Sabbath

Leon Gork

Jerusalem Saturday, January 20, 2007

One can only understand the Sabbath by reading the first verse of the Bible correctly; according to the exact translation from the original Hebrew and not according to the official English translation.·

"Creating (or beginning to create) ·, God created the Heaven and the Earth."

Reading the verse like this leads one to conclude that God was doing something else before He started creating.

We learn what this is in the first two verses of Gen 2, which tell us that after 6 days of creating He finished creating and rested (Sabbath).

It seems logical to assume that what He did after creating, namely, resting (Sabbath) is the same as what He was doing before creating.

Sabbath and not creating, is God's natural situation. God came from it to create the world and when He was finished He returned to it.

He sanctifies it because it is the place where He is; it is God's eternal place.

Gen 2:

1 Then the heaven and the earth and all their host were completed.

2 So on the seventh day God had finished the work he had done. So He rested (Sabbath) from all his work which He had done.

3 Therefore God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested (Sabbath) from His work that God had done by creating.

Sabbath is the spiritual ether in which the universe is suspended. It is the opposite of the six days of creation. They are finite Sabbath is infinite.

At a certain moment, known only to God, He came out of that Sabbath of unknown time and began creating.

In those six days of creation God lodged the finite universe in the infinite ether, the Sabbath.

Understanding this it's easy to appreciate the enormity of God's act of coming out of the infinity of rest (Sabbath) to the finiteness of creation.

God did this for man; He came out of His rest to create man.

As He came out of His rest so God wants man to come out of His creation, which is physical, to Sabbath, which is spiritual.

God created man for this reason.

Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments because God requires man to raise himself above the physical limitations of His creation to the unlimited spiritual realms of the Sabbath.

Sabbath is equally binding on the believer as the other commandments.

This makes it one of the laws which God expects all His subjects, not only the Jews to observe.

His subjects are everybody who considers Him the one God who created the universe

God gives man free choice to believe in Him as creator, and so obligate himself to observe the laws of Sabbath, or not to believe in Him and remain bound to the physical realm which God created for him.

Many people speak of the social value to resting one day a week.

This may be true but has little to do with why God gave his followers the law of Sabbath.

It has everything to do with man making his choice of who is going to be his Lord who he will follow forever.

In making his choice man must be aware that it involves a choice between the spiritual infinite, symbolized by the Sabbath and the physical finite of creation.

The human being can be like His creator by observing the Sabbath laws of rest. Sabbath gives man the opportunity to feel a little of the infinity which God feels forever.

"Everything is in the hands of God, excepting belief in God." Once a man believes he is obliged to observe the Sabbath.

A person isn't obliged to belief, but once he believes he's obliged to keep God's laws.

One who doesn't observe the law of Sabbath can't be said to believe in God as the creator.