catapult magazine

Read this issue’s Bible study verses: ../issues/backIssue.cfm?issueid=24#study

Read the creation account. What was the nature of God’s rest on the 7th day? Has God rested since then?

I was very excited to learn during a study of Hebrews recently that the New Jerusalem that will come down from heaven in the end will be a city of rest. “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work., just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following [examples] of disobedience.” Hebrews 4:9-11

The Hebrew word “Salem” is related to “Shalom”, so Jeru-salem can be thought of as Jeru-shalom (which sounds like the way Sean Connery talks, but this knowledge makes me all the more eager to get to the final promised land, the “New Shalom” where everyone will talk like Sean Connery—oh what joy!).

God does not need to rest. He neither sleeps not slumbers. Instead, God teaches us by analogy that we will have rest after we have labored in this world. Primarily this means we will dwell with God and no longer be tested for holiness, as both the first and second Adams were.

But it also means other things. In the resurrection we will be like the angels (Matt 22:30), meaning we will no longer procreate (in fact we even be married; will we even have sex organs in heaven?). A former professor at the seminary I attend argued that this means the end of culture. He argues that culture is unique to humans on earth. The angels have no such culture, and as such neither will we engage in cultural activities in heaven. Our rooms are already made for us in heaven (John 14:1), will there be a need for architecture?

I think this brings up an interesting question. Will culture not be optional in heaven, because it won’t even exist? Hmmm….

An afterlife without architecture and culture seems a bit depressing to me.

Are you refering to heaven as our final resting place or as an in-between place where we wait for Christ to come again?

I don’t know if it’s fact or fiction, but a woman supposedly came to CS Lewis distressed because her pet cat had died. She wanted to know if she would be in heaven. Lewis’s response was, I thought, clever: “Ma’am, if it’s necessary to your happiness, your cat will be in heaven.” The woman was releaved. She would be happy resting in heaven! But of course, she received no guarantees that her cat would be in heaven.

A life without culture may seem dreary (I share your concern!), but I’m not so sure it’s not in fact our limited knowledge and imagination that is the problem (excuse the double negative). With or without human culture, heaven will be unbelievably invigorating.

(Incidentally, the argument for no human culture in heaven is open for debate. I’m not entirely convinced.)

I’m refering to heaven as our final resting place. Is there any biblical evidence for an in-between place where we wait for Christ to come again? I’m curious.

Consider Exodus 31:16-17. The children of Israel are to keep the Sabbath as a perpetual covenant, because it is a sign between them and God. “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he rest and was refreshed.”

God’s resting in Gen 2:2 is connected with the Sabbath. The end of creation is the Sabbath, a time when humankind will enter rest on a higher plane of existence. (Ever wondered at why Noah’s name means “to rest”).

Also, God is effortless in his creation. The idea of rest means peace. Many myths of the Ancient Near and Middle East depicted violence in the birth of the universe, including rape, murder, warfare, etc. In contrast, God has no equal, no one who can interrupt his rest. God is our unequaled king who is able to rest when he pleases.

I am more inclined to think of this rest in terms of peace, not necessarily as a rest from culturing activity.

And I refuse to go along with the idea that rest was only given to us as an “analogy”. The rest of God after the six days of creation might not just be a lesson on resting from work, but on the completeness of God’s creating. This is completeness, not in the sense that the creational activity stops, but that it was complete: nothing was lacking.

In the same way, our entering God’s rest is a reaching of the promised land (this is the message of Hebrews) where God’s redemptive work is complete, but still “busy” (in the old promised land, the Jews still had to build buildings, get water for their families, provide food to eat). In that final rest, all culturing will be God’s culturing, complete, not lacking anything. This “good” culturing activity will be done in the shalom of God’s city, which contrasts the incomplete culturing activity that is done on this side of heaven (where culture is often done to try to achieve different ends than those of God’s Kingdom, i.e. Bush bombs Iraq to achieve “Enlightenment” Freedom for the Middle East, rather than God’s Shalom for the world).

