A Story of Sevens

Alright, and I know you're probably a little bit hangry. I am too. I actually brought some granola bars with me, but then I didn't eat them because I want to make sure I'm feeling what you're feeling, and we'll try to get out of here more quickly. I am going to have to kind of turn around here and look to make sure that I'm looking at what I think I'm looking at here.

Chaos. I probably felt a lot of it in your life. I certainly have. And some people probably don't even get away from it completely at the feast. You might have things that have followed you here that you're still struggling with. Sometimes it feels like this is life all of the time. How do you give hope and encouragement to others in the midst of chaos when things around you seem like they're falling apart?

How can you keep from being sucked into the culture of fear whenever there is great uncertainty in the world?

You know, Andy Duran brought up COVID-19 the other day, a few years ago, what we went through with that. And that was sort of a...you know, he talked about the end times being like birth pangs. That was kind of like a Braxton Hicks contraction, I think, in many ways. You know, like a false birth thing. There was a test for many of us to see how we would do whenever we don't know how things are going to turn out.

It was a scary time. We didn't know what the new normal would be. And one thing that really helped me was the Sabbath day. I've personally found a renewed sanctuary in the Sabbath, and I think probably many of you did, too. And though we had to meet online, there was this specialness to it where we appreciated it just a little bit more. So I'd like to share an insight that has helped me transform the way that I read since then as I think about what the Sabbath means.

And it's basically this. Sabbath is the shape of the Bible story. The story is about God the Father. The story is about Jesus Christ, and Sabbath is its shape. And there'll probably be some things I say here that might be a little mind-bending or not the way you've thought about it before, but probably for some others of you, you may come up to me afterward and say, big deal, this is the way I've been reading my Bible for 50 years. So we'll see how that goes. But some of this, I just never quite thought about it this way before. The Sabbath day pictures God's plan.

When we keep the Sabbath, we enter what some have called a temple in time. When you observe it, you are celebrating the ultimate reality, the ultimate reality in which heaven and earth touch when they come together. And it's a future in which God is going to dwell with His people, all His people, in His complete, unified family. So what I'd like to do is just kind of step through patterns of seven that help us see this story as we go through the Bible. And I'm going to be moving fast.

We're recording this. Hopefully you can go back and look if you want to go through it a little bit more slowly later. And there's a ton of stuff I'm going to skip over that I didn't include in this.

This is the first sentence of the Bible. It says, B'rashit, B'ra, Elohim, Et Hashemayim, Ve'et Ha'erit. Seven words, 28 letters. And if you go online, it's crazy. There's people who've done all kinds of math that just show ridiculous layers of sevens that work off of the letters of just the first sentence. of the Bible. I'm not going to go into that. We've got other things to cover. But I wanted to show you that this would be something to be keyed into.

That the first readers of the Bible are going to be aware of this as they're memorizing Genesis 1. They're going to see this pattern. That we start off seven words, a multiple of seven letters. From there, Genesis 1 kind of unfolds. It's like a diamond. It's got all of these patterns of seven. You get God mentioned five times seven times, heavens three times seven times, earth three times seven times.

But why? What's the deal with the sevens? It's okay to ask that. It's a question anybody would have when you're shown this. A lot of it has to do with this wordplay that just gets used over and over in the Bible. This is the word seven in Hebrew. It's sheva here. Here's the word fullness. In case this doesn't quite register, it's the same word, basically.

You just get that wordplay over and over. Seven is heading to completeness. It's heading to satisfaction. It's heading to fullness. This is something I learned not too long ago. At first, I wasn't sure, but it's been growing on me as I've been considering all these other things. The middle of the seven words, the smallest one, is not an important word by itself. It's called a direct object marker. It's just a helper word in Hebrew.

But it is made up of aleph and tav, which are the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. So right here in the beginning, we've got this thing that echoes where we end up in the end with alpha and omega in the end. This idea of fullness. From there, Genesis 1 is really interesting. You have the heading, which is seven words in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Then you get the setting, which is a statement that's twice that.

