05.15. Chapter Fifth.

Chapter Fifth.—The Marriage Relation And The Sabbatical Institution. THE two ordinances of marriage and the Sabbath are here coupled together, as having so much in common, that they alike belonged to the primeval constitution of things, and were alike intended, without any formal alteration, to transmit their validity to times subsequent to the fall. They carried an import, and involved obligations, which should be co-extensive with the generations of mankind. Yet with this general agreement there is a specific difference, which is of moment as regards the point of view from which the subjects must here be contemplated. The formation of a partner for Adam out of a portion of his own frame, and the junction of the two under the direct sanction of their Maker, so as to form in a manner one flesh, however important in a social and economical respect, however fitted also to bear indirectly on the higher interests of the world, was still not formally of a religious nature. For the world’s secular well-being alone there were reasons amply sufficient to account for its Divine author resorting to such a method, when bringing into being the first family pair, and in them laying the foundations of the world’s social existence. For it was by an instructive and appropriate act, entwined with the very beginnings of social life on earth, that the essential conditions were to be exhibited—if exhibited so as to tell with permanent effect—of its right constitution and healthful working. And so far from being, as some have alleged, an unbecoming representation of the Divine character, a lowering of the Divine Majesty, that Eve should have been said to be formed out of Adam’s side, and thereafter presented to him as his own flesh and bone, on account of which they would turn the whole narrative into a myth, it will be found, when duly considered and viewed in the light of the important interests depending on it, every way worthy of the wise foresight and paternal goodness of Deity. He has thus interwoven with the closing act of creation an imperishable moral lesson,—made it, indeed, the perpetual and impressive symbol of the great truth,—that the fundamental relation in family life was to consist in the union of one man and one woman; and these so bound together as that, while distinctions as to authority and power on the one side, and subordination and dependence on the other, should exist between them, they should still be regarded as a social unity—corporate manhood. So far from the Divine procedure in this violating our sense of the fitting and proper, or doing more than the circumstances of the case required, the records of history were not long in furnishing mournful evidence that it proved all too little to secure the end in view; it failed to perpetuate the intended unity and good order of families. Even among the chosen people, the practical inference drawn from it with instinctive sagacity and true spiritual insight by the first Adam. (“Therefore shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh,” Genesis 2:24), came to be so much lost sight of, that it required to be announced afresh, and with sterner authority imposed, by the second Adam (Matthew 19:5-6). The Scriptural evidence for the deep significance of the Divine act in respect to the formation of Eve, and the nature of the marriage union founded on it, is both explicit and ample. But in the circumstances of the parents themselves of the human family, and also of those of their posterity who lived in the earlier ages of the world, it could scarcely have occurred to them to carry that significance into any sphere beyond that of the family life. Nothing in the prospect as yet held out to them of a restored condition, was fitted to give their ideas so definite a shape as to suggest a spiritual relationship formed after the model of this natural one; and in the religion of patriarchal, or even much later times, scarcely anything is found that bears this specific impress. As the result of God’s fuller manifestation of Himself and closer intimacy with His people in the wilderness, a kind of marriage union indeed is implied to have sprung up between them, since their defection from His service is represented under the light of an adultery or whoredom (Numbers 14:33),—a style of representation which became of frequent occurrence in the writings of the later prophets (Isaiah 57:3; Jeremiah 3:9; Jeremiah 13:27; Ezekiel 16:1-63, Ezekiel 23:1-49, Hosea 1:1-11, Hosea 2:1-23, etc.). In one or two passages also the Lord expressly takes to Himself the name of the husband of Israel, or speaks of Himself as having been married to them (Isaiah 54:5; Jeremiah 3:14). In the Book of Canticles this relation even forms the scene of a kind of spiritual drama; and in Psalms 45:1-17 the hero of the piece, the King of Zion, is even represented as standing formally related to a queen who shares with Him in the honours of the kingdom, and by whom can only be understood the true Israel of God. It is not to be denied, however, that this series of Old Testament representations took its formal rise in the covenant engagement entered into at Sinai, and merely availed itself of the marriage-bond as one peculiarly adapted for portraying the obligations and advantages connected with fidelity to the engagement, or the guilt and folly of the reverse. In none of the passages does there seem any distinct reference to the primeval union in Eden; and rather as a fitting emblem, than a type in the proper sense, is the marriage relation in such cases employed much as also the relations of a pastor to his flock (Psalms 23:1-6, Ezekiel 36:1-38; Zechariah 11:1-17), of a husbandman to his vineyard (Psalms 80:1-19; Isaiah 5:1-7; Ezekiel 15:1-8), or of a king to his subjects (1 Samuel 8:7; Psalms 2:1-6,etc.).

