What Do Christians Have To Do With The Sabbath?
Exodus 20:1-17; Luke 6:1-11; Isaiah 58:13-14
Turn with me, if you would, to Exodus 20:1-17. While you are turning there, let me ask you a question:
Which of the Ten Commandments no longer applies in our lives today and why?
Does that seem like a simple question to answer? Let’s look at it. Look over the Commandments as they are listed in the text and tell me which of them has little or no application in our lives today.
We say that they all apply to us today, but do we really live as though they do? What about the Fourth Commandment? Do you think that it applies to us today – really?
Do we live as though it applies to us today? No – we do not.
Tell me why: why do we live as though the Fourth Commandment to, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” no longer applies in our day and age?
Let’s look into this a little deeper, shall we? Turn to Luke 6:1-11, a parallel passage to one we studied a few months ago when we studied Matthew 12:1-14.
In this section of the Scriptures, we see two interactions between the religious leaders and Jesus taking place.
First, we see Jesus and the disciples walking through a barley field on the Sabbath and the disciples are eating some of the grain. The Scribes and Pharisees have a bit of a fit over this. As we discussed before, the Law said that there was to be no harvesting on the Sabbath (picking the heads of grain), no threshing (rubbing the head of grain between their hands), no winnowing (separating the grain from the husk), and no grinding (the grinding that took place when they chewed the grain in their mouths).
The second incident happens on another Sabbath when Jesus is in the synagogue and a man with a withered hand is also there. The interpretation of the Law by the Pharisees was that the only healing help that could be done on the Sabbath was the bare minimum to preserve a life, nothing more. When Jesus has the man stretch out his withered hand and it is healed right there in front of them, as Dr. Luke tells us, “But they themselves were filled with rage.” Odd reaction to an act of mercy, wouldn’t you say?
So where do turn to uncover the background on the Sabbath and how all of this ties together? We turn, of course, to the beginning – to Genesis 2:1-3:
“Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.”
What we have is God establishing the day of rest as part of His creation ordinance. There is nothing else in all of the measurement of time that is divided into sevens.
The cycles of the moon and the months, the months of the year, the minutes of the hour, the hours in a day, the days in a year and so on all divide by threes and sixes. Only the measurement we know as the week is broken up into sevenths. And, it is universal throughout the world of man. God could have found a different way of designating a week – one that would have divided evenly into the months and the years. He chose not to do so.
Next, we move back to our text in Exodus 20:8-11, and we see that God moves the observance of the Sabbath from His creation ordinance into the realm of His moral law.
Look at the other nine commandments – are they not moral in their implication? We will return to this point in a little while. The Scribes and the Pharisees well understood the importance to God of the Sabbath – the question is: Why do we not?
When we see where this commandment fits (between God’s command to not take His name in vain, and His command to honor our parents), we see that there is a natural flow from our duty to God to our duty to the people in our lives.
Look at verse 11. God tells His chosen people the reason they are to observe the day of rest as a holy day: "For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.”
Hold your finger there for a moment and turn with me to Deuteronomy 5:12-15. read what it says there. Notice what God says is another reason that He expects this day to be observed as a special and holy day apart from the other days of the week; verse 15: “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day.”
In the first instance, we see that God commanded the keeping of the Sabbath as a remembrance of God’s completion and rest from His work of creation. In this instance, we see that God commanded the keeping of the Sabbath as a remembrance of His work in their salvation. Are you beginning to see a pattern here?
One more Old Testament reference before we return to the New Testament and the remainder of our study: Isaiah 58:13-14:
"If because of the sabbath, you turn your foot from doing your own pleasure on My holy day, and call the sabbath a delight, the holy day of the LORD honorable, and honor it, desisting from your own ways, From seeking your own pleasure and speaking your own word, then you will take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; and I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."
What we see here is, number one, God calling the Sabbath day His day, and, number two, promising wonderful blessings if His people will honor His day and call it a delight – a delight from His perspective, I might add.
Why did God take six days to create and why did He rest on the seventh day? Surely, since He was able to speak into existence whatever things He wanted to create, He could have done all of it at the same instant. And, since He is all-powerful and really has no need of resting and rejuvenating, He didn’t have a need to really rest.
So, why did He set this out in this seven day pattern like this? One of the wonderful things about the nature and character of God is His delight in allowing mankind – created in His image, remember – to share in His work and His blessings.
