Why Do We Count to Seven Every Week?
First we need to talk a little about the fourth century and the Jewish-Roman mashup that occurred. On December 24th, when we say it’s Christmas Eve, we are really using the Hebrews’ way of beginning the day. They began their day at dusk. In the Roman world, the new day doesn’t begin until midnight. I’m sure they had their reasons. Midnight is 12 hours after the sun’s zenith, when the sun is opposite of high noon. It is just rounding the globe, so to speak. And you may already know where the day December 25th came from. The day we celebrate the birth of the Jewish messiah was given to us by the Roman Empire, because the 25th of December represents the winter’s solstice. That’s when the days stop getting shorter and start getting longer. The Roman god of the sun was said to be reborn on this day.
After Constantine made Christianity legal, Rome began to say that the Jewish Son of God was born in Bethlehem on the same day that the Roman sun god was resurrected. The king united his polytheistic Kingdom with Christianity. But it’s debatable who the king was more loyal to: his Christian mother or his pagan motherland. Every year now, everyone could celebrate together; the birth of Christ and the rebirth of Rome’s sun god.
Even the rebirth of the Son of God, who by the way was originally Adam, even the rebirth of the Son of God isn’t celebrated without honoring a Roman god. Every year Easter is on a Sunday. That’s the day of the week named in honor the god of the sun. The Roman holiday of Easter and the Christian celebration of The Resurrection are both on the same Sunday. But it’s not the first Sunday after the start of Spring. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of Spring. And this is due to another Roman/Jewish mashup.
Before the night of Passover, the Son of God was taken off of the cross and placed into a tomb. As the sacrificial lamb, the only begotten Son took the place of the firstborn son. The Jews always commemorated the passing over of their firstborn in the middle of the month, which was always a full moonlit night. They needed the moon to see. They didn’t have street lights and headlights like we do. On the third day after this Passover sacrifice, Last Adam was resurrected, as the firstborn. The last became first when the final fulfillment Jew was resurrected into the new Jewish creation. And it was indeed right after the full moon of that year’s Exodus anniversary that the tomb was found to be empty. But most people have been taught that the day the Son of God was resurrected was on the Roman holy day, rather than on the Jewish holy day. Welcome to “My Judæo-Christian-Roman Worldview”.
I want us to think about something we all have in common; the seven days of the week. In Genesis chapter one, the work of creation begins on the first day of the week in the dark. Just as you yourself were formed in the darkness of your mother’s womb before you ever saw the light of day, the seven days of creation also began in the dark. So, it’s no mystery why the ancient Hebrews counted their days from dusk rather than midnight as I do. They followed the example of the creation of humanity.
It the beginning of the creation, God blessed His seventh day and declared it holy. Then in the fourth century of the new creation, a sun worshiper named Constantine blessed the day of the sun, which is the first day of the work week and he declared it to be the most holy day.
In the Genesis story, creation days always start in the dark. In fact your body recreates you and your sense of well being every night while you sleep, in the dark. Sometimes in this restoration phase, your brain goes into a somewhat chaotic and freewheeling mode while your chemistry gets it’s reset. We call it dreaming, which some people find revelatory. At any rate, “Everything can look better in the morning”, after we’ve been unconscious for hours and autonomic biology is given time to repair what we’ve stressed to exhaustion the previous day. In a sense we die every night and are resurrected every morning, especially if we go into deep and effective sleep. It’s like a reset to another day for sorting things out again. All that to say, that even our daily ability to join in on the work of creation begins in the dark.
Believe me, I’m not on a mission to change the holidays on the calendar or when our days officially begin. It looks like we are stuck with the Roman midnight start of the day rather than beginning with the Hebrew time, at dusk. And I don’t plan to change that. But if I care to exegete the word of Yahweh correctly then I should at least be familiar with His ways of counting the days, so I don’t impose my Roman ingrained methods on my interpretation of a Hebrew text.
The Romans named the days of the week after their gods, which corresponded to the five known planets, plus the sun and the moon, which they also considered planets by the way. But that’s okay. We are still calling starfish and crayfish, fish. We just didn’t have as many categories or even words back then. On the other hand, if Mercury and Venus are tidally locked to our sun then that would make them moons of the sun rather than planets. Categories aren’t always that clear. We do always see the same face of our moon from Earth because it is for sure tidally locked to us as it orbits.
The seven day weekly time frame reflects the approximate time it takes our moon to transition between it’s four phases. From new moon to new moon takes about 29 and a half days. The first sighting of the first sliver of the new moon begins each new moonth or month on the lunar calendar. The seven day week is not only more tolerable than an eight day week, it also allows lunar calendars to have leap years by adding an extra month rather than having to periodically lose a month. Evidently, making a calendar was always frustrating work. It was never an exact science. Maybe it was never meant to be.
