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The summary of the six days' work is given in Gen. 2: 3: "All His work which God
created and made."
Because, to express the facts, we should have had to use a clumsy circumlocution, we
have said in the earlier part of this article, "and the creation of light". But the word
"create" is not used of light; the statement is "Light be, and light was." Similarly, "Let
there be a firmament", "Let the waters be gathered", Let the dry land appear", "Let the
earth bring forth", and so on.
The present creation was constructed to form a platform upon which the drama of the
ages should be enacted, after which it is destined to pass away so that the goal of the ages
might be enjoyed in a new heaven and earth, which are to be the glorious complement of
the heaven and earth created as a "beginning".
A legitimate question to raise in connection with the six days' creation is, Why should
the Lord have taken six days and not five or ten or any other number? Further, Why
should the Lord have "rested" on the seventh? We are assured that "The Creator of the
ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary" (Isa. 40: 28). We are certain that the six
days of creation and the seventh day rest are not mentioned without purpose and, seeing
that the very "beginning" of Genesis anticipated its glorious "end", we return once more
to the consideration of "time" in relation to the doctrine of Scripture, with the assurance
that if we "seek" we shall "find".
"Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 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 had created and made"
(Gen. 2: 1-3).
In other studies we have drawn attention to the way in which Noah stands as a sort of
"second man and last Adam", and in connection with this use of the number seven, we
find that shebu "seventh", occurs nowhere else in Genesis except in chapter 8: 4,
where we read that "the ark rested in the seventh month". Not only Noah but his father
Lamech emphasize this, for Lamech, the father of Noah, was 777 years old when he died.
In Gen. 26: 33 we read: "And he called it shebah (that is an oath)", and it is a
feature not to be lightly passed over that the same Hebrew root that supplies us with the
number seven gives us the word for "oath" and "to swear". The words shaba and
shebuah, "to swear", occur in Genesis twenty-one times, or three times seven.
We have seen that the opening sentence of the Bible (Gen. 1: 1) anticipates, as a kind
of firstfruits, the end, and it may be well to remind the reader that the Hebrew of that
verse contains 7 words, 14 syllables and 21 letters. We now see that in the choice of this
number "seven" God has, in type, sworn that His purpose shall be accomplished. In the
epistle to the Hebrews the Apostle quotes Gen. 2: 2, and from an examination of other