The appearance of this new day

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The appearance of this new day is rooted in the expectation of salvation, in that striving toward the future and in those messianic hopes which were just as characteristic of the theology of the Old Covenant as the cult of the Law. If in the sabbath the Hebrew honours the Creator of the universe and His perfect Law, he knows too that within this world created by God hostile forces are rebelling against Him, that this world is spoiled by sin. The Law has been broken, man is sick, life is poisoned by sin. The time which is included in the weekly cycle is not only the time of a blessed and God-pleasing life, but also the time of a struggle between light and darkness, between God and all that has rebelled against Him. This is the time of the history of salvation which is founded in an eschatological realization— the Day of the Messiah. And again, no matter what may have been the original content and genesis of Hebrew Messianism and the apocalypticism connected with it, the important thing for us is that the time of the manifestation of Christianity coincided with the ultimate limit of intensity of these expectations, with their growth into a universal eschatological outlook. It was precisely in connection with or as a result of this eschatology that there arose the idea of the Lord’s Day, the day of Messianic fulfilment, as the ‘Eighth Day, ‘overcoming’ the week and leading outside of its boundaries. In the eschatological perspective of the struggle of God with ‘the prince of this world’ and the expectation of the new aeon, the week and its final unit— the sabbath— appear as signs of this fallen world, of the old aeon, of that which must be overcome with the advent of the Lord’s Day. The Eighth Day is the day beyond the limits of the cycle outlined by the week and punctuated by the sabbath— this is the first day of the New Aeon, the figure of the time of the Messiah. ‘And I have also established the eighth day,’ we read in the book of Enoch, a characteristic example of late Hebrew apocalypticism, ‘that the eighth day be the first after my creation, that in the beginning of the eighth (millennium) there be time without reckoning, everlasting, without years, months, weeks, days or hours.’ The concept of the eighth day is connected with another idea characteristic of Jewish apocalypticism: the cosmic week of seven thousand years. Each week is thus a figure of all time, and all time, that is the whole of ‘this age,’ is one week. So then the eighth day and the eighth millennium are the beginning of the New Aeon not to be reckoned in time. This eighth day (coming after and standing outside the week) is also, therefore, the first day, the beginning of the world which has been saved and restored.

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Malihah
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