So many rules…
“Walk, but don’t run!”
“Wade, but don’t swim!”
“Hike, but don’t bike!”
These are a few interesting Adventist Sabbath regulations I grew up with. Of course, all these regulations were intended to guide energetic, youthful minds on properly preserving the sanctity of the seventh-day Sabbath. On a certain level, I am grateful for that attempted guidance. However, as an adult (and a parent), the rationale behind some of these prohibitions and restrictions rings a bit hollow, lacking a biblical basis (at least that I can see). Furthermore, I know I’m not alone in my estimation of some of these Adventist Sabbath traditions. Many of my peers (Millennials), and even more so Gen-Zers, can no longer pretend these rules make sense. I would venture that even those of us who at least appreciate the spirit behind the initial development and subsequent bequeathing of these rules to us, by and large, don’t find them compelling, necessary, or biblical. Indeed, I think it’s possible that we, as Adventists, may have, at times, fallen into the same trap as the religious leaders of Jesus’ day. Perhaps through misguided zeal for the holiness of the Sabbath, we have propped up too many restrictions and traditions around the biblical Sabbath commandment that prevent the world we’re trying to reach from actually being attracted to and appreciating its true beauty.[1] As the current-day torch carriers of the Adventist message and mission, we should reflect on this and investigate whether our traditional Sabbath-keeping practices are more reminiscent of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day and whether they need a good pruning.
Fenced in
By the time of the first century AD, a vast amount of commentary had been developed and passed down orally through the various religious schools of thought within Judaism. The Gospels refer to these teachings as the “Traditions of the Elders.”[2] One of the critical topics of Jewish debate and commentary was proper Sabbath observance. These rabbinical commentaries were initially intended to help ordinary people live in accordance with the law without becoming experts in Torah. However, they evolved into traditions and enforced regulations that became so burdensome that Sabbath-keeping was nearly impossible. Again, the initial intent of these commentaries was in some respects positive in that it was intended to serve as a fence around the plain commandments regarding Sabbath-keeping in Torah. The idea was that if one builds a fence around the Sabbath, then if someone “broke” one of the traditions that surrounded the Sabbath, the Sabbath (and its holiness) would remain intact. The problem is that subsequent generations after the Babylonian exile identified (rightly) the cause of their exile as the desecration of the Sabbath and idolatry, and therefore (and wrongly motivated) concluded that to avoid another exile and to return Israel to independence and eventual world dominance, the Jewish people would need to keep the law perfectly. This led to the creation of traditions or fences around the fences that were already created.[3]
As time passed, and world domination and even independent nation status eluded them, more rules were added to “help” the common Jewish people keep the Sabbath (and other religious laws) better. Unfortunately, as generations passed, new religious scholars would add more fences around the previous fences until, by the time of Christ, the intent of the Sabbath was wholly misunderstood, such that religious teachers thought that the Sabbath was more important than meeting the felt needs of suffering humanity (Luke 13:14,15). This was especially so when the teachings that composed the fences were treated with the same sanctity as Scripture. These extra-biblical Sabbath regulations, which were meant to be a guide and a fence to protect people from inadvertently breaking the Sabbath, turned into a barrier that kept people from experiencing the Sabbath as God intended, a day of liberation, a day of spiritual and physical renewal, in a word, a foretaste of true wholistic peace (Shalom), a gift from the Prince of Peace.[4]
A Gift Wrapped
Have you ever received a gift package in the mail that was a little too well packaged? What was the purpose of the packaging? Presumably, it was to safeguard the contents within it while it was in transit to you, the recipient. However, once you have received the gift, the packaging is only a frustrating barrier that blinds and blocks you from the actual gift inside. Indeed, some packaging (typically that which surrounds my children’s toys for Christmas and birthdays) has frustrated me to the point of nearly no longer caring what was inside. And that is my point here, to raise the question: Have we, as Adventists, used the wrong wrapping paper for the Sabbath? When we tell others about the Sabbath, do we only mention what we cannot do while failing to mention the liberating aspects of what the Sabbath commemorates and allows us to do and experience? Are we so concerned about the Sabbath being inadvertently desecrated “by the young people” that we have forgotten to actually enjoy it (and show other people how to do the same)?
When we share the Sabbath as a list of “Don’ts,” especially when those “Don’ts” lack a scriptural warrant and are purely based on Adventist traditions, we may be unwittingly committing the same error as the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, whom He declared were tying burdens on people that were too heavy to bear (Matt. 23:4). When the Jewish religious leaders unintentionally made the Sabbath more of a burden than a blessing, they essentially hid the gift of the Sabbath under layers of unnecessary regulations. Only Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath, could pierce through these layers and reveal the true blessing of the Sabbath—a day of liberation! This serves as a caution, reminding us of the potential harm in prescribing overly strict regulations that can obscure the true essence of the Sabbath and steal its joy from God’s people.
