Sunday vs. Sabbath

Will you go to Hell for picking the wrong day to relax?

Recently I made a post inviting readers to ask me questions, and one of them revolved around the question of resting on the Sabbath versus Sunday. If you have a question, ask me:

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Seventh-Day Adventists are so radical in their beliefs about Saturday worship that claim worshiping on Sunday will be the “Mark of the Beast” spoken of in Revelation—which, if you recall, guarantees that the person will burn in Hell for eternity. They say that the pope will gain global geopolitical power and enforce Sunday worship under penalty of death. They say the faithful will be killed for keeping Sabbath but be rewarded with eternal life.

We should recognize that the Seventh-Day Advent movement was based on hoaxes and lies. The earliest founders taught that Jesus Christ would return in 1844—which was of course a hoax. After that, they pivoted to the false prophecies of Ellen G. White, who claimed to have thousands of visitations and messages from God.

Ellen G. White, false prophet of the Seventh-Day Adventists

She taught that Jesus would return in the lifetime of those who heard her messages, which was another hoax (she said this in the late 1800s). She stole material from other authors of the time and claimed to receive it from God. She taught that masturbation caused insanity, that pork was dangerous because it didn’t float in water, and other nonsense that fit the superstitious era of her day. This is similar to the Pentecostal movement, which started around the same time and also preyed upon the gullibility and illiteracy of American Christians (see the article below:)

Speaking In Tongues

Nevertheless, the idea that Christians should worship on the Sabbath can be discussed independently of this false movement. Let’s take a look.

Q. Did Constantine mandate worship on Sunday?

Not directly. However, the Roman ecumenical councils he established began hijacking matters of doctrine and bent them to suit Roman imperial preferences. Eventually they pushed for Sunday to be the proper day of Christian “rest”, and even called resting on the Sabbath “Judaizing”, as seen in the Laodicea Council, canon 29, given in 364 AD:

Christians must not Judaize by resting on the Sabbath but must work on that day, honoring the Lord’s Day [Sunday] by resting, if possible, as Christians.

Sunday worship was one part of an ongoing campaign by the Roman ideologues to divorce Christianity from its Jewish background and marry it more strongly to Roman customs. Emperor Constantine himself said that Sunday was the “venerable day of the Sun” and decreed that the empire should rest on that day, in 321 AD. The fact that a council was required 40 years later to push for Christians to obey this custom implies that many were still resting on the Sabbath despite this. So this proves that Constantine was not able to control Christian behavior from on high. However, it also means it’s not a stretch of the imagination to say that pre-Constantine Christians tended to use the Sabbath as their day of rest, and that they some had strong feelings about it. Otherwise, the council would not have needed to accuse them of Judaizing in order to pressure them to change their ways.

Q. Did the early churches have perfect doctrine? Should we try to replicate their lifestyle?

No. Much like the Seventh-Day Adventists, the early churches had many false assumptions about prophecy and global affairs, such as the belief that Jesus would imminently return in their lifetimes. (Ironically, this is something the Seventh-Day Adventists founders did share in common with them.) They disagreed on many things, established their own rival schools of thought, and tried their best to find answers. The whole reason we have a New Testament is because it seemed to them that Jesus Christ was delaying his return and they needed to temporarily give the converts instructions on how to behave themselves in the short meanwhile. Nobody predicted that it would take as long as 2,000 years, and none of them were attempting to establish a permanent system of hierarchy and routine; although the principles, theology, and morals they taught remain evergreen.

As such, there was no such thing as a uniform system of behavior in the early church. Some experimented with church communism, where they sold everything and lived together with no private property, while others dug tunnels into mountains and under cities in order to await the arrival of Jesus and flee persecution. Others traveled far and wide without fear of persecution, while others headed for places of intellectual discourse to debate pagans directly. There is no one example we can point to in order to say, “this is how they lived” or “this is the best example.”

Q. Does the Bible instruct Christians to rest on a given day of the week?

No.

In fact, there does not need to be any “day of rest” in the Christian routine. It’s irrelevant. Elderly and wealthy people tend to not have any days of labor, while others work nine days straight and have four days off, or some other lopsided arrangement. Most people work five days and have two days off. None of this matches the Hebrew customs from thousands of years ago, and none of it matches what the early church did. Having a dedicated holy day of rest once a week is not important to a Christian’s religious life. Those who insist on the matter are unable to provide any citation from the New Testament that supports their claim.

The ancient Babylonians had a seven day rest period, but Israelites were unique in having a strict day of rest on the seventh day. The Greeks (at least in Athens) had a 10-day cycle (“decade”) and no dedicated day of rest. The Romans had an 8-day cycle (“nundinum”) and also had no dedicated day of rest. They generally did have a special “market day” at the end of this cycle that served as a kind of day of rest for farmers, where people shopped and resupplied. But according to the strict Moses Law, this traveling and shopping would have been considered work, not rest.