Do you recall what God assigned to Adam as his task when He first placed Adam and Eve in the Garden? He gave him the task of naming all of the animals. Now, why did God do that? Surely He had the authority and the power and the wisdom to name all of the animals and to simply inform Adam of what they were to be called.
But no; instead, God shares the task with the crown of His creation and allows Adam – and, by extension, us – to be a participant in His divine purpose and plan. He invites us to be co-laborers with Him.
If you doubt that, just remember part of what Jesus says when He invites the weary and heavy laden to come to Him for rest in Matthew 11:28-30: “Take my yoke upon you (verse 29).” A yoke is a simply of labor, not of rest and relaxation.
God also tells us in the creation account that He said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth (Genesis 1:26)."
And, two verses later, we read, “God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth (verse 28).’"
From all of this we see that God was establishing a pattern for all of us to follow – six days of work, and then the seventh to rest. The word Sabbath literally means “rest”. The word used in Genesis 2:2 that is translated “rested”, literally means “brought to and end; completed.”
God completed His work in six days, then sat back and enjoyed what he had done – “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good (1:31a).”
Now back to the Luke 6.
What does Jesus have to say about the Sabbath? It depends on which account of these incidents we look into. Now, we must always keep in mind that when we have information in more than one account and there are slight differences in the accounts, that doesn’t mean that the Bible contradicts itself. What it simply means is that, just as four people can be witnesses to the same events and remember different true details, so, too, the Gospel writers have often done the same thing.
For instance, in Mark’s account in Mark 2:23-28 of the response of Jesus when the Pharisees challenged Him about His disciples eating the grain on the Sabbath, we read an additional claim Jesus makes about the Sabbath: "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”
It is at this point that a lot of people have taken this one phrase and come up with doctrinal teaching that it is in the statement of Jesus that He does away with the need of any further observance of the Sabbath.
We have to ask: is that really so? Is that really what Jesus is saying here?
To answer that, we must backtrack to what we have already learned – from the beginning, the Sabbath – the day of rest – was given by God to all of mankind. Hence, Jesus’ statement, “The Sabbath was made for man.” It was a gift from God to all of mankind, not a special day just for His Chosen People.
We have discussed before how the Pharisees had built a fence around the Law of God in order to prevent the ignorant and the uninformed from inadvertently violating that Law.
The passage we are studying in Luke 6 is a case in point. In Deuteronomy 23:24-25, God had told the children of Israel, "When you enter your neighbor’s vineyard, then you may eat grapes until you are fully satisfied, but you shall not put any in your basket. When you enter your neighbor’s standing grain, then you may pluck the heads with your hand, but you shall not wield a sickle in your neighbor’s standing grain.”
As I mentioned earlier, the Pharisees had classified the simple actions of the disciples as harvesting (picking the heads of grain), threshing (rubbing the head of grain between their hands), winnowing (separating the grain from the husk), and grinding (the grinding that took place when they chewed the grain in their mouths).
That is why Jesus challenges the Pharisees with His, "Have you not even read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God, and took and ate the consecrated bread which is not lawful for any to eat except the priests alone, and gave it to his companions?"
And in Matthew’s account Jesus adds, "Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent (12:5)?”
In all three accounts, Jesus says, "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” So, how do we put this all together so far?
What we have is what has happened all down through the ages – man adding his own complexities to the simple and easily understood commands, permissions and prohibitions of God.
The Sabbath was a gift from God to man to allow man to rest and to commemorate God’s creative and redemptive work, as well as a day that He called His own and was to be kept holy and separate from all the other days.
In the process of their attempting to ensure obedience to God’s command about the Sabbath, the Pharisees had ended up propelling themselves into a place of authority over God Himself. The many restrictions that the Pharisees had added to what was allowed and what was disallowed on the Sabbath had taken on more importance than what God had ordained in His own words.
Now, lest we be tempted to tsk-tsk these nasty old Pharisees too much, we have to take a look at ourselves. Anytime we add or subtract our own requirements or limitations to what God has clearly said, we put ourselves in the same place of condemnation that the Scribes and the Pharisees placed themselves.
In Matthew 23:1-4, we read:
“Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to His disciples, saying: "The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses; therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them. They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.”
Even more, in Luke 11, Jesus lets them have it with what are known as The Seven Woes. In Luke 11:46, He says, "Woe to you lawyers as well! For you weigh men down with burdens hard to bear, while you yourselves will not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers.”
