What Day is the True Sabbath Day?

According to Jewish law the Sabbath is Saturday which is the seventh day of the week, but what do we, as Christians, do with the Sabbath? Exodus chapter 20 clearly states that the seventh day is to be kept holy. "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God."

What makes the fourth commandment any less binding than the other nine?

Sabbatarians believe that every command in the Decalogue is binding and that the fourth command is no less binding than the others. There are also a number of Christians who have switched the Saturday Sabbath to Sunday, observing the first day of the week as the new Sabbath which was the most popular view of the churches centuries ago.

A number of Christian scholars have long since realized that there is no precedence for either of these views. The seventh day commemorated the completion of the first creation and the first day commemorates the completion of the new creation when Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

There are strong indications in the New Testament that the early Christians worshiped on the first day of the week such as Acts 20:7. "On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the morrow; and he prolonged his speech until midnight."

Then again in 1 Corinthians 16:2 where Paul is organizing a collection for Jerusalem where it says, "On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that contributions need not be made when I come."

When God sanctified the seventh day it was for the benefit of all creation to pause one out of every seven days and reflect on the Creator. It was applied to animals as well as man to stop and realize that God was the source of all they saw around them.

Sabbath means rest. Notice what it says in Exodus 20:9: "Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God." It mentions nothing about a particular day, it just says work six days and rest one. And this day of rest is to be holy or God-focused.

We are to do all things to the glory of God but if we don't pause periodically to worship and reflect, we can lose the focus of why we do what we do and get caught up in the ways of the world. This is not our permanent home and if we lose that focus we can begin to drift away from the reality of God and make this world, which is passing away, our only reality.

From Genesis we see that God rested from the work of creation until the fall of man but there was nothing said about man resting or worshiping on the seventh day. Adam didn't rest, God rested. But the idea of "rest" isn't that God was taxed. God is never taxed. He never grows tired.

The seventh day represented the completion of Creation. God ceased creating. The Sabbath isn't mentioned again for centuries. It was in Exodus when the law was introduced that the Sabbath came back into the picture. Actually, it was mentioned in the wilderness in connection with the manna that rained from heaven in the wilderness but it was instituted at the giving of the law by Moses.

In Exodus 31:17, God told Moses that the Sabbath was a sign (which points to our rest in Jesus) specifically between God and Israel just like the rainbow of Noah and the circumcision of Abraham. The Sabbath was supposed to be a day of rest, worship, and reflection, but the Israelites turned it into a day of rigid rule-keeping and sacrifice which God hated. "Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations- I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them." (Is. 1:13)

Jesus would never violate the law yet He purposely violated the Sabbath many times. The Sabbath belonged to Judaism and everything associated with the corruption of that self-righteous system which was destroyed in 70A.D. Jesus finished the work that the Father sent Him to do and entered His rest. We no longer work to earn salvation for we have entered the rest of our Lord. "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest!"