Fr. Stephen De Young: Verse nine.

Then God said, "Let the water under heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear," and it was so. The water under heaven was gathered into its places, and the dry land appeared. So God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas, and God saw that it was good.

Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth the herb of grass, bearing seed according to its kind and likeness. Let the fruit tree bear fruit whose seed is in itself according to its kind on earth." It was so. Thus the earth brought forth the herb of grass, bearing seed according to its kind and likeness. The fruit trees bore fruit whose seed is in itself according to its kind on earth. God saw that it was good. So evening and morning were the third day.

Q1: Busy day!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] So the third day, again, we see at the beginning this idea of separation and putting in order. And notice the language. God doesn't cause the dry land to rise up out of the water. If we were making a movie today, that's probably how we would depict it, rising out of the water. What it says is that God takes the waters and sort of pulls them back and restrains them, gathers them together so that the dry land appears. Why is that? Because the seas, again, represent chaos. We started out with waters, with chaos. So God is taking that chaos and restraining it to produce order. So God is the One who's sort of holding the chaos that's out at the extremes back from the earth that he's put in order.

There's also then this transition, because he's now created again spaces. He's created the dry land. And so we start to see the beginnings of life, because we get plants and we get trees that bear fruit. Fruit by definition has seeds in it, a plant ovum, essentially, so that it can reproduce.

So these first three days are focused on that first issue, of disorder, of chaos. And God is putting things in order and creating these spaces, which are still mostly empty. Now we're going to see as move to the second set of three days, those three days are going to be in parallel with the first three days, but they're going to be answering the second problem, the emptiness.

The fact that this is in two parallel sets of three days is treated as important, not just by the Fathers but even in our liturgical tradition. One of the readings for Holy Saturday before Pascha is from Genesis 1, and you read these first three days. You think, "Well, why don't you read…? Why do you stop halfway through the story?" And that's connected to Christ rising on the third day. So there are going to be other things about Christ related to the sabbath that we're going to get to when we get to the end of the chapter, but there is also this connection of the restoration of order, because remember we talked about how that order is later going to be called justice. St. Paul is going to say in Romans that Christ was raised for our justification. To be justified means to be put back in order. So putting that reading there connects the three days and the third day of Christ's resurrection to Christ restoring the order of creation, as Christ said in Revelation, "making all things new."

So now we'll start day four. Now we're getting into— We're putting things in order; now we're going to be filling things with life.

Verse 14. "Then God said, 'Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven, for illumination to divide day from night.' " This is what I meant by: if you try to take both the fourth day and the first day super literally, you're going to run into problems. [Laughter]

"Let them be for signs and seasons and for days and years. Let them be for illumination in the firmament of heaven to give light on the earth." It was so. Then God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of heaven to give light on the earth and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good, so evening and morning were the fourth day.

So the sun, moon, and stars are created. We're not used to thinking of them as life, especially as modern people. We're used to thinking of the sun as a mass of incandescent gas, like a giant nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is turned into helium… [Laughter] Anyway. And we're used to thinking of the moon as a big rock that orbits around the earth; and the stars as being like the sun, just really far away; and the planets as being like the moon, just farther away. But we have to understand that for ancient people the sun, moon, and stars weren't just a representation of divine beings, but they were those divine beings. So in the case of the Scriptures, they are seen as being angelic beings.

We saw all through Revelation angels are stars, all the time. It's a direct comparison. So the understanding here— And the place where you really see that… So they can be balls of plasma and rocks, and help you divide seasons and times and years. But it's the ruling-over aspect, ruling over the day and ruling over the night. So the idea here, this is why a lot of the Fathers connect this fourth day to the creation of the angels, because they're making this direct connection. And because the way they understood angels to function is that, as Philo, who was a Jewish writer in the first century BC, put it, they're not gods, but they're angelic beings who serve God, and God has an administration. He's the king, but the king has a court. And these angelic beings are his administration. So God assigns them to different parts of his creation, to oversee those things, to guide those things. And that that's what's being brought out here.

We're going to see this later in the Torah. It's going to talk about the sun, moon, and stars to whom God assigned the governance of the nations other than Israel in Deuteronomy 4. It's going to be like: What? This is also reflected in our iconography, where the sun and moon are frequently depicted with faces. [Laughter] And we talk about, like at the time of Christ's crucifixion, the sun and the moon hiding their faces. This is that connection to angelic beings. As we've talked about, going through the New Testament and connecting that with the promises to Abraham, the promise in the Old Testament is that someday the righteous will shine like stars. The whole idea of sainthood is that humans who are glorified, who find salvation, also take up places in that administration.

