Perspectives

Why So Many Christians Reject Sabbath

Oblivious to the obvious.

Clifford Goldstein

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Why So Many Christians Reject Sabbath

Why do so many Christians not see the seventh-day Sabbath, so obviously biblical? It’s because they’re reading the Bible through 1,800 years of Sunday-keeping.

Of course, as a Seventh-day Adventist, I would say that. But, still, that’s what they do: interpret the texts through this defective lens, which explains why they’re oblivious to the obvious.

Old Testament

“Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended 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” (Gen. 2:1-3).

Before the fall, before human sin, before sacrifices, before the Jews even, the seventh day was blessed and sanctified, set apart by God who Himself (as the text says) rested on it. 

Thousands of years later, at Sinai, Scripture says, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work . . . For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it” (Ex. 20: 8-9, 11). The imperative, the command to “Remember,” refers to what they already knew: the sacredness of the seventh day, sanctified and made holy millennia earlier (Gen. 2:1-3), and now reiterated in the fourth commandment.

Besides that, their knowledge of the seventh-day Sabbath is affirmed in Exodus 16, when, before Sinai, the Lord said, “that I may test them, whether they will walk in My law or not” (Ex. 16:4). What law? Well, whatever that law included, it certainly included the seventh-day Sabbath, because that was the immediate test: “See! For the LORD has given you the Sabbath; therefore He gives you on the sixth day bread for two days. Let every man remain in his place; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.”

If, however, people knew from Eden about the seventh-day Sabbath, why was no mention made of the commandment during the patriarchal days? Maybe for the same (unknown) reason no mention was made of the commandment against adultery, even though Joseph could declare, “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (Gen. 39:9). Who told Joseph that it was a sin against God? Or, even much earlier, when God had warned Cain. “And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door” (Gen. 4:7). How would Cain, without the law, know about sin (see Rom. 3:20)?

Also, didn’t the Lord say about Abraham, long before Moses, or even before Joseph, that “Abraham obeyed My voice and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws” (Gen. 26:5). Commandments, statutes, laws, including the seventh-day Sabbath, before Sinai or before the Jews even. 

How, then, can some argue that the seventh-day Sabbath was given only to the Jews?  Because they have to narrow the scope and application of the seventh-day Sabbath, a move which makes its abolition, or replacement, with Sunday, easier to justify. In other words, after being filtered through 1,800 years of Christian Sunday-keeping, an obvious truth, the seventh-day Sabbath from the Eden onward, becomes blurred, even lost.

Meanwhile, even if one accepts this error, nothing in these Old Testament texts hint at, or foreshadow, Sunday.

Sabbath in the Gospels

Most mention in the Gospels of the seventh-day Sabbath center around Jesus healing on it. The accounts follow a motif: Jesus heals on the Sabbath, and the religious leaders accuse Him of breaking it, such as with the boy blind from birth. “Therefore some of the Pharisees said, ‘This Man is not from God, because He does not keep the Sabbath.’ Others said, ‘How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?’ And there was a division among them” (John 9:16). 

Or with the man and his withered hand: “So the scribes and Pharisees watched Him closely, whether He would heal on the Sabbath, that they might find an accusation against Him. But He knew their thoughts, and said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Arise and stand here.’ And he arose and stood. Then Jesus said to them, I will ask you one thing: Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy?’ And when He had looked around at them all, He said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ And he did so, and his hand was restored as whole as the other. But they were filled with rage, and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.” (Luke 6:7-11).

In every case, Jesus was showing the proper way to keep the seventh-day Sabbath (“Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy?”), as opposed to leaving the people under the mind-numbing man-made restrictions that the religious leaders placed on the fourth commandment. [i]

And yet—what? Some argue that Jesus did these healings on Sabbath in order to wean His followers from the seventh day in favor of the first, which He knew was coming. How, possibly, when each incident only reinforced how to keep the Sabbath, could these healings be seen as Jesus weakening it?

It’s easy. The interpretation—that, by diminishing the seventh-day Sabbath, Jesus was preparing people for Sunday worship—comes from imposing the long tradition of Sunday-keeping on the texts themselves. It certainly doesn’t come from the texts themselves.

Also, even if one accepts the dubious idea that Jesus was weakening the commandment, nothing in the accounts hint at Sunday.

Lord of the Sabbath

In Matthew 12 (see also Mark 2:28 and Luke 6:15), in response to another challenge by the Pharisees regarding Sabbath observance (His disciples plucking heads of grain to eat), Jesus said, among other things: “Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless? Yet I say to you that in this place there is One greater than the temple. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless,’” (Matt. 12: 6-7). In other words, He’s showing not only the deeper meaning of the law, which the leaders had lost sight of, He’s also letting them know, again, who He really was: One greater than the Temple.

Of course He was greater than the Temple. He was the Lord who established the Temple, and so He knew what you could and could not do, not only in the Temple but also on the Sabbath, which He established even before the Temple, and why He said: “For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Matt. 12:8). That is, as Lord of the Sabbath day, He knows how it should be kept.

