneously. There will be no opportunity to hop on the soul train at the last minute. For when God finally reveals himself fully to modern mankind, where our faith can no longer be manifested within us to please Him, it will be too late to start giving the God you have just seen with your own eyes a second chance.
God does love you, if He did not, then there would be no road signs for you to even see. The end would come quickly, and quietly, without warning; with no opportunity to do anything different. God is not interested in a heaven where we sit around strumming harps all day long; He is a being who created families, holidays, parties, celebration, love, laughter, and joy. He plans to engage in that kind of rest going into this next Millennial age and His sort of rest includes all the wonder He intended for mankind to have. He wants you to share in that seventh Sabbath day that never ends.
Won’t you change your mind and accept His invitation to the party?