A Triune God & A Sevenfold Week
The story of Scripture opens with an account of a triune God who creates the heavens and earth over the course of a seven-day week.
What’s the connection between these numbers? Could a triune God have created the world over any period of time he chose?
No doubt he could. But a sevenfold week seems particularly apt. Here’s why.1
Given three conceptual entities, seven sets naturally emerge, or eight if we include the empty set.
The contents of these sets imbue them with a natural order/structure.
The empty set contains no elements at all.
Three sets contain one element each—{A}, {B}, and {C}.
Three more sets contain two elements each—{A, B}, {A, C}, and {B, C}.
And one set contains all three elements—{A, B, C}.
Our eight sets thus organise themselves as shown below,
…which is distinctly reminiscent of God’s order of creation.
The number three thus seems apt to generate a sevenfold structure. And quite a lot can be said about that structure.
Suppose we conceive of the elements A, B, and C not as abstract symbols, but as Father, Son, and Spirit. What happens? We end up with the structure below,
…which corresponds to Creation Week in a number of significant ways. For instance, the days when life is created are associated with the Spirit (cp. Gen. 2.7’s ‘breath of life’), and the days when males and females are created are associated with (grammatically) male and female persons of the Godhead (viz. the Father and Spirit on Day Five and the Son and Spirit on Day Six). We can put things more explicitly as follows.
Day One is the day of light. It can thus be seen as the day of the Father, the one who is light, the Father of lights, from whom comes every good and perfect gift.
Day Two is the day of the Son—the day when the heavens above are separated from the earth beneath, which will ultimately become Jesus’ footstool.
Day Three is the day of the Spirit, when life springs forth from the earth. Just as the Spirit is grammatically feminine (Gen. 1.2), so the verbs ‘to bring/sprout forth’ are feminine. (The earth ‘brings forth’: Gen. 1.11–12.) Hence, just as the third month is the month of Pentecost, so the third day is the day of the Spirit.
Day Four, when the sun and stars are created, is the day of the Father and Son. The light of the Father is made manifest in the Son/Sun—the radiance of the Father’s glory and imprint of his nature, the Daystar enthroned on high.
Day Five is the day of the Father and Spirit. Life again bursts forth on the earth—fish and birds—, and we first encounter the words nefesh hayah—‘life-filled souls’. Just as the Father and Spirit are (grammatically) male and female, so too is what is created, hence the text’s (first) command to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen. 1.22).
Day Six is the day of the Son and Spirit. Like the Father and Spirit, the Son and Spirit are (grammatically) male and female, and the same is true of Adam and Eve, whose union foreshadows the marriage of Christ and his (Spirit-filled) Church.
Day Seven is the day when God’s work is finished. The seventh set is thus the full and final set—Father, Son, and Spirit, in perfect harmony.
These thoughts were inspired by a man named Beren who attended a numerology course run by myself and Alastair Roberts a couple of years ago. The details are now lost to me, as is Beren’s surname, but I’m thankful to him as well as to the other people who attended the course.
Thanks for this!! (I'm trying to avoid twitter and the fact you also post here makes that easier!) I think it's also interesting to consider associating day 4 with {Son,Spirit}, day 5 with {Father,Spirit}, and day 6 with {Father,Son}, so each pair of forming/filling days is complementary. I might have to send you a really long email about some thoughts I have here :)
Good stuff. I can save it "as is", but you should add a save as PDF button to your site.