REST COMES BEFORE DOING
Gen 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
Gen 1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
Gen 1:13 And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.
Gen 1:19 And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.
Gen 1:23 And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.
Gen 1:31 And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Gen 2:2 And on the seventh day God finished His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.
{In God's economy, night comes before day. Before God begins His workday, He rests. }
Gen 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it He rested from all His work which God in creating had made.
{And also, in God's economy. rest is the completion, the goal of everything He does.}
Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Gen 1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
H7363 (Ancient Hebrew)
H7363 = AHLB# 2763 (V)
2763) Phr% (Phr% RHhP) ac: Flutter co: ? ab: ?: The stirrings and shakings of a bird in the nest. [from: ph - a bird covering the nest]
V) Phr% (Phr% R-HhP) - Flutter: [freq. 3] (vf: Paal, Piel) |kjv: shake, move, flutter| {H7363}
H7363 (Strong)
רָחַף
râchaph
raw-khaf'
A primitive root; to brood; by implication to be relaxed: - flutter, move, shake.
{When God was putting our world together, when all He could see was chaos, void, He did not panic and start manically scrambling to get things ordered. God, rested. He took everything in.
The word râchaph is our word for brooding, fluttering, the action a bird takes in caring for its incipient life, its undeveloped young. When a mother bird is brooding over its eggs, it is taking in all that the eggs need. It is not protecting itself from those needs by distancing itself from them. This is an essential characteristic of trust/rest.
When we see a need, when we see something that needs to get done, we are meant to brood, to take in the full reality of the need, without doing anything about it. This can only be done as we trust God to give us the impetus, the insight, the creativity, the spiritual strength to do what needs doing to meet that need.
This rest, in the Exodus story, is referred to as God's stopping. It is a Sabbath. We must begin by stopping, and until we do this nothing we do will ever succeed in truly meeting the need. Until we begin by stopping, we will only ever be cleaning the outside of the cup and leaving the inside of the cup full of corruption.
And our ability to enter into God's Stopping is constructed completely on the acceptance we receive from God via His gesture of forgiveness (of atonement) that is Jesus' sacrificial death for the sins of the world. The psychological reality embedded in this theological idea is that unless and until we can trust God to love us enough to truly forgive us, we cannot have the courage to trust Him to fix us. We will always be trying to get Him to love us by fixing ourselves.
The stopping we receive in Jesus is first of all our letting go of our self-righteousness. And secondly, it is our letting go of our fixing ourselves with our own strength, willpower, integrity, and our waiting on God for His strength, His power to effectively, to fully resolve our problems. And His power to resolve our problems will always come in the form of His word. God must say something to us, and that something said contains the power we need to change. That communique from God must not be a generic, one-size-fits-all principle. It must be something God specifically speaks to our particular person with our particular need. It is a highly personal interaction, or it is what the Apostle Paul called dead letter.
Our stopping/resting/sabbathing in the face of one of our serious problems is to trust God to give us the personal communication of His word. And this waiting, this stopping, this resting kills off our trust in ourselves to fix our problems, and ultimately it perfects our trust in God to make us acceptable to Him via His forgiveness of our sins, and not our works.
And waiting is key, just because we have no control over the restoration of our soul, the resolution of our problems, and therefore must come to trust in God and not our own resources (which we have long ago come to rely on). Waiting is the effective means God deploys to kill off our trust in ourselves and build up our trust in Him.
And so, we come to mirror God's resting before doing. Rest, trust is not some nice by-product of our relationship with God. It is the basis of it, and so God must be the origin and the completion (the perfecting) of our trust/faith in Him.
And this then is the state of being all we who follow Jesus are in.
© John Brusseau, 7/30/2026
