A Peculiar Time
The Sabbath is a confusing conclusion to God's creation of everything. In the beginning at the beginning of the Bible, we read the account of God creating life and matter in all their many forms and kinds. At each stage He calls forth abundance, forming matter and filling space not only with fruitful life now but also with life for the future in the shape of tiny, innumerable seeds. God describes all He made with a simple word - good - before speaking the mystery of His blessing. There are many ways we describe the creation we are part of, but God assesses all that He made from nothing with just one, much overused word: good

After all His creative activities are finished and  life is brought into being and our first ancestor raised from the earth's dust by God's breath, we read a most simple and confusing conclusion: God rested. What does it mean for an eternal and omnipotent God to rest? Why would God ever need to rest from anything? If He is a God who "does not become weary or tired" (Isaiah 40:28) and "will neither slumber nor sleep" (Psalm 121:4), why would the Bible conclude so great a demonstration of creative capacities with such weak-sounding and anticlimactic words as: God rested?

What is even more confusing and disturbing is that God bestows the greatest honors upon His rest by both blessing it and sanctifying it. There was nothing God sanctified in all He created but He sanctifies His rest, this day which lacks any material substance to prove its worth and appears to be most defined by negatives: an absence of work; an end to creating. It is this apparently empty and fatigued time that alone is sanctified by God. What and where is its value? What possible sense can this Sabbath make for us? What relevance can this peculiar conclusion to creation have on life in general and on each life in particular?

A Peculiar Book
Those who believe the Bible is inspired by God, trust it to be a historical account of what is. The Bible is by no means an exhaustive account of historical events but is focused on what has been called sacred history, the account of God's unique revelation of Himself as He relates to His creation as a whole and especially to us, who He made in His image. Therefore, when we read the Bible, it is meant to be read as from God, from His Spirit and His heart's peculiar intention towards us. We are to hear the words of the Bible as from God's own mouth that spoke all into creation, His mouth that breathed into the nostrils of Adam, articulating life

When we hear the Bible spoken by God's Spirit, we are overwhelmed by His good and divine love that is pure and overflows eternity. But when we hear this same Bible spoken from our own mouths and hearts, its meaning is greatly changed. The God we read about in the Bible to ourselves can sometimes sound loving, at other times judging and punitive, and again at other times arbitrary, willful, petty and destructive. When we read the Bible from our own human reason and understanding, we hear the echoes of our reasonings and especially our judgments. We try to make human sense of this God who is indecipherable to our senses and does not conform to our judgment of what is and isn't acceptable of a good God. When our knowing proceeds from the reflections of our own mind and heart, we can easily conclude that this God of the Bible is ultimately not good at all and certainly not one worthy of our adoration

Such an inevitable human judgment of this God of the Bible bears witness to the uniqueness of His book. This is not a book whose divine intentions we can accept and understand from our own selves. The revelations of this book can only be received and known by the One who inspired them. God's Spirit, who inspired the Bible, can alone receive in us the true nature of the One who the Bible means to reveal. The words of this book are as a lamp lighting the way to the true God and our true selves before Him. Understanding the Bible by God's Spirit is entirely different from our human understanding of it. There is no true point of convergence between these two kinds of knowing. His ways are an immeasurable distance from our ways

"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways," declares the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts"(Isaiah 55:8, 9)