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The Sabbath

God sanctifies places and things to communicate to His people. He set apart the ark of the covenant and tabernacle. He set apart His holy book—the Bible. He set apart His Holy Son—Jesus, and He set apart a holy day—the Sabbath. God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it… (Gen. 2:3). The Sabbath is the celebration of God’s complete and perfect creation. As Judah Halevi explains, “The observance of the Sabbath is in itself an acknowledgment of His omnipotence, and at the same time an acknowledgment of the creation in His divine word.”

The fourth commandment instructing us to keep the Sabbath day holy is thirty percent of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments contain 322 words. 98 of those words are are about the Sabbath.

The Sabbath was held in high esteem in both in Jewish circles and in early Christianity. The Sabbath was made at creation, two thousand years before there were any Jews. After Abraham’s time the Sabbath applied to all people, aliens, and animals within the gates of the Israelites. (An alien is someone who is not a native of the land. This is the Hebrew “ger,” a righteous non-Hebrew who has been grafted into Israel. See Romans 11:13-21.)

God intends that the Sabbath be regarded as something honorable, something significant, not for its own sake, but because of what it represents. Keeping the Sabbath is the only one of the holy days to be ordained in the Ten Commandments. It is tied to two specific and highly significant acts in history: 1.) God’s “resting” after six days of creation (Gen. 2:2) and 2.) Israel ’s deliverance from Egypt (Deut. 5:15 ).

God’s model of work and rest demonstrates how much of our lives is to be spent in labor and how much is to be spent in worship. In both the Old and New Testaments, the Sabbath calls to mind God’s sovereign rule and His merciful redemption.

The Sabbath is not a yoke of bondage. It’s a day of joy, rest, eating, and enjoying Scriptures, fellowship, etc. The Sabbath was never intended to be a restraining time of punishment. What would your reaction be if your boss came to you and said, “I want you to take tomorrow off to rest. Enjoy yourself, eat, rest, read, just don’t even think about work.” Would you feel burdened?

The Sabbath is a holy time of resting from our weekly work in order to come into a joyous worship of God. It is a time of release from the stress and pressure of making a living. It is a time to rest from our normal pursuit of physical gain and to remember our Creator.

Keeping the Sabbath honors God, our Creator, who also rested on the seventh day (Genesis 2:3). It also unifies our families and sets priorities for them. This day of rest refreshes us spiritually and physically—providing time when we can gather together and when we can reflect on God without the stress of our everyday activities.

History

The study of when the Sabbath was changed to Sunday is very interesting. The New Testament is totally silent with regard to any change of the Sabbath day or any sacredness for Sunday. The adoption of Sunday observance in place of the Sabbath did not occur in the early Church of Jerusalem by virtue of the authority of Christ or of the Apostles, but rather took place several decades later.

In 132 A.D. Bar-Kokhba led a revolt against the Romans. When he was done, 50 percent of the population of Judea was dead and tens of thousands of men and women who remained alive were sold into slavery. Jews were forbidden to set foot in Jerusalem, and the province was renamed Palestine. It was a dangerous time to be identified with the Jews. During this period, the predominate day of worship among Christians gradually began to change from the Sabbath to Sunday. The day changed, in part, because of the need to disassociate the Christian movement from the Jewish nation.

Years later, the Church of Rome: Canon 29, Council of Laodicea, 364 C.E., worried about Judaizing and gave the following statement: “Christians shall not Judaize and be idle on Saturday, the Sabbath, but shall work on that day; but the Lord’s day (Sunday) they shall honor, and as being Christians, shall, if possible, do no work on that day. If, however, they are found Judaizing, they shall be shut out from Christ.”

The Catholic Encyclopedia states that it was the Catholics who changed the day of worship from Sabbath to Sunday and claims this as a mark of its authority. Converts Catechism of Catholic Doctrine said, “Sunday observance is from when the Catholic Church transferred the solemnity from Saturday to Sunday.”

The Sabbath should be enjoyed as a day of rest, family worship and strengthening relationships and focusing on Christ. Let it bring unity and focus to your home.

Sabbath in Bible Times The Encyclopedia of Judaism explains:

The Bible does not mention that the Patriarchs observed the Sabbath (although rabbinical sources do). During their wanderings in the Wilderness of Zin and with the introduction of manna, the Israelites were first commanded to observe the Sabbath; they were told that five days of the week they were to collect a single portion of manna, but on the sixth they should collect a double portion, for “…Tomorrow is the rest of the holy sabbath unto the LORD…” (Ex. 16:23). When some searched on the seventh day for manna and found none, “And the LORD said unto Moses, How long refuse ye to keep my commandments and my laws? See, for that the LORD hath given you the sabbath, therefore he giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days; abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day” (Ex. 16:28-29). Three weeks later, the Israelites received the Ten Commandments, the fourth of which is devoted to the Sabbath.

Little information is available about Sabbath observance during the First Temple period, although something may be gleaned from statements in Amos and Hosea. There is no prohibition against trading on that day in the Pentateuch, but Amos (8:5) implies that it existed in his time. Hosea (2:13) includes the Sabbath in the happy times which will cease. Isaiah (1:13) bears witness to the Sabbath being a national institution. Jeremiah (17:21-22) exhorts the people to observe the Sabbath as it was commanded, for the future of Jerusalem depended on it. Nehemiah (chap. 10) tells of the covenant he made with the returned exiles, one point of which was not to buy items on the Sabbath. However, upon his return from Persia he saw that the covenant had not been adhered to and introduced changes to insure Sabbath observance (Neh. 13:15-22). Ezra and his disciples began to systemize rules and interpretation of the Bible and tradition to preserve and encourage Sabbath observance.

The residents of Jerusalem would not defend themselves on the Sabbath when besieged by Ptolemy I. Some 150 years later, however, during the Maccabean wars, Mattathias the Hasmonean ruled that the laws of the Sabbath may be transgressed to save lives, therefore the Jews could defend themselves on the Sabbath (1 Macc. 2:40-41). After the Sanhedrin began to function, Sabbath laws became more formalized in the Halakhah, and the rabbinical laws became the touchstone for all further development of these rules until modern times. Work is prohibited on the Sabbath. The basic feature of the Sabbath is to refrain from “work,” following the injunction in Exodus 20:10, “But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work.”