HKB
must cease from all the efforts of our own understanding, that having God operating within us, we may enjoy rest in him, as we are also taught by the Apostle.(870)
XXX. This perpetual cessation was represented to the Jews by the observance of one day in seven, which the Lord, in order that it might be the more religiously kept, recommended by his own example. For it is no small stimulus to any action, for a man to know that he is imitating his Creator. If any one inquire after a hidden signification in the septenary number, it is probable, that because in Scripture it is the number of perfection, it is here selected to denote perpetual duration. This is confirmed also by the circumstance, that Moses, with that day in which he narrates that the Lord rested from his works, concludes his description of the succession of days and nights. We may also adduce another probable conjecture respecting this number—that the Lord intended to signify that the sabbath would never be completed until the arrival of the last day. For in it we begin that blessed rest, in which we make new advances from day to day. But because we are still engaged in a perpetual warfare with the flesh, it will not be consummated before the completion of that prediction of Isaiah, “It shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord;”(871) that is, when God shall be “all in all.”(872) The Lord may be considered, therefore, as having delineated to his people, in the seventh day, the future perfection of his sabbath in the last day, that, by a continual meditation on the sabbath during their whole life, they might be aspiring towards this perfection.