@ Josh
2024-07-19 20:13:47
I stood in the back of the church after Sunday’s service. An unfamiliar congregant approached me with a question: “If Saturday is the Sabbath day, and the Sabbath command is one of the ten commandments, then why do churches worship on Sunday?” It is a good question. While many evangelical churches today hold that the Sabbath command is the only commandment of the ten commandments not repeated in the New Testament, and therefore no longer binding, the more traditional Protestant view is that the ten commandments are part of the moral or natural law, and therefore all of the ten commandments remain in force, including the fourth commandment.
If that’s true, why worship on Sunday? Christians have worshiped on Sunday since the earliest times in the church because Sunday, the first day of the week, is the day Jesus rose from the dead. They called it “the Lord’s Day” (Rev. 1:10), and 1 Cor. 16:2 and Acts 20:7 both strongly suggest, if not demonstrate conclusively, that it was the early disciples’ custom, from the beginning, to meet on the first day of the week for worship. Jesus set apart the day not only by rising from the dead on that day, but also in His frequent appearances on the first day of the week after His resurrection (John 20:19; 20:26) and in the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, also on the first day of the week.
Still, if the Sabbath is a perpetual command, and Saturday is the Sabbath day, then how can churches simply ignore that fact and change the day it is observed? Aren’t they breaking God’s commandment? In truth, the fourth commandment never fixes Saturday as the day it must be observed. Scripture simply says it is to be observed the seventh day, because the LORD made the earth and the heavens in six days, and on the seventh day He rested from His work (Exod. 20:9; 35:2; Gen. 2:2-3). Granted, the seventh day, counted from the first day of creation, if we call that seventh day “Saturday,” would be observed Saturday each week, in perpetuity. And yet, the New Testament is very clear that Christ has inaugurated a new day, and a new creation. As 2 Cor. 5:17 says, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” In fact, many prophecies, both verbal and typological, of the Old Testament, point to a fulfillment which sets apart the first day of the week (the eighth day as opposed to the seventh) as particularly holy (e.g. the Temple was dedicated on the first day of the week; Hebrew males were circumcised on the eighth day, etc.).
So that first resurrection Sunday, when Jesus rose from the dead very early in the morning (John 20:1), was the expected and prophesied dawning of the first day of a new world (Rev. 21:5). It was the dawning of that eschatological eighth day, the beginning of a new week—a new Sabbath, if you will—prophesied in types and shadows throughout the Old Testament. Jesus did not come to abolish the Law, but He did come to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17). He is Lord of the Sabbath (Matt. 12:8), and He set apart and sanctified the first day of the week by rising from the dead on that day. Which is a more fitting day for Christians to worship Jesus our risen Redeemer—Saturday, the day He was dead in the tomb, or Sunday, the day He rose triumphant from the tomb?
The upshot is this: Christians still observe the day of God’s rest, every seventh day, just as the fourth commandment requires, but we observe it not on the day God rested from His work of creation, but on the day Jesus, God incarnate, rested from His work of redemption, as Christians have from the beginning. For if Jews under the Old Testament observed the Sabbath every seventh day in remembrance of the day God rested from His work of creation, how much more should we worship every seventh day, in remembrance of the day God rested from His greater work of making a new creation?
Author's note: I am indebted for much of the substance of this article to Robert Haldane's concise but persuasive work entitled Sanctification of the Sabbath: The Permanent Obligation to Observe the Sabbath or Lord's Day.