We are not, therefore, disposed to connect with the religious worship or hopes which came in after the fall, any distinct reference to the marriage relation, viewed as growing out of Eve’s derivation from Adam, and subjection to him. In that particular form, and as an ideal pattern for the nourishment of faith and hope, it belongs to New rather than Old Testament times—the times, namely, when the Lord from heaven stands distinctly revealed in the character of the second Adam. As such, He also must have His spouse, and has it in part now; but shall have it in completeness hereafter, in the company of faithful souls who have been washed from their sins in His blood—the elect Church, which in all its members grows out of His root, lives by His life, and is called at once to share in His glory, and as an handmaid to minister to His will. So that the mystery of the primeval spouse (“a bone of Adam’s bone, flesh of his flesh”) may justly be regarded as the mystery of the Church in her relation to Christ (Ephesians 5:30-32; 2 Corinthians 11:2; Revelation 19:7; Revelation 21:2). But in this special aspect of the matter,—an aspect that belongs to creation rather than to strictly historical times,—it must be allowed to stand in some respects apart from the typical relations with which we have now properly to deal, and which all in a greater or less degree contributed to mould the religious views and feelings of fallen men.

It is otherwise in the respects now mentioned with the Sabbatical institution, which also belongs to the primeval constitution of things. This at once bore a directly religious aspect, and pointed to the future as well as the present. The record given of it tells us that “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” (Genesis 2:2-3). This procedure of God appears in such immediate contact with the work of creation (for in that respect the passage admits but of one fair interpretation), that the bearing it was intended to have on man’s views and obligations must primarily have had respect to his original destination; and if designed to lay the foundation of a stated order, this must have been one perfectly suited to the paradisiacal state. Yet a slight reflection might have sufficed to convince any thoughtful mind, that whatever significance it might have for the occupants of such a state, that could not be lost, but must even have been deepened and increased, by the circumstances of their fall from it. In the procedure itself of God there may be noted a threefold stage, each carrying a distinct and important meaning. First, the rest itself: “He rested on the seventh day from all His work;” and in Exodus 31:17, the yet stronger expression is used, of God’s refreshing Himself on that day. Figurative language this must, no doubt, be understood to be,—for “the Creator of the ends of the earth fainteth not, neither is weary,” that being rendered impossible by the infinitude of His perfections,—yet it is not the less expressive of a great truth, and one just as cognizable by man as the acts of creative energy by which it was preceded. What was it, indeed, but the proper complement of creation—the immediate result at which it aimed, and in which, when realized, there was set the seal of Heaven on its beauty and completeness?The glorious Creator is presented to our view at the close of His six days work,—brought at length to its proper consummation in man, as clothed with the Divine image, and charged with the oversight and development of the territory assigned him,—surveying His own workmanship, looking with complacence on the product of His hands, taking it, as it were, to His bosom, and in the freshness of its joy and the prospect of its goodly order finding satisfaction to Himself. How near does not this show God to be to His creatures in particular to the rational and upright portion of them?And must there not have been on their part the response of an intelligent appreciation and living fellowship?Must not man, endowed as he was with God’s likeness, and crowned with glory and honour as God’s representative, here also have communion with his Maker?How could he fail to do so?As it was his calling to enter into God’s work—to take it up, as it were, where God left it, and carry it forward to its proper results; so it was his privilege to enter into God’s rest—making this in a sense his own, and thereby rendering earth the reflex of heaven. It was for this end that God disclosed His manner of distinguishing the seventh day from those which preceded, viz., to teach His earthly representative to go and do likewise; so that this day so kept might be an ever-recurring memorial and sign, both how man’s ordinary work should form a continuation and image of God’s, and man’s rest be a conscious appropriation and enjoyment of that blessed satisfaction and repose with which God was Himself refreshed. But this was not left to be simply inferred; for if even the first stage of this Divine act has respect to man, still more has the second, which points directly and exclusively to him: “And God blessed the seventh day.” This blessing of the day is not to be confounded with the sanctifying of it, which immediately follows, as if the meaning were, God blessed it by sanctifying it. The blessing is distinct from the sanctification, and is, so to speak, the settling of a special dowry on it for every one, who should give due heed to its proper end and object. Let man—the Divine act of blessing virtually said—only enter into God’s mind, and tread in His footsteps, by resting every seventh day from his works, and he shall undoubtedly find it to his profit; the blessing, which is life for evermore, shall descend on him. What he may lose for the moment in productive employment, shall be amply compensated by the refreshment it will bring to his frame—by the enlargement and elevation of his soul—above all, by the spiritual fellowship and interest in God which becomes the abiding portion of those who follow Him in their ways, and perpetually return to Him as the supreme rest of their souls.

