Nightline's series on the Ten Commandments continues with a look at the Sabbath command, and it raises a question that often arises: Do Christians celebrate "Sabbath"? Let's begin with the command itself, in both versions in the Old Testament, and then I want to address our question.Exodus 20:8 "Remember the Sabbath day to set it apart as holy. 20:9 For six days you may labor and do all your work, 20:10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; on it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, or your male servant, or your female servant, or your cattle, or the resident foreigner who is in your gates. 20:11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy.
Deuteronomy 5:12 Be careful to observe the Sabbath day just as the Lord your God has commanded you. 5:13 You are to work and do all your tasks in six days, 5:14 but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. On that day you must not do any work, you, your son, your daughter, your male slave, your female slave, your ox, your donkey, any other animal, or the foreigner who lives with you, so that your male and female slaves, like yourself, may have rest. 5:15 Recall that you were slaves in the land of Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there by strength and power. That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
First, "Sabbath" was a day of rest and was not a day of "worship" together as is done in the Christian Sunday. But, a careful reading of Genesis 1 shows that the Sabbath is the day the Lord takes up habitation in the Cosmic Temple -- the world -- and so the seventh day of Creation should not be seen simply as relaxation from work. God's rest is more than relaxation; it is Shalom -- it is God's world being what it was intended to be. We only "do Sabbath" well when we dwell in the world as God intended it to be. The earliest Christians had a Sabbath (Saturday) and worship (Sunday, the Lord's day).
Second, there's more: Jesus cut up the Ten Commandments into love God commands and love other commands. The Sabbath was traditionally understood as a day of sanctity toward God, a day wherein one did not work at all. Hence, it became a day where focus on God was paramount ... and Jesus saw a crack. Some were so devoted to Sabbath's sanctity that they failed to show mercy to those in need.
Herein lies the genius of Jesus when it comes to Sabbath: "rest" means dwelling in the world as God would have it. That means loving God (worship, obedience, etc) and loving others (doing good on Sabbath). So, for Jesus, the Sabbath straddles the love God commands and the love others commands.
Matthew 12:1 At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on a Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pick heads of wheat and eat them. 12:2 But when the Pharisees saw this they said to him, "Look, your disciples are doing what is against the law to do on the Sabbath." 12:3 He said to them, "Haven't you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry - 12:4 how he entered the house of God and they ate the sacred bread, which was against the law for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests? 12:5 Or have you not read in the law that the priests in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and yet are not guilty? 12:6 I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. 12:7 If you had known what this means: 'I want mercy and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the innocent. 12:8 For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath."
On top of the Sabbath being a day of doing good -- toward God in worship and love and obedience and toward others in compassion and love and justice -- the earliest Christians, third, eventually swallowed up the Sabbath into Sunday, a day of worshiping together on a day that memorialized the resurrection. So, for the Christian, Sabbath also signifies the new order, the new day of Jesus, the day when BC changed to AD. As ancient Israel, in Deuteronomy, saw the Sabbath as the result of being liberated from slavery, so the Christians saw Sunday as the day of resurrection, the day when they had been liberated from sin and death.12:9 Then Jesus left that place and entered their synagogue. 12:10 A man was there who had a withered hand. And they asked Jesus, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?" so that they could accuse him. 12:11 He said to them, "Would not any one of you, if he had one sheep that fell into a pit on the Sabbath, take hold of it and lift it out? 12:12 How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath." 12:13 Then he said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out and it was restored, as healthy as the other. 12:14 But the Pharisees went out and plotted against him, as to how they could assassinate him.
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THANK YOU ALL FOR KNOWING & TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT THE TRUE SABBATH (SATURDAY). THANK GOD SOME PEOPLE KNOW HOW TO READ THE WORD OF GOD, AND KNOW THE TRUTH. PRAISE GOD, JESUS CHRIST. GOD BLESS ALL OF YOU, IN JESUS NAME. NOW WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT THIS KNOWLEDGE ? ARE WE TELLING EVERYONE THAT THIS IS THE REAL TRUTH OF GOD'S WORD ? I HAVE BEEN TRYING AND I AM GETTING MUCH RESISTANCE AND BEING PERSECUTED FOR THIS TRUTH. THE WORD SAYS; THAT IF WE BREAK 1 COMMANDMENT, WE HAVE BROKEN THEM ALL. IF THE TRUTH HAS BEEN SHOWN TO US AND WE DO NOT PREACH THE TRUTH, (NOT SAYING ANYTHING) THEN WE ARE DISOBEDIENT TO GOD FOR KNOWING AND NOT SPEAKING THE TRUTH. WE ARE EITHER GOING TO BE OBEDIENT OR DISOBEDIENT TO GOD !!! WHICH IS IT GOING TO BE ? PRAISE GOD WE DO THE RIGHT THING, FOR I DO NOT WANT TO END UP IN HELL FOR BEING DISOBEDIENT TO GOD'S WORD. I WILL NOT GO TO HELL FOR ANYONE. I KNOW MY FATHERS WORD AND HIS WILL FOR MY LIFE, IN JESUS NAME.