It's 14 words in Hebrew. And then you get the seven frames, the seven panels of the story as we show God creating through the week. And then it closes three times seven words, where there's this triplet triad blessing here, where God finished his work. He rested on the seventh day, and then God blessed the seventh day. Three sentences, each one with seven letters. So in Genesis 1-2, we're given the setup for what we're doing here.

We start with the chaos. This is where God starts working. And the problem here is said in three stages. It's dark, it's formless, and it's empty. And God methodically attacks those three things. He starts with the last one, the darkness, and addresses that first. Let there be light, he says. Let there be light. And he does that by separating and creating out of separation. And this is the way God works. He separates, and then creation happens. Light comes out of darkness, and then he moves through creation. Back in the time the Bible was written, people didn't talk about nebula or solar systems or DNA. The way they talked about the world was usually, you could think of it like a three-layer cake or a tiramisu.

In the Bible, even, you get that language all the time. Heaven, Earth, Sea. Or heaven, sea, earth. And so this is the shape of Genesis 1. He is taking all that chaos, and he's separating and forming. And he just goes through from God's space down to the place that we can live. We can live on land. We can't live out in the wilderness.

We can't live out in the ocean. He's forming to the place where man can live. And so, first three days, he does that. Second three days, perfectly parallel that. Day one, let there be lights. Day four, let there be lights, he says. And then he fills each of these spaces, finally ending up in day six. Now, I think that this forms a fascinating portrait of how God works.

Genesis 1 isn't just here as an explainer for curious scientists to say, oh, by the way, here's how I did this. This is the prologue to the story of what God's doing with mankind. It was a prologue to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and becomes the prologue to everything he's doing. So this isn't just how God worked. It's how he works. You think about it in your own life. You were formed in your mother's womb. God formed you. Eventually, he fills you with God's spirit, and you become a light to other people. This is the nature of how God's working individually. It's how he created the earth. It's how he's going to fill the earth with his presence whenever Jesus Christ comes to rule on earth and onto the New Jerusalem. These are patterns of thought. These are paradigms for us.

Now, it looks like he got done in six days, doesn't it? In fact, even in the command in the Ten Commandments, it says the earth was created in six days. Oh, maybe ironically, it does it in this poem that is seven parts. This is sort of a ring structure poem. They call it a chiasm. It's where you see the outer parts match, and then the next inner ones, and the next inner ones. It's actually a seven-line poem. The inside of that, it tells you who shall not do the work, and it has a list of seven people who won't do the work. But what's the deal with the six and the seven? Well, the difference is the difference between a house and a home. We saw in those first six days this forming process and this filling process, and now we have this grand house. But there's a difference between a house and a home, and that's why the seventh day is the culmination. It is the point that's moving from heaven, and it's moving into a space where mankind can dwell, but also a place where God's going to be. Because we know that the original idea is that if God tells Adam and Eve that they're going to need to go out and rule the world, how are they going to do that without wisdom? Well, they're not supposed to get it from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they're going to need that knowledge. But we find God walking in the garden. That's where they're going to get it. They're going to get it walking with God. So we have this original vision of this idea that God and mankind are going to walk together. And something interesting about it is that we begin in darkness. The last day is the only day that doesn't say, and there was evening, and there was morning, the seventh day. So at least from sort of a literary standpoint, it just leaves you hanging there. You never go to darkness again. It's like you started darkness and no light, and you end with light and no darkness. Now I want to focus a little bit on this word, nuach, and what it means. Because when in Genesis 1 we're told that God rested on the seventh day, it says he just stopped. He shebodied on that day. But whenever it gets retold in Exodus 20, it uses a different word, and that different word is kind of important. Instead of saying he shebodied, it says he nuach'd. And that has a different shade to it. It has this idea of settling in. It's like what a king does when he comes back conquering, and he settles in in a place. An example I could use is when we came here to Jack O'Lyland, we came from Cincinnati. I've got four kids, and the youngest is nine. Everybody had to share a bed at the hotel that we stayed at on the way here. And it wasn't super fun for any of them. There were some problems in the middle of the night with that sleeping arrangement. The point is we had all our stuff packed in our van. It wasn't the best. It was in Asheville on the way down. But we got down here, and maybe you did too if you took several days to get here, and you check into your place, and you unpack all your stuff, and you put it all down, and then you're tired, and you see the chair, and you go sit down in it. That is Newark, where you are settling in. That's what God did at the end of creation.