Then, the last stage in the procedure of God on this occasion, indicates how the two earlier ones were to be secured: “He sanctified it,” set it sacredly apart from the others. Having appointed it to a distinctive end, he conferred on it a distinctive character, that His creature, man, might from time to time be doing in his line of things what the Creator had already done in His own—might, after six successive days of work, take one to reinvigorate his frame, to reflect calmly on the past, and view the part he has taken and the relations he occupies on the outward and visible theatre of the world, in the light of the spiritual and the eternal. It was to be his calling and his destiny on earth, not simply to work, but to work as a reasonable and moral being, after the example of his Maker, for specific ends. And for this he needed seasons of quiet repose and thoughtful consideration, not less than time and opportunity for active labour; as, otherwise, he could neither properly enjoy the work of his hands, nor obtain for the higher part of his nature that nobler good which is required to satisfy it. God, therefore, when He had finished the work of creation by making man, sanctified the seventh day—His own seventh, but man’s first; for man had not first to work and then to reap, but as God’s vicegerent, nature’s king and high-priest, could at once enter into his Maker’s heritage of blessing. And henceforth, in the career that lay before him, ever and anon returning from the field of active labour assigned him in cultivating and subduing the earth, he must on the hallowed day of rest gather in his thoughts and desires from the world, and, retiring into God as his sanctuary, hold with Him a sabbatism of peaceful and blessed communion. The Divine procedure, then, in every one of its stages, plainly points to man, and aims at his participation in the likeness and enjoyment of God. “With the Sabbath,” says Sartorius happily, and we rejoice and hail it as a token for good, that such thoughts on the Sabbath are finding utterance in the high places of Germany—“with the Sabbath begins the sacred history of man the day on which he stood forth to bless God, and, in company with Eve, entered on his Divine calling upon earth. The creation without the creation-festival, the world’s unrest without rest in God, is altogether vain and transitory. The sacred day appointed, blessed, consecrated by God, is that from which the blessing and sanctification of the world and time, of human life and human society, proceed. Nor is anything more needed than the recognition of its original appointment and sacred destination, for our receiving the full impression of its sanctity. How was it possible for the first man ever to forget it?From the very beginning was it written upon his heart, Remember the Sabbath-day to sanctify it.”^[120] There is nothing new in such views. Substantially the same interpretation that we have given is put on the original notice in Genesis, in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 4), where the record of God’s rest at the close of creation is referred to as the first form of the promise made to man of entering into, God’s rest. The record, then, of what God in that respect did, was a revelation. It embodied a call and a promise to man of high fellowship with the Creator in His peculiar felicity, and, consequently, inferred an obligation on man’s part both to seek the end proposed, and to seek it in the method of God’s appointment. But did the obligation cease when man fell?or was the promise cancelled?Assuredly not—not, at least, after the time that the introduction of an economy of grace laid open for the fallen the prospect of a new inheritance in God. So far from having lost its significance or its value, the Creator’s Sabbatism then acquired fresh meaning and importance, and became so peculiarly adapted to the altered condition of the world, that we cannot but regard it as having from the first contemplated the physical and moral evils that were to issue from the fall. In the language of Hengstenberg, with whom we gladly concur on this branch of the subject, though on too many others we shall be constrained to differ from him, “It presupposes work, and such work as has a tendency to draw us away from God. It is the remedy for the injuries we are apt to incur through this work. If anything is clear, it is the connection between the Sabbath arid the fall. The work which needs intermission, lest the divine life should be imperilled by it, is not [we would rather say, is not so much] the cheerful and pleasant employment of which we read in Genesis 2:15; it is [rather] the oppressive and degrading toil spoken of in Genesis 3:19, work done in the sweat of the brow, upon a soil that brings forth thorns and thistles.”^[121] We would put the statement comparatively rather than absolutely; for the rest of God being held on the first seventh day of the world’s existence, and the day being immediately consecrated and blessed, it must have had respect to the place and occupation of man even in paradise. Why should work there be supposed to have differed in kind from work elsewhere and since?There could be room only for a difference in degree; and being work from its very nature that led the soul to aim at specific objects, and put forth continuous efforts on what is outward, it required to be met by a stated periodical institution, that would recall the thoughts and feelings of the soul more within itself. Man’s perfection in that original state was only a relative one. It needed certain correctives and stimulants to secure the continued enjoyment of the good belonging to it. It needed, in particular, perpetual access to the tree of life for the preservation of the bodily, and an ever-returning Sabbatism for that of the spiritual life. But if such a Sabbatism was required even for man’s well-being in paradise, where the work was so light, and the order so beautiful, how could it be imagined that the Sabbatical institution might be either safely or lawfully disregarded in a world of sorrow, temptation, and hardship?