The names we use today for the days of the week have been filtered through Germanic mythology. A lot of the English language is Germanic in origin. The sun is personified as the goddess Sunna, The moon as Mani. Tuesday is the Norse god of dueling. Wednesday is Woden’s day. Thor’s day is named after the son of Odin and Friday is named after his wife. But for Saturday we have kept the Roman word which translates into Saturn’s day. So, what does all of this have to do with the ancient Hebrews and the days of creation? Not much. In fact, the Hebrews only had a name for one of their days. And they were always counting on getting to that day. They counted like this: one, two, three, four, five, six, stop. Sabbath means stop or rest.
Yeshuah the Messiah whom we call Jesus is most associated with the Hebrew’s Sabbath day. Not only did He call himself the Lord of the Sabbath, He also said to get to know him is to find rest for your very soul. That is the ultimate personification of a day that we should all want to get to. There is nothing better for us than to find rest for our soul. The goal is to get your soul to the seventh day. In fact in Hebrew speak, to be sevened is to be covenanted or completed or fulfilled. It is to find rest for your soul.
I want you to know that I go to church on Sunday and I have no plans on changing that. The Hebrew people who wrote my Bible were very clear to tell us that the fulfillment of Old Covenant typology is in the body of Christ and that even during the transition phase from the Old Covenant to the New, people were free to count a day as holy or treat every day alike. The Jewish holy days all pointed to Sabbath rest in the Messiah. Has anyone even noticed that 1500 years have gone by since the Roman Empire mandated their day of sun worship on the world? And that that was already hundreds of years after the first Hebrew covenant came to it’s conclusion. Maybe, just maybe it’s time we distanced ourselves from the politically correct crown of King Constantine and started to tell the gospel truth. Maybe humanity would be more effective, more attractive if it were more honest, if we kept it true.
The Word of Yahweh never told the ancient Hebrews to count to Sunday and then rest. To be very clear, that was a Roman man named Constantine. His regime not only blessed the day of the sun as the most holy day, but they also cursed you for worshipping on any other Jewish day, especially the Jewish seventh day. The law of the Roman Empire did require Sunday worship, but it is no longer a federal crime or a capital offense to disobey the Roman sun worship law. Maybe I’m still by law not allowed to buy wine on Sunday morning, while some churches are actually drinking it, but at least we can tell the truth now without fearing the wrath of a 4th century king.
Not that there isn’t silliness on the part of those who still want to mandate Sabbath laws on the seventh day. Those claiming to still be under Old Covenant Sabbath laws will even hire gentiles to push their elevator button on Saturday or they will program the elevator to stop on every floor, so they don’t have to do any work that day by pushing the button. If they drive to the hospital for an emergency on the seventh day Sabbath, they are not allowed to drive home. If they milk their cow on the Sabbath, they must add blue die to the milk. That way it can only be used for cheese, since the blue die separates in the cheese making process and gets thrown out with the whey. For some reason only the soon to be fermented milk receives the modern-day Sabbath exemption. And that is known as a blue law.
Martin Luther didn’t really like things that seemed too Jewish to him. That included the book of James, which we probably call James because the book of Jacob is too Jewish sounding. And Martin Luther wasn’t really fond of the book of The Revelation either. And I doubt if he saw the rebirth of the church on Pentecost as a Jewish promise fulfilled. Even Luther saw the Bible through his Roman tinted glasses, preferring to keep the true Jewish interpretation at a distance. Biblically the true Jews were born-again on their Pentecostal celebration 2000 years ago. Yet today we even say that, that Pentecost when Old Covenant Jews met together and started their New Covenant was on a Roman Sunday.
About ten years after that Pentecostal celebration, the church going Hebrews were astonished when the first Gentile was added to their New Covenant. The church was in fact founded by Jews and specifically promised to Jews and even made possible by a single Jew. So why do people today get Sabbath law ideas from unbelievers, who only claim to be the true, albeit seriously modernized, Sabbath keepers. And why do we believe a politician from the 4th century, who simply changed the dates of the birth and rebirth of Christ to fit Rome’s religious days?
Anyway, Sabbath rest is found in a new covenant person, not in a 24 hour day. We are no longer in the typical or symbolic Old Covenant. We aren’t even in the transition from the Old to the New. Most of the Bible after Malachi was in the transition phase as the Old was passing away and the New Covenant was taking its place. In the first century, when the era of Sabbath days and Sabbath festivals was about to pass, the temple still had standing. Some people were still observing Jewish holy days and even holy weeks. They were apparently not keeping the holy years though. But some of the people entering the New Covenant age already regarded all of them as obsolete.