In Genesis chapter 2, whenever God puts man in the Garden of Eden, He doesn't set them there or place them there like you probably have in English. He Nuaks them there. So He's placing them into this place for him. That's the first use of the word Newark in the Bible. If you go down to the seventh use of Newark in the Bible, lo and behold, it's actually when the seventh day is commanded in Exodus 16. It's when the Sabbath is formally introduced as a command. And this thing happens. It's the manna story, where God sends the manna, and He gives them special instructions. He says, collect them one through six days, and don't collect any on the seventh day, because there's going to be enough. There's going to be enough that He's going to provide. And to show that, He says, take some of this from the sixth day and save it and put it in this jar. And He says, Nuak the manna that is prepared in advance of the Sabbath. And then on the Sabbath, the Nuakt bread did not stink or have worms. So then God says the manna will make you full, Shavah. And on the seventh Shavah day, He does the word play right there. The manna is going to make you full, and on the Sabbath day, don't go out and collect any more. And then Moses was commanded to take the jar and put some of this manna that just lasts forever and put it in the presence of God. To put it in the jar, and it goes in the Holy of Holies. So it's like it's always there together, living in the Holy of Holies, in the presence of God. It's a lot to think about in what that is saying. Not just about the fact that for some reason the spread didn't stink, but that this is a picture of where the Sabbath story is going. The bread new locks with God inside His ark in the most holy place. This is the kind of symbol of life that Mr. Cowell was talking about in his sermonette this morning. This qualitative life. Not just eternal, but it's a kind of life.

The manna account reflects Genesis 1, where God organizes, forms, and fills the earth with a beautiful garden space, overflowing with food by the end of the sixth day. Now, it's too bad things didn't stay that way. Too bad we didn't just have the Garden of Eden just go on. But there was a there was more to this story that had to play out. And unfortunately, after Adam and Eve eat from the wrong tree, it just seems like things get worse and worse and worse. The first sibling relationship ends the way you might think a lot of your kids are going to, but don't usually.

The first brothers, one murders the other. And you get this path that if you look at it through the sevens, Cain starts this line that goes down and down and down, and it just becomes, we might say, evil turned up to 11 in the US. But they would say evil turned up to 777, where this guy Lamech is just the worst. If Cain's a murderer, this guy's a premeditated murderer. If Cain takes a wife, this guy takes two wives. He's the first polygamist that we get. And he says, if Cain is to be avenged seven times over, then for Lamech it will be 77 times. But then the story jumps way back up to Eve, and Eve is given a son. And we already know that Eve's seed is going to overcome the snake that was in the garden. It's going to crush the serpent. And we jump back up there, and we get this other line that comes down to this other Lamech. It was like the parallel universe Lamech. And lo and behold, he's another kind of a triple seven. All his days are 777. And you know what he does? He has a son, and he names him literally rest. He names his son rest. And we could do this whole thing on the Noah story, because it's just lousy with sevens. And it comes into a lot of things that have to do with this, but I'm going to skip over most of that.

There's stuff I really want to tell you about that, though. Another time. Story for another time.

But you go on from there, and things again... They look like they're going to start off great. And Noah fulfills this role where he's this intercessor where he prays on behalf of all people, and God hears his prairie. He smells the sweet savor come up. But then he has his own failure moment, and things decline again. We get to the Tower of Babel from there. But then there's this moment in Genesis 12 where God picks out this one elderly couple, and he does it in a seven-line poem that has five blessings in it. Sort of the match to the five cursings that happen in Genesis 1. And this is where the story of the Bible really kicks into gear, because this is where the promise starts, that a lot of the rest of the Old Testament is going to be about. I think about those old games you used to have where they had a spring, and you could pull them back. I guess it's like Plinko, or like Pingball, or something, where you'd send the ball up, and it would just kind of go down, and it would hit these different rods until it gets to the bottom. That's kind of what the rest of the Old Testament is, with this promise that's happening, that somehow we're going to overcome the snake. All humanity is going to be blessed through a single descendant from this family.

