Posted on by Jack Kilcrease

Our Sabbath Rest and Vocations in Christ

Throwback Post

In the Genesis 1, the pinnacle of creation occurred on the sixth day when God made humanity in his own image. Then on the seventh day God remained present with his very good creation and rested. God’s sixth-day creation and seventh-day rest pointed toward and paralleled the Son’s Incarnation as the ultimate gift of divine presence and rest. The Incarnation prefigures the destiny of the whole creation. At the end of Revelation, St. John writes that the whole creation has become a Tabernacle of the divine presence (Rev. 21:3, 21:22). This correlates well with Daniel’s promise that the Temple mount (i.e., the locus of the presence of the divine kavod) would permeate the whole of creation (Dan. 2:35).1 

The promise of God’s communicative presence and divine rest are inexorably tied up with the promise of grace found in the gospel. The gospel is a unilateral gift and, as such, is an act of self-donation. To make an unconditional promise entails surrendering one’s being to the other. The one making the unconditional promise ceases to makes any conditions (i.e., the works of the law). As we have already seen, unconditional promise is also manifest in the covenantal imagery of marriage and its consummation (established in Genesis 1). This is why the Bible uses the image of the nuptial feast for the eschaton (Lk. 14:7-14, Rev. 19:6-9).  

God’s works (and human works in response to God’s works) in the protological week culminating in the Sabbath find their typological fulfillment in the eschatological promise of divine presence and rest from all works.2 In God’s eschatological rest and presence at the end of time, the Son has fulfilled the law of creation and there is no more need to work (i.e., perform of the law). The fact that law precedes the gospel in salvation history and in the life of the Christian mirrors the fact that God’s works in the first six days preceded his divine rest. In Genesis 1, the week of works fulfilled in rest also prefigures Christ’s actualization of the new creation. The Son accomplished this through his works of active and passive obedience, culminating in his Sabbath rest in the tomb.3

Nevertheless, as we have also seen, in the midst of the protological week, rest also precedes work. Since days are measured from evening to evening, God rests before he works. Consequently, he established a cosmic order in which his creatures do the same. The movement from works to rest (i.e., law to promise) parallels the redemptive movement of humans coram Deo through the work of Christ. So too, humans as God’s image bearers also imitate the movement of rest to work coram mundo.  

Grace is fundamentally the promise of rest from need to engage in self-justifying works (Eph. 2:8-9). Contrary to what the Reformed tradition often urges, Genesis 1 and 2 do not envision a kind covenant of works.4 Nevertheless, in both the primal and redeemed state, freedom from the need to engage in justifying works does not mean that works cease. Rather, freedom enables active works of obedience in the human vocation of governing creation.5 When God placed the first man and woman in Eden, he gave them their vocations over the original creation. Adam and Eve received the promise of dominion and also fertility, that is, the promise of freedom and life (Gen. 1:26-8). 

In the era of the New Testament, this promise of freedom and life exists as Christ’s promise of freedom from the law and eternal life. Enjoying the Sabbath rest of their conscience coram Deo, Adam and Eve may engage in the task of wisely governing creation and cultivating the Garden coram mundo. The same pattern rest before work also obtains in the era of the New Testament. Christ’s resurrection, which grants eschatological rest to the conscience of sinners, occurred on the first day of the week. It now enables the obedience of the faithful in their vocations the subsequent days of the week.6

  1. Beale, Temple and the Church’s Mission, 144-53. ↩︎
  2. Meredith Kline, God, Heaven and Har Magedon: A Covenantal Tale of Cosmos and Telos (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 195. ↩︎
  3. N. T. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, 4 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992-2013), 3:440. ↩︎
  4. Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, trans. G.T. Thomson (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 281-300; Michael McGiffert, “From Moses to Adam: The Making of the Covenant of Works,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 19 (1988): 131-55. ↩︎
  5. See: Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation, trans. Carl Rasmussen (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004). ↩︎
  6. Many thanks to Rev. David Fleming for this insight. ↩︎

From the manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word: Restoring Sola Fide (Lexham Press, 2022).

Cover image: Hans Holbein, detail of The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1520-1522, at “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb,” Wikipedia, last edited June 15, 2024, accessed July 16, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_of_the_Dead_Christ_in_the_Tomb; other image: Rest meme from Liturgy Matters, Facebook Group, https://www.facebook.com/lutheranmass.