Today nobody can keep the Old Covenant laws, because it is impossible without sacrificing animals. Sabbath keeping days, weeks and years have officially passed, along with animal sacrifices. Yahweh graciously waited 490 years before he kicked his people out of the typical promised land for not keeping His Sabbaticals. Even while in the typical Old Covenant promised land, the Hebrews just couldn’t make themselves rest under their old law mode.
So what did we get instead of all of the Sabbath laws? Well we certainly didn’t get a single go to church on Sunday law to take their place. The ancient Hebrews and the first century Jews who gave us the Bible didn’t change the enforceable under penalty of death Sabbath law to a go to church on the first day of the Roman week law. But Rome did. Maybe Constantine just didn’t want to seem too Jewish or maybe he loved his own Roman sun-god or maybe it was just pure politics. Anyway it sounds like something a worldly king would do; worship on the first day of the work week rather than resting in the already accomplished work. I don’t know if Constantine twisted the Bible to preach his Sunday sabbath laws, but we sure have done it since.
Now I know we’ve been told that the New Covenant fulfilled the Sabbath by changing it to the first day of the work week. And I really tried to make my Bible say that. I wanted it to be true. It’s my culture. I was raised that way. It was ridiculously hard for me to accept the truth. There are at least eight verses in the Bible that we will have to deal with if we want to believe that God changed the day, that the New Covenant Jews were meeting, from Sabbaths to Sundays. Go online and find a free bible concordance or an interlinear and see it for yourself. In six of the seven resurrection day verses, the Greek text reads plain as day that Jesus was resurrected on, “one of the sabbaths”. In one of the resurrection verses it says He was resurrected on, “the first sabbath”. And again, plain as day, Paul told the Gentiles in the Corinthian church to put aside an offering on, “one of the Sabbaths”. To my great chagrin, nothing was ever said about Sunday or the first day of the week.
Paul from the tribe of Benjamin, was trying to get back to Jerusalem with an offering before Pentecost arrived again. There were seven weeks of harvest time that always lead up to Pentecost. It was one of the times of year when farmers had an income. After six days of harvesting, the Corinthians would have something to give to the struggling Christians in Jerusalem. Paul was asking them to set aside a portion of the previous week’s harvest on, “one of the sabbaths”, during the spring harvest season, not on the first day of the work week, before they even harvested anything.
That Paul wanted to arrive in Jerusalem before Pentecost is clearly stated in Acts chapter twenty. Pentecost was always on the eighth weekly sabbath after Passover. Eight Sabbaths equals 50 days. Paul sailed from Philipi after the Passover and after the seven days of Unleavened Bread and then he arrived in Troas in five days. He stayed there for seven days and then met with the brethren to break bread. The Jubilee Translation of the Bible says this day was on the “first of the sabbaths”. They chose to translate the Greek word mias as first rather one. The Concordant Literal Bible rightly translates this phrase “mias twn Sabbatwn” as “one of the sabbaths” not “the first of the sabbaths”. It couldn’t have been the first of the sabbaths because three weeks have already passed since Passover. Paul, as a Christian, was clearly meeting with the brethren on one of the Sabbaths in their eight Sabbaths count to Pentecost, but for sure it was not the first one.
Paul wanted to bless the Jewish church in Jerusalem on or before their next Pentecostal celebration. He wanted to bring to the original church a financial gift from the Gentiles. The betrothal gift of the Holy Spirit, that Paul himself did not receive on that original fulfillment Pentecost, was now preparing people from other nations to stand with the Hebrew nationality. The financial gift to born-again Jews from the born-again Gentiles, would be proof that the Abrahamic promise, that Abraham would be a blessing to all nations, was in fact being fulfilled in that generation.
Paul saw the struggle the Jewish church was having with the Old Covenant body. The Old Covenant Jews were required under law, to be in Jerusalem for Pentecost, with an offering, from their seven weeks of spring harvest, to support the temple and the priesthood. Paul however wanted to take an offering to the New Covenant priesthood, because the Old Covenant holdouts were not supporting the transition, at all. In fact they were ruthlessly fighting against it.
The Pentecost pattern was meant to lead the Jews in Jerusalem to their New Covenant. Just as circumcision on the eighth day symbolized a born again, new creation, no longer in the flesh, the church was born again by the Spirit, on the eighth weekly Sabbath of Pentecost. Even the Jubilee year was on the eighth Sabbatical. Jubilee was a 50 year renewal. It was a super-Sabbath reset year. It was not a super-Sunday year. Did Yahweh all of a sudden change the whole picture and put His true to-his-image Son into His born-again creation on a Sunday? Did Jesus enter Jerusalem as the Sabbath was approaching and then become the firstborn of the new creation on the 9th day rather than on the eighth day?