Burdening people down – ourselves included – with caveats that God never intended puts us at odds with our Creator and with our Savior.
That being said, we need to look closely at what the Scriptures do inform us about this issue of the Sabbath. The question we are asking, and the title of this message, is, “What do Christians have to do with the Sabbath?”
One of the first things I hear when people begin to speak about this topic is that, “We are no longer under the Law, so we are not required to observe the Sabbath.”
I understand the first part of that, and I know it to be true. Paul makes it clear in several places that the Law convicts us of sin and that we are completely incapable of living up to it. God, knowing this, provided a means for us to be considered pure and blameless through our faith in the substitutionary death and resurrection of His Son.
As to the second part of that statement, I want to ask this question: Of the Ten Commandments, other than the fourth, which are we no longer bound to obey?
See, the claim people make is that expecting Sabbath observance of any kind is legalism. Well, let’s test that, shall we?
What is the first commandment? “Thou shalt have no other God’s before Me.” What God is saying is that He is to have preeminence in our lives; He is to occupy the greatest portion of our affections, our energies, our devotions and our interests – no one and no thing is to be more important to us that He is.
Has that changed? Is putting God in first place “legalism”?
How about the second commandment? “"You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them.’”
Is avoiding making idols and worshiping them legalism? Then how about not taking the name of the Lord in vain? Is it now okay to use God’s name as a curse word? Is showing deep respect for the name and the character of God legalism?
What about honoring our parents? Not murdering? Not committing adultery, not stealing, not lying or not coveting what God in His wisdom and mercy has given to others? Is observing those commandments legalism? Are they no longer valid and can we now live however we choose without thought to at the least God’s discipline if not His judgment? Do we now have freedom in Christ to lie, steal, murder and commit adultery?
Then how is it that that one commandment, the commandment to “remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” how is it that that is the one command of God that is no longer valid?
The primary reason is that doing so is totally inconvenient, old-fashioned and violating it doesn’t really do any harm to someone else. We’ll discuss that more in a moment.
It’s inconvenient because, “It’s really the only day I have to get caught up on things around the house,” or, “Sunday is the only day we have to get our shopping done,” or, “I have so many projects to get done at work that I can’t afford to slack off for a day.”
It’s old-fashioned because, “Nobody but the really legalistic churches do that anymore,” or, “People don’t really do that anymore,” or, “Times have changed and that’s Old Testament, not New Testament.”
We say that violating the sanctity of the Sabbath doesn’t really harm anyone else, but what about the single mother of three who waits tables for a living? She has three youngsters that she would love to spend time with, maybe take them to church, play with them at the park – you know, just enjoy a quiet Sunday together. But, she has to work because Sunday is one of their busiest days, what with the huge “after-church” crowds that come in every Sunday afternoon.
What about our national economy? When the Children of Israel had gone on for a very long time, not giving the land the Sabbath rest that God had commanded them to give it every seventh year, God made sure the land got all of the rest they had denied it – al at one time. The land was allowed to rest for seventy years while they were in captivity in Babylon.
The years of a steady economy have been largely absent from our nation ever since both of these ordinances of God have been more and more neglected in America – bringing His tithe into the storehouse and keeping the Sabbath holy.
Just as Jesus warned the Pharisees about tampering with God’s Law by making it burdensome and demanding, there also exists a warning to us not to make being obedient to God’s Law no longer an important part of holy living. Tampering with the moral Law of God in either direction is equally problematic and places the tamperer in opposition to Almighty God. He is, after all, the Giver of all law.
When Jesus confronts the Pharisees about their lack of understanding about God’s view of the Sabbath, He was not, as my favorite Bible teacher puts it, “putting and end to the use of the Sabbath; He was putting and end to the abuse of the Sabbath.”
Think about this for a moment: if Jesus was doing away with the command to observe the Sabbath as some teach, why then did He continue to observe it after that day?
We need to look at ourselves through the lens of the heart of the Pharisees as we look at their attitude while they are in the synagogue on that Sabbath. Do we, as they should have, come to the house of God with a desire to worship the Lord and to be instructed by Him, to celebrate the wonder of His majesty and glory?
Or do we come to the house of prayer looking for and expecting to find something wrong, something we can disagree with, something that we can complain about? For my part, I believe that everyone listening to me today comes here for the former cause and not the latter. Guard your hearts, though – it is too easy a slide into the pharisaical to be overconfident.
