Q: Did God give mankind a calendar at Creation that determined when the Sabbath day would fall, thus ensuring proper and accurate keeping of the seventh-day Sabbath? — Basil, from Jamaica
A: Basil, at Creation God did something better than giving a calendar. He gave us the seven-day week, culminating with the seventh-day Sabbath!
It’s interesting that there are astronomical reasons for other measurements of time:
• the 24-hour day is determined by the time it takes the earth to rotate once on its axis;
• a month is determined by the time it takes for the moon to revolve around the earth;
• a year is the time it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun.
But there is no astronomical reason for having a seven-day week.
We know from the Bible that the same seven-day week has existed for millennia. In Exodus 16 we read how God sent manna to the Israelites six days out of seven (with a double portion on the sixth day — Friday), but no manna appeared on the seventh day, Sabbath.
Jewish records indicate that the seven-day week was continuously followed through history and we know that by the time of Christ in the first century, the same seven-day week was still in existence, with Jesus and the apostles keeping the seventh-day Sabbath.
We can be assured that the seven-day week that we have today is the same that has existed throughout this earth’s history, and that God’s seventh-day Sabbath is still as special and holy today as it was at Creation.
For more regarding the days of Creation, I recommend visiting this page from the Geo-Science Research Institute. For those interested in reading excellent scholarly presentation on the topic of the Sabbath, I encourage you to read “The Biblical Sabbath: The Adventist Perspective” by Dr. Ángel Manuel Rodríguez.