Long Post Warning! You will need a few minutes to read through this! If you prefer to do that at your leisure rather than online, you can mail me via the contacts page and I will send you a PDF.

There is a great deal of difference between working out our understanding of Scripture - our theology - in the study or the armchair, and in practice. One can imagine all kinds of scenarios and think through some of the issues related to them, but the acid test comes when we are faced with the practicalities: something is happening or not happening, holiness is not being seen amongst the people of God, the issues are pressing.

The question of Sunday, whether or not it is the Sabbath and how we should observe it, and what bearing this has on the question of worship, is one of those questions that has come to life for some of us. It has moved out of the study and in to the forefront in one sense, and yet it has done so when for many Christians the battle is over and the matter has settled. How has this come about?

Historically speaking it is a mystery, in the sense that the opinion of the mainstream Christian church for centuries has been that Sunday is in some sense the Christian Sabbath, that it is a day set aside for holiness, quite apart from the other days of the week. The great teachers of the past and the times of the greatness of the church concur on the issue: God has appointed a day on which he requires that his people spend their time in holiness and in worship. It is not that there is no difference in some respects between the various teachers on this matter. If we take Calvin, for example, we find that he is prepared to consider the question of whether Sunday need be the day on which we meet. In the ‘Institutes’ he says:

I do not cling so to the number seven as to bring the Church under bondage to it, nor do I condemn churches for holding their meetings on other solemn days, provided they guard against superstition. This they will do if they employ those days merely for the observance of discipline and regular order. [2.8.34]

Calvin might on the strength of this and similar comments be thought by some of as at an extreme in the matter, but we would be very unwise to rush to the conclusion that Calvin supported a modern view of the day set aside for the things of God:

Strange and monstrous are the longings of our pride. There is nothing which the Lord enjoins more strictly than the religious observance of his Sabbath, in other words resting from our works; but in nothing do we show greater reluctance than to renounce our own works, and give due place to the works of God. [2.3.9]

Religious meetings are enjoined us by the word of God; their necessity, experience itself sufficiently demonstrates. But unless these meetings are stated, and have fixed days allotted to them, how can they be held? We must, as the apostle expresses it, do all things decently and in orders (1Cor. 14:40). So impossible, however, would it be to preserve decency and order without this politic arrangements that the dissolution of it would instantly lead to the disturbance and ruin of the Church. But if the reason for which the Lord appointed a sabbath to the Jews is equally applicable to us, no man can assert that it is a matter with which we have nothing to do. [2.8.32]

The matter is clearer still in the thinking of Jonathan Edwards. His famous ‘resolutions’ include this:

38. Resolved, Never to utter any thing that is sportive, or matter of laughter, on a Lord’s day. Sabbath evening, Dec. 23, 1722.

There are many places where Edwards continues to work out that resolution in his teaching and practical living, that speak in a similar manner. Indeed, Edwards says in commenting on Isaiah 56:1-8:

Now here it is foretold, that in the days when “God’s salvation shall be come, and his righteousness revealed,” by the coming of the Messiah, this wall of separation should be broken down, this ceremonial law removed out of the way; (but still taking care to note, that the law of the Sabbath shall be continued, as not being one of those ceremonial observances which shall be abolished) . . . .

At this point we can move straight to the modern Sabbath controversy, because Edwards has touched on an issue that is immediately relevant. Recent thinking on this issue has moved us to the point where speaking of ‘the Sabbath’ and its requirements for the Christian is the most obvious of all faults. Even among the Reformed churches many would regard this as legalism, wrong thinking by its very nature. Here is a statement from a Reformed web site, made on 28th July 2008:

We believe the Old Testament regulations governing Sabbath observances are ceremonial, not moral, aspects of the law. As such, they are no longer in force, but have passed away along with the sacrificial system, the Levitical priesthood, and all other aspects of Moses’ law that prefigured Christ.

