Keeping the Sabbath
By Mac, 16 June 2001
"Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 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 manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. 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. (Exodus 20:8-11) (NIV)
Are you concerned about God’s fourth COMMANDMENT? Are you afraid that if you don’t keep all of God’s ‘original 10’, that you won’t make it? And, what EXACTLY did God MEAN when he etched these holy words into a stone tablet? This has plagued a lot of folks I know, myself included. I like to ‘work’ sometimes on a Sunday afternoon around the yard. A lot of people, Christians included, work on a job on Sundays. Does that mean that all of us that do any type of work on ‘the Sabbath’ is bound for the fiery lake? Let’s dig into this a little deeper, and see if we can answer this, and other questions that we may have about “Keeping the Sabbath”.
First of all, I guess we need to attempt to identify what the “Sabbath” day is? Some folks, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and most Jews, consider our current calendar day, Saturday, as being the ‘Sabbath’. The last day of the week. The day that God said he ‘rested’. Then WHY, do so many ‘Christians’ tend to hold most of their worship services on a Sunday, the FIRST day of our calendar week? Well, tracing back through history, we can see ……well, ACTUALLY, we can not find any specific time or event where the First Day of the week (Sunday….named after the sun –Sun Day--) (Click here or see the addendum to this study about how weekdays became Named) became the ‘day of worship’. We DO know that the Catholics have been using Sunday as their ‘holy day’ for centuries, but I am not able to track down when it was first practiced. There are INDICATIONS that the first century church of Christ MAY have been ‘A’ ‘starting point’, but there is really no biblical, or historical, evidence, that they actually started worshipping specifically on that day. The first day of the week did become important to the first century church in their worship of God and Jesus. Jesus was risen on the ‘third day’, which was on the first day of the week. Recall Matthew 28, verses 1and 2, that says “After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it.” (This is also recorded in Mark 16:2, Luke 24:1 and John 20:1) In the book of Acts, as the church was beginning to grow, we find Paul setting the example for doing things on the FIRST day of the week. Read Acts 20, verse 7: “On the first day of the week we came together to break bread. Paul spoke to the people and, because he intended to leave the next day, kept on talking until midnight.” And later, when Paul wrote his letter to the church in Corinth, he seemed to be emphasizing the first day of the week. See 1 Corinthians 16:2: “On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with his income, saving it up, so that when I come no collections will have to be made.” And the day of Pentecost, which was originally an Old Testament festival, was on the first day of the week. This OT festival was based on a feast of ancient Israel. God laid it out for them, recorded for us in Leviticus Chapter 23. It was a harvest festival, sometimes called the Feast of Weeks because it lasted seven weeks, actually fifty days to the day, after Passover. And, if you look at the Christian calendar, Pentecost, 50 days after Passover, was celebrated on a Sunday. It was on THIS Sunday, the day of Pentecost, forty-nine days after Jesus rose from the dead, that the disciples received their baptism of fire. SO, it WAS an important day for them (the First day of the week), but it still didn’t necessarily prove that Sunday was THE Holy day of worship.
Well, if the First Century Church didn’t make Sunday a primary day of worship, when DID they worship? The answer to this question is, essentially, the basis for my final conclusions in this study (to be revealed later…). The disciples of this time frame, for about 70 years after the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, worshipped God EVERY day. This was recorded by the Apostle John in the book of Acts, in verse 46 (“Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,…” In Acts 16:5, it is strongly suggested that God was worshipped daily, as “So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers.” The same thing appears in Acts 19:9—“ But some of them became obstinate; they refused to believe and publicly maligned the Way. So Paul left them. He took the disciples with him and had discussions daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus.” The author of the book of Hebrews records: “But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness.” (3:16) This DAILY encouragement, if not direct worship, was definitely related to it. And lest we forget about our noble and earnest Bereans. They researched the scriptures DAILY to determine what Paul was teaching them was the truth. Jesus taught people every day…you can find several scriptures in the Gospels that record this. So we can infer that even the Great Teacher considered DAILY worship so much more important than worship on just ONE single day.
But, regardless of when people worshipped: the Last day of the Week (Sabbath), the First day of the week (Sun-Day), or even EVERY day, what does that really have to do with God’s COMMANDMENT to ‘keep the Sabbath holy’? Probably very little. But I wanted to show you the life-style that the first century disciples were developing, which was in stark contrast to their non-believing Jewish friends were followed strict ‘Mosaic’ (the laws of Moses) laws. There were other laws that the Jews followed as well. The Torah was the original writing of the law, and from which all laws are based. Tradition states that at the time of the Torah, an Oral Law was delivered at the same time - but not written down. Tradition also states that each Oral Law can find a base in the written law. The term Torah actually refers to both the written and oral portions of the law, and Orthodox and Conservative Jews considered both oral and written law as one. Oral Law was later written down by the Rabbis and forms the Mishna portion of the Talmud. The early Rabbis formulated RULES to help Jews avoid violating the Torah or the Talmud. These RULES became known as Rabbinic Law . And one other ‘law’ that Jews followed, and follow today, is that of Tradition. Today, the Jews believe that the Torah defines the Jewish people as a holy corpus (part of the holy body). As such their practices and traditions themselves became holy. Long standing practices took on the power of law. Traditional practices may or may not be based on a law. It is PROBABLY this SAME type of REASONING that most ‘Christians’ eventually started the practice of worshipping on a Sunday, rather than on a Saturday. “SOMEONE” started a practice, and it eventually became TRADITION, and most people feel that it is a LAW—that SUNDAY is the day that God wants us to ‘keep’ in his name, and rest upon that day.
