The Law and Sabbath in the Life of the Modern Christian: Part 3
How Does the Christian Relate to the Sabbath?
While the termination of the law may seem like a straightforward argument for the termination of the Sabbath requirement, there are other considerations to take into account. For instance, some have accounted for a Sabbath requirement by looking in the past beyond the Mosaic covenant to creation. What, if anything, does the Mosaic Sabbath tell us about Christian Sabbath requirements? How did the early Christians view the Sabbath? How did first-day worship begin? And what about the concept of Sabbath transference?
For those who saw the Decalogue, and in particular the fourth commandment, as binding moral law, a Sabbath requirement for Christians was not a stretch. For others, seeing the Sabbath in terms of a creation ordinance, its permanence could be established in the face of the Mosaic covenant’s temporary nature. However, “reference to the seventh day of creation in the New Testament is of a different nature than an appeal to a universally binding principle for all people.”[21] In Hebrews 4:3-4, the writer’s quote of Genesis 2:2
is not in order to ground the Sabbath in creation but
rather to ground the eschatological salvation rest, which
God has for His people, in the divine rest at creation.
God’s rest is seen…as the consummation of His purposes
for the creation… The evidence thus leads us to the con- clusion that while the notion of God’s rest in Genesis 2
was treated eschatologically by the biblical writers, it was
not held by them to be a "creation ordinance."[22]
During the Mosaic economy, the death penalty underscored the seriousness of the Sabbath (Ex. 31:14; 15; 35:2). Everyone - family, servants, animals and visitors - were to do no work.
It [was] a sign of Yahweh’s sanctification of His people
(Ex. 31:13), the unique possession of Israel marking them
out as a separate people whose allegiance is to Yahweh…
The command not to work one day out of seven taught a
nation of slaves that they had been liberated and that in
entering into covenant relationship with Yahweh they
were free men and women who could rest in their de-
liverer. In this way the Sabbath was to be a weekly lib-
eration day… By bringing all routine work to a halt for
twenty-four hours the people were acting out their
allegiance and confessing that the covenant Lord was
specifically Lord of their time. This is why the Sabbath
could serve as a sign of the whole covenant relationship.
By demonstrably laying down her work and allowing the
seventh day to “lie fallow,” Israel was acknowledging her
complete dependence on her suzerain.
As part of the Mosaic Law, the Sabbath had a role in fore-shadowing what was to come with Christ. Rest for everyone, slave and free, anticipates Christ’s injunction to love one another.[23]
As previously discussed, Paul saw the Sabbath as part of the Mosaic covenant that had been superseded by the New Covenant in Christ. He was tolerant of those who kept the tradition so long as it did not interfere with or taint the gospel, but he “regarded those who practiced it as adolescent and not yet mature in Christ.”[24] The apostles reacted strongly against those who used the Sabbath as part of keeping the law to earn salvation. Their own Sabbath practice “is more likely to have been carried out for evangelistic purposes than because of convictions about the Sabbath’s abiding validity (Acts 13:13; 44; 16:3; 17:2; 18:4).”[25]
How, therefore, did first-day worship begin? Here, extra-biblical history informs us as much or possibly more than the biblical record. “Evidence for Sunday observance over and above that connected with the title Lord’s Day in the second century begins with the Epistle of Barnabas and then Justin and continues until the time of Clement of Alexandria, and from then on references to Sunday worship are even more plentiful.”[26] However, even before then, the Palestinian Jewish Christians were most likely making Sunday worship a regular practice.[27] The title Lord’s Day is invariably tied to the first day of the week being the day that Christ rose. However, in Romans 14:5, Paul makes it clear that no day is to be considered any more sacred than another. Sunday, the first day, is not holy, nor is it sacred, and it was never meant to be a Sabbath.
The rest on Sunday was simply meant to provide an opportunity for worship, but by the seventh century, under Constantine, work was prohibited for the entire day.[28] From here grew Sabbath-transference theology. “The biblical and theological grounds adduced took the form of the notion first that the Lord’s Day was analogous to the Sabbath and then that the requirements of the fourth commandment concerning Sabbath rest had been transferred to the observance of the Christian Sunday.”[29] But we have already observed that the Mosaic Law in its entirety had been nullified; therefore, the law was no longer binding. And we have concluded that the Sabbath was not a creation ordinance. Thus, both legs have been pulled from under Sabbath-transference theology.
Next, our conclusion.
[21] Ibid., 351.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid., 353-355, synthesized and summarized where not directly quoted, applies to entire paragraph.
[24] Ibid., 368.
[25] Ibid., 366.
[26] Ibid., 384.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid., 390.
[29] Ibid.