Is the Sabbath Over? What the Bible, Jesus, the Apostles, and the Early Church Did with the Seventh Day

The Question

Most Christians do not keep the Sabbath. They do not keep the food laws either. They do not keep Passover, the Feast of Booths, or the Day of Atonement. They have accepted that the old covenant has passed. Yet many of these same Christians believe they are still under the Sabbath. They call Sunday “the Sabbath.” They feel guilty when they miss church. They quote the fourth commandment to their children. The trouble is that Sunday is not the Sabbath. The Sabbath was the seventh day of the week, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. No Christian church I know of changed that by command of Scripture. So the Christian who believes he must keep the Sabbath, and keeps Sunday instead, is keeping neither. Other Christians see this and keep Saturday. Still others say the day does not matter but one day in seven does. Protestants alone hold at least four different positions. I lean toward one of them, and I will say which. I hold it with an open hand. My aim here is to lay out what the Bible says, what Jesus did, what the apostles did, and what the early church did. Then we can ask what Christians should do now. I could be wrong. The texts are not.

Where the Sabbath Comes From

The seventh day first appears at creation. Genesis says that God finished his work on the seventh day and rested, and that he blessed the seventh day and made it holy (Gen 2:2–3). The word “Sabbath” does not appear there. Neither does a command. God rests, and no one is told to do anything. Victor Hamilton notes how unusual the blessing is. “All the preceding days God called either ‘beautiful’ or ‘very beautiful.’ This day alone he sanctified.” He adds, “Nothing in the creation context that is connected with space is called holy.”¹ The first holy thing in the Bible is a day, not a place. That matters. Then the Bible goes silent for a long time. Genesis never shows Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob keeping a Sabbath. The first command to rest comes in the wilderness, with the manna, after Israel left Egypt (Exod 16:23). The church noticed this early. Justin Martyr wrote around AD 155 that the righteous men before Moses, “though they kept no Sabbaths, were pleasing to God.”² Irenaeus pointed out that “Abraham himself, without circumcision and without observance of Sabbaths, believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness.”³ Tertullian added Melchizedek: “uncircumcised and inobservant of the Sabbath,” yet “chosen to the priesthood of God.”⁴ The pattern of the seventh day goes back to creation. The commanded Sabbath goes back to Moses.

What the Law Required

At Sinai the Sabbath became law. The fourth commandment opens, זָכ֛וֹר אֶת־י֥וֹם הַשַּׁבָּ֖ת לְקַדְּשֽׁוֹ, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exod 20:8). The reason given is creation: God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh (20:11). When Moses repeats the commandment forty years later, the wording changes. It opens שָׁמ֛וֹר, “Keep,” and the reason changes too. Israel is to rest, and to let their servants rest, because they were slaves in Egypt and the Lord brought them out (Deut 5:12–15). So the same commandment carries two reasons. One looks back to creation. The other looks back to the exodus. Then God tells Moses something that settles who the commandment was for. The Sabbath is א֨וֹת הִ֜וא בֵּינִ֤י וּבֵֽינֵיכֶם֙, “a sign between me and you,” between God and the people of Israel throughout their generations (Exod 31:13). It was the sign of the Sinai covenant, the way the rainbow was the sign of the covenant with Noah. The penalty for breaking it was death (31:14–15). The law forbade kindling a fire in any home on that day (Exod 35:3). The prophets called it a delight and warned against doing one’s own pleasure on God’s holy day (Isa 58:13). Nehemiah shut the gates of Jerusalem to stop the merchants from trading on it (Neh 13:15–19). By the time of Jesus the rabbis had defined “work” in great detail. The Mishnah lists “forty less one” forbidden categories, from sewing and plowing to writing “two letters” and carrying an object “from one domain to another.”⁵ Those rules were written down after the New Testament, but they record the kind of debate Jesus walked into. The Sabbath was the most visible mark of a faithful Jew. Everyone could see who kept it.

What Jesus Did with It

Jesus kept the Sabbath. Luke says he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day “as was his custom” (Luke 4:16). He was a Jew born under the law, and he never told any Jew to stop keeping it. Yet the Gospels record more conflict over the Sabbath than over almost any other part of the law. His disciples picked grain in a field, and the Pharisees asked why they were doing what was not lawful (Mark 2:23–24). He healed on the Sabbath again and again, and asked his critics whether it was lawful on the Sabbath “to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it” (Luke 6:9). Then he said two things that changed the question. First, Τὸ σάββατον διὰ τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐγένετο καὶ οὐχ ὁ ἄνθρωπος διὰ τὸ σάββατον, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). William Lane explains that this saying “was remembered and transmitted for its assertion that the Sabbath was instituted by God to benefit man.” It reaffirmed “the original intention of the Sabbath which the extensions of the Law in the Pharisaic tradition had obscured.” Lane also notes that a rabbi of the second century said something close: “the Sabbath is delivered over for your sake, but you are not delivered over to the Sabbath.”⁶ So far Jesus sounds like a reformer. The second saying goes further: ὥστε κύριός ἐστιν ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ τοῦ σαββάτου, “so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28). No rabbi said that. The Sabbath belongs to him. In John’s Gospel he defends a Sabbath healing by saying, “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (John 5:17). God rested from creating. He never rested from sustaining and saving. Jesus put himself on God’s side of that line. He did not abolish the Sabbath while he lived. He claimed to own it.

