⁹ So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.

Laborious this is not. The writer of Hebrews is not ready to rest his case about the “rest” of God. He toils over his selection of words and OT passages to convey that the story which began with the creation account in Genesis 1 had not yet been completed. What do we mean by that?

When God made humans, He made us in His image. We reflect His glory, which means we reflect Him as He is. That was God’s goal in fashioning us out of the dust of the earth. He took of His created matter and formed it into a replication of Himself. So what does His glory look like in us?

Well, God spent time (six days, as Genesis puts it) working, creating the world, then He rested on the seventh. So too, we were created to work, as we see in our fore-parents, Adam and Eve, who were instructed to care for the Garden (Gen 1:26-30, 2:15). But there is no evidence in the Genesis record that they ever had a day of rest from their work. Their reflection of God did not extend yet to the seventh day rest. In a sense, the rest of Scripture is about man’s quest and failure to reach that rest—and of God providing it for them. Yes, the Sabbath rest (as the seventh day came to be called) was talked about much and practiced by the Jews, but it was only a physical rest. The labor of the soul and spirit has continued on since the Garden to this very day. There still “remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.”

Israel, as we have pointed out before, did physically enter the land. After the Exodus from Egypt and after Joshua and the people entered the Promised Land, there was a tumultuous time of the Judges, where there were frequent wars with the surrounding nations. Although there was a relative short time of peace during the latter part of David’s reign and that of Solomon’s, the line of kings after that only found continual war and conflict. Physically, they were in the land, but not at peace or rest. Then after 70 years of exile from the land because of their disobedience and disloyalty to God, they were returned to the land, but not with a wholehearted or lasting devotion to their Lord. And clearly not with the Messianic reign of peace they had come to expect.

So by the time of Jesus, Israel still wrestled with the obvious lack of God’s blessing, otherwise they would have ascended to prominence in the world, as ruling over all others and ushering in the peace of God on earth. In Christ, now, we find the spiritual rest that Israel longed for. Through faith, we are finally made right and restored to the One who rested on the seventh day.