Now, I want to jump back real quick to that creation week, and point something else out that you may not have noticed before, and that's that we're also forming and filling time. Because when light and darkness is separated, they're not called light and darkness, they're called day and night. Those are time measurements. Those are the separation of time. And then on the seventh day, we get the Sabbath, which gives us the first building block of what holy time is supposed to look like. Now, you've probably heard before, you may have heard before, that day four, which balances them out, it's let there be lights in the sky, and they're going to be for the holy days. They're going to be for the Moedim. It doesn't mean seasons, it just means holy days. What you may not have heard before is that the word lights is significant, too, because you don't get that word for lights again until it shows up here. The next time it shows up is when we're describing the creation of the tabernacle. When God is giving Moses the instructions for the tabernacle, and we talk about the lampstand, that's when we get this word again. Because the tabernacle functions as kind of this mini version of the cosmos. And the cosmos that God creates is like a mega version of the temple, which is all telling you something about what the ultimate vision is going to be on a major scale beyond Israel, that this whole thing is going to, this whole plan is going to take over the earth. And the lights that are up there, the sun and the moon that we have, they're for the holy days, and they are like God shining down on the cosmos, just like the lampstand shined down on the bread. I thought about showing you a chart of all the parallels between Genesis 1 and the Exodus commands for the tabernacle. It would take us a long time. I'm not going to. I'll just say briefly that when God creates the world, He does it in 10 words. And seven of those words are the let there be commands. So He does that in a pattern of seven too. And those end up echoing when the Lord says to Moses all the commands for the tabernacle, that's one of dozens, honestly dozens of connections between them linguistically, between the tabernacle and Genesis. And interestingly, the seventh one, the seventh time Yahweh talks to Moses, is the command for the Sabbath day. And the fourth one is actually the command about the oil. And if you go into Exodus there, you'll see that the oil is for, guess what, seven things. I thought about like having a red dot every time I was about to say seven and seeing if I could get everybody to just shout seven every time we get to one of these. So the middle thing is for the oil. That's for seven things. The middle thing of that is the lampstand. It is the oil for the accoutrements of what happens on day four. So there's this alignment that happens all the way down between those things. Now the single building block, we start with this as Sabbath, and it's a really simple idea. It's darkness to light. You know, the smallest unit of time, I guess you could say, that happens in Genesis 1 and 2, is even the single breath when God breathes into Adam. You know, that what is a breath? It's a you know, you breathe in, you gasp, that's when you get tension and things like that, but whenever you sit down in that easy chair when you get to the feast, that's the exhale.

This is the shape of history. Darkness to light. So the story is sold in a way so that the week begins in darkness and finishes in endless light, and the Sabbath is to time, what the temple is to space. Have you ever picked up a leaf and looked at it and just thought, well, that looks kind of like a tree. I think we've probably had that experience, you know, where small things look like the bigger things, and that's how types work in the Bible.

They're often one thing that's a model for a larger thing, and you see God do that with this building block of the Sabbath. You've got every seven days there's a Sabbath. You've got two times seven. The 14th day is Passover, which is followed by a seven-day festival, which is followed by Pentecost, which is a day that follows seven times seven Sabbaths. Yeah, I could go down this list. Trumpets is when the seven trumpets blow, which is the first of the month. It's the seventh month. Atonement has these two patterns of sprinkling blood inside the tabernacle.

