The Sabbath
What did John mean by “the Lord’s day’”’ in Revelation 1:10?
The first day of the week, not “the day of the Lord,” or the great tribulation. In chapter 1 John has no vision of the day of the Lord, but of Christ among the churches. The day of the Lord follows the apostasy of the churches, and the taking away of the Church. John’s subsequent Patmos visions take in the day of the Lord.
What is the scriptural teaching concerning the Sabbath?
Two kinds of Sabbaths have been known among men. There is, first of all, God’s Sabbath, the seventh day. God “blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it,’ when He had finished His creation work; but the Sabbath was not given to man till twenty-five hundred years after creation (Ex. 20:8-10; Neh. 9:18, 14). This Sabbath, the true biblical Sabbath, was simply and only a day of rest. The word means “cessation.” It was not a day of religious observance, except when it coincided with the annual feasts, and even then its character of rest from toil was preserved. This Sabbath was ‘‘made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” It was the day when the weary beast and the weary slave, alike with man, shared God’s rest. Not one line of Old Testament Scripture associated it with templegoing, or other religious observance.
Then, secondly, the New Testament (in the Gospels) shows us a perverted Sabbath. The synagogue, an institution unknown to Revelation, had been set up by men after the captivities, and in connection with the synagogue the scribes and Pharisees had turned God’s sweet day of “cessation,” when families and neighbors might have time for innocent social intercourse, into a stern, hard, ritual day, hedged with requirements and limitations utterly foreign to God’s Word. Against this Pharisaic Sabbath Christ set Himself. In the judgment of the most religious men of His day He, the Lord of the Sabbath, was accounted a Sabbath breaker!
This perverted Sabbath came into observance again under the Puritans, who made it even sterner, sadder, more forbidding and burdensome than the Pharisaic Sabbath had been. Unfortunately, the divines of the Protestant reformation followed Rome in confusing together the two wholly different days; the Jewish Sabbath which is, always was, and always must be the seventh day, and the Christian Lord’s day — the hybrid receiving the name of the “Christian Sabbath,” a designation as self-contradictory as it would be to speak of “the Jewish Lord’s day.” They are alike in but one respect — they both hallow one-seventh of the time.
The Puritan “Sabbath” was a yoke too hard to be borne by any except stern fanatics and resulted by inevitable reaction in the present Sunday desecration. The only hope of the recovery of the first day to sacred uses is to teach its true character and this is illustrated in the use of our Lord made of the first Christian Lord’s day. He comforted weeping Mary; walked seven miles with two perplexed disciples, giving a Bible reading by the way; sent messages to other disciples; had a private interview with backslidden Peter, and imparted the Holy Spirit to the men in the upper chamber.
In other words, the Lord’s day is a day of holy activity in resurrection joy and power. The best work on this important subject is Dr. R. A. Torrey’s booklet, “Ought Christians to Keep the Sabbath?”
Why do not Christians keep the Sabbath?
Because the Sabbath belongs to the system of law, while Christians of this dispensation are not under the law, but under grace. The Sabbath in which Jesus lay in the tomb marked not only His death and burial, but the death and burial of the whole Mosaic economy, including the Sabbath. The new day that followed marked not only the new life and resurrection of the Son of God, but the bringing into life of a new era for the race. How fitting, then, that we, as members of the new covenant, should keep the first day of the week as a glad day of privilege and communion rather than as one of legal observances! There was an old Sythian custom to carry a corpse around among its friends dressed up in its best attire, feasting over it, ete. But, after all, it was but a corpse. So with the legal Sabbath.
If Adam, before the law, kept the Sabbath, is it correct to speak of it as a Jewish institution?
There is not only no scriptural evidence that God made known the Sabbath to Adam, but there is direct evidence that not until the Exodus did He “make known His Sabbaths,’ etc. Assuming, however, that Adam had and observed the Sabbath of the Decalogue, I should say that if he had never fallen he would be observing the seventh day in Eden now.
Does not the fact that the commandment concerning the Sabbath is not mentioned in the New Testament show that it was to remain unchanged?
1. It is a significant fact that every one of the commandments contained in the moral law is mentioned in some way in the New Testament except that of the Sabbath, and upon that subject Paul, through the Spirit, says, ‘Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy day,... or of the Sabbath days.” Therefore it is for every believer to settle for himself with God as to the setting apart of special time for service and worship. The first day, rather than the seventh, of course, is the day set apart by believers of this age as the Lord’s resurrection day (see Lev. 23:10, 11, 16), but even as to this observance we may not judge another. Keeping either the Lord’s day or the Sabbath is certainly not a requirement for salvation, nor the failure to observe either a proof that one is not saved. It is rather a question of the life after one has been saved and must be settled with the Lord, according to the light given.
2. As believers in this age we are not under the law, which Paul tells us (Gal. 3:24) was our schoolmaster to lead us to Christ, but we now live by the outworking, through the Spirit, of that new life which God has put within us through the new birth. That new life, instead of being governed by rules and regulations, as under the law, — is the spontaneous outflow of love, and so living, we are fulfilling the law in all its righteousness, for Paul tells us that he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law, and that because love worketh no ill to his neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law (Rom. 13:8, 10; Gal. 5:14; see also John 15:10-12). Jesus kept His Father’s commandments — He fulfilled the law (Rom. 10:4), thus setting us free to live under His new commandment of love by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:2, 3, 4). The commandment is love; the enabling is the Spirit.