Pascha, The Glorious Eighth Day
/I opened my eyes still tingling with joy and sleepiness. The clock read 8:00 to remind me that today is the glorious and mystical eighth day.
God created the world in six days, and on the sixth day, He made man (and on the sixth day, man crucified Him). Then on the seventh day He rested, the Sabbath (Saturday). On both the day after the creation and on the day after the crucifixion, on the holy seventh days, He rested. On the eighth day, the Jewish baby boy gives his piece of life-giver to God in circumcision. On the eighth day (Pascha), God gives immortality back to mankind. God believes in give and take; He is not interested in one-sided relationships.
On the eighth day Resurrection, Israel's quest to be rid of Jesus failed. That hurt. However, the failure also marked the fulfillment of the covenant. The deal that Abraham would become the ancestor of a multitude of nations was paid in full. Abraham is not just the ancestor of the Arabs/Islam, through Ishmael and the Jews through Isaac and Jacob but since the eighth-day Resurrection, Abraham is truly the ancestor of many nations. His Greatest Grandson, Jesus, adopted a world of peoples and brought Abraham more children than he could imagine. It is official. No one can trace a bigger family tree; like the stars on a clear night and the dust particles on the ground the seed of Abraham covers the earth. The eighth day circumcision and the eighth day resurrection are the beginning and the end of a very good deal.
As a parent bribes his child with worldly riches, a bike, a ten-dollar bill, to get him to do something that is more important to the parent than to the oblivious child, God bribed Abraham to get him to mark a body of people of His very own (with circumcision) . The Jews are not Abraham's people. They are God's chosen people, His control group. Abraham received the multitude of nations as God promised. God received one nation, the tribe of Judah, into which He would someday place Himself as a man, and walk on earth as Adam did. What Adam would not do, God would do Himself. God, as Jesus, would trust God. Through Jesus, God would restore His image and likeness to humankind by individual acts of free will; neither by nature, genetics, nor slavery would humankind be immortal as God, but by a human's own desire and self-sacrifice would God's children eventually live with Him on a new earth happily ever after. This is super-long range planning, but so what. God has all the time in the world.
For God, the covenant was never about money and power, or even land; it was always about immortality.
And so on this mystical eighth-day morning Evangeline begins life anew with a refreshed soul that just caught a glimpse of God and won't let go.
Excerpts taken from The Immortal Life by Evangeline Hopkins.