In His role of liberating the Sabbath from extra-biblical and unbiblical traditions, we see Jesus again and again in the gospels doing what was considered “unlawful” by the religious teachers of His day. On the Sabbath, Jesus…
- Healed Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1:29-31);
- Healed a man with a withered hand (Mark 3:1-6);
- Healed a man born blind (John 9:1-16);
- Healed a physically disabled woman (Luke 13:10-17);
- Healed a man with dropsy (Luke 14:1-6);
- Healed the person with paralysis at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-18);
And for good measure, Jesus…
- Performed an exorcism in Capernaum during His Sabbath sermon (Mark 1:21-28).
Jesus almost certainly performed even more miracles on the Sabbath than these, but of the ones mentioned in the Gospels, most were not only acts of compassion but also teaching moments to liberate the Sabbath in the eyes of the common people from the excessive and complicated restrictions taught by the religious leaders of their day. In other words, through His miracles, Jesus liberated the Sabbath from extrabiblical, superfluous regulations so that the authentic Sabbath experience could liberate people from spiritual and physical oppression.
When we tell others about the Sabbath, do we only mention what we cannot do while failing to mention the liberating aspects of what the Sabbath commemorates and allows us to do and experience?
A Gift Unwrapped
My oldest daughter is no longer enamored by wrapping paper on Christmas morning or her birthday. She now understands that the thing of value is the gift contained within the wrapping paper. When it comes to the Sabbath, we’ve identified the wrapping paper, but what is the gift we’ve been given to appreciate, experience, and then share with others? The gift is life, real life. I mean that the Sabbath, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel put it so well, is a “palace in time,” and time is life.[5] We measure life with time, specifically in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, quarters, years, and decades. And every adult finds out sooner or later (because of sin) that we don’t have much time in this life, at least not the type of time, quality time, that our hearts crave. Time with family, time with community, time in nature, and most importantly, intimate time with God. Sabbath is a 24-hour pause in the cycle of hectic, chaotic, rat-race time that our employers and the economy have purchased from us. Sabbath is quality time, royal time, to echo Rabbi Heschel, to experience what it means to be royal image bearers. By spending that time with Him, His people, and His lost children who have yet to find their way back to him, we acknowledge the true Master of our time – our Creator (Exo. 20:8-11; Heb. 10:25).
Most Adventists recognize that the Sabbath honors creation and the Creator, but what else composes the Sabbath gift?
- Sabbath points to God’s intent for unabated human flourishing. Needless suffering should be stymied and eliminated whenever and wherever possible, especially on Sabbath.[6]
- Sabbath is a day of physical and spiritual liberation, pointing to the eschatological liberation of the Second Coming and New Earth, as demonstrated in Moses’ expository sermon on the 10 Commandments.[7]
- The Sabbath and its proper uncoerced observance bear witness to the Lordship of Christ since He is the Lord of the Sabbath. Wherever the Sabbath is properly observed, the reign of Christ and His works, including acts of mercy and love toward humanity, is manifested.[8]
When our Sabbath-keeping becomes more than a list of “don’ts” and incorporates the principles just mentioned above, I believe we, in our own personal lives, families, and worship communities, will experience the Sabbath the way God intended. We will worship God alongside fellow liberated believers and use the Sabbath to reach those who have yet to experience liberation and salvation in Christ. Then, we will begin to have a sense of what heaven is like and what the world should be like and will eventually be like. (Isa. 11, 66; Rev. 21).
Many of us may possess the gift of the Sabbath; we’ve memorized Exodus 20:8-11, and we know all the biblical regulations and many extra-biblical ones, too. Again, many of us possess the gift of intellectual knowledge about the Sabbath, and we “keep” the Sabbath through rote behavioral cycles due to habit (I’m guilty of this myself), but I would venture that many of us have yet to experience the Sabbath at a more fundamental level of physical, spiritual, and communal renewal regularly. We walk around, showing everyone and telling everyone about the wonderfully wrapped gift we’ve received, but we have no idea what’s inside because we’ve never or rarely experienced it!
Thy Kingdom Come!