How could anyone claim, then, that Jesus’ statement about Himself as “Lord of the Sabbath” was Him showing His prerogative to change the day to Sunday, a sign of the New Covenant? For one reason alone: they are reading back into the texts what’s not in the texts, and that is, centuries of Sunday-keeping.

And even if one believed that Jesus calling Himself “Lord of the Sabbath” showed His intent to change it, Matthew 12:8 nowhere points to Sunday.

New Moons and Sabbaths

Every Sunday polemic includes Colossians 2:16, 17—”So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ.” Whatever the ceremonialism that Paul is confronting here, he’s certainly not confronting the fourth commandment, which is not a shadow of anything but a weekly reminder of creation and redemption. Thus, to stick the seventh day, first sanctified and set apart in Eden and before human sin, and then reiterated in the fourth commandment—to stick that in the same class as shadowy ceremonial food and drink is to distort the text into saying that the fourth commandment was “part of  the handwriting of requirements that was against us,” and thus “wiped out” by the cross (Col. 2:14).

Only by reading Colossians 2:16-17 through 1,800 years of Sunday-keeping does one find “evidence” for the abolition of the seventh day, which, in their thinking, paves the way for the first. That is, even though nothing in the texts point to Sunday as the replacement for the seventh day, supposedly “wiped out” by the death of Jesus.

The Lord’s Day

The sin qua non text for Sunday-keeping apologetics is, of course, Revelation 1:10—”I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and I heard behind me a loud voice, as of a trumpet.” The only problem is that, in the Bible, the first day of the week, Sunday, is never referred to as His, the Lord’s, day. Verses like “the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night” (2 Pet. 3:10; see also Acts 2:10; 1 Thess. 5:2), are dealing with apocalyptic events, not with a day of the week.

The Bible does, however, state: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God” (Exo. 20:8-10; italics supplied). Etched in stone, by the finger of God Himself, the commandment calls the seventh day “the Sabbath of the Lord your God”; or “the Lord’s Day.” And if “the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath,” and if the Sabbath is the seventh day, then the seventh day is obviously, Jesus’, or the Lord’s, day.

How, then, did the clause “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day” come to be almost universally understood as Sunday? It’s the same principle: interpreting the New Testament through tradition rather than through the New Testament itself.  

Meanwhile, nothing in Revelation 1:10 implies, or hints at, Sunday.

1,800 years of tradition has so distorted the Christians’ view of the Sabbath that most remain oblivious to the obvious.

Saved by Faith

Last but not least, every Protestant knows the verse: “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law” (Rom. 3:28) and others like it (Rom. 4:13; Gal. 2:16; Phil. 3:9). The law only condemns, not justifies, and what Christian who has had any experience of God’s holiness, in contrast to his or her own sinfulness, could think otherwise?

Yet for some strange reason texts like these mean that though all other nine commandments—idolatry, adultery, theft, etc.—remain valid, the fourth commandment, the Sabbath, became nullified, antiquated, Old Covenant stuff (even though it existed before any covenant), replaced with the “Lord’s Day,” Sunday, the supposed new covenant symbol of grace, of our completed rest in Jesus. All this, even though not one text says that Sunday is the “Lord’s Day,” or that it replaces the biblical Sabbath as a sign of rest in Christ.

Why, then, do we hear reasoning like this, or similar, from other Christians regarding the fourth commandment? It’s the same easy answer: they are reading 1,800 years of Sunday-keeping tradition back into texts that have nothing to do with Sunday, and certainly not as a replacement for seventh-day Sabbath.

Bull’s-Eye

We should have sympathy for Sunday apologists, really. Wherever on the historical timeline, first-through-fifth century AD, one places the beginning of Sunday-keeping, it has been practiced for so long that it’s just assumed correct. It’s more deeply rooted in the Christian psyche than is Christmas or Easter, even if no more biblical than Santa Claus or painted eggs. 

Yet the longevity of a belief doesn’t make it true. For about 1,300 years people believed that the sun orbited the earth, in contrast to only the last 600 (a bit later for Rome) when humanity learned the truth. Meanwhile, many known figures in Christian history (except Jesus, Paul, and the apostles) kept Sunday, such as Augustine, Luther, the Popes. And could they all be wrong, while Seventh-day Adventists, small stuff in comparison, are correct?

And, also, keeping the seventh-day Sabbath would mean being linked with (heaven forbid!)—the Jews.

Consciously or not (and, probably, in most cases, unconsciously) Sunday apologists are like those who draw a target around the bullet hole, ensuing a bull’s-eye. They’re faced with a fact: long centuries of Sunday-keeping, which, though not biblical, has to be “made” so.  

In short, though the seventh day was sanctified and set apart in Eden, reiterated in the Decalogue, kept by Jesus and the early church, and remains a weekly reminder of creation and redemption—1,800 years of tradition has so distorted the Christians’ view of the Sabbath that, yes, and unfortunately, most remain oblivious to the obvious.


[i] To begin to get an idea of all the restrictions, man-made, on how to they were supposedly to keep the Sabbath, see  https://www.ou.org/holidays/the_thirty_nine_categories_of_sabbath_work_prohibited_by_law/

Clifford Goldstein

Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Bible Study Guide. His latest book is Risen, Finding Hope in the Empty Tomb.

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