Note that this is a head on collision with the view that Edwards expresses. What Edwards says (and prior to him the Puritans in Scotland, England, America and Holland also said) is that the Sabbath commandment is not ceremonial; the modern statement is simply the exact opposite of that. It appears on the surface to be a ‘matter of opinion,’ but in reality it is much more. Here we are considering the very broad and important issue of how Christians, the people of the new covenant, relate to the laws given under the old covenant. The consistent teaching prior to our times is one that recognises a division in the law between ceremonial, moral and civil aspects of the Mosaic law. The one place where the line was held to be very clear was in the matter of the ten commandments; these were held to be entirely moral and furthermore to be the direct expression of both the character and will of God, since he himself wrote them and Moses was merely the deliverer. The ceremonial law (largely the sacrificial system and the matters of the priesthood and details of temple worship) was always seen as prophetic in that it pointed to the Lord Jesus Christ and therefore passing away. It is not too much to say that no-one (who claimed orthodox belief) dared say as much of the ten commandments. Now, that barrier has not only been broken down, it is absolutely destroyed in the minds of those who take the modern position. Edwards’ view of the Sabbath is not simply a minority view in our time, rather it is opposed as unacceptable on a number of counts.

It is not only by simple contradiction in saying that the fourth commandment was ceremonial that the modern case is made. Obviously with so many people saying so much on the issue it is difficult to produce one statement to which all would assent, but the following points are commonly made:

All days should be held to be holy by the Christian.

Worship is not a one day activity but something that should characterise all the Christian does.

The Sabbath was ceremonial and pointed to Christ, and with his coming it is therefore abolished.

Any day would be a suitable day for Christians to meet, Sunday happens to be traditionally convenient for many but has no special requirement of itself.

The New Testament does not reiterate the Sabbath commandment: this proves that the Sabbath is not for Christians.

One interesting issue that immediately arises is that the first two points are almost unarguable. Who is going to stand up and say that all days should not be held to be holy in that our lives are to be lived coram deo, before the face of God? Who will deny what the New Testament clearly teaches, that everything is to be received with thankfulness and every work done with the same remembrance that we are always in the Lord’s presence? The Scripture proofs seem to be almost superfluous and the battle over before it has begun!

Well, not quite. Supporters of the modern view are very quick to claim Calvin as on their side (the Reformed web site I quoted above does so) and it is certainly true that the great Reformer seems to be saying something similar in that he can be shown not to be Sabbatarian and to be quite flexible on the issue of what day is appropriate for the church to meet. He does not refer to ‘the Sabbath’ anything like as freely as Edwards does and he certainly does explore the possibility that other days could be used for services of the church. Note, however, the two quotations above from Calvin and in particular these points:

There is nothing which the Lord enjoins more strictly than the religious observance of his Sabbath, in other words resting from our works . . . .if the reason for which the Lord appointed a sabbath to the Jews is equally applicable to us, no man can assert that it is a matter with which we have nothing to do.

Let me clarify what we are seeing here. To repeat, Calvin certainly is not a ‘Sabbatarian’ and it would be interesting to hear a debate between him and Edwards, but at the same time Calvin is very far from the current popular understanding of the Sabbath. He takes the ‘day of rest’ principle, in terms of resting from our own works, extremely seriously, and he is also very concerned that the Sabbath should not be simply abandoned but rather that its meaning and the intention of the Lord in giving it should be transferred to our time. Because Calvin is a wise pastor, he knows our tendency to ‘be given an inch and take a mile,’ so his teaching on this issue as with so many other things is peppered with warnings against allowing what we think of as Christian liberty to become mere licence.

This is where Calvin is most certainly not in line with the modern teaching. One must sadly say that the result of the modern teaching shows where it originates. It would be wonderful if we had produced a generation - or at least a large body - of Christians who lived every day as if it were before the Lord; of whom it might be said that their day by day lives were so much in worship that one could not really determine in quality the difference between their working and family lives, and the day on which they met to worship. Indeed, it would be marvellous if there were any such signs anywhere of the beginning of such an age, but the truth is that we are not only not quite there but we are further away from it than ever our forefathers were in their supposed Sabbatarian ignorance. The ‘de-emphasising’ of Sunday has simply led us to a day on which we grant that it is good to meet together for worship as the people of God (although we have accordingly devalued even that, since we believe the ‘important issue’ is our daily lives of worship), but we also feel quite free to do whatever pleases us. Elders of churches feel no shame in spending a substantial portion of Sunday watching sport on television or doing whatever else they feel fits in with their ‘day of rest;’ not surprisingly, the majority of the people of God draw no line more strictly than their leaders. Even on the mission field attendance at one short morning service is enough and the rest of the day is free for whatever one feels one wants to do. It is, after all, ‘a day off.’

