The Daytime and the Sabbath Are Like Dry Land—but in Time

Although seeing the centrality of this image through this lens, the separation of waters itself is a familiar image from the creation story. It has not disappeared completely from the lay biblical imagination.

What is less familiar is the way that the separation of darkness to make space for light is paired inseparably with the separation of water to make space for space: sky and land. The pulling back of darkness to create space for light as another image of the same creative ordering is not something I have heard much about, other than in that Darlene Zschech and Israel Houghton banger, “In Jesus’ Name”: “God is fighting for us, pushing back the darkness.”

This has implications across Scripture. There is an ancient Jewish tradition of imagining the people of God as light to the world, but John’s Gospel in particular has never looked the same to me since noticing this pattern. John refers to Jesus as the light of the world, and Jesus famously says, “I am the light of the world.”

N. T. Wright, in his Gifford lecture series and its written form, History and Eschatology, talks about how the Sabbath does for time what the temple does for space. A few years ago, as a keen fan and aspiring theology nerd, I attended a lecture by Wright emerging from that Gifford series. Much of it went over my head, but one phrase has stuck with me ever since: “You don’t need candles when the sun has risen.”

The Sabbath candles represent the eternal Sabbath day when the sun does not go down—the only day of the seven that has no evening. In Jesus, the light of the world, that hope is fulfilled. Daytime and Sabbath can therefore be read as parallel acts of divine ordering: God makes room for light in the world and room for rest in time.