Days? Really?

In a comment on a Stand to Reason blog:

@29:40, the '7 days of creation'? In fact, there are 6 days of creation. The 7th is God's rest: which he is now in, which the Sabbath pivoted on covenantly and which we join fully in the realized kingdom.

The issue about the days reminds me of the old joke: a man wheels a barrow of straw out of the mill each evening. The foreman carefully checks it, finds nothing stolen, and waves him on. At a retirement party some years later the foreman asks him why he took the barrow of straw home each evening. He replied, It wasn't the straw, but the barrows: I sold them down here at the pub.

He was stealing them right before the foreman's eyes yet the foreman hadn't seen for looking!

So it is with the days of creation: they stare us in the face, but we miss to easily their theological import. They must have one, because we know the creation that they describe is the basis of our worship of God as it is articulated through the scriptures; they are the crux of our worship of him (in his direct speech) in Exodus 31:12ff...a passage just after the passage about the skilled craftsmen, interestingly This worship continues re-configured on Christ: John 1:1-3, Romans 1:20, 1 Cor 8:6, Colossians 1:16, 17, Hebrews 1:2, 2:10 and 11:3.

 The sequence of days are the very act of God revealing his identity as creator. They are not trivial.

Our worship of God cannot hang on an analogical creation, a creation that is more Neoplatonist fantasy than concretely real or one that is a mere echo of pagan trash talk (I think of Enuma elish). It has to hang on what is objectively real.

The days do three obvious things:

The days, real days, show that the creator God is:
- placed personally in the creation: in our history, while not containing him in his creation
- powerfully and directly active in the creation (cf Psalms 8, 33), while not part of the creation, nor remote from it and
- lovingly relating to creatures in his image in the commonality of action in history, not subordinate to them, but holy, eternal and wise.  

These are not figurative attributions, but the direct implication of real days, and distinguish our Creator God from the distant god of deism (an uninvolved God who 'wound up the cosmos': somewhat where 'long age' views take us), the invisible god of theistic evolution, which attempts to adopt modern monist materialism, to merge god into the cosmos on the pretense that it made itself, and inviting the everything is god/god is everything impersonal god of pantheism, nor the non-god of modern 'I'm spiritual not religious'.

The personal God who is love and who speaks is none of these and makes the point immediately clear in the creation in terms of the tempo he has set for us to live and work in as the first act of loving fellowship, expressed conclusively in Genesis 3:8. God shares in the domain that he made for us to worship and enjoy him within by him first creating that domain in the very days which denominate our experience of life within it, and of him. The days join the creation events to the flow of history in which we live and experience God and make real the link between our world and God's acts.

The real days of real action provide the context for the theophanic events throughout the OT, and resoundingly for the Incarnation, where the God who was active in our history in creation is the God who comes into our history in Christ, in the form of a creature. The creator enters his creation in which he is not foreign! This to resolve the brokenness of the world through the Kingdom to be consummated in the New Creation (also made by the Creator).

OTOH, if the days and their events are not real, then something else is; creation is other than described and it is this 'other thing' that establishes what truly is, gives God's true identity and calls for our worship in spirit and truth...but we don't know what it is! What then constitutes our worship of the God who maybe created somehow that we can't establish? OK, let's use materialism instead: conforming our thinking to Christ that way? Not really!