Eighth day is the seventh high day. You move on from there. These things kind of telescope out into things with larger and larger ramifications. The seventh year is the land rest, which is really going to be a different kind of year if you're living it. And then you've got the Jubilee year, which follows seven times seven land rests. Lots of other stuff I'd love to talk about. I kind of wish I'd talked a little bit about Jesus genealogy because it's another thing that echoes the beginning where you just...

the way Matthew tells it is fascinating because you've got these seven seven seven seven seven seven, 14 14 14, which in Hebrew is the name David. It says David David David. Another time. But we'll keep moving here. Sabbath is a place. It's a time. But there's something else that happens. As you move through the Old Testament, you start anticipating some kind of man of rest. And you get it with Noah. His name literally is rest. You get it with people like Boaz, for one, who Naomi says, I'm looking for rest. She says I'm looking for the man of Nuach for Euorpa and Ruth. And whenever Boaz shows up and they have the happy ending, his genealogy is told.

And the genealogy is told with kind of a surprising starting point. The starting point is made so that Boaz will be number seven. He'll literally be the man of rest that leads to David the king. And, you know, we could talk about the others. We won't. So we're anticipating more than a time and a place. We're anticipating that somehow this is going to come to fruition through a man. Now, again, the plane crashes again. You would love for the Israelites to have become that kingdom of priests that is a light that's a city on the hill to the nations. But they don't. We know that they go into exile. So much so that the way Jeremiah describes it in Jeremiah 4 is he says, I looked and the earth and it was formless and empty and the heavens they had no light.

So when we move against God's way, when we move against his plan and we're not in tune with the way that he does things, we take order and we send it back to chaos. I think we probably all experience this in our lives. And this is what happens on this big stage with Israel. And that's what Jeremiah was meditating on there. But then there is this hope that is carrying through after that. We see it from Isaiah, which has already been quoted this feast, Isaiah 61, where you think about Israel being in exile and they start contemplating the whole Jubilee system, this whole idea of what happens when you fall into debt slavery that you can be rescued in the end.

And they start applying that to the whole nation. They start thinking about it as, oh wait, we as a nation have become debt slaves here. We have this debt to God. We're in slavery. And so Jubilee becomes part of the message of how that becomes thought about. And that's how God sends this message to Isaiah to talk about it.

And he gives him a seven-point plan for restoration. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And this is what Jesus gets up and reads. He reads the first half of it anyway whenever he starts his ministry. He actually stops in the middle of the middle point when he does. And so it gets cut off, but it is all going to get done. You can count on it. It's just like the rhythm, the cadence of time.

You don't have to wonder about whether God is going to carry through, whether he's going to be faithful, whether he's going to show his grace over time to a humanity that has not followed him, but he's going to come and rescue them. You see it in this pattern. I wanted to point out Matthew 12.

This is when Jesus and his disciples go through the grain fields, and they pick the grain, and they eat it. Well, I guess I should back up a bit. Jesus did a lot of healing on the Sabbath, and I think you could think that maybe he was just trying to poke the Pharisees in the eye, maybe, something like that.

I don't think so. I think what Jesus was doing is showing us what Sabbath is ultimately going to mean. He was living out what the Sabbath represents. And so when we get to something like Matthew 12, when the disciples are plucking the grain heads on the Sabbath, the Pharisees confront him about that.

But the way that Matthew has arranged it, here's what comes right before. This is what's right before that. At that time, Jesus answered and said, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes, even so, Father, for so it seemed good in your sight. All things have been delivered to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal him.

This would be some big language for anybody who's not the Son of God to say. And then he says, Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. We've been waiting for this man of rest. It kind of looked like maybe David was going to be the guy, and he turns out not to be. And maybe Solomon's going to be the guy, and he turns out not to be. Here's someone who is putting forward his kingship in the language of Sabbath, that he's going to be that rest. The implication is that you are a slave.

We're in Egypt, and we need this rescue. But this yoke that Jesus brings is going to be light. It's going to be work, but it's going to be the kind of work that happens inside the garden, not the kind of work that happens outside the garden where you're toiling under the sun, as Solomon says.