The Pharisees came to the synagogue on that second Sabbath with the intent of catching Jesus violating their standards on the Sabbath – they just never seemed to learn the lesson, did they?
Yet, here again we need to be careful – it is so easy to expect others to have the kind of relationship with God, the kind of prayer life, the kind of life in general that we expect them to have. Who made us the judge of any of that, I ask you.
This is to be a place where every person who comes through that door or calls on the telephone or sees one of us at the store or anywhere else that this is the safest and most merciful and gracious place for them to come in their weaknesses and in their need, and in their lack of knowledge and understand, and be graciously guided, lovingly supported, gently corrected, compassionately heard and consistently spoken God’s truth to.
So, how are we to deal with this issue about the Sabbath?
If you will look up here for a moment, you will see that I have three objects close at hand. There is a block of wood, a large nail, and a delicate glass paperweight. The latter is a gift I recently received from a kind and dear friend, and it is part of a set.
My goal at the moment is to drive this nail into this board. Why doesn’t really matter at this point – this is just something that I need to accomplish. Now, the nail and the board go together – but what does the paperweight have to do with the other two items?
Usually, nothing at all. But, at this moment, since I need something harder and heavier than my hand with which to drive in this nail and this paperweight is more convenient than my hammer, I am just going to use it. Okay?
Any objections? You think this is an improper use of this gift? Do you consider me to be a little lazy in that I won’t make the effort to inconvenience myself for a few minutes and go and get the proper tool for the job?
We have to be quite honest with ourselves, I think. When we look around us at the culture in which we live, what do we see in this regard? Why, the Lord’s Day is pretty much like any other day except that many of us do not work on Sunday. There are, however, a great many people who do work on Sundays – in America and abroad – that would not have done so forty years ago.
I can recall the great amount of discussion that was going around in the small community where we lived in the early sixties. The United Sates Supreme Court had ruled in 1961 that the Sunday Closing laws that most states had on the books were constitutional because they had a secular not a religious purpose.
Ironically, within a couple of years, many states began to change those laws. I can remember going to the Lucky Supermarket several blocks from our home after church on the first Sunday that they opened after Washington State changed their law.
Here was hardly anyone in the store (I went after church, and we lived across the street from the church we were attending at the time). I bought a can of Shasta root beer for a nickel. I felt a little weird to be there doing that – almost like something bad had all of a sudden been declared good and I wasn’t sure if it was true or how to handle the change.
No lightning; no earthquake; no voice from heaven. I don’t remember ever giving much of a thought after that. Like most people, I adjusted quickly to the change. It didn’t take long before almost every business around the area was open for a few hours on Sunday.
What does that have to do with our study today? Like I said, take a look around at our culture today. Today, we rarely see places of business in many industries closed on Sundays: restaurants, gas stations, shopping malls, and a variety of others. Now, within the last few months, even liquor stores are starting to be opened on Sundays in certain jurisdictions.
Add to that professional sports, places of entertainment and things of that nature, and we see that there is little if any regard for the gift and the ordinance of God that the Sabbath has been throughout most of human history.
So what do we do? Do we choose to live our lives in accordance with God’s statutes out of love and reverence for Him and all of His glorious attributes and gifts, or do we choose to live according to the relevant culture in which we live in abandonment of what God has ordained and instituted – for His own glory and for our benefit?
I need to take a moment and speak to the issue of which day is the Sabbath day supposed to be. Historically, the Sabbath day was the seventh day – Saturday. It was this day that the Lord rested after completing His work of creation. It is also the day that the Jewish people, those to whom God had codified the observance of the Sabbath as part of His moral Law, had always observed as the Sabbath.
When did this all change, you might ask. There is no single instance or one single verse we can turn to and say, “Oh, here it is, ‘And it was at that time that the Sabbath was commanded to be observed on Sunday, the first day of the week.”
We have to look at the whole of Scripture in this regard as we do with many doctrines of the Bible. The doctrine of the Trinity comes immediately to mind. Nowhere in all of sacred Scripture is the term “the Trinity” ever employed.
But, the concept is clearly there in a multitude of places. And, when taken all together, the Scriptures clearly teach that God is three distinct persons who are one in essence while being different in personality and in function.
When we look at the Old Testament, see that God has declared the Sabbath as His own day and see that the first day of the week is called “the Lord’s Day” in the New Testament, we have to examine the New Testament records and see how this occurred.
