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To innovate, we must rest

On the seventh day of creation, the almighty and all-powerful God rested. Was He exhausted from dividing the dry ground from the sea? Was the process of designing all those insects so mentally taxing? No. Unlike the humans He created, God didn’t need rest to regain strength; rather, He chose to cease working. God surveyed His work, declared it good, and stopped creating.

Adam and Eve walked in community with God, fulfilling their mandate to care for the newly created world around them. They were following His plan—until the serpent planted a seed of uncertainty: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” Doubting God’s plan, Adam and Eve chose a path based on their own wisdom, thus breaking their divine community with God.

Still today, our natural tendency is to rely on our own understanding and intellect. In Deuteronomy 5, as God is reestablishing this broken relationship with some of Adam’s descendants, He mandates the nation of Israel to rest after six days of work. The Hebrew word used here, shabat, which literally means to cease or stop, would later be used to name the seventh day of the Jewish week.

To mirror His own creation shabat, God asked that the people of Israel not only take a day of physical rest, but that they use it to remember their deliverance from slavery in Egypt—“… the Lord your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand” (Deuteronomy 5:15). God knew that in our human frailty, we need physical rest, so He established a Sabbath day to remind the people of Israel that their work was only possible through Him. There is no good work apart from Him.

Therefore, as we work, labor, and innovate—using our gifts and talents for His glory—we must do so with a posture of humility, acknowledging our complete dependence on God at the root of all our activity. When we rest from our work—good and important work—we affirm our trust in God’s ultimate place in our lives, understanding like the apostle Paul that “neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow” (1 Corinthians 3:7).