So this is the one who formed the Sabbath. Now he's going to start filling it. And what happens after that is Matthew 12, the grainhead story. And it's actually two stories put back to back about the Sabbath that mentions the Sabbath seven times in dialogue. You see this, and you just think this is not accidental. This is the way it is. Number four, the one in the middle, for the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath. And these are the kinds of things that are going to happen when the Lord of the Sabbath returns. Jesus wasn't offering some kind of alternate religion that allowed breaking the Sabbath. He's saying that this whole thing was leading to him. This is Sabbath, what he's doing. We move on through the Bible, and we see how powerful this paradigm for life is. You get to the end of the Bible. I think we've already read at this feast, in Revelation 22. He showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street and on either side of the river now was the tree of life, the tree by the river. There shall be no night there. They need no lamp, nor light of the sun, for the Lord gives them light, and they shall reign forever and ever.

Genesis begins with darkness and no light. Revelation ends with light but no darkness.

It's like I love that song that the Schaeffer sang on opening night, where they sang light after darkness, gain after loss, strength after weakness, crown after cross, sweet after bitter, hope after fears, home after wandering, praise after tears, and it continues from there. Sabbath is the shape of the story. We're going into a period of light, but right now there's just points of light that are all around. That's where we are right now. It's not a smooth transition. Martin Luther King kind of saw this maybe a smooth transition when he said the arc of history bends toward justice, which he said I think right after quoting Amos actually in the speech that he was giving. Instead, there's this point in the middle. It's the day of the Lord, which is a day of gloom. It's not going to be fun, but it's going to be victorious in another way. But before that, there are these points of light, and that's what we are right now. I like this quote from Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament scholar. He said, people who keep the Sabbath live all seven days differently.

And I think that's true. When we see that as a temple in time, it's not just a time not to work. It's a time that's like a mountain vista, where you can see forward and you can see backwards in time.

We are still sojourning. Right now, Eden is still a booth in the wilderness. The writer of Hebrews, whenever he said that passage that we hear, quoted so much, there's the remains of rest for the people of God. It's fascinating to see what he's doing there, because he's talking about a rest that was never fully attained in the whole Hebrew Bible. He's quoting Psalm 95 when he says that. He's using all this language. He's talking about the Promised Land. He's talking about the kingdom of God coming. He's talking about our conversion now. He's funneling it all up and being able to capture it all with this word rest. There is a future ultimate settling in of rest for us, but yet there's a rest that we can participate in right now. We can taste a little bit of this reality right now. The Feast of Tabernacles was a time when Israel was in Leviticus. The whole book of Leviticus is setting up the way that God can live among his people. It's how God can dwell among his people. One of the things is the Feast of Tabernacles, where they go take these palms and the branches of the willow by the brook, the tree by the river, and they build a little hut out of it. They can move through the wilderness, and they're both sojourning, and they're sort of in a mini Eden with God. That is our experience now. That is where we feel the conflict in our lives now as converted people in a world of darkness. We're on a path right now where we are sojourning, but in a way we're also at home when the Father and Jesus Christ make their home in us. I know I'm running over time. Do you mind to stay just a little bit more?

Okay, thank you. Part of what I think I want to get across with all of this I've been thinking about is how this is the shape of the story, and any time you read about any of these ideas, they are all talking to each other. You should always hear the echoes of the other as you read each part. I wish somebody had told me this when I started reading the Bible as a kid, because I would read about these individual things and think, well, that's weird. It's weird what they're doing with these animals, and Jubilee is a weird word. It was hard for me to see the connective tissue, and I hope that you at least come away with that in seeing how these stories build and cascade and operate on top of each other. Sabbath is the shape of the story. The seventh day is built into the fabric of creation in history. It's how we sink ourselves to the way God thinks, and without it, there's no creation and there's no human story. We're part of that creation, and observing the seventh day puts us in tune with the rest of creation. And it leads us to where we want to end up, where Jesus said in John 14, 23, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home in him. So this is us right now. We're like a little oasis in the desert. Having Christ living in you turns you into a walking, talking pocket of Eden. At least that's the ideal. You're a part of the city on the hill that's shining out right now, as Jesus said on the Sermon on the Mount. If Christ is in you, you've turned into kind of a time traveler. It's like that light in the darkness and delight thing that I showed you. You're a representative of the light that's coming. You're just a point of light out there right now, but you're sort of like a time traveler from the future that's showing people just this little pocket of Eden where it's going. Or as Mr. Armstrong used to say, he had different language for this. The way he said it was, you're an ambassador for the world tomorrow. Jesus said, He who believes in me, as the scripture said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water, the pocket of Eden. And yet it's not easy. It is not easy to live this way. Eden doesn't mean it's easy. And we suffer just like everybody else. Jesus wept. He wept when his friend died.