We can discuss this at length another time, but for now, suffice it to say that Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday, the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, which occurred on a Sunday, and we find John in the book of Revelation being “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day (Revelation 1:10).” No one is ever confused about what day of the week that was. It was on the first day of the week that the early church met for worship and the like (see Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2). Let this be part of your homework.
Do you feel like you don’t have enough time to do all that you need to do? Do you feel rushed and overwhelmed? Do you have a sense of time moving too quickly and of actually running out of time?
Let’s look at this from another perspective. Think about your finances for a moment. For those of us who are regular givers, those of us who at least follow the basic discipline of tithing, what is it that we have discovered?
We have discovered that the 90% always goes further than the 100% ever did. We have discovered that, in being obedient on this fundamental level to what God has ordained as a principle for demonstrating obedience to what He has established within Hid economy as being good and right, we see a miracle performed on a regular and recurring basis.
What I mean by that is, just as the Children of Israel were miraculously fed with manna from heaven on six days of every week for forty years, and just as the only time that keeping manna over for an extra day did not end up with the stuff rotting and turning putrid was on the Sabbath, so we, too, see that God consistently provides above and beyond what we should actually have financially if we were to look at it from the world’s point of view.
I mean, really – how can 90% go further than 100%? That doesn’t even figure logically. And that, of course, is the point, isn’t it? God’s economy does not make sense to those who live outside of that economy.
Take that concept and apply it to keeping the Sabbath. Does it not seem probable that God – in His desire to provide everything we need in order to live in obedience to His statutes and to be blessed in the process – that God would do the same thing with our time as He does with our finances? Who created time in the first place?
Let’s go back for a moment to the passage we read earlier in Isaiah 58:13-14: What does it tell us?
"If because of the sabbath, you turn your foot from doing your own pleasure on My holy day, and call the sabbath a delight, the holy day of the LORD honorable, and honor it, desisting from your own ways, from seeking your own pleasure and speaking your own word, then you will take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; and I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."
If we call the Sabbath a delight, call it honorable and honor it, abstain from doing whatever we please, and if we speak His Word instead of our babbling about anything and everything, if we put the focus of our minds and our activities on God and the things of God, what does He tell us will happen? That our greatest delight will be the Lord and the blessings in our life will overflow and be greater than anything we know.
What does Psalm 37:4 tell us? “Delight yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart.”
What is it that your heart cries out for? What is it that you need more than anything else? Are you operating in God’s economy to obtain those things, or are you functioning under the economy of the world? Remember, the economy that you work under is the economy by which you will be paid.
Stress, fatigue, disease, mental disorders and premature aging are the normal by-products of overwork and lack of proper rest and relaxation – even complete nervous breakdowns and sudden death. Why would we drive ourselves to obtain those things? For a few dollars or for a reputation that won’t last much beyond the day of our death?
This is the natural result of ignoring what God has given us as His standard for life in this regard. It also results in a breakdown in our relationships – with God and with our friends and loved ones.
What is it that we believe about the Word of God and how do we live that out? Do we believe that what we believe is really real? Do we believe what the Word of God says, what God reveals about Himself in His Word and live as if that was the absolute truth or do we not?
You see, the answer to that question is going to determine whether or not this lesson today is a complete waste of time and energy from your perspective. What is your worldview? If it is in the Bible, what do you do with it? And, as we have discussed many times before, what we live is what we believe; we tell what the truth is about what anyone believes by looking at how they live.
For example, if someone believes that what Jesus says about God loving and wise provision in the life of every believer is absolutely true, they will live their life faithfully obedient to God’s standards and will live virtually worry-free in regard to their needs being met.
On the other hand, someone who worries about finances and food and clothing and shelter and about having enough for this or for that, this person does not really believe what the Word of God says about the nature and character of God in this regard. What they really believe is that for some reason or other, either God is not faithful to what is revealed about Him in His Word, or that they are somehow the exception to that truth. And that is a whole other topic of discussion for another time.
So, do we believe that the Ten Commandments preserve for us the eternal moral Law of God, or do we believe that when Jesus said, “"Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished (Matthew 5:17-18),” He wasn’t including the Ten Commandments?
The problem, you see, is that many of us live as though this is what we believe – at least as it applies to the fourth commandment. And here is why I believe this happens.
When we look at the punishment God required to be made when someone violated the Sabbath – and that punishment was death – and we know that the punishment is no longer required because Christ took the punishment for our sins upon Himself, we erroneously extrapolate that therefore, since the punishment for violating the Law is removed, so is the requirement to obey it.
