Exodus 20:11 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth. — Comp. Genesis 2:2-3, and Exodus 31:17. It is not improbable that the work of creation was made to occupy six days because one day in seven is the appropriate proportion of rest to labour for such a being as man. God might have created all things on one day had He so pleased; but, having the institution of the Sabbath in view, He prefigured it by spreading His work over six days, and then resting on the seventh. His law of the Sabbath established a conformity between the method of His own working and that of His reasonable creatures, and taught men to look on work, not as an aimless, indefinite, incessant, weary round, but as leading on to an end, a rest, a fruition, a time for looking back, and seeing the result and rejoicing in it. Each Sabbath is such a time, and is a type and foretaste of that eternal “sabbatising” in another world which “remaineth for the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9). The secondary object of the institution of the Sabbath, assigned in Deuteronomy 5:15, is in no way incompatible with this primary one. The thought of God’s works in creation might well be associated in the mind of an. Israelite with the thought of His “wondrous works” in Egypt, and the recollection of the blessed peace and rest in which creation resulted, with the memory of the glad time of repose and refreshment which supervened upon the weary task work of the Egyptian bondage.