The other day I wrote about whether Christians should keep Sunday as their Sabbath day. There are four primary objections to the suggestion. We dealt with the first one in the previous article, the argument that Sabbath obligations no longer apply because we are under grace, not law. The other two suggest that whilst Christians do observe a sabbath it is not Sunday either because
- We enter into our sabbath rest which is Christ so that there isn’t a distinct day.
- The Sabbath continues to be on Saturday, it was never moved to Sunday.
- Sabbath is about rest not worship. It is important that we take a day off from work but this is distinct to gathering as the church.
What should we make of these? Well, there’s a lot of truth in the first point. We should consider every day as holy and the whole of life as worship. However, this does not take away from the focus on one day as distinct and set apart particularly for God’s people. We also want to be careful of an overreached eschatology here. When Hebrews 4:9-11 talks about a Sabbath rest for God’s people, it describes something which remains but hasn’t yet been fulfilled. This is a permanent ceasing from work, yet God’s people have been saved for good works (Ephesians 2:8-10).
Some, groups have argued that the Sabbath continues in force and is still the Saturday Sabbath of the Ten Commandments. This is the Seventh Day Adventist position. Their argument would be that there hasn’t been an explicit New Testament instruction changing the day from Saturday to Sunday. However, what we clearly see in the New Testament is that God’s people shift their practice from gathering on Saturday to gathering on Sunday, this quickly becomes known as “The Lord’s Day.”
Importantly, the early church, are essentially using “The Lord’s Day” for the same purpose as the Jews used the Saturday Sabbath. This is crucial too in responding to the suggestion that Sabbath is about rest not worship. If this view is correct, then Christians can gather for worship on Sunday but use any other day of the week as their “day off.”
So, we need to look at what the original Sabbath command says. In Exodus 20:8-11 it says:
8 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Moses repeats the command in Deuteronomy 5:12-15 with a slight variation.
12 “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. 15 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
Notice that in both places, God’s people are told to set the day apart, it is Holy, it is to the Lord. They are not merely commanded to rest. They are to cease from their day to day work of the other six days. They pause from one thing (work) to commit to the other, keeping a day for YHWH. Secondly, the day is rooted in God’s creation pattern. God worked for six days, creating the world and then rested on the seventh. It wasn’t that God needed a bit of time out to recover, to sleep. Instead, the point of his Sabbath seems to be that God finishes his work and then stops to survey and enjoy it. The first humans are invited into this enjoyment.
The Puritans understood that enjoying God was fundamental to our purpose as human beings. Our chief purpose is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Enjoyment and glorification are bound up together. So, it is fair to say that rest, enjoyment and worship are bound up together.
Sabbath rest is more than stopping our day to day labours. In fact, when you consider it, most people who work in offices and factories tend to use their Saturday for things such as family activities, shopping, sport and physical fitness, DIY etc. It is really only since the Industrial Revelation that we have distinguished these household activities from our paid work. The 21st century Saturday is not a ceasing from our normal work/labour but a continuation of an important part of it.
True rest for the believer means that I pause from those activities completely to be reminded that my nourishment is found in God. I am completely dependent on him. So, for the Jews, Sabbath was about remembering. They were to remember God’s creative acts but they were also, according to Deuteronomy to remember God’s redemptive acts. For them, it was specifically God’s redemptive act in rescuing them from Egypt.
So, guess what Christians are meant to do at their Sunday gathering? Well, have a look at 1 Corinthians 11 and you discover that our gathering on the Lord’s Day is all about remembering Christ’s redemptive act, his death and resurrection. Christians are doing exactly on the Lord’s Day when they meet what Israel were meant to do on their Sabbath.
So, it seems to me that the Church, very naturally moved from a Sabbath observance on Saturday when they ceased from their daily activities in order to remember God’s saving act, binging them out of Egypt to a Sabbath observance on Sunday as the Lord’s Day when they remembered God’s saving act in Jesus when we were brought out of our slavery to sin through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Faithroots 