Did God rest on the seventh day, or does he keep working?

The passages

Genesis 2:2–3

God ended his work and “rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made”, and blessed that day.

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

John 5:16–17

Accused of healing on the Sabbath, Jesus answers, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”

And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay him, because he had done these things on the sabbath day. But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.

Hebrews 4:3–4

“The works were finished from the foundation of the world”, and God rested on the seventh day from all his works.

For we which have believed do enter into rest, as he said, As I have sworn in my wrath, if they shall enter into my rest: although the works were finished from the foundation of the world. For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all his works.

Hebrews 1:3

The Son is “upholding all things by the word of his power”.

Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;

The objection

Genesis says that God “rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made”, and blessed that day because he rested on it. But when Jesus was accused of working on the Sabbath, he answered, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” If God is still working, Sabbath days included, in what sense did he rest?

The answer

Genesis and John speak of two kinds of work. The verb in Genesis 2:2–3 is shabat (H7673), ‘to cease, stop’: God stopped creating because creation was finished. Hebrews puts it the same way: “the works were finished from the foundation of the world” (Hebrews 4:3). Genesis does not say that God stopped keeping the world in being. Had he done so, nothing would last a moment, for the Son is “upholding all things by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3), and every creature waits on God for its food and its breath (Psalm 104:27–30). Gill explains that God ceased from making new kinds of creatures, but never from sustaining and providing for those he had made. (On whether God grew tired, see the entry on whether God needs rest.)

That ongoing work is what Jesus appeals to in John 5:17. The sun rises and the rain falls on the Sabbath, and children are born on it; no one thought that God broke his own Sabbath by such work. Jesus claims to share in it: his Father is at work, and so is he. His hearers saw that he was claiming more than a right to heal, for he was making himself “equal with God” (5:18). The healing at Bethesda was a work of that kind, the giving of life, not the ordinary labour that the Sabbath law forbade (see the entry on whether Jesus broke the Sabbath).

So both statements are true. God rested from creating, once for all, on the seventh day; he has never rested from upholding, governing and giving life. Calvin puts it plainly: the creation was finished in six days, but God’s ruling of it goes on without a break.

God’s rest still goes on

Augustine and many after him noticed that the seventh day in Genesis has no closing ‘evening and morning’, and Hebrews 4 speaks of God’s rest as one his people may still enter: “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9). On this reading God’s rest is not idleness but the settled enjoyment of a finished work, which goes on alongside his care for the world.

A Jewish answer too

Jewish writers of Jesus’ time faced the same question. Philo of Alexandria, quoted by Gill, wrote that it is as natural for God to work as for fire to burn. Jesus’ opponents did not dispute that God works on the Sabbath; what angered them was his claim to share in that work as God’s Son.

From the classic commentators

In six days, therefore, the creation of the world was completed, but the administration of it is still continued, and God incessantly worketh in maintaining and preserving the order of itJohn Calvin, Commentary on John 5:17 (tr. William Pringle), at CCEL