Earlier someone said that God does not need to rest and that is certainly true. We do need to rest. If we don’t do so, bad things happen.

But just because God does not need to rest, does not mean that he does not rest. For us, resting usually means that we are not tending to things that we should tend to. I am not suggesting that in his resting, God turns off his omniscience or omnipotence, only that he does in fact rest.

When he was done creating the universe, God said that it was good and rested from his labors. He ceased his creating. He took some time to look at what he had made.

Though this may serve as an example to us, it doesn’t seem to me that he did it only to be an example. Nor, i suspect, did he do it because he was tired.

Yet the fact remains, God did rest.

I am inclined to think of rest in terms of approbation, rest from testing, than in terms of cultural activity (even if that is also implied). Adam’s faithfulness was tested in the garden, yet it would not have lasted forever. Had he remained faithful he would have earned his salvation. That Adam failed, which required Christ’s merit, means the birth of grace (in history not necessarily in God’s mind; God may have intended for us to understand grace in “rest” as well) in the idea of rest, so to speak.

Did God rest? What does that mean? Must we surrender to archetypal (God “rested” in just the same way as we do; i.e. no analogy used) or equivocal (God “rested” in no way similar to the way we do)? In saying it’s an analogy, I mean that God did not rest as we usually understand humans to rest, and that God did not rest in a way so different that we cannot possibly understand it.

As to whether God’s rest means an end to culture, I don’t know. I’m not convinced by your argument grant. Could you flesh it out?

Resting from work seems to have a LOT to do with God’s rest in Genesis. Read Exodus 20:8-11. The Sabbath command is “in it you shall do no work.” Why? Because God did his work in six days and no work on the seventh. “Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.” In the Genesis account we read that God made the seventh day holy by doing no work on it as well.

Also, on the day God rested, there is no evening or night mentioned, as on all other days. The seventh day is a perpetual, unending day. I argue that’s because seventh day of creation, when God rested, and the hallowed Sabbath day refer to eternal, unending heaven. What is God teaching us by resting from his work creating and commanding us to cease our work on the Sabbath?

It occurs to me that Christ’s cry, “It is finished!” may support the idea of approbation, ceasing from the work of earning salvation by works. Ideas? Criticisms?

I guess the issue of God resting raises the question of what manner of rest we have in Christ. Is it a rest from cultural activity? I’m not convinced either way. I’m curious as to what you all think.

Pondering a possible rest from cultural activity in heaven has made me wonder why God has given us cultural activity in the first place. Obviously cultural activity was highly important to God. Why is the cultural activity of humans important to God?

There’s much to address here. I do not care to get romantic about culture having to go on and on and on. It would be nice, perhaps, not to have to “culture” anymore. But so much good seems to come out of work. I can’t believe that work itself, which is essential to the “genius” of Shakespeare, Van Gogh, Bob Dylan or U2, is what we must leave behind. When I read about the curse set upon Adam, I don’t think the curse is work itself, but that the work has become a pain, labor.

In the wake of such pain, the Greeks longed for a kind of Dionysian rest or culture of leisure where they don’t have to do the menial tasks of day to day living. And I think we’ve let this distort our reading of the intention of the Old Testament descriptions of rest. Before sin, Adam and Eve were called to work in the garden. Why wouldn’t that continue after Christ has won our freedom back? And I take Jesus’ last words to be a statement that his ministry on earth had been completed, and now it’s up to God to raise him from the dead.

I’m not sure we can reduce Christ’s ministry just to the idea that we no longer have to work for our salvation, though that is part of it. And I will still take issue with the idea that God’s rest is an analogy. Where do we learn how to rest? It’s not from an analogy. It is implanted in our very nature because we are made in God’s image. If a developmentally disabled person does not have the ability to make sense of the analogy in Scripture, does she never learn how to rest?