We as Christians, from the earliest days of the church have always held Sunday, the day of resurrection as a holy day and have chosen it as our particular day of worship, setting ourselves apart from the Jews who remain under the Law and worship on the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week. Our Lord’s resurrection might be considered enough of a reason to change the day on which we meet together to worship God, but it turns out, like all things revealed to us by God, that this day is prefigured in the Old Testament, not as one might think, as the first day of the week, but rather as the eighth day, a new and eternal day where we leave the endless repetitive cycle of seven days and enter into eternity.
Genesis 1:33 - 2:3 states that God had completed his creation in six days and then rested on the seventh. It is readily apparent, however, that God has never stopped creating since each new person who is conceived is a new creation. We did not exist as disembodied souls prior to the beginnings of our life in the womb. We also know that God is spirit and that He is omnipotent and cannot become tired from the work of creation. Tiredness is something of the flesh, not of spirit, so here we begin to understand that the seventh day of rest is something significant for God incarnate, since only flesh needs rest. Like so many other things that are prefigured in the Old Testament we must understand that there is a deeper meaning to the seven days of the Genesis account. They are a type of something in the future, or indeed something outside of our understanding of time entirely.
We have already seen how the Sabbath, the day of rest, is of significance to the God-man, Jesus Chist. We know that through the whole of His incarnation, that is, His conception, His birth, His life of teaching and example culminating in His death and resurrection, Jesus fulfilled all of the Law and the Prophets. So how did He fulfill the Sabbath? It was certainly not through the keeping of the Sabbath on a week to week basis since Jesus continued to work on the Sabbath, healing people and teaching in the synagogues and the temple.
Jesus was crucified on the “sixth day”, Friday, He lay in the tomb for the whole of the “seventh day”, the Sabbath, then He rose again on the “eighth day”, the incorrupt, eternal, and unending day, the day without night following. Thus did Christ fulfill the Sabbath, when His flesh, through death, ceased to do work and so He did rest, having finished all His works of creation and salvation.
It should be noted that the eighth day has particular significance throughout the Old Testament. Male boys were always circumcised on the eighth day after their birth, regardless of whether this broke the Sabbath. We are no longer required to be circumcised, rather we receive circumcision of the heart through entry into the eternal eighth day of the resurrection
The book of Leviticus has many references to the eighth day, regarding circumcision, sanctification of the altar (seven days of preparation, then its use from the eighth day and onwards). The day on which an offering is brought to the temple after a period on uncleanliness is again, on the eighth day after whatever was causing their uncleanliness had ceased.
In the Septuagint Old Testament, it does not call the first day of creation “first”, but “one”, “one day”, because the first day is a prefiguring of that Sabbath which is the preeminent one of all Sabbaths. It is an image and prefiguring of the day of Resurrection, which is the beginning of the “eighth day”, the incorrupt, eternal and unending day. Therefore Genesis names the first day “one day”, because it is an image of eternity. The psalmist also refers to the “eighth day” in the superscriptions of psalms 6 an 12, a day which is outside of our seven day cycle of time.
/continued next post…
