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A Good That Leads To Death
Many times while creating, God pronounced all that He made good. When God calls a thing good, He is both describing it as good and blessing it to be His good. The description and blessing are inseparable in God’s good. All this universe and continually propagating life are good in their nature because they have been blessed by their Maker’s good to be His good

By the second chapter of Genesis we enter the Garden of Eden, and another good is introduced. Whatever we believe of the events in Eden, however literally we read this part of sacred history, they reveal some of the deepest truths about God, our human nature, and our relationship with our Creator. In the midst of the Garden, God planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and distinguished it from everything else that was in the Garden. God explained to Adam that the good from this tree is as different from His good in the rest of creation as life differs from death. In all the Garden we could witness the blessing of God’s good creating endless varieties with such abandoned abundance that the present cannot contain all His giving but He must break open the future to make way for the present’s overflow of promised life in bountiful seeds. There is one thing, however, God withholds from Adam: fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The one to whom God gave His breath and image, whom He made sovereign over all His creation, was denied the fruit of this tree. To add to all else God gave Adam, He gave him this explanation so that he could know. The good of this tree is connected to evil and leads to death. This tree’s good will kill him

From the beginning, God wanted Adam and his seed to know -- He wants us to know -- that the good which originates from His creation is completely different from His good and will lead us away from Him if we replace Him with it as our god. God’s good towards us is wholly different from creation’s good and our self-derived good. Though we are made in His image to reflect His good, our good becomes insubstantial when we live as reflections of what God created. This world’s good is doomed to fade and die as a plant is doomed when it is cut off from its life sustaining roots. God’s unique good originates from Him alone, the Source of life. All other good originates from dust and inevitably leads to death

At the moment Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, they were completely changed. They no longer lived in the blessing of God’s goodness. They became afraid of Him, ashamed before Him, hiding, disoriented. They had succumbed to the good pronounced by the tree that judges God and leads to death. This turn of events in the Garden of Eden dramatically reveals how differently our good and God’s good affect us, how different are our ways from His ways. In trying to understand God’s rest, we must repeatedly return to this truth, that His rest and ways are all different from our rest and ways. When we remember this, we are better positioned to learn and receive from His good which is living and is always able to bless

A Holy Day
When God sanctified the Sabbath, He set it apart from the work of His creation. He also set it apart from all human work as the fourth of His ten commandments to Israel explains. The word sanctify is kadosh in Hebrew and simply means “to set apart,” a definition of its position but not of its nature. When God sanctifies, He sets a time or life or thing apart to be with Him and purified by Him as He is pure, so it can be intimately related to Him. It is His pure and holy presence that replenishes and transforms from nothing to something, from broken to whole, from death to life and from life to death. It is in God’s holy presence that we discover what is the fulfillment of His rest. There is no emptiness or weakness in God’s rest. What we find instead is His grace that completes so entirely and fills so overflowingly, it must destroy any efforts to add to or subtract from it. No work can contribute to God’s fulness or detract from it.  No created effort can ever bias His free choice to rest in the perfect integrity of His gracious will

God’s Sabbath is set apart from His creation and from us. It is in God’s true rest that we meet Him on His terms, by His Spirit, and learn to humbly receive and live His gracious and holy life on this earth that He made for us to live in