So God doesn't need anybody to help him administer the cosmos. It's not like: Oh, it's too big for him to handle, so he needs a bureaucracy. It's: God, out of love, shares his life and his rule over creation with his creatures, and that includes the angelic beings. These are very much— We talk about the light and the darkness, the day and the night, the heavens: these are the creatures who live there, even though we're not used to thinking of them as alive at all. But you can see how day four and day one are parallel, dealing with these two issues.

So now, day five:

Then God said, "Let the waters bring forth creatures having life, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of heaven's firmament." It was so. Thus God made great sea-creatures and every living thing that moves with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." So evening and morning were the fifth day.

You can see right off the bat, second day, fifth day. Second day, God separates the sky and the sea; fifth day, he fills the sea and he fills the skies with life, and tells them to continue: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill it."

Q1: Now it makes more sense than the birds coming out of the sea, as opposed to...

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. So now those two spaces are filled with life. Another interesting thing to note in the Hebrew here is that it's translated here as "every living thing that moves." What it literally says in the Hebrew is "every soul." We have this kind of Platonic thing that we've gotten from Western culture, that humans have souls and nothing else does, but no ancient people thought that. Ancient people thought that having a soul is what made something alive, as opposed to inanimate. And I use that word on purpose, because anima is the Latin word for "soul," so "inanimate" literally means soulless. But different living things have different types of souls. And as late as St. Gregory Palamas— He has a treatise on the souls of animals.

Q1: Yes! I always hoped that that was true.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which is why my dogs can be heathens. [Laughter] He says of course they have souls—they're alive—but it's a different kind of soul than a human soul. That's just a very common way of speaking, but they didn't translate it literally here, because people would have been like: "What? All the souls that swim in the waters? What are you doing?" at the idea. They translate it as "living things" because that's pretty much what it means. Having a soul means you're alive.

Verse 24:

Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth the living creatures according to its kind, the quadrupeds (there's a great translation), the creeping things, and the wild animals of the earth, according to their kind." It was so. So God made the wild animals of the earth according to their kind, the cattle according to their kind, and all the creeping things on earth according to their kind. God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let us—"

Well, we'll pause there. [Laughter] Before we get to humans, we'll pause. So now, again, right away you can see: third day, he made the dry land; sixth day, all the living creatures that live on the land. He's filling it with life. So we have this parallel again.

I'll comment here on the refrain that we've seen on all of these days, where it says, "God saw that it was good." "Good" gets used in a lot of ways in English today. We use "good" as opposed to "bad" or as opposed to "evil." We use "good" as a mild… as a form of mild praise.

Q1: "That tastes good."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, "That tastes good." [Laughter] "It's pretty good." There's a place not far from my house that has on their permanent sign, "Home of Good Boudin." I'm like: Well, that's a modest claim. They're not saying it's great, they're not saying it's the best in town, but, enh, it's good. [Laughter] None of those that I just mentioned are what the word "good" is getting at here. In Hebrew, it's the word tov, and "good" really means something more like beautiful or whole. Beautiful or whole, and that beauty element gets at that aspect of order.

Not just on the first three days, but you notice on days five and six the animals are brought out "according to their kinds," which— There's an interesting juxtaposition there in terms of the original concept. So you have these sea-creatures—remember, the sea is chaos—sea-creatures, including great sea-monsters, "according to their kind." On land, wild animals and creeping things, which is basically reptiles—it's herpetoid, Greek—"according to their kind." So these animals that were considered unclean animals, these animals that were seen as sort of indicative of chaos are "according to their kind." So even those things are part of God's order in the original creation. They're all part of that, and so they can be called good in the sense of beauty and wholeness because of that order.

So now we'll do humans. Verse 26.

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of heaven, over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that moves on the earth." So God made man: in the image of God he made him; male and female he made them. Then God blessed them and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of heaven, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

So there are a bunch of things there, but we'll go through, step by step. Here's another place I'm probably going to get accused of heresy, because I know a lot of people really like to use the "Let us" here—really want to connect that to the Trinity. Trinity's here, but this is not the place. I'll get into that in a minute. That's the grammatical part. If you're looking for the Trinity in Genesis 1, we've already seen it, because we have God creating; we have the Spirit of God hovering over the waters; and what does he use to create?

