By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. – Genesis 2:2

Today’s Scripture Reading (February 20, 2012): Genesis 2

I grew up in a culture that seemed to take a perverse pleasure in the Sunday rest. From naps when on Sunday afternoons when the last thing I wanted to do was stop from my play (after all, play on Sunday’s was already limited with the two church services we attended) to a prohibition of Sunday onsite sporting events at the camp meetings of my youth, everything that I enjoyed seemed to come to a halt on Sundays.

And the basis of the halt was God’s decision to stop his action of creation on the seventh day. Traditionally the seventh day is actually Saturday, but the Christian Church decided very early on to honor Sunday as the day of rest, because that was the day that Jesus rose from the dead – but both traditions refer back to the fact that God rested. But what does it really mean for God to rest. If my experience with the Sunday morning is any indication, it seems to mean a total stop.

But that is a scary thought - that God would actually stop. So what does the Sabbath rest mean to him? It can’t be that God stopped everything. If what we believe is correct, history is a record of God’s action through time. It could be that God stopped or paused his creative activity, except that it would seem that creation is so close to the core nature of God.

On the seventh day God rested. And maybe all that means is that God had reached the pinnacle of all that he had wanted to create – us. There would be no higher height. But at the same time, in that act of breathing into us and giving us the will to act on our own, his real work had just begun. In giving us the freedom to choose, he gave us the ability to really mess up what it was that he had created.

Every fiber of my being tells me that God is still at work in this world. And we can take pride that we are at the pinnacle of that creation – that on that day God rested; he stopped trying to improve his design. And inside of us is the potential to be exactly what God dreamed we could be in the days before creation began.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Genesis 3