“I am the Lord your God,” a common recognition formula that God often employs to instruct His people on who He is. When morning came, Moses relayed the command of the Lord to the people to take as much as they could eat, an omer, according to the number of people in each tent. Those who gathered a lot, had nothing left over, while those who gathered little had no want.
The concept of rest is woven throughout Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. As we have seen, rest punctuated God’s creation, it was created for Adam and should have been his final resting place, it was subsequently broken by the sin of this first man and his wife, and then with the arrival of Noah, we find an expectation for a return to this original rest.
It’s noteworthy that the significance of God’s creation ordinance of rest on the seventh day seems peculiarly absent from Genesis 2throughout the remainder of the book, except for the aforementioned narrative on Noah. We find no commands to observe a Sabbath day, no commands for corporate or even individual worship, and apart from Adam and Noah, no explicit revelation on the concept of rest, with perhaps the exception of implied rest in the covenant promises made with Abraham, see Genesis 12-24. We might say the remainder of Genesis develops the prototypical people of rest and the typological place of rest. However, with the Mosaic/Sinaitic/Old Covenant, there is renewed emphasis on the Sabbath Principle. That said, the most detailed revelation on the concept of rest begins after Israel’s Exodus from Egypt and then through the giving of the law by God to Israel through Moses. From here, rest becomes intertwined with a people, a promise, and a land.
Our first encounter with this fresh revelation of rest occurs in Exodus 16 within the context of God providing manna from heaven in order to supply food and sustenance for the Wilderness Generation of Israel.
Subscribe to Free “Top 10 Stories” Email
Get the top 10 stories from The Aquila Report in your inbox every Tuesday morning.