It is not ‘reading in’ to Calvin to realise that such a situation would have been wholly unacceptable to him and to say that he would have been horrified both by those who claim to be his heirs in terms of theology and perhaps even more so by those who claim Calvin himself as their authority. In any case Calvin is not the standard by which this issue is to be considered and he would not have wanted to be. It is to Scripture we must go, and Scripture must settle the matter. Consider a further statement form the Reformed web site mentioned above:

The Sabbath was the sign to Israel of the Mosaic Covenant (Exodus 31:16-17; Ezekiel 20:12; Nehemiah 9:14). Since we are now under the New Covenant (Hebrews 8:7-13), we are no longer required to observe the sign of the Mosaic Covenant.

Now if it were true that the Sabbath was a ‘sign of the Mosaic Covenant’ it would certainly be an important issue, and the old/new distinction introduced here also has weight. Scripture is referenced quite liberally, in these two sentences at least. Nobody (as far as this writer is aware) is wanting to sign up with the Judaizers who Paul opposes so vehemently in Galatians! The framers of this Reformed statement know that and so they go on to say:

In Galatians 4:10-11, Paul rebukes the Galatians for thinking God expected them to observe special days (including the Sabbath).

The matter looks settled, until one examines the statement more clearly. Notice first that Paul does not refer to the Sabbath as such in Galatians 4:10-11. It could be implied, of course, although we cannot be sure. Even the NET translation notes say of this text In light of the polemic in this letter against the Judaizers (those who tried to force observance of the Mosaic law on Gentile converts to Christianity) this may well be a reference to the observance of Jewish Sabbaths, feasts, and other religious days. The reference by the NET translators to Jewish Sabbaths is of importance; the Judaizers might have tried to re-impose the Mosaic Sabbath with all its attendant laws and traditions and if they did Paul would be opposed to that. But that is speculation, not fact as the statement suggests. Secondly, all the Scripture proofs cited to show that the Sabbath was a sign to Israel do not include the original statement of the ten commandments in Exodus 20. Why not? Well, the Sabbath commandment is cited in two ways in Scripture. The first reflects the institution of the Sabbath, which takes place at Creation when the Lord is said to rest on the seventh day. Exodus 20 does just that; in verse 8 the Sabbath commandment begins and runs through the requirement and prohibitions of the day to conclude in verse 11 where the reason for the commandment is made plain:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. [Exodus 20:8 ESV]

This is one reason why the Sabbath commandment is not questioned by our forefathers in the faith; its roots are clearly stated to lie in the act of creation and therefore in God himself. In Mark 2:27 this is further developed by the Lord Jesus Christ who reveals that the institution of the Sabbath is an act of grace: it is made for man, as part of the blessing of creation, and the Lord Jesus Christ (who, as the New Testament makes clear, is the active Creator) is Lord of it. It is true enough that the passage in Exodus 31 says of it the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a covenant forever (v16). But verse 17 goes on to say It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed. Unless the claim is that Christians are not a result of creation it seems to me the argument of the statement is somewhat weak. It is quite legitimate to recognise some things in the old covenant as limited to the old covenant people of God alone; it can hardly be right to do that when the Scripture uses something as universal as the truth of God’s special creation of the earth. There must be a more than local principal where the Lord uses such a universal canvas. The Ezekiel passage referenced seems to me equally weak in establishing that the Sabbath is uniquely for Israel. It says Moreover, I gave them my Sabbaths, as a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the LORD who sanctifies them. What is unique to Israel here? Is the intention to consider sanctification as something Christians have no interest in? Surely not! It would seem to be more in keeping with the intention of the framers of this statement if they had cited the Sabbath commandment from Deuteronomy 5:12ff where the reason for the Sabbath reflects the alternative to linking it to creation, representing the second way in which the Sabbath is cited:

You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day. [Deuteronomy 5:17 ESV]

The problem is that the link to salvation history is no less strong than that of creation in terms of the demands it makes on our thinking on the relevance for Christians. Is the history of salvation not the record of the same grace of God by which we ourselves are saved? At least one might argue that the delivery from Egypt was in the limited historical sense peculiar to the people of Israel, even if the origin of the Sabbath commandment and its major citations are not!

One reason I am not linking to the web site I am quoting here is that I do not want to be thought to be attacking a specific writer or group of Christians. My use of the site here is because what they are saying is very much in the mainstream of current Christian thinking on the Sabbath question and it is useful to interact with what someone has actually said, rather than what I might imagine they could say. Nevertheless, I have to go so far as to say that the kind of argument used is both misleading in itself and in its use of Scripture. Here is a further statement from the same source, same context:

There is no evidence in the Bible of anyone keeping the Sabbath before the time of Moses, nor are there any commands in the Bible to keep the Sabbath before the giving of the law at Mt. Sinai.