Q1: The Word.

Fr. Stephen: His Word. He says, "Let there be light." He creates through word, very literally. That's the place where we see God's act of creation happens through the Word and the Spirit. That's the place where we see the Trinity here.

Q2: Like John said, "In the beginning was the Word"?

Fr. Stephen: Right. "All things were made through him." [Laughter] So he's coming back, and he's interpreting and drawing this out. And then the Word becomes flesh and is Christ. So that's there.

Elohim, which is what's being translated as "God" all through here, is grammatically plural. You will sometimes hear people say that this is a plural of majesty, and they will say that because they're trying to connect it to the royal "we," to Queen Victoria saying, "We are not amused," which I don't know that she ever actually said, but in every movie she says that at some point. [Laughter] They're trying to connect it to that. That's not totally off-base, but it's also not right, because Hebrew doesn't actually have a plural of majesty. But it's kind of similar: Hebrew does have a plural of intensification, where you put something in plural to intensify it, in the sense that— So for example, when we would say, "the mountain of mountains" in English or "the great mountain," you could do that in Hebrew by just making the word plural. You just say harim when referring to one mountain. You call it harim in the plural to say this is the great mountain; this is the mountain of mountains.

Q1: You could just say "kings" instead of "king of kings"?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and have the same effect, when you're referring to one person. Another biblical example of this is "behemoth." "Behemoth" is a grammatical plural, behemot. It's actually the plural of the word for cow or bull.

Q1: So Behemoth is super-cow.

Fr. Stephen: Behemot, it's sort of the— Or it can be used for a beast, so it's sort of the super-beast, or the beast of beasts. We talked about that a little in Revelation when we were talking about the beasts: behemoth. It's the beast of beasts, and you just put it in the plural to say that. You're pointing at this one beast and calling it cattle, essentially, if you're really literal, but the point being it's an intensifier. That seems to be what's going on with "Elohim."

But it's not just like: "Hey, here's a convenient way to say that the God we're talking about God, capital-G, the God of gods, the great God, God Most High." There's an extra reason to do that, because the singular, "El," it also means God, but "El," singular, was also the name of a particular pagan god, the father of Baal. If the Torah had used the singular, "El"—"in the beginning, El created the heavens and the earth"—the Canaanites would have been like: "Oh, okay. When does he take a wife and give birth to Baal?" [Laughter] So it's also a way of distinguishing the God whom we're talking about from that pagan god. We're not talking about him; we're talking about God, capital-G, the Most High God, not that dude.

Q2: In Hebrew, we use the word "Elohim," even though it means "gods."

Fr. Stephen: Plural, yeah. And so, because it's in the plural, you sometimes find plural pronouns, plural verbs, like "Let us," connected to it. I believe in the Trinity. I'm just saying pointing to this is a bad argument for it, for the doctrine of the Trinity. That's not going to convince much of anybody. So, yeah, don't try and take that too far. But there are things to point to here, like we talked about: God creating through his Word and through his Spirit. There are things to point to here if you want to talk about the Trinity, connecting it to St. John's gospel, in the beginning of it.

So then he says, "Let's make man in our image, according to our likeness," and then in verse 27, God does this, made man: in the image of God he made him. So what does that mean? How long do we all want to be here…? [Laughter] No, so we tend to think of us being in the image of God as a static concept. Now, we don't take it so woodenly literally, like image like photo, like "we look like God" unless you're Kenneth Copeland. That was a cheap shot, but anyways. [Laughter] So it doesn't mean that we physically look like God. That's not what it's getting at.

But the more common way to take it as sort of a static idea, a single category, is people will try to identify some facet of human nature and say, "Well, that's what the image of God is." That is super problematic. First of all, a bunch of them don't work out, so you'll find a lot of theologians suggesting that, like, language— And that's an interesting suggestion, because Christ is the Word, so you want to do language. But then you discover that lots of animals have language, so that doesn't work out so well.

