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The Importance of the Sabbath

The fourth commandment in Exodus 20:8 (KJV) says “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.” It’s not only one of the ten commandments which Yahweh gave to Moses to give to the people of Israel, it’s one of the first four which deal directly with our relationship with God. And yet, we seem to have relegated it to honorable mention/B-team status, that is if we pay any attention to it at all. One of the ways which we do this is by acting like it means we should attend a church service on a particular day.

“But wait a second.” I can hear you saying right now. “How can you say we’re blowing off the fourth commandment if we’re obeying it? Doesn’t it mean the seventh day of the week has some magical, holy power to it that we’re supposed to honor?” And there lies the confusion: the translation of “Remember the sabbath” as “Go to church” and “day” as “a specific twenty four hour period of time”. (There are even those who misinterpret this in the extreme by coming to the conclusion that attending church on a given day is a requirement for salvation. In this essay, I’m not going to deal directly with the fact that salvation is a gift of grace and cannot be earned in any way. Maybe I’ll deal with that topic another time.)

This misjudgment that one particular twenty four hour period is uniquely holy has caused a few people lately to try to “evangelize” me into becoming a “true” believer and switching to a church that gets together on Saturdays instead of Sundays. They are correct in their assessment that Saturday corresponds more closely with the original Jewish Sabbath, (although literally it was sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday night) and so they have translated the fourth commandment to mean if you don’t attend church on Saturday you’re either going to Hell, or at best being a major source of irritation to God.

However, this mistaken attitude isn’t just limited to the “Saturday pushers”. I took a drama team from my home church out to perform for another church one Sunday several years ago. When we returned to our home church the following week, we were rather coldly berated for our decision to minister elsewhere by one ranking member. We could have gone any other day to perform anywhere else, but Sunday was the day that this person had decided that we needed to be located at that specific church. In that person’s opinion, we were dishonoring God with our actions. (Or possibly we were dishonoring that person by not deeming them important enough to obey as if that person were God, but that’s another essay.)

Both of these attitudes contain the same basic flaw at their root, and that is that they fail to take into account that God’s plan for us has not changed, but it has progressed. Or you could say that God has not changed, but due to His own doing, we have. The Holy Spirit has now been made available to us, whereas the people of Israel during the time before Christ had no personal access to this gift. They had to rely on second hand information from a handful of sources that the Holy Spirit used as His voice in the land. Since only the Holy Spirit can reveal the true nature of God to us, and only the Holy Spirit can lead us into truth and understanding, Yahweh knew full well that it would flat out not be possible for the great majority of the people to understand Him or His laws. So what He did was oversimplify everything to its most basic, physical form which allowed for obedience without understanding.

The law or the Torah, the ark of the covenant, the feasts of Yahweh, the Sabbath, everything God set up was a shadow picture of better things to come. Even the Hebrew word for “day” in “Remember the sabbath day”, which has multiple meanings, meant an approximate twenty four hour time period to the people of Moses’ time, but they knew it represented something else which would be revealed later. Everyone knew that one day Messiah would come and reveal their true meaning. Even the Samaritan woman at the well was aware that “when he is come, he will tell us all things.” (John 4:25b KJV) After Jesus had died, two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus were confused and upset until Jesus Himself, from Moses through the prophets, opened their eyes to the real revelation of the scriptures: Him. Later on Jesus told His disciples that it was good for Him to go so He could send the Holy Spirit to us. Jesus knew that once the Holy Spirit was sent, all of our hearts could be opened to the real meaning of the Word rather than just a few people at a time that He could physically commune with.

Paul told us in Colossians 2:16-17 (KJV), “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is of Christ.” Unless you’re intentionally trying to misinterpret this passage, it’s obvious that Paul is letting us know that a particular day of the week is irrelevant in our worship of Yahweh.

It’s important to understand before we go on that there were two types of Sabbaths to the Jewish people. There were your weekly Sabbaths, and then there were special Sabbath days that occurred during the feasts of Yahweh. To us it would be like comparing Sunday to Thanksgiving. Some have said that when Paul told us not to worry about the Sabbath that he was referring to the feast days, but Paul makes sure to distinguish the holy days of the feasts from the regular weekly Sabbaths. “or in respect of an holy day,” refers to the feast days. The English word Sabbath in “or of the sabbath days:” was translated from the Greek word sabbaton which means a day of weekly repose from secular avocations.

