295 
92. We read in Genesis (ii. 2, 3) that “On the seventh 
lom (or day) God ended His work lie had made; and He 
rested on that seventh day, and blessed it, because that in 
it He had rested from all His work which He had created to 
make,” And so in Exodus xx. 2, it is said, “In six days 
Jehovah prepared* heaven and earth, the sea and all that in 
them is, and rested the seventh day ” ; from which it is argued 
that our warrant for observing a weekly sabbath of twenty-four 
hours duration is dependent upon God’s rest from His work 
for a similar period. But, as Hugh Miller has observed, “ I 
know not where we shall find grounds for the belief that that 
Sabbath, during which God rested, was commensurate in 
its duration with one of the sabbaths of short-lived man — a 
brief period measured by a single revolution of the earth on 
its axis. We have not a shadow of evidence that He resumed 
His work of creation on the morrow. The geologist finds no 
trace of post-Adamic creation ; the theologian can tell us of 
none. God’s sabbath of rest may still exist ; the work of 
Redemption may he the work of IBs Sabbath day.” fi 
93. If we accept this suggestion, that the work of Redemp- 
tion may be, so to speak, the work of God’s rest, or Sabbath 
day, it may serve to explain our Lord’s words, “ My Father 
worketh hitherto, and I work” (John v. 17), as showing' that 
when God rested from the work of Creation, He commenced 
the work of Redemption, by planning out a mode consistent 
with His justice, whereby man might be restored to that 
Divine image in which he had been originally made, but had 
lost when Adam fell. Thus God’s sabbatic rest becomes a 
restoring process, a building up from the ruins of the fall, 
including both a Divine purpose and a Divine work, in raising 
man to a higher level than that on which the material creation 
placed him. In this work both the Father and Son are said 
to be engaged, the work of the one being a reflex of that of 
the other a work in which the profoundest rest is not excluded 
by the highest activity. 
94. Have we, then, any intimation afforded in Scripture of 
the duration of God’s day of rest? I think we have. The 
* It is necessary to remind the English reader that the word “ made ” in 
the Authorized Version is very far from conveying the actual meaning of 
Moses’s teaching; as it is very naturally understood to express the same sense 
as “ in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But a totally 
different word rwp is employed here, and which can only be adequately 
rendered by the English word “ prepared ” or “ made ready,” as Jehovah 
prepared the earth for the use of man. 
f Miller’s Footprints of the Creator, p. 307. 