The most common thing—and this is coming from Aristotle more than the Bible—is reason. Why does that cause a problem? Well, does that mean that an unborn infant isn't in the image of God, because it doesn't have the capacity to reason? Does that mean someone with advanced dementia, or someone who suffered a brain injury, is no longer a human in the image of God because they don't have reason? And so any attempt to kind of just nail this down as "oh, this is some faculty that humans possess" can not only— doesn't work out so well, but can be dangerous, morally and ethically. And not just "can hypothetically be" but has been in human history.

So the concept here is much more dynamic than static. It has to do with a capacity, a potential that human beings have. Imaging God is something that we can actively do, or not do. Functioning as God's image is something we can do or not do. So the most common biblical metaphor for understanding someone being someone else's image is father and son. This includes the relationship between God the Father and Christ. We're told in the New Testament that Christ is the "express image," the perfect image, the complete image, of God the Father. But again, going to St. John's gospel, what that means is, as Christ says in St. John's gospel, that means the things he says are the things that the Father says; the things he does are the things the Father does. When someone who knew my dad says I'm the spitting image of my dad, sometimes they just mean my physical appearance, but more often it's something about the way I talk, some mannerism I have, some way I express myself, that reminds them.

This is why— Here we have this "in the image and likeness." And the Hebrew words and the Greek words there are basically synonyms, but the Fathers make a distinction between the two. They're not making a grammatical distinction; they are synonyms. They do mean the same thing. But the distinction they're making is: "image" being this potential we have to be imitators of God, to be participants, to be his image in the world and reflect him in the world; and "likeness" is the end, the goal of that, the final fulfillment of that that we aim toward. Sort of the fullness of the image being the likeness, that idea, so that through being God's image in the world, we become like him at the end. So "image" is sort of both something we're born possessing in that potential—we have the ability to become like God. As St. Gregory the Theologian said, humans are the being who are commanded to become god. And likeness, the image (because it means the same thing) is also the end, the goal at the end.

And that destiny and that potentiality is what separates humanity from other creatures, not just animals but angels. And that's fulfilled in Christ, because in Christ humanity and God are perfectly united. Christ was not incarnate as a dog or a sheep or an angel, but as our human nature. And that's what gives us this potential and this destiny.

Q3: So that's men and women, right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, that's what I'm about to get to. [Laughter] This is also the very— And this is very important, because we're going to read about the creation of man and woman in chapter two, but this gets brought in here, this "male and female he created them," for a very important reason. So this— This seems obvious to us now, but for most of human history this was radical to the point of being revolutionary. If we're talking about the Ancient Near East, you have a hard time finding anyone who thinks women are human. [Laughter] By the time you get to Aristotle in Greece in the fourth century BC, he thinks that women are defective men. He literally taught that all fetuses are developing into men and some of them don't quite get there and are born as women. [Laughter] So for Aristotle, being a woman is a birth defect, essentially! And that's an improvement over a lot of the other cultures at the time! For Plato, if you read the Symposium, it's impossible for a man to love a woman because a man can only love his equal. [Laughter] Other delightful things like this.

I mean, this is the reality of the whole ancient world, and this isn't a New Testament thing. The Torah already has this, that are placing male humans and female humans on an equal plane specifically in terms of this potential and this destiny, in terms of serving as the image of God, which is— was unheard of.

Q3: So where did that… evolve, I guess? [Laughter] I understood that there was a Jewish saying that God, not a man, a woman… A dog, a woman… Wait, there were three things. A dog, something, and a woman.

Q2: A Gentile.

Q3: A Gentile. So when did that…?

Fr. Stephen: Who were all pretty much dogs anyway, yeah. Well, that's later, but you do find stuff like that. You find… One of the most— [Laughter] Ben Sirach just straight out says at one point, "Women are evil!" And he's trying to do a thing with Eve. He's basically trying to give Adam's excuse which we'll see in Genesis 3. Adam's excuse didn't get him very far with God. [Laughter] When God comes to question him, he's like: "It's not me, it's this woman you put here with me!" But Ben Sirach was still trying to use that. St. Paul kind of responds to that in Ephesians.

Q3: The best thing I got out of that, and you told me this, but I don't know where you heard it, isn't what you're saying, "Thank you God, that I am able to fulfill the entire Law"? Because an animal, a Gentile, or a woman is exempted.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. That's a nice read. [Laughter] Right, so— But, no, this is important, because the reality is the rest of the Old Testament is about Israel's failure to keep the Torah. That's the story of the Old Testament, is: God gave the Torah; they didn't keep it. That's it, and that's where St. Paul goes, like in Romans 2. He says there are great advantages to being one of the Jewish people, like you have the Torah. Of course, do you keep the Torah? Because if you don't keep it, it's not a big advantage.