[120] Sartorius über den alt und neu-Test. Cultus, p. 17.

[121] Ueber den Tag des Herrn, p. 12. Was there really, however, any Sabbatical institution? There is no command respecting it in this portion of the inspired record. And may not the mention there made of God’s keeping the Sabbath, and blessing and sanctifying the day, have been made simply with a prospective reference to the precept that was ultimately to be imposed on the Israelites? So it has been alleged with endless frequency by those who can find no revelation of the Divine will, and no obligation or moral duty excepting what comes in the authoritative form of a command; and it is still substantially reiterated by Hengstenberg, who certainly cannot be charged with such a bluntness of spiritual discernment. We meet the allegation with the statement that has already been repeatedly urged—that it was not yet the time for the formal enactments of law, and that it was by other means man was to learn God’s mind and his own duty. The ground of obligation lay in the Divine act; the rule of duty was exhibited in the Divine example: for these were disclosed to men from the first, not to gratify an idle curiosity, but for the express purpose of leading them to know and do what is agreeable to the will of God. If such means were not sufficient to speak with clearness and authority to men’s consciences, then it may be affirmed that the first race of mankind were free from all authoritative direction and control whatever. They were not imperatively bound either to fear God or to regard man; for, excepting in the manner now stated, no general obligations of service were laid on them. But to suppose this; to suppose, even in regard to what is written of the original Sabbatism of God, that it did not bear directly upon the privileges and duties of the very first members of the human family, is in truth to make void that portion of revelation—to treat it as if, where it stands, it were a superfluity or a blemish. We cannot so regard it. We hold by the truthfulness and natural import of the Divine record. And doing this, we are shut up to the conclusion, that it was at first designed and appointed by God, that mankind should sanctify every returning seventh day, as a season of comparative rest from worldly labour, of spiritual contemplation and religious employment, that so they might cease from their own works and enter into the rest of God. But we shall not pursue the subject farther at present. We even leave unnoticed some of the objections that have been raised against the existence of a primeval Sabbath, as the subject must again return, and in a more controversial aspect, when we come to consider the place assigned to the law of the Sabbath in the revelation from Sinai. It is enough, at this stage of our inquiry, to have exhibited the foundation laid for the perpetual celebration of a seventh-day Sabbath, in the original act of God at the close of His creation work. In that we have a foundation broad and large as the theatre of creation itself and the general interests of humanity, free from all local restrictions and national peculiarities. That in the infancy of the world, and during the ages of a remote antiquity, there would be much simplicity in the mode of its observance, may readily be supposed. Indeed, where all was so simple, both in the state of society and the institutions of worship, the symbolical act itself of resting from ordinary work, and in connection with that, the habit of recognising the authority of God, and realizing the Divine call to a participation in the blessed rest of the Creator, must have constituted no inconsiderable part of the practical observance of the day. And that this also in process of time should have fallen into general desuetude, is only what might have been expected from the fearful depravity and lawlessness which overspread the earth as a desolation. When men daringly cast off the fear of God Himself, they would naturally make light of the privilege and duty set before them of entering into His rest. And considering how partial and imperfect the observance of the day, in the earlier periods of the world’s history, was likely to become, it is not to be wondered at, that, beside the original record of its Divine origin and authoritative obligation, traces of its existence should be found only in some scattered notices of history, and in the wide-spread sacredness of the number seven, which has left its impress on the religion and literature of nearly every nation of antiquity. But however neglected or despised, the original fact remains for the light and instruction of the world in all ages; and there perpetually comes forth from it a call to every one who has ears to hear, to sanctify a weekly rest unto the Lord, and rise to the enjoyment of His blessing.