I hardly believe that is what God intended. He SAID the Sabbath, I am sure he MEANT the Sabbath. (Our calendars (Gregorian) record the Sabbath, as Saturday, the LAST day of the week.) It is POSSIBLE, that are current calendars are incorrect. The SABBATH may even be on Wednesday!!!!! The reason I say this is that Pope Gregory XIII, who succeeded Pope Pius in 1572, convened a commission to consider reform of the calendar, since he considered his predecessor's measures inadequate. (Because earlier calendars WERE inaccurate, the equinox had gradually ‘moved’ so that it no longer was on March 21st.) The recommendations of Pope Gregory's calendar commission were instituted by a Catholic decree, called the "Inter Gravissimus," signed on February 14th, 1582 Ten days were deleted from the calendar, so that 1582 October 4, 1582 was followed by October 15th, 1582. And, how many other times in history since God ‘rested’, had ‘calendars’ been created, changed or ‘lost’. So, even in our current calendar, when IS the Sabbath? Who knows? No one here on earth, I am sure of that.
Then that makes it a little difficult to ‘keep’ the day, if you don’t even know ‘what’ the day is. But what I found out during the preparation of this study, may lessen your concern about this (it did mine).
Let’s get out of history books and back into the Bible to see what Jesus and the Apostles had to say about the Sabbath. See what the tax collector who Jesus called to follow him quoted Jesus as saying: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” (Matthew 5:17) FULFILL the law. That’s what he came to do. The Greek base word for ‘fulfill’ is _________ , which means to ‘close out’. BUT, in the very next few verses, Jesus explains that God’s laws ARE still in effect: “I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:18-19)
Still feeling uncomfortable if you are mowing the grass on Sunday (or whatever day you consider to be the Sabbath)? Will you (we) be called “least in the kingdom” if we don’t hold any specific day of the week holy? If so, we had better continue with the study.
Later in Matthew 7:12, Jesus says: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” In preceding verses, he was explaining how to live your life according the law (which he did NOT abolish, but fulfilled). Jesus and the leaders of the first century church did not preach the Word of God just on the Sabbath, they did it every day. God’s moral law has existed from the day he created man (Adam and Eve learned of it in the Garden of Eden.), and exists today. Jesus didn’t abolish it.
When one of the Pharisees questioned Jesus as recorded in Matthew 22:36 – “"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?". Jesus replied: …. "`Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: `Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." (vs 37-40)
So, does THIS mean that there are only TWO commandments? DO note that the ORIGINAL first two, on the tablets, were not identical to these two. Nowhere did it say to ‘love your neighbor’, nor even, really, to ‘LOVE the Lord’. You MIGHT be able to interpret the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me”, as meaning LOVE for Him, but, it was not explicit. He MAY have just meant ‘OBEY’. You CAN OBEY without LOVING! TWO commandments? ONLY two? No, I don’t believe he meant that either. But look at verse 40 again above. Jesus is telling us that if we do HIS TWO commandments, we will automatically do the original ten.
Addendum: How the Days of the Week were Named…..
In early Rome, there was an eight-day cycle between market days. It was only in the second century B.C. that a seven-day cycle became predominant, and this may have owed more to astrology than to Hebrew or Babylonian influences. Astrologers recognized seven planets (including the Sun and Moon) and assigned one planet to rule each of the 24 hours of the day, in a continuous sequence. The planet which ruled the first hour of the day was taken to rule the whole day, and this gave rise to a seven-day cycle.
The Romans began to name each day after its ruling planet: Saturn's day, the Sun's day, the Moon's day, Mars's day, Mercury's day, Jupiter's day, Venus's day. In the Romance languages, the connection is still evident. In French, for example, Monday to Friday become lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi. In the Germanic languages, the names of the Norse gods Tiu, Woden, Thor and Freya replaced Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus.
Jewish tradition originally had no names for the days of the week, giving them numbers instead. Only the Sabbath had its own name. The Roman names were adopted only slowly and reluctantly by the Jews and early Christians.
It is impossible to say whether the cycle of days of the week has continued without interruption since Roman times. The Gregorian calendar reform, though it removed ten days from the calendar at a stroke, nevertheless maintained the sequence of days of the week.
Anni Domini Nostri Jesu Christi
The following algorithm for computing the date of Easter is based on the algorithm of Oudin (1940). It is valid for any Gregorian year, Y. All variables are integers and the remainders of all divisions are dropped. The final date is given by M, the month, and D, the day of the month.
C = Y/100,
N = Y - 19*(Y/19),
K = (C - 17)/25,
I = C - C/4 - (C - K)/3 + 19*N + 15,
I = I - 30*(I/30),
I = I - (I/28)*(1 - (I/28)*(29/(I + 1))*((21 - N)/11)),
J = Y + Y/4 + I + 2 - C + C/4,
J = J - 7*(J/7),
L = I - J,
M = 3 + (L + 40)/44,
D = L + 28 - 31*(M/4).