And, yeah, that's… So it is very often posed in our contemporary world that if ancient Israel, Second Temple Jewish people, if Christians haven't lived up to what's in the Bible, then people will try to: "Well, the Bible must not actually say that." It's like: No, no, no, you don't decide what the Bible says or what Christianity teaches based on what we've successfully pulled off as a mass group—because they're not talking about individual saints that may have; they're talking about people like me, who don't—you look at what it says. There are worse things to be than a hypocrite, because at least as a hypocrite you have standards. [Laughter] You have something you're not— that you believe that you're not living up to. That's better than— It's better to be a hypocrite than a heretic. You can quote me on that. [Laughter] Because at least you're pursuing the right goal; you're just falling short.

And one of the beautiful things, when you understand the Scriptures correctly—and this includes the Torah—is the Torah, in addition to all these commandments and all these beautiful truths that we don't live up to, starting with this one, has the whole process of what to do when you don't live up to them: repentance, returning, healing. There's no myth here that we're going to live up to these or that most people or that much of anybody is going to manage to perfectly live up to this, because it remains that goal, that telos. There's nobody on earth who has hit that destiny. There isn't. That includes the saints, by the way. And you know who would be the first to tell you that? The saints. [Laughter] St. Sisoes the Great, monastic saint, when he was dying—he's one of the Desert Fathers—he was lying there dying, and as he was dying his face was shining with the uncreated light of God that his disciples saw. And his disciples said to him, "Do you have any last words for us, Father?" And he said, "I regret that I had only just started to repent of my sins." So built into this idea of potential and destiny is that we're not going to achieve it, but we press toward it continually and we work toward it. And so, yes, we haven't lived up to this.

And we're going to see when we get to Genesis 3, the "curse"—and we'll talk about what that actually means—about Adam and Eve, even though she wasn't Eve yet. But with Adam and Eve, part of that curse is that they're going to be at odds with each other. But we'll talk about that more in chapter two, that they're created to cooperate and work together, and instead the opposite happens.

So, yes, that short sentence there, putting in the "male and female," is huge, and we read right over it, but is massive.

Now notice the command that they're given. Notice that they're given it; it says said to them. "Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of heaven and over every living thing that moves on the earth." So there's two pieces there: fill the earth; subdue it. And the word that's translated "subdue" is elsewhere used to kind of conquer, to take control of something. Do those two things remind you of anything?

Q2: This is the text people use to justify polluting the whole planet.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but nyah. [Laughter] He doesn't say pollute anything. These are the two things God's been doing so far this chapter, in reverse order. Fill the earth with life. Subdue it, put it in order; give order to it. So part of that imaging, doing what God does, is that we're to continue the work of creation, because, as we're going to see next time when we get into chapter two, Eden is not— Paradise is not the whole world; it's in the world. And so humanity was supposed to go out and sort of continue that work. That's part of what it means to image God, and so there's those two pieces. But we'll talk about that more when we get into chapter two.

And, yeah, that exercising dominion is not massacre, it's not create order in the Roman sense of create a wasteland and call it peace, because those two things have to go together. That kind of order, the order represented by tyranny, does not bring forth life. This is why, when we get into chapter two, it's a garden, because a garden is sort of the perfect combination of those two ideas. It's put in order, and because it is in good order it brings forth life in abundance. So a parking lot can be nice and orderly, but there's no life. And our local swamps are full of life, but they're not in order, and that makes them dangerous. So both.

Verse 29:

Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing herb that sows seed on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed. To you it shall be for food. I also give every green plant for food for all the wild animals of the earth, for all the birds of heaven, and for everything that creeps on the earth in which is the breath of life." It was so. Then God saw everything he had made, and indeed it was very good, so evening and morning were the sixth day.