This is at least misleading in two ways. First, it is true there is no codified statement of the law of God at all prior to Moses. Note, however, that Cain is still guilty of murder, that Lamech in Genesis 4:23 is guilty of murder and is the first to take two wives, and that in spite of the absence of a codified law of which we are aware the people of Noah’s day are viewed as deserving ultimate punishment. We must be very careful in what we suggest in relation to this period because, if we are not careful, we shall find ourselves speaking ill of the Lord. Is it even remotely possible that the great judgements recorded of the Flood, the judgement at Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, all fell on a people who had no revelation of the will of God? What then did Noah preach for 120 years? How did that holy man preach righteousness if there were no known standard by which to differentiate righteousness and unrighteousness? The truth is that Scripture prior to Exodus 20 is full of references that tell us that some aspects of the law as we know it were known and understood as the commands of God. Secondly, Moses refers to the Sabbath in Exodus 16 in connection with the gathering of the manna. Since it is the Lord who gives the ten commandments in Exodus 20 Moses must have prior knowledge from somewhere that the Sabbath is a fact. One can only assume that it was known to some extent at least along with other laws. Or if not, how then was the Sabbath made for man, if for centuries it was unknown?

It is a similar case with this statement:

Nowhere in the Old Testament are the Gentile nations commanded to observe the Sabbath or condemned for failing to do so. That is strange if Sabbath observance were meant to be an eternal moral principle.

This is misleading because while the Scripture does pronounce judgement against the Gentile nations it never does so on the basis that they have not kept the laws of God that are specific to his people. By saying that the Gentiles are not commanded to keep the Sabbath the framers of the statement seek to rest their case that it cannot be an eternal moral principle, but it has never been the case that ‘the nations’ are expected to keep the laws of God. Scripture is quite specific that the conscience of man, coupled with an observation of the created order, is the limit of what men have without special revelation. The Sabbath cannot of itself be within the scope of conscience, although it can be argued that a realisation of God through conscience demands some regular worship. Be that as it may, the reasoning behind Christian conversion is that the person converted is ‘born again’ into the people of God, becoming part of a holy nation that makes very specific demands. This is the same principle that exists in the Old Testament, where people who were not born into Israel could nevertheless become part of Israel by being part of the people of God. The famous examples would be people like Rahab and Ruth who become part of the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ. These begin life as Gentiles but by their faith in the Lord become subject to the law of the God of Israel. More pointedly, the Lord speaks through Isaiah to say that the Sabbath is required of those who come to faith in the Lord:

And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, and holds fast my covenant. [Isaiah 56:6 ESV]

It does not seem to me to be too difficult to read the negative into this, that those Gentiles who do not join themselves to the LORD etc., are condemned. The statement at this point overreaches itself and descends to being untrue.

There is one more statement from the same source that I will deal with:

The New Testament never commands Christians to observe the Sabbath. On the other hand, each of the other nine commandments are reiterated in the New Testament.

The other nine commandments are nowhere referenced as one coherent block of text, of course, which is what would be needed for the New Testament to make a statement that could be clearly seen to exclude the Sabbath; without that this verges on being an argument from silence, but we shall consider the specific issue. Again, there are two points that should be considered here. The first is that omission from the New Testament as a clear statement is no proof that the Sabbath has no relevance to Christians. The division between the Old Testament and the New is artificial in the sense that all of Scripture is shown (in the New Testament, and most emphatically by the Lord Jesus Christ himself) to be the Word of God. The point I am making is that the division between the old covenant and the new is not as simple as a couple of blank pages between Malachi and Matthew. One might take the issue of tithing, which is only mentioned in the New Testament in passing, albeit positively (Matthew 23:23 for example; note these you ought to have done refers to the tithe. Still, as the Lord is speaking there before the cross one could argue that this is still the old covenant). Tithing is not without controversy; there are those who say that Christians are not under obligation to tithe and that they are simply required to give as they are able. As far as I know, however, no-one is arguing that Christians should give less than a tenth as a principle. (It remains a fact that churches that teach tithe as a principle have consistently higher offerings than those that do not; presumably those who reject tithing are still wrestling with how generous they should be!). In my view the argument against tithing is self-defeating precisely because the only logical step is to say that one does not agree with the tithe because Christians should give more. Granted, but then why not retain the biblical example of the tithe as an illustration of what Christians should, as the minimum, do? In the same way, trying to localise the Sabbath in the old covenant has the same effect. Is the suggestion that Christians, with all the revelation of the grace and love of God clarified in Jesus Christ, can do without a day set aside solely for God? One of my concerns with the decriers of the Sabbath is that they and their followers seem to live lives that do consistently reflect less honour and glory given to God than the old covenant Sabbath. Secondly, the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ specifically claims for himself the title ‘Lord of the Sabbath’ ought to make Christians sit up and take notice. It is not good exegesis simply to say that the Lord spoke this way simply to abolish it. As we have seen, the Sabbath memorialises creation and therefore has its roots in the grace of God determined before the foundation of the world. What are we wanting to see abolished here?

