So?
If you can’t understand those words, look up sabbath millennium and Barnabas, because he expects a millennium rest after 6,000 years, aka Gods rest for His people, that the sabbath day of rest given to Israel, was also a foreshadow of.
Yes, an eternal rest. He was not alone among the Amils.
Whilst the unregenerate Jews continued to zealously celebrate their Sabbath on a Saturday (their 7th day), early Christians considered their Sabbath day Sunday as the 8th, because it embodied the idea of new beginnings revealed in the supernatural resurrection of Christ. But the mainly Jewish early Church, in its infant state, saw Sunday starting at sun-down on the Roman Saturday. Therefore, uniquely, the 7th Roman day also saw the appearance of the 8th Jewish day.
The introduction of Sunday-keeping was a notable mark of differentiation between Christianity and Judaism. While most orthodox Christians did not observe the Sabbath in the Jewish sense, many Jewish believers did attend the synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath because it was the only way many had of accessing the Old Testament Scriptures. In the synagogue, they had the benefit of hearing the public reading of the inspired pages. As a result, Christian gatherings often took place on a Saturday evening after the Jewish Sabbath had ended. This replaced the traditional Havdallah service, a Jewish religious ceremony that marks the symbolic end of Sabbath and the ushering in of a new week.
It was here that they would discuss what they had earlier heard in the synagogue, give a Christian sense of the inspired text and examine the messianic significance of these readings. As the Gospel spread to the major Christian communities in Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, Asia Minor and throughout the Roman Empire this custom was widely observed. These post-Sabbath meetings became the norm.
So, having Church on Saturday evening after sun-set constituted Sunday worship from a Jewish perspective or Saturday worship within the regular Roman system. It was easy for Christians to view this overlap as both the 7th and the 8th day of the week, and therefore fit their theological paradigm.
Clement of Alexandria, Egypt (A.D. 150 - 215)
Clement associates the coming of the Lord with the 8th day. This was common in early church literature. This was found in both Amillennialist and Premillennialist writings.
Clement explains in chapter 16 of The Stromata (Book 6), speaking on the 4th commandment:
The world was created by God, and that He gave us the seventh day as a rest, on account of the trouble that there is in life. For
God is incapable of weariness, and suffering, and want. But we who bear flesh need rest. The seventh day, therefore, is proclaimed a rest— abstraction from ills— preparing for the Primal Day, our true rest.
Clement looks forward to the eternal Sabbath and to the “true rest” that will accompany it. But he too equates the Sabbath with the 8th day (Sunday), only spiritually relating this to resurrection day:
For the eighth may possibly turn out to be properly the seventh, and the seventh manifestly the sixth, and the latter properly the Sabbath, and the seventh a day of work. For the creation of the world was concluded in six days.
They reckon the number seven motherless and childless, interpreting the Sabbath, and figuratively expressing the nature of the rest, in which they neither marry nor are given in marriage any more.
Clement further explains in chapter 14 of The Stromata (Book 5):
The Lord's day Plato prophetically speaks … after the wandering orbs the journey leads to heaven, that is, to the eighth motion and day … But the seventh day is recognised as sacred, not by the Hebrews only, but also by the Greeks.
The Jewish concept of Saturday as the Sabbath is superseded in early Christian thinking by Sunday as the 7th day. The whole victory of Sunday as resurrection day easily fits in with the future reality of the future resurrection and the introduction of the eternal Sabbath. This was so because many Amillennialist and Premillennialist saw the world lasting only 6,000 years (6 days). The only difference being that Premillennialists saw a one thousand year Sabbath rest when Christ comes, whereas Amillennialist saw an eternal Sabbath rest being introduced.
Origen Alexandria, Egypt (185-254)
Against Celsus (Contra Celsum, Book VI, Chapter 61:
God ended on the sixth day His works which He had made, and ceased on the seventh day from all His works which He had made: and God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it, because on it He had ceased from all His works which He had begun to make; and imagining the expression, He ceased on the seventh day, to be the same as this, He rested on the seventh day, he makes the remark: After this, indeed, he is weary, like a very bad workman, who stands in need of rest to refresh himself! For he knows nothing of the day of the Sabbath and rest of God, which follows the completion of the world's creation, and which lasts during the duration of the world, and in which all those will keep festival with God who have done all their works in their six days, and who, because they have omitted none of their duties, will ascend to the contemplation (of celestial things), and to the assembly of righteous and blessed beings.
