Sabbath As a Microcosm

Periods of Rest:

Day/Night - Daily work/rest cycle (John 9:4, 1 Thes. 5:7). Once per day.
Sabbath - Man rests from labor every 7th day. Once per week.
Pentecost (Shavuot) - Occurs after 7 Sabbaths after Passover & Firstfruits (50th day). Once per year.
Shmita - The land Sabbath occurs every 7 years. Once per week of years.
Jubilee - Occurs after 7 Shmita cycles (50th year). Once per week of Shmitas.
Millennium - 1,000 year reign of Christ. Week of 1K years?

graph TD
	subgraph Millennium["Millennium"]
	    subgraph Jubilee["Jubilee"]
	        subgraph Shmita["Shmita"]
		        subgraph Shavuot["Shavuot"]
		            subgraph Sabbath["Sabbath"]
		                subgraph DayNight["Day / Night"]
		                end
	                end
                end
            end
        end
    end

God seems to want us to pay attention to the idea of counting 6, followed by a special 7th period of rest.

Notably, Shavuot and Jubilee are the counting of 7 Sabbaths leading to a +1 that is extra special. The Feast of Tabernacles follows a similar pattern, being 7 days followed by another special day that is set apart from the rest. The time of circumcision for Israelite children is also on the 8th day after birth.

The idea of the "8th day" is used by Christians to promote the idea of a Sunday sabbath. While the idea of an 8th period of time is not without biblical precedent as we have seen, the Epistle of Barnabas and Just Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho are the primary sources for the early Church referring to Sunday as the "8th day." It is a clever hermeneutical attempt to rationalize a change for which there is no mention in the biblical text and indeed came later.

However, in the case of the biblical counts, Shavuot and Jubilee are not a count to 8, but rather more accurately a +1, being a single day and a single year respectively (the 50th). In the case of Tabernacles and circumcision, they arrive at an 8th day simply because they are smaller cycles for which a day is the natural +1 to that count. I believe that the count to 7 as a special day of rest points us to Christ's millennial reign where he brings restoration and harmony to the world, whereas the +1 is a hint at the eternity afterward where the old world is "cut off" and a completely new heaven and earth, and a separate period of time follows that is not a part of the initial count.

Regardless, the point of this note was to show the nested micro and macrocosm of Sabbath cycles.