As regarding the ten commandments in general, we should remember that while very much the righteous standard for humanit in the flesh, given that we are in sinful flesh, the are called "the ministry of death, written and engraved in stones" in 2 Cor 3:7. To paraphrase what one once said in a books on the Letter to the Romans, if we think that God is going to enable us to keep the law of ourselves to establish our own righteousness, we don't know our need of a Savior. Thus we see the difference between the experience of Romans 7, where a soul with spiritual eyes to see turns them on themself as they try to keep the law and establish their own righteousness. Only when they turn their eyese to Christ in Romans 8 do they realize "There is now therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus" and learn "those that are in the flesh cannot please God" and "as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God." In Gal 5:16 we're told, "Walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." As regards the Sabbath, clearly the Sabbath was and always will be the 7th day -- but the Christian day of worship, the Lord's Day, is a different concept. From Exodus 20 we learn the principle of the Sabbath as, essentially, "rest because God rested from creation on that day." However, John 5:16-18, while as Man, Jesus never broke the Sabbath, yet as God the Son, he was no longer resting on the Sabbath -- how could He rest in the midst of the ruin wrought by the Fall? -- but stated clearly he was working. Finally, on the Sabbath He was in the grave where He left our sins, if we will have Him, and rose from the dead on the First Day, also foreshadowed in circumcision and other O.T. references as the "eigth day." "If any man be in Christ he is a new creation." (2Cor 5:17a. On the first day of the week (Acts 20:7) we worship the Lord as the firstfruits of this new creation as we wait for His coming, and with it the redemption of our bodies (Phil 3:20, 21) and ultimately "new heavens and a new earth in which righteosness dwells." (2 Pet 3:13).
The one called ‘g’, …for the sake of brevity, I suppose…, who responded, in a materially dualistic manner, to Scot McKnight’s article on the Christian Sabbath seems to have missed the point. Apparently the Transcendent is beyond him. The focus is the celestial is, not the mundane. To those who are open to other than themselves, and to the Divine, Scott’s perspicuity is conspicuous, at least on this point.
Jesus kept the seventh-day Sabbath, so did apostle Paul. More importantly, the early Christians kept it. Take a look at the following quotes by early Christians:
Clement of Alexandria (115-215 AD)
"Thou shalt observe the Sabbath, on account of Him who ceased from His work of creation, but ceased not from His work of providence: it is a rest for meditation of the law, not for idleness of the hands." - Constitutions of the Holy Apostles
Athanasius (297-373 AD)
“The ancient Christians were very careful in the observation of Saturday, or the seventh day...It is plain that all the Oriental churches, and the greatest part of the world, observed the Sabbath as a festival” -Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria
Eusebius (326 AD)
"Then the spiritual seed of Abraham fled to Pella, on the other side of Jordan, where they found a safe place of refuge, and could serve their Master and keep His Sabbath." Eusebius's "Ecclesiastical History", book 3, chap. 5
Zoroastrian Follower (335-375 AD)
"They despise our sun-god. Did not Zoroaster, the sainted founder of our divine beliefs, institute Sunday one thousand years ago in honor of the sun and supplant the Sabbath of the Old Testament which the Jews in our land then sanctified? Yet these Christians have divine services on Saturday. They desecrate the sacred earth by burying their dead in it and pollute the water by their ablutions. They refuse to go to war for the shah-in-shah; and they preach that snakes, scorpions, and creeping things were created by a good God." – Follower of Zoroastria, during the reign of Shapur II
Socrates (380-450 AD)
"For although almost all churches throughout The World celebrated the sacred mysteries on the Sabbath of every week, yet the Christians of Alexandria and at Rome, on account of some ancient tradition, refuse to do this."- Socrates, "Ecclestical History," Book 5, chap. 22, p. 289.
Martin Luther (1530 AD)
“Hence you can see that the Sabbath was before the Law of Moses came, and has existed from the beginning of the world. Especially have the devout, who have preserved the true faith, met together and called upon God on this day.”—Translated from Auslegung des Alten Testaments (Commentary on the Old Testament), in Sämmtliche Schriften (Collected Writings), edited by J.G. Walch, Vol. 3, col. 950 [St. Louis edition of Luther’s Works, 1880]).
“They [Roman Catholics] refer to the Sabbath Day, as having been changed into the Lord’s Day, contrary to the Decalogue, as it seems. Neither is there any example whereof they make more than concerning the changing of the Sabbath Day. Great, say they, is the power of the Church, since it has dispensed with one of the Ten Commandments!”
- “Augsburg Confession of Faith,” art. 28, by Melanchthon, approved by Martin Luther
All the answers to Sabbath questions are clearly explained on my blog at: http://robertclantonspeaksout.blogspot.com/ It also answers questions like: Are their 2 lifetimes to be saved??? And, Does man have immortal soul?
You can contact me at any time at clanton.bobclanton@gmail.com
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