Going back to Mark, chapter two, Jesus’ disciples (and perhaps Jesus Himself by extension) are accused of breaking the Sabbath because the disciples, as they passed through a field, were picking some grain (or harvesting according to the religious teachers) and smashing the kernels together in their hands (threshing and cooking, again according to the religious teachers) and proceeding to eat this light Sabbath snack. This violated a traditional understanding of a legitimate Sabbath law that the religious teachers had turned into an undue burden promoting hunger instead of Sabbath wholeness! Jesus essentially retorts that the disciples are blameless because their actions were not motivated by willful rebellion against the 10 Commandments but rather by real human needs of nourishment. Jesus defends His disciples’ behavior by providing a Scriptural example of what should have been considered a worse offense from the Hebrew Bible when David ate the consecrated bread of the presence to preserve his life even though he was not authorized to eat it being a Judahite and therefore not a priest (which were from the Aaronic line in the tribe of Levi). Given any other circumstances, this probably would have merited the death penalty, but again, Jesus and, presumedly, the religious teachers of His day understood that David was blameless in these circumstances because the perseveration of his life superseded a ritual requirement. Jesus crowns His argument with two declarations: (1) human beings were not made for keeping the Sabbath, but rather the Sabbath was made for humanity [as a gift], and (2) that Jesus Himself was Lord of the Sabbath and therefore He is the ultimate judge of what proper Sabbath observance is or is not.
As Seventh-day Adventists, we have a personal responsibility to extend the Lordship and reign of Jesus in this world, including His Lordship of the Sabbath. Not through coercive (beastly measures, i.e. Revelation 13) but through loving persuasion and demonstration (Matt. 25:31-46). One way we are called to do this work is to reveal Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath, by pointing people to the permanence of the seventh-day Sabbath as the only day God has set aside as a perpetual palace in time. (We also need to warn the world of the Sabbath’s eschatological importance so that they are not deceived by false christs and false religious systems that promote counterfeit Sabbaths that have no sanction in Scripture (Rev. 14:6-12). However, our calling also embraces demonstrating to others what the true seventh-day Sabbath can mean in a broken world. This goes hand-in-hand with identifying what day should be kept as the Sabbath for rest and worship. However, we are called not just to identify the day but to demonstrate to the world what Sabbath-living (not just Sabbath-keeping) is all about, a foretaste of heaven, a window into eternity depicting a world free from sin, strife, suffering, exclusion, fear, oppression, death, and every other thing that has no place in God’s very good creation (Gen. 1-2).
Traditions may sometimes be helpful and perhaps even necessary to maintain communities at a basic level, but let’s make sure all the “Adventist Sabbath fences” we’ve constructed have wide-open gates and that there are plenty of sharp scissors in hand to deal with stubborn wrapping paper when we endeavor to fulfill our great commission and present God’s twin gifts of salvation and the Sabbath to the world in their whole truth, glory, and beauty.
[1] To be clear, for any group to function properly, it must possess norms, a status quo, a modus operandi, and, in essence, a shared cultural baseline or common denominator to preserve its unity. As a worldwide denomination, Seventh-day Adventists have identified these core ideas as the 28 Fundamental Beliefs, which include a belief in the perpetuity of the seventh-day Sabbath. However, because we are a worldwide diverse body of believers, Adventist Sabbath observance might look very different and peculiar when migrating from one culture to another. Still, there should be an irreducible core of principles or values regarding Sabbath observance that can translate and incarnate into whatever people group, culture, or subcultures we attempt to reach. And these preferably (and I would say imperatively) should be grounded in a shared understanding of Scripture. Then, each cultural group, family, and, ultimately, individual guided by Scripture and the Holy Spirit should practice applying these principles and values to the minutiae of life without betraying or compromising the intent of the Sabbath.
[2] This oral tradition was codified not long after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and many of these teachings are preserved in what is known as the Talmud today in Judaism.
[3] This included limits on how far you could walk, what you could carry in a pocket, etc.
[4] JoAnn Davidson, recently retired professor of Systematic Theology from the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, often referred to the Sabbath as a day for miracles. This nomenclature also captures the true essence of the Sabbath as a gift to be enjoyed and not a burden.
[5] Heschel, Abraham Joshua, The Sabbath (Farar, Straus and Giroux, N.Y., 1951).
[6] Again, see the miracles of Jesus performed on the Sabbath, not despite but apparently because it was Sabbath! Keep these in mind if you’ve ever wondered why our hospitals stay open on Sabbath!
[7] Deuteronomy 5:12-15 points the rationale of the Sabbath not to Creation as it was written on the tablets of stone in Exodus but to the liberating events of the Exodus when Israel was set free from spiritual and physical bondage to tyrannical forces. Mark 1:21-28 depicts Jesus as an emancipator from spiritual tyrannical forces called demons which are fallen angels, but this act of liberation would extend to less oppressive situations such as common temptations and addictions.
[8] See Christ’s self-annunciation of His messianic mission in Luke 4:16-19, His declaration of being Lord of the Sabbath in Mark 2:28, and Isaiah’s articulation (Isa. 58) of what true Sabbath rest and other spiritual disciplines entail, including the frustration and elimination of oppressive tyrannical systems and powers though acts of mercy and love.