In the parallel between day three and day six, notice there's even the two pieces. Remember the two things that happened on day three were the dry land and then all the plants? So we have the creatures and then they're given the plants. So that's why the plants are there. The plants are there to feed all of the living creatures. But notice how the plants are described and the focus on fruit from trees. This sort of original diet here does not involve killing anything. It doesn't even really involve killing plants. The seed-bearing herbs we're talking about are like wheat. The idea here is that, in this original order of creation, that creation offers itself to the living creatures, including humanity, in the world for sustenance. That's part of this order. And we don't see— The animals are also eating plants in this, and this is the idea that there's not this predatory thing happening, and we'll see how that kind of devolves as we go forward.

Yeah, we'll do day seven. I've gone a little long, but we'll do day seven, because I feel weird leaving off there, even though there is a chapter break. This is one of the weirdest chapter breaks in the Bible. Like, why didn't you make the break before verse four?

Q1: And even the way it ends, it's like...

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! But so chapter two, verse one: "Thus heaven and earth and all their adornment were finished." So notice: heaven and earth; adornment. Spaces, filled.

And on the seventh day, God finished the work he made, and he rested on the seventh day from all the works he made. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it he rested from all his works God began to make.

A couple of pieces with that, that I won't belabor too much, hopefully. Notice he rested from all the works that he began to make.

Q1: Is there a switch in wordage there, from the "create" verb to the "make" verb?

Fr. Stephen: No, it's the same verb. They've been using "make" all along in the Orthodox Study Bible. But "began." Christ is actually going to reference this. One of the umpteen times that the Pharisees come and pester, he and his disciples were doing something on the sabbath in St. John's gospel, they were picking heads of wheat on the sabbath, and they come: "Why are you doing this?" And Christ responds and says that God is working—his Father is working even to that very day. So this is neither, as, say, the Thomas Jeffersons among us would have us believe, that God gets— He finishes the six days and is just— [Hands swiping] Walks off somewhere. Hands off now, everything's just going to chug along of its own accord. It's also not God taking a break for 24 hours and then getting back to work, because that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

What's actually going on here? Well, so we have the word "rest," and "rest," the way we use it in English brings this image to mind of: "Whoo! I need to sit down and drink some non-alcoholic iced tea"—because there's kids here—"and cool off and relax." Now, obviously that doesn't apply to God. But "rest" has another and more common earlier meaning, like a rock rolls down a hill and comes to rest somewhere. What does that mean?

Q4: It's still?

Fr. Stephen: It comes to the place where it sits. And so what's actually being gotten at here, the image here is of God sitting down, and he's not just sitting down somewhere to take a break. This is God enthroned now over his creation. So God's rest is another way of talking about God's kingdom. Everything is now in order, meaning there's justice, there's peace. He sits in his throne to preside over his creation. And so the sabbath— When he talks about hallowing that day— And this is of course— We mentioned that there are all these things in Genesis that refer to things that are going to be commandments later on in the Torah. This is Exhibit A, the sabbath day, the sabbath year; they're going to be commanded later. That rest is at the end of the week; it's the last day of the week. And the idea is that on that day they are entering into God's rest; they are entering into his kingdom, into his rule. And that's why they're not to busy themselves about work. They're to enjoy the kingdom.

So the idea was this is looking forward; this was the hope, at the end of your life in this world, was that you would go to rest. We're going to see later in Genesis, when Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, when they die and they're buried, it's going to say that they went to rest with their fathers. They entered into God's rest; they entered into his kingdom. This is at the end. And God is enthroned to rule.

Now, when we say that Christ fulfilled the sabbath, what do we mean? On the sixth day of the week, on Friday, he finished all his work. And in St. John's gospel, what's usually translated in English as "it is finished"—those are his last words, or last word because it's one word in Greek, on the cross—that's the same verb that's used here for God finishing his work. So Christ finishes his work, and then what does he do? He rests in the tomb on the sabbath. And then he rises again, new week, eighth day—we'll get into eighth day a little later in Genesis when we talk about people being circumcised on the eighth day—the new creation starts.

In the Old Testament with the sabbath, they're looking forward to the end, the purpose, the goal of the first creation. We worship and celebrate on the Lord's day, the first day of the week, the day of Christ's resurrection, because we're looking to and celebrating the beginning of the new creation. And so it moves in that way.

But so that's that concept of rest. And when it's talking about the deaths of the patriarchs and those kind of things. So unless anybody has any questions that they want on the recording, we'll end here, and we'll pick up in chapter two, verse four, where we get the first "this is the book of the generations" that I told you about. And chapter two, verse four, next week, Lord willing. Thank you, everybody!