What the Apostles Did with It

The book of Acts shows the apostles in synagogues on the Sabbath, often. Paul went in to the synagogue in Thessalonica “as was his custom,” and reasoned with them from the Scriptures on three Sabbaths (Acts 17:2). That was where the Jews were, and Paul went to the Jews first. James told the council in Jerusalem that Moses “is read in the synagogues every Sabbath” (Acts 15:21). That same council made the most important decision about Gentile believers in the whole New Testament. It decided not to trouble them with the law of Moses. It asked them to abstain from four things only: food sacrificed to idols, blood, what is strangled, and sexual immorality. The letter said, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these necessary things” (Acts 15:28–29).⁷ The Sabbath is not on the list. If the apostles believed Gentile Christians had to keep the seventh day, this was the place to say it. They did not. Paul wrote the rest in his letters. To the Romans he said, “One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind” (Rom 14:5). To the Galatians, who were being pressed to take up the law, he wrote with alarm, “You observe days and months and seasons and years” (Gal 4:10). To the Colossians he wrote, “Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath,” because these are σκιὰ τῶν μελλόντων, τὸ δὲ σῶμα τοῦ Χριστοῦ, “a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col 2:16–17). D. R. de Lacey reads the verse this way: “Paul’s statement ‘Let no one pass judgment on you,’ indicates that no stringent regulations are to be laid down over the use of festivals. As is the case with the law, the Christian is no longer bound by external stipulations in the matter of festivals.”⁸ A shadow is not evil. It tells you something real is near. Once you are standing beside the real thing, you do not go back to studying its shadow.

The First Day of the Week

Meanwhile the believers began to gather on a different day. Every Gospel says Jesus rose on τῇ μιᾷ τῶν σαββάτων, “the first day of the week” (Luke 24:1). He appeared to his disciples that evening (John 20:19). At Troas, Luke writes, “on the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread,” Paul spoke until midnight (Acts 20:7). Paul told the Corinthians to set aside their gift for Jerusalem “on the first day of every week” (1 Cor 16:2). John received his vision ἐν τῇ κυριακῇ ἡμέρᾳ, “on the Lord’s day” (Rev 1:10). The adjective κυριακός, “belonging to the Lord,” appears only twice in the New Testament. The other place is “the Lord’s supper” (1 Cor 11:20). Andrew Lincoln admits that this evidence “is scanty but, when taken together with that of the postapostolic period, it points us clearly in one direction.” He says Acts 20:7 “is a reference to a Sunday and not to a Saturday assembly.”⁹ The early writers outside the New Testament confirm it. The Didache, one of the oldest Christian documents we have, says, “But every Lord’s day gather yourselves together, and break bread, and give thanksgiving.”¹⁰ The Roman governor Pliny reported to the emperor around AD 112 that Christians were “accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god.”¹¹ Justin Martyr gives the clearest picture: “on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.” He gives the reason too. It is “the first day on which God … made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead.”¹² None of these writers calls Sunday the Sabbath. They are describing a new day for a new reason.

What the Early Church Said

The early church did not treat Sunday as a moved Sabbath. It treated the Sabbath as finished. Ignatius of Antioch, writing on his way to martyrdom around AD 110, described Jewish believers who had come to a new hope, “no longer observing the Sabbath, but living in the observance of the Lord’s Day, on which also our life has sprung up again by Him.”¹³ The Epistle of Barnabas has God say that the present Sabbaths are not acceptable to him, “Wherefore, also, we keep the eighth day with joyfulness, the day also on which Jesus rose again from the dead.”¹⁴ Justin told a Jewish teacher that “the new law requires you to keep perpetual sabbath, and you, because you are idle for one day, suppose you are pious.”¹⁵ Tertullian said the Scriptures “point to a sabbath eternal and a sabbath temporal,” and that Christians ought to rest from sin “not only every seventh day, but through all time.”¹⁶ Richard Bauckham sums up the second century: “the dominant trend of second-century Christianity was toward a forthright rejection of Sabbath observance along with Jewish practices in general.” He also notes that some churches felt a continuing pull toward Jewish practice.¹⁷ That pull lasted for centuries. The Council of Laodicea, in the late fourth century, ruled that “Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord’s Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians.”¹⁸ The words “if they can” matter. Rest on Sunday was not yet required. That came from the state. In AD 321 the emperor Constantine ordered city magistrates and workshops to rest “on the venerable Day of the Sun.” Philip Schaff observed that “there is no reference whatever in his law either to the fourth commandment or to the resurrection of Christ.”¹⁹ Sunday became a civil day of rest by imperial decree. Only later did Christians begin to call it the Sabbath.

