Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 127 · May 7
The Seventh 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.”
The seventh day is the only one with no evening.
Six times the account has closed the same way, and the evening and the morning were the third day, the fourth, the fifth. Then the seventh arrives and the formula stops.
You have tried to rest and been bad at it. The afternoon meant to be empty filled by half past two, and the hour you protected went on a screen with a low hum of guilt underneath. Rest becomes one more thing to be competent at, which is the one thing it cannot be.
What the text says happened is this. 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. A day gets blessed. Until now in Genesis the blessing has fallen on living things, the creatures of the sea and then the man and the woman. Here it lands on a unit of time.
When the commandment comes, the reason attached is this page rather than tiredness. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. Hebrews, arguing that the day was never fully entered, says there remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God, and defines it: he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.
Father, we have turned rest into work and then failed at it, and we know how the afternoon goes. Teach us to stop while things are unfinished, because yours were finished and ours will not be. Bless the hours we hand back to you as you blessed that day, and take out of us the fear that the week collapses if we are still in it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 127 is Light and Understanding (Psalm 119:130).