Why would Paul, a Pharisee of Pharisees who knew the law inside and out, and spent the entirety of his life not only precisely obeying it to the best of his ability but persecuting those he felt were in conflict to it, now admonish us to reject those who try to instruct us to “obey the fourth commandment” by treating a particular day as more holy than the rest, the way it had been obeyed for centuries? Because Paul knew that the physical had been made spiritual. He knew that the true messiah had come and fulfilled the law. He knew it was pointless to live with the shadow, when we had now been given the ability to live with the Messiah Himself. He knew the day of the week had no power in and of itself. He knew this because the Holy Spirit had come and had opened his eyes to that which had been locked in mystery for centuries.

Let’s look at the ten commandments for just a second, because one of the arguments that bounces around for going to church on a particular day is the fact that the other commandments such as don’t commit murder and don’t commit adultery still apply. But what does it mean to commit murder? According to the Torah, it is defined as taking the life of an innocent person, but according to Jesus you’re guilty of the sin of murder if you hold onto a hatred for somebody in your heart. What does it mean to commit adultery? According to Mosaic law, it is defined as sexual intercourse with someone other than your spouse, but Jesus said that if you even look upon somebody with lust in your heart then you’ve given in to the sin of adultery. Do you see how Jesus was explaining how the simple physical rules Yahweh gave were meant to reveal higher spiritual truths? If Jesus said this applied to the sixth and seventh commandments, why wouldn’t it apply to the fourth or in fact all of them?

What did Paul see that the “remember the sabbath means going to church on a given day” people fail to see? In a word, Jesus. He saw the spiritual side to which the physical aspects only hinted at which is an intimate, personal relationship with Yahweh Himself made possible by the blood sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and he didn’t want to dilute that relationship by reverting to the old once we had the new.

Jesus taught that the entirety of the law hangs on loving God with everything that you are, and loving those you come into contact with as you love yourself. The first four commandments, which deal with loving Yahweh, follow this pattern: Do not, do not, do not, do. The first three deal with avoidance, but the fourth is a commandment to do something. To love someone by avoiding an activity is to keep from hurting that person, but you cannot completely love someone with everything that you are by simply not doing harmful things. My wife would say that my love for her was pretty lousy if I could claim I’d never cheated on her, and never abused her, but also never spent any time with her.

The fourth commandment is a commandment to let Yahweh know how much you love Him by quite simply spending time with Him. I’ve heard it said that all God wants from you is all of you. Murder has moved from taking a life to hating your brother. Adultery has moved from a sexual act to a heart filled with lust. Remember the Sabbath has moved from going to church on a day of the week to falling in love with the lover of your soul.

I really hate to say this, and I know I’m going to make somebody mad with this statement, but the American church is all but dead. Going through the motions exactly as we do now, even if we switch our church services from Sunday to Saturday, is not going to change that at all. We’re dishonoring the fourth commandment by paying attention to a particular day of the week and treating it as if that’s what God really cares about. What God really cares about is you caring about Him. When are we going to truly fall in love with Him and stop chasing after the things of the world? When are we going to make Him our priority? When are we going to really start chasing He who is so passionately wooing us even as we run from him?

There’s somebody out there (I know his name, but choose not to reveal it here) who has offered one million dollars to the person who can biblically prove that God has revoked the fourth commandment. He has done this to “prove” that we need to attend church on Saturday. His money is safe. Nobody’s ever going to find that particular passage which says God no longer cares about the commandments He established. This man simply doesn’t understand what the fourth commandment actually means. I pity that man for spending so much time and effort defending a meaningless position and attracting others to defend it as well. At best it’s wasted effort, and at worst… well, I said I wasn’t going to deal directly with that in this essay.

Am I saying that if you religiously go to church every Sunday that you’re pathetic? Or if you go to church on Saturday instead of Sunday, you don’t really love God? Absolutely not. What I’m saying is we’ve made it the focus instead of Him and therefore reduced it to meaningless repetition. God is God every day of the week. Don’t look for Him for a couple of hours one day a week and call your religious duty done unless that’s all it is to you, a religious duty.

Rest in Him. Spend time with Him every day. Give Him the best of you. Treat Him to the passionate heart’s desire he’s looking for from you. Earnestly long for a deeper, more intimate relationship with Him.

In other words, remember the Sabbath day.

I am the pen.

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