Jesus was from the tribe of Judah and that is where the name Jew came from. They were the predominate tribe living in the land in the first century. But Jesus wasn’t Jew – ish. He was the only Jew to ever stand under law in the full image of His Father. He was the original true to His Word Jew. And he gifted that indwelling image to Jew – ish people on Pentecost. And it was 50 days after his resurrection. So why do we say it is always on a Roman Sunday? Did God really resurrect fully-formed, Eschatos Adam, into the made-new Jewish creation on the first day of the work week?
Yahweh formed first Adam on the sixth day before placing him into the garden. Then Eve was formed from Adam’s side and joined him in the garden, after some more creative work, still presumably in the sixth day. Jesus himself became flesh on the sixth eschatological day according to Hebrew reckoning. Even Saint Augustine believed this. And the law even released the redeemed bride, from Jesus’ side, while he was in a deep sleep on the cross, still in eschatological day six.
The centurion or law man pierced Jesus’ side with a sword to make sure he was dead. But the law did not kill Him. He was the only one in the Old Covenant that the law did not kill. The law of the land released the church from His side because He was already dead. The widow was set free to remarry in a new marriage covenant. By law widows are allowed to remarry. Jesus put the old man to death on purpose, and then He was resurrected, as the new man in the new creation.
Under Old Covenant law the husband was even free to take a whole Sabbath year off after getting married. Getting married on a Sabbath day was surely good Hebrew form too. If the wedding party lasted a week it would start on a Sabbath and then go on to the next Sabbath. And the marriage would be consummated on the eighth day (The typical marriage was probably consummated in the flesh on the first Sabbath of the festival. The marriage became even more spiritually intimate by the time they went home on the 8th day Sabbath). Eighth day circumcision is when a baby boy became a new creation. A Hebrew wedding moved this boy-becoming-man creation forward by adding to him his compliment. His Eve was added to his creation. Then the groom was free to take a whole Sabbath year off to be with his bride and bring her happiness for marrying up with him.
So why would Jesus be resurrected and placed into the new creation on day one? I thought the whole idea of Jesus sacrificing himself for his Old Covenant bride was to rescue her from being stuck in the sixth day of works mode. Jesus himself was able to stand in the full image of God under law in the sixth eschatological era, but he did not find a bride in His image. So he took his finished image-of-God-in-man work to the new marriage covenant.
First Adam did not in the full image of God rescue Eve. He fell with her. Fulfillment Adam rescued her from that day’s death, by taking Adam’s day upon himself. And then he conquered the death of Adam. We call this, bride-rescuing-week, “The Passion Week”. Jesus entered Jerusalem for his last week in the Old Covenant just as the Sabbath day approached. The only thing left to do was to form a bride in the image of God. Did He fail to ensoul her after he rescued her? Didn’t he send his Holy Spirit to the church so she could stand after being released from the side of the Old Covenant husband? Did the church stand? Is the church still standing?
To the church in Ephesus it was written, For by grace you are the ones having been saved through the belief and this is not out of you but the gift of God.
If being saved from the fall of Adam is by grace and the belief itself is also part of the gift, then what happened to the death threat. First Adam was warned that he would die in the day he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Isn’t that the day that we were saved from? Isn’t it impossible for the New Covenant man to fall like the Old Covenant son of God did? The made better covenant creation was initiated and sealed by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. If the Spirit hovering over the waters on the first day was creative, how much more and personal the indwelling of the Spirit on the sixth and seventh days? Has the New Covenant been sevened yet?
Jesus told His people to follow him and experience rest for their souls, from all the heavy burdens they were trying to carry under the fallen law mode. In eschatological day six he said this. Symbolically enough, the seventh day in the Genesis creation account is the only day that has no evening and morning, because it points to the never ending Sabbath rest in the Messiah. So why would the New Creation, also called the New Covenant, start on the first day of the work week? It was under Old Covenant law that the 6th day work load was impossible to complete. The New Creation starts with a new husbandman who stood up in the complete image of God and was able to shoulder that load. He bore up under law. He was raised under law to regain the Holy Spirit that the first Adam lost. He then laid down that life to get us out of it. He then gifted the Holy Spirit to his bride. He laid down his living and blessed Old Covenant soul to rescue and ensoul his newly covenanted bride. As he brought her into a covenant that is no longer under the fallen old man.