What the Reformers Said

The Reformers split, and their split is still with us. The Lutherans were blunt. The Augsburg Confession says, “Scripture has abrogated the Sabbath-day; for it teaches that, since the Gospel has been revealed, all the ceremonies of Moses can be omitted.” It says the church chose the Lord’s Day so that men “might know that the keeping neither of the Sabbath nor of any other day is necessary.”²⁰ Luther’s Large Catechism says the commandment, “according to its gross sense, does not concern us Christians,” and that we keep a day of rest so that “we come together to hear and treat of God’s Word.”²¹ Calvin agreed more than most Presbyterians remember. He wrote that “on the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ, the ceremonial part of the commandment was abolished,” and that “Christians, therefore, should have nothing to do with a superstitious observance of days.” He kept Sunday “as a necessary remedy for preserving order in the Church,” not as a ceremony. He even said, “I do not cling so to the number seven as to bring the Church under bondage to it.”²² A century later the English Puritans went another way. The Westminster Confession calls the fourth commandment “a positive, moral, and perpetual commandment binding all men in all ages.” It teaches that the Sabbath was “changed into the first day of the week” at the resurrection and is to be continued “as the Christian Sabbath.”²³ The Baptists copied that wording in 1689.²⁴ Richard Gaffin, himself a Westminster man, concedes the difference: “Whatever the merits of the moral-ceremonial distinction drawn by the Westminster Confession, it is not the view of the ‘false prophets’ Calvin condemns.”²⁵ Rome teaches that “Sunday is expressly distinguished from the sabbath” and that it “fulfills the spiritual truth of the Jewish sabbath.”²⁶ The Seventh-day Adventists hold that “the fourth commandment of God’s unchangeable law requires the observance of this seventh-day Sabbath.”²⁷ Every one of these positions claims the Bible. They cannot all be right.

The Rest That Remains

Hebrews gives the deepest answer, and it gives it in a single word. In chapter 4 the preacher has been talking about God’s κατάπαυσις, his “rest.” Israel failed to enter it in the wilderness. Joshua did not give it to them either, or God would not have spoken of another day later through David (Heb 4:8). Then he writes, ἄρα ἀπολείπεται σαββατισμὸς τῷ λαῷ τοῦ θεοῦ, “So then, a Sabbath rest remains for the people of God” (4:9). He changed the word. The word σαββατισμός appears nowhere else in the New Testament. William Lane says its use here is the earliest in extant Greek literature. He argues that the writer chose it on purpose, because it “conveyed a nuance not found in κατάπαυσις.” In the few other places the word turns up, it “denotes the celebration or festivity of the Sabbath.” So it “stresses the special aspect of festivity and joy, expressed in the adoration and praise of God.”²⁸ The Sabbath that remains is not a day off. It is a festival. The next verse tells us who enters it: “whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his own works, just as God did from his” (4:10). Then comes a strange command: “Let us, then, make every effort to enter that rest” (4:11). The rest is entered now by faith, because “we who have believed do enter that rest” (4:3). It is finished at the end, when the people of God join the celebration that God began on the seventh day. That is why I believe the Sabbath has been fulfilled in Christ. The day was a shadow. Christ is the substance. The rest the day pointed to is the rest he gives: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28).

Do Not Give Up Meeting Together

This does not mean Christians may stay home. Hebrews forbids it in the next breath. The preacher writes, μὴ ἐγκαταλείποντες τὴν ἐπισυναγωγὴν ἑαυτῶν, “not giving up meeting together, as some have made a habit of doing, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Heb 10:25). The verse names no day. It does not say Saturday, and it does not say Sunday. Lane explains the word ἐπισυναγωγή: “it is the place or occasion for mutual encouragement and exhortation.” He adds that the present-tense participles show “the importance of the regular gathering of the local assembly for worship and fellowship.”²⁹ The only other place this noun appears is 2 Thessalonians 2:1, where Paul speaks of “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him.” The weekly gathering is a rehearsal for the final gathering. That is why the preacher says to meet “all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” Some ask whether this meant every week, or the great yearly feasts that Israel attended. The text answers that. These were not pilgrims going up to Jerusalem three times a year. They were a house church that met often, and some had “made a habit” of staying away. Jews in the synagogue met every Sabbath (Acts 15:21). Christians met every Lord’s Day (Acts 20:7; Didache 14). The church met weekly from the beginning. It also met daily when it could (Acts 2:46). So the command is not about a day. It is about a people. The Christian who says “I am free from the Sabbath” and uses that freedom to abandon the church has missed the point of both.