Do we still put to death those who commit adultery or in fornication? No – and far from it. Our society today actually seems to not only embrace but to celebrate those sins. Do we still put to death those children who curse their parents or who take the name of the Lord in vain? Again, far from it.
Does that then mean that the Law of God has ceased to be the Law of God simply because He has allowed a reduction in the penalty for committing sin against that Law?
Far from it. When Jesus was confronted with dealing with the woman caught in the act of adultery in John 8, did He indicate that what she was doing was no longer sin? Not in the least. Even though He told her accusers, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her, (verse 7)” He also said to her (verse 11), "I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more."
Jesus did not allow for her sin. What He did do was call Her sin just that and then call her to repentance. That, after all, is the purpose of the Law in our lives today.
In the same way, we do not put to death by stoning a person who is caught working on the Sabbath. But does that justify saying that the Law of God no longer applies?
What are we to do with this?
We have to ask ourselves some questions and we have to prayerfully study the Word of God. How we interpret the Bible – our hermeneutics, if you will – is of great importance.
Some will turn to Galatians 4:9 as a proof-text to demonstrate that Paul taught that believers are no longer bound by the observance of the fourth commandment. When we look at that verse, however, we find ourselves in a dangerous theological position if we consider the moral Law of God to be “weak and worthless elemental things.”
What Paul is referring to here is their superstitious pursuit of God’s favor and blessing through their observances instead of through the shed blood and redeeming grace of Jesus Christ. He is not saying that remembering the Lord’s Day and keeping it holy is a weak and worthless thing.
People also use Colossians 2:16-17 as a proof-text to say that we are to no longer be concerned with observing a Sabbath. Those verses have to be taken in context, however. Paul is investing a great deal of theological energy combating a heresy that was wreaking havoc in the church at Colossae.
Judaizers – men who came saying that faith in Jesus Christ was not enough for salvation, but that to be a believer and have assurance of salvation one had to also observe all of the ceremonial laws as well – were causing many to stumble and grow weak in their faith.
Paul confronts those false teachings and assures the Colossian believers that faith in and obedience to Christ is enough, that “For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority (Colossians 2:9-10).”
Any time someone teaches that salvation is “Jesus Christ and…” anything else, they are teaching falsehood and you need to confront their false teachings as heresy.
What do we do, then, with Romans 14, when Paul talks about the stronger and weaker brother and their differences in what they eat and what day they consider to be holy?
We have to once again remember our rules of hermeneutics. We have to understand who Paul is writing to and their frame of reference. Poor hermeneutics, poor biblical interpretation has led people to believe that in this passage, Paul sets aside the fourth commandment, just as he does the requirements of observing certain dietary laws.
What he is doing, in fact, is telling his readers that we are not to judge another about whether or not we follow certain ceremonial dietary requirements or whether we observe the Sabbath on the Lord’s Day instead of on Saturday.
We have this battle going on between the Seventh Day Adventists and the rest of Christendom today. The SDA’s contend as the Judaizers of old that we are required to maintain all of the Old Testament laws and believe in Jesus Christ to be saved.
The problem with that is twofold. First, this is patently not so according to the teachings of the Bible, some of which we have already delved into here today. The second is that they themselves do not adequately observe these ordinances themselves to be considered adherents to the laws they claim are relevant and binding for salvation.
If we hold to the interpretation that has become common and widespread in evangelicalism today that what Paul is saying is that anyone who considers any day more important than another for worshiping God and focusing on Him is weak, I think we run dangerously close to heresy ourselves.
I hear people say, “Every day is the Lord’s Day, so it doesn’t really matter what day you set aside to worship God.” There was a time when I bought into that interpretation myself. I no longer can believe that to be the case and have had to repent of that this week myself.
Again, let me use the example from Revelation 1:10, when John says, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.” What day of the week was that? Sunday? How do you know? If every day “is the Lord’s Day”, couldn’t it have been Tuesday? Or Thursday? Or maybe it was Friday?
No. Anyone with even a lick of understanding of the Bible and Christian heritage knows that John is speaking specifically about Sunday.
We arrive at the personal application part of the lesson, and this is important for all of us to understand. Just as the ways in which we live our lives for Jesus Christ have similarities and differences because our faith is personal, so will our personal application of this lesson have similarities and differences.
When do the majority of believers in the world meet for community worship and study of God’s Word? When do the majority of believers in the world go to church? On Sunday. And that, my friends, is where the commonality and uniformity of observance of the Lord’s Day exist.
