SABBATH

Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Six days you shall you labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your GOD.
Exodus 20:8-10

The Hebrew word is ‘shabbat’ and means-everywhere I can find-‘to rest’. It literally means to just stop and take a nap. And that might just be all we need to know to answer that age-old question: when should we go to church’? Because that is a question that has split some churches and ended fellowship of some with another. Some say Saturday is the ‘seventh’ so THAT is the ‘Sabbath’ (I suppose because ‘Saturday’ and ‘Sabbath Day’ sound alike?) And some say Sunday because that’s when the early church met. Except…well, we will get to that later.

But in reality this is a verb, not a noun. And in scripture it was used in reference not only to the ‘sabbath’ as a day of worship, but to the feast days and festivals outlined in scripture. We MADE it a noun evidently because we didn’t have enough to argue over. The Pharisees certainly took it to heart, with the rabbinical law having 39 CATEGORIES of things you couldn’t do on the Sabbath, and the Sabbath being very specifically what we wold consider Saturday. But these were man-made rules, added to the simple instruction ‘rest’. Keeping track of all the work you weren’t allowed to do strikes me as a whole lot of work…

We need to be very clear when we choose to make rules. Actually, we should follow the old saying of the Campbellite movement (which really is just a paraphrase of Romans 4:15) that ‘we will make no law where there is no law’. God did NOT say ‘Saturday (or Sunday) is a special day, that’s MY day, worship me’. No, He said that the day of the ‘sabbath’-the day of rest-is to be given over to Him. He DID say ‘six days you shall work’, and established a 7-day week, but He did NOT say which particular day that was to be. Just make sure to do it. Take time to consider God. To thank Him for everything. To consider His ways.

God also gave a ‘year of Jubilee’ where the land was to have a whole year of Sabbaths. Did that mean every day was Saturday (or Sunday)? Of course not. It meant that the land was allowed to rest. To recover from its labor.  Which was both Old Testament law and actually as far as  I can tell never followed, anyway. But we are New Testament believers. So maybe we should meet the day that the early church did, which was on the ‘first day of the week’. Buuuuut actually, Acts 2 says they ‘…continued to meet every day in the temple courts.’ So if we want to be TRULY ‘New Testament Christians’ maybe we should try this? 

Today we in the orthodox Protestant faith take it to be Sunday. That is the ‘first day of he week’ even though we usually thin of it as the last day of the weekend, the early church held their ‘feast days’ or ‘day of remembrance’ on that day (though many still worshipped at the temple on Saturday) and we use it because Jesus rose from the dead that day. Though if we stop to think about it, He rose from the grave on Easter Sunday and went right to work. His redemptive work was completed on Friday, He rested on Saturday and on Sunday He arose to get the church organized for the Spirit to take over. So maybe we missed the mark there, as well..

The first council in Jerusalem (and most of the disciples attended it so they might’ve had a better inkling for what Jesus thought than we do) didn’t seem to think the specific day was that important. They didn’t even address it, instead giving instructions on just avoiding things polluted by idols, sexual immorality and food with blood still in it. Later Paul will write in Romans 14 that whatever day a man chooses to worship God is fine, don’t try to force it on anyone else. The idea is that it isn’t the SPECIFIC day that’s important, just that we TAKE a day during our week to devote to God.

Colossians 2: 16-17
Therefore let no one pass judgement on you of food or drink, or with regard to a festival or new moon or Sabbath. These are shadows of things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.