God Squad: Why did God rest on the 7th day? Why should we?

Dear Rabbi Gellman: What, precisely, did God do on the seventh day? I like to rest, too, but staring at an empty computer screen all day gets old, at least for me. I am curious. Thank you.  — J in Cary, North Carolina

MG: God does not need to rest but God did rest. Why?

This is one of the first great questions raised by the Creation account in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. Why would an all powerful God need to rest on the seventh day, or for that matter on any day? How is the world sustained and protected from chaos on the day of God’s resting? Is one day on earth to us the same and one day of rest for God?

Rest is the first spiritual conundrum and mystery and blessing of the Bible and through Judaism, Christianity and Islam it has become a part of Western civilization.

Perhaps God wanted to teach us that working must be balanced by resting in our lives. Resting gives us time to solidify family bonds of love and time to express our gratitude to God for our blessings in prayer on the day of rest.

The right to rest is grounded in another belief clearly taught in the Creation account of Genesis, and that is the belief that all people are made in the image of God. This belief in Imago Dei is arguably the great spiritual revolution of the biblical religions. Other ancient religions all taught that people were created to serve the gods. The Bible alone taught that a part of what makes God holy is also in us. It took two millennia and contact with Greek philosophy for Judaism, and later Christianity and Islam, to refine our spiritual identity into body and soul, but from the first chapter of the Bible the idea that we are holy like God was a foundation of faith.

So, if we are made in the image of God but we obviously are not God, our only viable spiritual option is to imitate God to the extent that we are able. If God rests, then we should imitate God by resting on the Sabbath day. Resting is a gift from God that reminds us we are made to reflect and represent God here on Earth.

Implicit in the Sabbath day is a critique of slavery in all its forms. Resting on the Sabbath is thus an assertion of freedom in a world that often crushes freedom for so many. The freedom of Sabbath rest is a foretaste of the soul’s freedom in Heaven.

Through resting, the Bible establishes a sacred order of time that intersects with our secular profane world once every seven days. Once that sacred order of time is established, it can then be introduced to sanctify the holidays, which transform the cycle of the seasons into a celebration of God’s blessings to us in nature and in history.

I would love to hear ways that you and your family sanctify the Sabbath day and make God’s time real in our broken world.