God's Spirit gives us a taste of Eden, but it does not insulate us from light. With Jesus, he was affected by what happened around him. He wept, but there was still something that was irresistible to him as well. With him, there was always enough time. There was always enough compassion. There were always enough fragments of bread. And those of us who Christ directs, who Christ is living, and we're like those little seeds of what's going to eventually germinate into the tree that grows on both sides of the river in the New Jerusalem.

Now, some who love darkness, the people we encountered in this world, they will see our light and they're going to be threatened by it. And rightly so. They'll be rightly threatened by it because they see that our values represent some kind of eventual demise of the world that they love and the world that they have created. So for those people, when they encounter us in our ethics, it's like this mini Day of the Lord moment for them. They have a really tiny Day of the Lord whenever they see what we're like. But for other people, we're going to be a lighthouse in raging seas. They'll know that there's something there that they have been hungering for and searching for whenever that light shines from us. Now, most people are going to be somewhere in between that. They're going to be pulled in two different directions. It will be like a spork that they can't figure out where to put us. There's things that are attractive about this, but things that I couldn't let go of if I'm going to walk this way. And those people will have to wait to see how it all ends up, probably in the second resurrection. Those are the people who come up and they'll glorify God in the Day of Visitation when they remember their encounter with us. But we're preaching the good news to them through living that picture of God's way today.

I don't think I would be giving this presentation now, except for a few specific people who have been in my life, who've been like this to me. People who just broke all my rules for how I thought life was supposed to work. Who just had Adam and Eve-like nakedness in terms of their sincerity, in the way that they didn't wear a mask. People who had courage to give graceful but uncompromising answers for their faith, even when their job or relationship was on the line. People who responded to hate thrown at them with love. And people who responded to insult with curiosity and compassion. There are people who have known who believed that there were enough resources. They somehow had enough time for people. They had enough love. They had enough attention to go around. And you probably have people like that in your life who may be part of why you're here right now, who contributed to you seeing something that made you realize what the Bible's talking about has to actually be true. Maybe you have those people. The experience of the Sabbath, when God's own spirit is tabernacling, new-ocking with us, when we're praying, we're meditating on God's Word and living accordingly, when we're praising God in community with others, which we've come here to do, and we're seeing to others' needs and ministering to them, that's experiencing the shadow of the greater reality. It's peering through a glass darkly into eternity and into God's intentions for his global family.

So every week we have an opportunity to step into that eternity. It's not about the rules, the rules for the Sabbath, how we rest, how we come together. It's like a game that you play. The rules are not the point of the game, but they get you in the game. They're not the point. It's the same with us. It's not just about resting. It's not just about our performance and how well we keep the Sabbath. It is a test commandment, but it's much more than that. That's just the corner of it. It is stepping into eternity and seeing what God is doing. We should be experiencing that every week when we keep the Sabbath. It's that mountain vista. You see forward, you see back. We participate in a seven-day countdown to the fullness of new creation, even as God is creating us anew right now. It's one of those tools he uses to reshape the way we think, and it's our story. This is our story, and we're going to keep living it out every seven days until night itself is banished forever. So if there's anybody here who hasn't committed to Christ and the Father living in them, who has not pursued baptism, I would encourage you to talk to your pastor when you get back. Talk to them and get together with them and start moving in that direction. Just have some discussions to begin with. Invite Christ and the Father to make their home in you, and then go out and be a pocket of Eden. Thanks and have a great lunch!