Time Out
and God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy Genesis 2:3
Holy – God declares holy a separated time, not a special place. Let that sink in for a moment. The first use of the Hebrew qadash (holy) in Scripture is about time. Every other ancient cosmology operates with some declaration of sacred space, but not here. What God makes holy is a period of time in the repeated cycle of life. Every seventh day is holy to Him.
Do we affirm God’s declaration of a sacred time? You would be hard pressed to answer “Yes.” Our landscape is littered with sacred places. We call them churches or temples or cathedrals. God calls them nothing special at all. They are not holy places because God has no holy places. He has a holy time (which most of us simply ignore). God’s creative act establishes His absolute sovereignty over all space. Now He declares His sovereignty over time. If you read carefully, you will notice that the concluding formula for every other act of creation, namely, the numbering of the day, is absent here. The Scriptures do not say, “and it was evening and morning, day seven.” What they do say is that God declared this time, the only day with a proper name, a sacred time set apart for Him alone.
Did human beings establish this day of worship and rest? Absolutely not! God set aside this day and it remains His Sabbath even if no human being on earth honors it. It is designed to put a stop in the midst of creative activity. It is a time out from labor in order that all who observe it will recognize one of the deepest attributes of God. This time out hallows the God who is at rest in Himself. In it we find His tranquility and peace expressed in our created existence. He declares it so.
The ancient cosmologies move in the opposite direction. They push us toward sacred spaces, places where men encounter the gods. Pagan religions all have their holy hilltops or blessed grottos. They erect temples or shrines where spirits trod. God pushes all that nonsense off the table. There is no place where He is not present. It all belongs to Him. St. Mark’s is no more sacred than the gutter on Skid Road. But every seventh day something inviolable arrives no matter where we happen to be. Every seventh day every man and woman in the world confronts God’s declaration of rest. The Sabbath is everywhere at once.
Perhaps we need to rethink our ideas of sacred. Perhaps God makes sacred what we have no control over at all. No man delays the coming of Sabbath. No man controls it. You can’t fence it in, build around it or occupy it. You don’t come to the Sabbath. It comes to you. It is just slightly beyond us, but it is never more than six days away. Perhaps our lack of control over the seventh day is precisely what we need to remember. We participate in something important to God. We do not own it. We do not control it. We do not contain it. But we can honor it.
Topical Index: Sabbath, holy, control, cosmology, qadash