All of this leads to the question, what are we then to make of the Sabbath? Whatever one makes of the totality of Calvin’s comments on the Sabbath, he is undoubtedly right in commenting that:

There is nothing which the Lord enjoins more strictly than the religious observance of his Sabbath, in other words resting from our works . . . .if the reason for which the Lord appointed a sabbath to the Jews is equally applicable to us, no man can assert that it is a matter with which we have nothing to do.

Calvin’s argument for Sunday could be reduced to the fact that it is the traditional and convenient day for the church to meet: that is what many of his modern readers would most identify with, and it is accurate but not a complete picture of what he says. We must concede however, that though he says strongly that without it the church would be in danger and insists upon a high degree of observation of the day accompanied by reverent and godly intent, he is not Sabbatarian in the sense that Jonathan Edwards is. Edwards refers consistently to ‘the Sabbath’ and takes it as normal that there is to be a degree of holiness attached to it that separates it from any other day. There is no evidence at all that Edwards contemplates any day other than Sunday. When he refers to the day other than by the term ‘Sabbath’ it is as the Lord’s Day; in his thinking it is as fixed as the seventh-day Sabbath was for the people of the old covenant. How shall we take a course that honours these two giants of the church? We can take first the points on which Calvin and Edwards would agree:

There should be a day set aside for the church to meet.

That day should be marked for believers by a willingness to attend the services that are set.

Outside the time spent gathered as the church, believers should keep the remaining time for godly pursuits: reading the Word of God or other spiritual material, meditation on the things of God, prayer etc.

It will require a conscious and determined effort on the part of the Christian to do all this.

It is to the glory of God and the blessing of his people that it should be so.

Perhaps that is enough. It may be that to go any further is to limit true Christian freedom, that Calvin is right in his caution on this matter. What is certain is that any less is not faithful to Scripture, nor is less than this faithful to the historic witness of the people of God, including Calvin. It should give us pause that all our talk of finding and promoting new covenant freedom is leading to manifestly low standards of godliness and holiness that our forefathers would not have tolerated. There is no stage in church history where the faithful people of God have taken it that the day the church sets aside for gathered worship should consist of just an hour or two of that worship, with the rest of the day given over to what pleases the individual. There is no stage in the history of the church, apart from our own, in which even legitimate worldly entertainment is an acceptable focus for the people of God on the Lord’s Day. The time should not be now, and may the time never be.

Finally, we might reflect that the position that Edwards took is the view of many godly men throughout the history of the church. There have almost always been debates on this issue and I am not suggesting that Edwards is right in all he says, but simply that he is representative of a large and important class of godly people throughout the history of the church. He does make his case well in Sermon 13 in Volume Two of his works, ‘The Perpetuity and change of the Sabbath.’ But perhaps John Owen would be a better representative: in Volume 18 of his works (in the section devoted to the book of Hebrews) he devotes almost two hundred and fifty pages to an examination of the Sabbath question, concluding in the end that the Sabbath is part of the moral law, that the observation of the seventh day as the Sabbath is alone tied to the old covenant, and that God has sovereignly and graciously located the Lord’s Day as the Christian Sabbath. He argues that a ‘Pharasaical’ observation of the day is never warranted, but that the nature of it as a gift of God’s grace and the fact of it being a memorial of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ demand from us a holiness in the observance of it. It would be well if some of the modern detractors from this position would labour for a while in dealing with Owen’s investigation and perhaps then produce some statements of their position that do justice to Scripture and to the history of the church.