Video: Creation has a rhythm we're designed to live in

If you’re like me, you consider your day to begin when you wake up in the morning. Right before you— if you’re like me— prep that coffee. Or, if you stayed up to midnight, you may look at your watch and think, “Oh, gee… it’s already tomorrow… a new day. I’ve got to get in bed.”

We’ve programmed ourselves to think of our days as "daylight first” and “nighttime second.” We get up to start the day; we go to bed to end it.

Turns out, that’s backwards. Creation doesn’t begin each new day’s clock with the sun. Creation begins with the moon.

If you go all the way back to the beginning of the Bible, back to the very first page, you find the story. There, we read a refrain over and over and over again. It’s so common you may have never noticed it before. I guarantee you, though, once you see it, you’ll never forget it.

Here it is: “There was evening and then morning, the ________ day.”

We find the phrase six times (Genesis 1:5,8,13,19,23,31):

🌙☀️  Evening and then morning

🌙☀️  Dark and then day

🌙☀️  Rest and then work

🌙☀️  Pause and then play

🌙☀️  Off and then on

In God’s rhythm of Creation, days began with dark, not light. They began with the moon in the sky, not the sun. They began with sleep, not work. They began with rest, not activity. That’s the rhythm of Creation.

There’s a poignant example of this in the New Testament. Fast forward a few thousand years from Creation to the Cross. They removed Jesus from the the stake before sundown on Friday, the day He was executed, because Saturday was the Sabbath. Yet the Sabbath didn’t begin on Saturday morning— or even at midnight. The Sabbath began at sundown, around 6pm (John 19:31). So, Friday at sundown they lowered Jesus from the Cross and placed Him in the tomb, removing Him just moments before the Sabbath officially began.

From the beginning, the new day began when the sun dropped, at sundown. That was the sign of a new day, the rest. The rest came first.