He didn’t rescue us from the fallen son of God to bring us into the never ending Sunday. To the Jew a never ending Sunday would be like a never ending Monday is to us, and the sun itself didn’t even exist on day one in the original creation account. Day seven is clearly pictured there as the never ending day. The Roman day of the sun is just not the biblical picture. In fact, in the eternal state the Son of God is portrayed as the light of the world and there is no more need for the sun. We have instead, immortalized the typical sun on work day one, and left the Lord of the Sabbath out of the picture. The resurrected Son of God is the eternal light of the spiritual world.
Seven Sabbaths after the resurrection of Jesus, AKA Eschatos Adam, the widowed bride enters the New Covenant betrothal on the day of Pentecost. Pente means 50. The church is pictured seated at a fellowship feast when the Holy Spirit arrives to graciously write the law of the new human on her heart. Whatever day of the week Jesus enters the new creation, it’s the same day the church enters the new creation. Because 50 days after a Tuesday for example is always a Tuesday. So Pentecost is always on the same day of the week as First Fruits. And First Fruits is the day when the Son of God was resurrected. So if First Fruits was on the seventh day of the week then Pentecost was also on the Sabbath. Yeshua entered the New Covenant in the fully formed image of Yahweh, no longer in Old Covenant works mode. Did He really do this on the first day of the Roman work week?
The epistles are addressed to the newly betrothed bride of Christ. She is also known as: the diaspora pilgrims, the holy nation, the city of God, the New Jerusalem or the church. The church today is the mother of all the living. As the fulfillment of typical Eve, she was rescued from the day of death and brought back into the presence of God by the indwelling Spirit of Yahweh, and in that way she was enabled to stand, in His image, for the never-ending marriage. The Hebrew betrothal covenant was a promise and a preparation time prior to the wedding. She wasn’t stood up after she was enabled to stand in the image of Yeshua. Yahweh makes more sense than that.
Jesus worked for and earned the Holy Spirit under law and then gave the Holy Spirit to his bride as a betrothal gift. Why would he rescue his bride from works mode and then bring her into the presence of his Holy Spirit on day one of the typical work week? Even though she was still in eschatological day six, the seventh day Sabbath is the appropriate day for the betrothal gift. It was an already but not yet Sabbath rest. The New Covenant is supposed to be an improvement on the Old Covenant. It moved them forward and closer to salvation, not backward all the way to day one.
And God didn’t start over with nothing either. He moved His people He was already forming from their Old Covenant into their New Covenant. For centuries the diaspora Jews had been very busy preaching Moses to the all the nations, thus humanizing or forming them. That involuntary diaspora put the 12 tribes into missions mode and was the means of the pre-evangelism. If Jesus wanted to start over, He could have taken a Jewish wife and had Jewish children. But he came to rescue the whole human race, not start it over with an individual bride. The church is now the married-on-the-Sabbath mother-of-all-the-living, and her children are still being born and raised into His image, by humanity and the indwelling Spirit of God.
Adam was placed into the garden in the presence of God on day 6. As you know he broke the one and only rule that would get him kicked out of the garden. Fulfillment Adam, who we call Jesus, was born into the already fallen law mode, to reverse the curses on Adam, and take him and us into the never-ending Sabbath. To seven something in the Hebrew mind is to complete it or to make a covenant with it. The true to His word Son of God now keeps the covenant he personally sevened. He reversed the curses that kept us frustrated in the sixth day by dying on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in obedience, rather than dying in disobedience as the first human did. He has completed his work week and no threat of death or mission of death hangs over his head. He took that day when the son of God lost Yahweh’s presence, and He conquered that day. He will never fall as the only begotten Son of God in the new and made-better covenant.
Nothing more evil or more good can ever happen than what did happen on that tree in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. Humanity even reset the calendar because of what Eschatos Adam did. He took the place of the first born as his own blood flowed over the post and lintel of the cross and he put Adam to death for the second time. But Hades had no legal right over the Eschaton Adam.
The full image of God in Adam stood in a Jewish temple for the first time in their history. He is now the first and the head human in the New Creation Covenant and y’all are the temple of Yahweh. Those who claim to still be in the frustration of the old fallen covenant creation, still try to keep a calendar that begins with the first Adam’s birth. To them we are still in the cursed covenant year of 5781, rather than in the blessed covenant year of 2020. Even though they consider themselves to be the blessed ones, still stuck in the sixth day, and still under the law mode of sin and death. And to them, Yahweh’s newly covenanted people are really the cursed ones, in the restored by grace, presence of God. In my next post, I want to think about the reversing of that cursing. I’m talking about that ancient curse on Old Covenant humanity, that was brought on by the death of the firstborn son of God and was overcome by the death of the only begotten Son of God.