You see, nobody really rests on any day the way God commanded the ancient Israelites. People drive places, cook food, mow their lawn, exercise, go shopping, or otherwise do something fun that nevertheless constitutes work. The ancient Hebrews could be killed for gathering firewood (Num 15:32-36). However, there is little evidence that the ancient Israelites actually did enforce this commandment strictly for long, especially after their exile to Babylon. When Jesus came, he was condemned by the religious extremists of his day for telling a cripple to pick up his floor mat after he healed him (John 5:8-18), but they didn’t gather stones and try to kill him, or the man who was carrying his mat. This shows us that the tradition was weakened to begin with, and that God himself (through Jesus) did not care much about it anymore. He had much bigger plans involving a new covenant.

These are things I wish every Christian understood:

1. Nobody on earth keeps the Sabbath day holy. In order to keep the Sabbath day holy according to the Old Testament, you not only need to prepare all of the things you’d do in advance the day before, but you also must prohibit everyone else around you from working on that day, or else collectively kill them (Exodus 31:14-15, 35:2). Therefore, anyone who tolerates another person working on the Sabbath is themselves guilty of violating the Sabbath, because it’s the responsibility of everyone to police each other. The reason they had to kill the individual offender was because God would punish all of them collectively if they did not. Therefore, not even extreme Orthodox Jews keep the Sabbath. They don’t kill offenders.

2. When these people make somebody else do work, they’re hypocrites. If you go to an emergency room for medical treatment, dine at a restaurant, fill in gasoline in your vehicle, or cause somebody else to do work or provide a service on your “day of rest” you are endorsing the breaking of your own supposed holy day. Most enjoy having at least restaurants open, internet service running smoothly, police on patrol, fire departments ready to act, and the military protecting the nation on our “rest day.” Even having electricity and plumbing requires work on the part of the utility companies. The ancient Jews truly sat in their tents and had nothing going on during their day of rest. I suppose only the Amish could claim to truly be resting on a given day, although even Jesus pointed out that the religious Jews would rescue their cattle from a ditch, and he didn’t judge them for doing so.

3. “Observing” a holy day means almost nothing. The word “observing” is very obnoxious to me, because it is so open-ended that it practically means nothing. There are certainly people who are so busy that they need to set aside time for remembering God and being mindful of the scriptures, and I sympathize. A dedicated day of worship can be a nice bare minimum to a believer’s routine, although a more mature Christian ought to incorporate prayer, study, and scripture into their day-to-day thinking, not separate it from the rest of their lives. For example, don’t you encounter things every day that remind you about a teaching of the New Testament? You can reflect on Christ’s teachings any time of day, such as while you’re on the elevator, eating food, driving your car, or before you go to sleep. Going to church can be very nice for new Christians especially, but the goal should be to grow into the kind of believer who merges their daily life with a consideration of God’s Word (especially if you are literate).

Q. Will Sunday worship be a matter of prophetic importance?

Perhaps, but only insofar as meaningless disputes about which day to rest on will contribute to the betrayals and confusion spoken of by Jesus Christ. All sorts of false teachings will probably be dredged up and used as divisions during that time, and Sabbath worship will likely play its part.

The idea of the “Mark of the Beast” being Sunday worship is one of the dumbest teachings ever produced by a false Christian movement. The idea that God would send people to Hell for eternity because they attended a church service one day apart from the appointed time is so offensive, blasphemous, and unjustified that anyone who teaches it must have a gnawing feeling in their gut as they condemn those who have been saved by faith. Seventh-Day Adventists try to mimic the Jewish teaching that Sabbath begins on Friday evening at sunset and lasts until Saturday evening at sunset, but this is also strange. By ancient Israelite logic, the calendar centers around Jerusalem, and therefore the Sabbath would also center there. When you’re 10+ time zones away, shouldn’t you offset your own clock to respect the “holy day” at the same time as those who are in Jerusalem? This is one of the reasons why the exile of the Jews to Babylon and the later destruction of Jersualem by the Romans made it impossible for Jews to properly worship; not only did they not have their temple, but their calendar was messed up. People pick and choose how to interpret all of these things in order to gain an advantage over gullible believers.

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My friends, don’t let cults and false prophets goad you into worrying. Salvation does not come from routines and rituals, or from displays of spiritual power, but from God above. He gives us grace and forgives us our many faults, not so that we can become neurotic about ourselves or judgmental of others, but so that we have no excuse not to serve His Kingdom in our own little way, in our own given time, as the Spirit and the Word leads us. Trust in God, do your part, and be gentle with yourselves.

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