After God created the heaven and the earth in the first six days, he rested on the seventh day. Genesis 2:1-3. God Himself blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. But one may ask: What is the seventh day that God made holy? The Fourth Commandment gives us a positive answer:
“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.” Exodus 20:8-11.
The Creator blessed and sanctified the Sabbath before the fall of Adam. From the very beginning, he determined the Sabbath to be a day of rest. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says:
“The sabbath was made for man…” Mark 2:27.
Therefore, it was made for humankind – not only for the Hebrews but also for the Gentiles. Whenever we sanctify the Sabbath according to God’s Commandments, we are reminded of the Creator and His might which he manifested through the first six days of Creation. So, the Sabbath is a great memorial that reminds us of the ultimate power of God.
The Sabbath is not a law that came from the Hebrews, nor from Moses, because Jesus said:
“The Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.” Mark 2:28.
God blessed the Sabbath and sanctified 2,300 years before there was any Jew. The Bible never terms the Sabbath “Jewish” but it always calls it “the Sabbath of the Lord”. Even before the Law was given – the Ten Commandments – the people of God knew the division of the weekly days (Gen. 2:1-3; 7:10; 8:10, 12; 29:27) and they kept the Sabbath holy.
This is seen very clearly from Moses’ account in Exodus 16:4, 5, 27-29, where God fed His people in the wilderness with manna. Here God was testing the obedience of His people by the seventh day. On each of the six working days he gave His people manna and on the sixth day (Friday), the people received a double amount of food – for preparation day and the Sabbath.
After some time, when God gave His Law – the Ten Commandments – the Fourth Commandment specifically decreed the observance of the seventh day. Exodus 20:8-17. And through the prophet Ezekiel God says:
“And I gave them my statutes, and shewed them my judgments, which if a man do, he shall even live in them. Moreover also I gave them my sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the LORD that sanctify them.” Ezek. 20:11, 12.
Not long after that, the people began transgressing the commandments, and God told the people:
“… they walked not in my statutes, and they despised my judgments, which if a man do, he shall even live in them; and my sabbaths they greatly polluted…” Ezek. 20:13.
The counsel of God has always been and now is:
“And hallow my sabbaths; and they shall be a sign between me and you, that ye may know that I am the LORD your God.” Ezek. 20:20.
God promised Israel that if they would keep the Sabbath, Jerusalem shall always be inhabited and it shall not be destroyed. Nevertheless, though they had all those warnings and counsels that God sent through His prophets for the keeping of the seventh day, the people began to transgress the Fourth Commandment and to work on the Sabbath. As a result of this sin, God punished the Israelite nation with the Babylonian captivity and allowed Jerusalem to be destroyed by fire. See Jeremiah 17:21-27; Neemiah 13:18.
All the prophets of God kept the Sabbath holy. The prophet Isaiah who gave so many prophecies about the Messiah, about His life, His teachings, His sufferings and death, prophesied also that before the Second Coming of Christ, many of the Heathen shall come to believe in the Lord, will love His name and keep His Sabbath. See Isaiah 56:1-6.
Those Christians who place great value on the prophecies that God gave, can clearly see in this prophecy that the Sabbath has not been given to the Jews only, but also to the Gentiles who would come to believe in Christ. The Gentiles could not serve God or love the name of the Lord before Jesus gave His life a sacrifice for sin. Therefore, the prophecy in Isaiah 56 refers to the time after the death of Christ, when many of the Gentiles would make a covenant with the Lord and keep the Sabbath holy, having faith in Christ.
The prophet Isaiah continues and he says in his prophecy that God shall give them in His house (the New Jerusalem – John 14:1-3; Gal. 4:26) a place and a name better than sons and daughters, and that their name will not be cut off (verse 5). Today in every part of the earth there are sincere Christians who believe in Jesus and His blood and keep the Sabbath holy, in preparation for His soon Second Coming.
This clear prophecy that the Sabbath will be kept also by the strangers – the Gentiles – before the Second Coming, is aimed to assure us that Jesus has not buried the Sabbath (as many believe) but he has opened the way for the Gentiles to observe it also, with faith in Christ. Blessed are those who participate in the fulfillment of this prophecy. God has promised them a heavenly homeland and an eternal reward. Are you, dear reader, a part of this peculiar people?
This same prophet has prophesied, in chapter 58, verses 12 and 14, that those who would be born of God (the righteous ones) will honor God and keep the Sabbath holy, not doing their usual works, not attending to their own life cares and making the effort not to speak their own words. To them God promises that He will feed them with the heritage of Jacob – they will receive eternal life.
When Jesus went to the Mount of Olives and he described to His disciples the future events, and when he declared to them that Jerusalem would be surrounded by armies and destroyed to the ground, he counseled His disciples to pray that their fleeing would not happen to be in the winter or on a Sabbath day. Why?
Here Jesus very clearly wished His disciples peace and rest on the Sabbath. So it happened – when the Roman soldiers burned the palace of Herod and the Antonia tower on the Sabbath, the apostles had found good refuge in the city of Pella.
When Jesus was on the cross, and he cried: “It is finished!”, and His body was taken down from the cross, on the same day the women came back and prepared the spices and ointments, and “rested the sabbath day according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56). According to which commandment were they resting? Undoubtedly, according to the Fourth Commandment which begins with the words: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.”
After the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and after His Ascension, the apostles and the early Christians kept the Sabbath holy. This is seen very clearly in the following texts: Acts 13:14, 27, 42-43; Acts 16:13. Paul preached Christ from the Scriptures on the Sabbath. Acts 17:2. This was his usual manner. See Acts 18:4, 11. The early Christians never called the Sabbath “Jewish” or “Hebrew”. This same apostle wrote to the Christian church the following words, in 54 A.D.:
“For we which have believed do enter into rest… For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all his works… There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his. Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest [i.e. to keep the Sabbath], lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief.” Heb. 4:3-11.
If the first Christian church after Christ celebrated Sunday (as it is claimed today), then why did Paul tell the believers to keep the Sabbath holy? And if all days are equal, as many people preach, then why did Paul write about the seventh day?
This testimony of the prophet is a fact that is solid enough to convince all that the early Christian church kept the Sabbath holy, with faith in Christ. To show that we need to keep the Fourth Commandment, the apostle Paul adds one more warning:
“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Heb. 4:12.