We can attend services anywhere in the world and discover a myriad of approaches to the holding of worship services. But the one thing that almost al of them will have in common is that they occur on Sunday.
Now, you may have a little internal grating going on at this point, thinking that I am being legalistic. I am not – all I am telling you is what I have discovered from my study of the Scriptures on this matter. What you and your household do with it is up to you. I will not judge you for how you choose – and, I ask the same from you in return.
I dare not give you a list of do’s and don’ts about observing the Lord’s Day. I dare not add unbiblical mandates to what God has spoken clearly about. What I am required to do, however, is tell you as clearly as I am able what God has to say in His Word about these matters and help you grow in the training and admonition of the Lord – and to do so with grace.
Each of us has to go to God and ask Him to speak to our hearts about what He would have us do with this truth. All of us has to go to the Lord and confess that we have held assumptions that are not consistent with what His Word says and ask Him to guide us into the truth in such a way that we will have the desire and the ability to live faithful to that truth.
And we need to go to Him with gratitude for His mercy and His grace in loving us despite our ignorance, our willfulness and our hardheadedness. We need to ask Him to help us understand this without being legalistic or self-righteous.
There are amazing benefits to being faithful to observing the Lord’s Day. It honors Jesus Christ and it brings blessing to each of us. Jesus, as Lord of the Sabbath, has given us every spiritual blessing, and that is the best way in which to see this matter, I believe.
When we come here on Sundays, if we do so thankful that we have one day when we can put away the chores and duties and requirements of everyday life and replace those with time spent with other believers of Jesus Christ and involved in singing His praises, remembering how He has moved in our lives and being instructed in His Word, we come to understand that the sanctity of the Lord’s Day is not a burdensome duty but instead is a wonderful gift from our loving Savior.
Jesus has given us two gifts, if you will, to help us commemorate who He is and what He accomplished for us: the Lord’s Supper and the Lord’s Day. The Lord’s Supper serves as a steady reminder to us of the atoning sacrifice of His death on the cross, the forgiveness of our sins and the reconciliation between us and God. The Lord’s Day is the reminder to us of His resurrection and the promise of the eternal life that He has purchased and given freely to us.
That is why it is important for us to observe both on a regular basis. That is also why it is important for us to understand the significance of these two gifts.
The Lord’s Day is a day of consecrated rest. We have all kinds of holidays to rest from our labors. But one day has been given to us to rest and worship, to pull back from the world and focus on the things of heaven and to seek opportunities to share God’s mercy and grace with others.
Our goal on the Lord’s Day is to be on God, not on anything else – it is His day, not ours. We have six days in which to do our labors, six days to be active and running around and doing our whatevers – but there is one more day in the week, and He has asked us to devote that day to Him. Is that too much for Him to ask? Is it an unreasonable request that He is making? And, is it really a request, or has it truly been commanded.
I think that if you truly study the Scriptures, you will discover the latter to be the case. But God never gives us a command simply to exercise His power and control over us. That is what men and women do to us – but God never does.
There are always benefits and blessings to obeying what God has commanded There are often struggles with our flesh to do so, and that is where the difficulties arise – in our unwillingness to completely submit to God’s sovereignty.
Nothing should be more important to us than growing in our faith in God, in our understanding of Him, in our relationship to Him, and in our worship of Him. To set aside one day each week to accomplish that makes absolutely perfect sense, aside form it being what He has ordained to be His will.
The things of this world strive together to pull us away from those things. We struggle through the week against the pull of all that ungodliness and temptation. The Lord’s Day provides us with rest from that as well as the ability to refocus our energies and our affections to where they should be.
There is a lot more than I could say about this, but I will leave it for another time. You have been very patient with me as I have taken though a great deal of material. I pray that God will find a way to use at least some of it to draw you into a deeper walk with Him.
I want to close with this: turn with me to Ephesians 2:10. The verse begins with this statement: “For we are His workmanship.” That word, “workmanship”, is poema in the Greek. From it, we get our word poem – we are God’s “poem”.
The rest of the verse tells us what the purpose of God’s poem is to be: “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
The Lord’s Day is the day when God’s poema comes together to worship Him, to share in the gifts He has given us, to welcome those who are hurting and struggling, and to render acts of kindness and mercy.
As you study and discuss this lesson through the week, I ask you to keep that all in mind
Let’s pray.