So What Do We Do?

I land on one view, and I hold it loosely. The Sabbath of the fourth commandment was the sign of the Sinai covenant, given to Israel, and it has passed away with that covenant. Jesus claimed lordship over it. The apostles did not lay it on the Gentiles. Paul told the Colossians not to let anyone judge them over it. The early church did not keep it and did not call Sunday by its name. The rest it pointed to is now found in Christ, entered by faith today and celebrated forever in the age to come. That is what I believe the Bible teaches. Yet three things remain. First, the pattern of work and rest goes back to creation, before Sinai, and a body that never rests is not honoring its Maker. Taking a day of rest is wise, and many believers find great blessing in it. It is not a law that binds the conscience. Second, the church must gather. Hebrews 10:25 is a command, and the first Christians obeyed it on the first day of the week because that was the day their Lord rose. Sunday is a good day to gather for that reason, and for no other. Third, no Christian should judge another over this. A believer who rests on Saturday out of love for God is not wrong. A believer who gathers on Sunday and works on Saturday is not wrong. Paul said it: “Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind” (Rom 14:5). What is wrong is calling Sunday the Sabbath and then pressing the fourth commandment on people who are not under it. What is also wrong is using freedom as an excuse to drift away from God’s people. The Sabbath was made for man. Man was made for Christ. In him the rest has already begun.

Notes

1. Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1–17, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 143. Hebrew text throughout is from the Westminster Leningrad Codex; Greek text is from The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition, ed. Michael W. Holmes (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature; Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010). Translations of Hebrews are my own; other translations are my own unless marked. ↩
2. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 19, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (ANF 1). ↩
3. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.16.2 (ANF 1). ↩
4. Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews 2 (ANF 3). ↩
5. The Mishnah: A New Translation, trans. Jacob Neusner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), m. Shabbat 7:2. ↩
6. William L. Lane, The Gospel of Mark, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 118–19. ↩
7. Acts 15:28–29: ἔδοξεν γὰρ τῷ πνεύματι τῷ ἁγίῳ καὶ ἡμῖν μηδὲν πλέον ἐπιτίθεσθαι ὑμῖν βάρος πλὴν τούτων τῶν ἐπάναγκες, ἀπέχεσθαι εἰδωλοθύτων καὶ αἵματος καὶ πνικτῶν καὶ πορνείας. ↩
8. D. R. de Lacey, “The Sabbath/Sunday Question and the Law in the Pauline Corpus,” in From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Investigation, ed. D. A. Carson (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999), 183. ↩
9. A. T. Lincoln, “From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical and Theological Perspective,” in Carson, From Sabbath to Lord’s Day, 383. ↩
10. Didache 14 (ANF 7). ↩
11. Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96, Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook. ↩
12. Justin Martyr, First Apology 67 (ANF 1). ↩
13. Ignatius, To the Magnesians 9 (ANF 1). ↩
14. Epistle of Barnabas 15 (ANF 1). ↩
15. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 12. ↩
16. Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews 4. ↩
17. R. J. Bauckham, “Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church,” in Carson, From Sabbath to Lord’s Day, 259. ↩
18. Council of Laodicea, canon 29 (NPNF² 14). ↩
19. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 3 (New York: Scribner, 1867), §75 and n. 693, quoting Codex Justinianus 3.12.3. ↩
20. Augsburg Confession, art. 28.58–60. ↩
21. Martin Luther, Large Catechism, Third Commandment, §§82, 84. ↩
22. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2.8.31, 33, 34, trans. Henry Beveridge. ↩
23. Westminster Confession of Faith 21.7. ↩
24. Second London Baptist Confession 22.7. ↩
25. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., Calvin and the Sabbath (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor, 1998), 44. ↩
26. Catechism of the Catholic Church §2175. ↩
27. Seventh-day Adventist Church, Fundamental Beliefs 20, “The Sabbath.” ↩
28. William L. Lane, Hebrews 1–8, WBC 47A (Dallas: Word, 1991), 101–2. ↩
29. William L. Lane, Hebrews 9–13, WBC 47B (Dallas: Word, 1991), 289–90. ↩