The Sabbath, part seven
posted Saturday, October 13, 2007 :: 12:13 PM
Previously: In His presence there is fullness of joy
I saw something for the first time when reading in Genesis this week. My daughter helped me see this. We were talking about the first promise of the Redeemer which appears in Genesis 3:15. She pointed out to me that in the curse placed upon the woman:
"To the woman He said,
"I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth,
In pain you will bring forth children;
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he will rule over you."" Genesis 3:16
That the word translated "pain" in the above passage, really means in Hebrew, "toil," and is in fact the exact same word the Lord uses in the next verse pronouncing the curse upon Adam:
"Then to Adam He said,
"Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,
And have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it';
Cursed is the ground because of you;
In toil you will eat of it all the days of your life." Genesis 3:17
In other words, the curse placed upon both the woman and the man is the same: work, sorrow, labor, painful toil. Now how wonderful is the Lord our God, who, before man ever sinned on the earth, sanctified the Sabbath day and hallowed it as a day of REST for all creation throughout our generations! It is a pure gift of grace, that God would gift us with a respite, a rest, from work in the midst of the painful toil that is our lot that we earned for ourselves. It is such a cruel deception of the enemy that he would take God's gracious gift of rest from the curse, the Sabbath, and turn it around in men's minds as a hated, obligatory chore! No wonder Jesus told us that the Sabbath was made for man!
To be continued ...
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Update: continued in The Sabbath, part eight
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