Origen, in Selecta in Psalmos 118, states:
The number eight, which contains the power of the resurrection, is the figure of the world to come, just as the number seven is the symbol of this present world.
Origen presents the number seven as an eschatological symbol representing this present evil age, and the number eighth as an eschatological figure of the world to come. This was subtly denigrating and eliminating the importance of the Jewish seventh day.
Origen submits in his Homily on Number 23:4
The true Sabbath on which God rests from all his works will be the future age, when pain and grief flee away and God will be all in all. On that Sabbath God will graciously allow us to celebrate with him.
Jerome Rome, Italy (331-420 AD)
Against Jovinianus (Book II) Chapter 25.
Being in bondage during the six days of this world, on the seventh day, the true and eternal Sabbath, we shall be free.
Epistle 139:8
“A thousand years in thy sight as yesterday.” From this passage, and from the epistle which is attributed to the apostle Peter, I conclude that the custom comes of taking a thousand years for one day; with the result, that is, that just as the universe was fashioned in six days, so one believes that it will last only six thousand years, and that afterwards will come the sevenfold and the eightfold number, when the true Sabbath will be kept.
Homily 3, on Psalm 7. FC 48, p. 26.
We have both a first and an eighth day; we receive the kingdom of heaven on the eighth; the eighth day after the sabbath is again the first day from the beginning.
Hilary Bishop of Poitiers, Gaul (modern-day France) (300 –368 AD)
His Commentary on Matthew 17 explain:
After six days, Peter, James and John were taken apart from the others and brought to the top of the mountain. As they were looking on, the Lord was transfigured and resplendent in all the brilliance of his garments. In this manner there is preserved an underlying principle, a number and an example. It was after six days that the Lord was shown in his glory by his clothing; that is; the honour of the heavenly kingdom is prefigured in the unfolding of six thousand years.
Basil, Caesarea Mazaca, (AD 329-379)
The Hexaemeron (Homily 2), 8:
God, who made the nature of time, measured it out and determined it by intervals of days. He ordered the week to revolve from period to period upon itself, to count the movement of time, forming the week of one day revolving seven times upon itself; a proper circle begins and ends with itself. Such is also the character of eternity, to revolve upon itself and to end nowhere. If then the beginning of time is called “one day” rather than the “first day,” it is because Scripture wishes to establish its relationship with eternity.
He adds:
The day of the Lord, Scripture says, is great and very terrible, and elsewhere Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord: to what end is it for you? The day of the Lord is darkness and not light. A day of darkness for those who are worthy of darkness. No; this day without evening, without succession and without end is not unknown to Scripture, and it is the day that the Psalmist calls the eighth day, because it is outside this time of weeks. Thus whether you call it day, or whether you call it eternity, you express the same idea.
He sums up:
Give this state the name of day; there are not several, but only one. If you call it eternity still it is unique and not manifold. Thus it is in order that you may carry your thoughts forward towards a future life, that Scripture marks by the word one the day which is the type of eternity, the first fruits of days, the contemporary of light, the holy Lord's day honoured by the Resurrection of our Lord. And the evening and the morning were one day.
The coming of Christ, and the introduction of the eternal state, is likened to the 7th day of creation, but designated the eighth day to fit in with the early Christian understanding of Sunday rest. The emphasizing of it having no “succession” or “end” reinforces his perception that the day of the Lord is both climactic and eternal.
Migne, Patr. Graec., 29, 49.
The Lord’s Day is great and glorious. The Scripture knows this day without evening, having no other day, a day without end; the psalmist called it the eighth day, since it is outside of time measured in weeks. Whether you call it a day or an age, it is all the same. If you call it an aeon, it is one, and not a part of a whole.
