Genesis 2:2-3

The concept of the seventh day has also troubled me. The origin of the concept of the sabbath begins with this passage in Genesis 2:

2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

First, the concept of work strikes me as being odd. In Genesis 1, everything was created by God. And how? God said ___ and it was so. All God did was say it, and it was. This does not strike me as "work" in the sense that human beings understand it. Beyond this, I am puzzled by why an omnipotent God would need to rest. This passage doesn't quite come out and say He needed the rest, but that is certainly implied.

I've heard some people say that the first six days of creation were eons long, and that we are still living in the seventh day. The evidence for this, they say, is: (i) in the Bible, the fact that Genesis makes no mention of evening and morning coming, signaling the end of day seven and the beginning of an eighth day; and (ii) outside of the Bible, the geological evidence showing how old the Earth is, how long the process of creation/evolution took, and, frankly the fact that God does not appear to be taking an active role in world events today. He is resting, disinterested, watching, but not working, these people say. That concept is one of the most depressing things I've heard since the first time I heard of Nietzsche's "God is Dead" school of thought.

Yet, admittedly, this makes no less sense to me than the concept of a literal "firmament" in the sky, separating the oceans from the floodgates on the other side of the stars. However, skipping ahead (and thinking back), I see that the Bible is full of actions by God which occurred after the start of this seventh day. If the Bible is true, then these actions (many of which are clearly "work") demonstrate that the day of rest is not a still-ongoing epoch. And if the Bible is not true, well, it doesn't really matter, does it?

This passage also gives us our seven day weeks, which would otherwise appear to be a rather random time period selection. Nature does not seem to recognize weekly patterns. Days, months, seasons and years are all marked by astronomical gauges and corresponding patterns in nature. The concept of a week, however, is strictly a religious or otherwise manmade period. Why, if a week is so significant, didn't God create patterns in nature that reflect the beginning and end of a week? Out in the desert, without a calendar, a man cannot tell whether a day is a Monday, a Wednesday or a Saturday. Conversely, the nature that God created visibly reflects the beginning and end of a day, a lunar month, a season, a year. But you see nothing weekly.

And literally, the seventh day is Saturday. This is the day of the week that God "blessed" and "made holy" by virtue of resting from His work. Saturday is the day that God commanded the Israelites to observe as the sabbath, a day of total rest. Genesis doesn't make anyone observe this day, or acknowledge its holiness. That will come later, when God meets Moses on the mountain. However, Genesis calls into question why Christians (other than sabbatarians, such as the Seventh-day Adventists) celebrate Sunday as their day of worship. Jews keep Saturday holy. But, in the Bible belt, it is Sunday that sends the masses to church and closes the liquor stores. If God made the seventh day, Saturday, holy, why do we make the first day the holy one instead?

Why do we disregard the fact that "God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it." Is it that we don't take Genesis all that seriously?