In De Spiritu Sancto 27:66:
We pray standing, on the first day of the week, but we do not all know the reason. On the day of the resurrection (or standing again Grk. ἀ νάστασις) we remind ourselves of the grace given to us by standing at prayer, not only because we rose with Christ, and are bound to seek those things which are above, but because the day seems to us to be in some sense an image of the age which we expect, wherefore, though it is the beginning of days, it is not called by Moses first, but one. For he says There was evening, and there was morning, one day, as though the same day often recurred. Now one and eighth are the same, in itself distinctly indicating that really one and eighth of which the Psalmist makes mention in certain titles of the Psalms, the state which follows after this present time, the day which knows no waning or eventide, and no successor, that age which ends not or grows old.
He continues:
[A]ll Pentecost is a reminder of the resurrection expected in the age to come. For that one and first day, if seven times multiplied by seven, completes the seven weeks of the holy Pentecost; for, beginning at the first, Pentecost ends with the same, making fifty revolutions through the like intervening days. And so it is a likeness of eternity, beginning as it does and ending, as in a circling course, at the same point.
Gregory the Theologian, Nazianzus, Turkey (AD 325-389)
Gregory the Theologian teaches in On the New Lord's Day, PG 36.612C-13A:
This is what the divine Solomon wishes to symbolize when he commands a part, seven to some, that is, this life; and to others, eight, or the future life. He is speaking here of good works and of the restoration (apokatastasis) of the next life. The great David seems to sing of this day in the psalms on the octave.
Everyone who exercises diligence with regard to virtue has in mind the future life. Its beginning is called the "eighth," for it follows this perceptible time when the number seven is dissolved. Therefore, the inscription “for the eighth” advises us not to set our minds on this present age, but to look to the eighth . . . The present time of the seventh number which is subject to measurement will remain; the eighth will succeed it, the full day of the age to come. [J.83-84].
Just as God rested on the seventh day (“the seventh day is the end of creation and encompasses within itself the time coextensive with the creation of this world” [J.188, l.20-22,]
Moralium 1, 8,12, PL 75, 532:
The story truly indicates that the blessed Job when offering sacrifices on the eighth day, was celebrating the mystery of the resurrection . . . and served the Lord for the hope of the resurrection.
Oratio 44, In novam Dominicam:
He understands “the first day with reference to those that followed and as the eighth day with regard to those that preceded.
The eighth day, for him "refers to the life to come” and therefore “doing good while yet here on earth."
His first Easter Sermon:
"Behold in this the blessed Sabbath of the first creation! Recognize in that Sabbath this Sabbath. Upon this the only begotten God rested indeed, when he in the gospel plan of death observed the Sabbath after the flesh, and when returning to what he was before, he raised with him everything that was lying down, and became to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, life, resurrection, dawn, and day." "This is the day which God made; it differs from the days which God made at the creation to measure time. It marks the beginning of a new creation. Then on this day God created a new heaven and a new earth — the firmament of faith in Christ, and the good soil of the heart.” “Sabbath-keeping implies inactivity with reference to evil.”
Athanasius, Alexandria, (296 – 373AD)
In Athanasius’ On Sabbath and Circumcision Chapter 3 we learn:
The Sabbath was the end of the first creation, the Lord's day was the beginning of the second, in which he renewed and restored the old in the same way as he prescribed that they should formerly observe the Sabbath as a memorial of the end of the first things, so we honor the Lord's day as being the memorial of the new creation.
John Chrysostom, Constantinople, Turkey, (c. 349–407)
John Chrysostom said in his Treatise on Compunction:
What is then the eighth day but that great and manifest day of the Lord which burns like straw and which makes the powers on high tremble? The Scripture calls it the eighth, indicating the change of state and the inauguration of the future life. Indeed, the present life is one week only, beginning on the first day, ending on the seventh and returning to the same unit again, going back to the same beginning and continuing to the same end. It is for this reason that no one calls the Lord’s day the eighth day but only first day. Indeed, the septenary cycle does not extend to the number eight. But when all these things come to an end and dissolve, then the course of the octave will arise.
Tyconius, Africa (c. 330-390)
Several times, one day is 1000 years just as it is written: “in the day you taste from the tree you shall surely die” and the first seven days or seven thousand years: the Lord worked for six days “and rested from all his works on the seventh day and he blessed and sanctified it.” However, the Lord says “my father is working still.” For just as he worked this world for six days, so he works the spiritual world, which is the church, for six thousand years; and he is going to stop on the seventh day, which he has blessed and made eternal (Libellus Regularis, Rule V.6).