Fewer and fewer Christians spend a day of the week worshipping and resting from all forms of work. Should we worry about that? Seventh-day Adventists and Seventh-day Baptists say yes and argue that the Sabbath should be the Sabbath.
Certain types of presbyterians and reformed Christians, as well as others influenced by the heritage of puritans, respond ” yes?”With the same emphasis, however, they insist that Sunday is the Christian Sabbath, there are still those who defend the principle of rest. a day of seven, but they don’t care about the day of the week, because preachers, for example, can barely rest on the day they run the sects. Is one of these three perspectives correct? Not really.
- Jesus said: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I did not come to abolish it.
- But to realize it.
- (Matthew 5.
- 17.
- NIV).
- It is an unusual contrast.
- Usually when someone says they’re not finishing something.
- They go ahead and say they’re keeping it intact.
- But that is not how the word achieve is used in the Bible.
- Only in Matthew.
- Its most common meaning is “To achieve what was predicted?” or? make sense of something that has only been partially discovered? (eg.
- 1.
- 22.
- 2.
- 15.
- 17.
- 23.
- 3.
- 15.
- 4.
- 14).
- Christians of all stripes recognize that they did not need to bring animals into church to kill them and offer them as a sacrifice for their sins.
- Although such a practice was central to the entire old covenant system of worship.
- Christ is our sacrifice for sins once for all; Therefore.
- The way we keep the many sacrificial laws of Leviticus today is by trusting Jesus for the forgiveness of sins.
- Does the New Testament also introduce many other changes to Old Testament law? all foods are now ritually pure.
- So there is no problem eating pork or shrimp (Mark 7:19).
- We don’t need to go to a specific place for temple rituals.
- Because we worship where we can meet.
- In Spirit and in truth? (John 4.
- 24).
- Christian men do not need to be circumcised.
- Although this was one of the most basic Jewish commandments.
- Even before the promulgation of the law at Mount Sinai (Genesis 17).
- Instead.
- Does God accept all people equally today on the basis of a faith that acts out of love? (Galatians 5.
- 6).
- The list of similar changes is long.
But what about the Ten Commandments? They certainly have something special about them and are particularly timeless, unlike the rest of the old covenant law. Despite a long history of Christian thought in this direction, nothing in the Bible says this. All Scripture is seen as a unit (James 2: 8-11). The Jews believed that all their laws were immutable. This is what made it so difficult for many of them to accept Jesus as sent from heaven; defied its eternal laws. It didn’t matter that he left many apparently intact; his teaching that the new era of human history, which he ushered in, would change some of these laws, causing many people to catch fire. Only God could change God’s law. But, if Christ was God, then he had that right. If he wasn’t, his teaching was blasphemous. Christians, however, believe that Jesus is God. So even if a law appears in the Ten Commandments, we cannot assume that it enters the New Covenant Age unchanged. We need to examine how Jesus and the apostles treated it before we can understand whether it is still mandatory.
So what does the New Testament teach about the law of the Sabbath, a commandment among the ten famous (Exodus 20:10)?Jesus does not answer this question as explicitly as we would like; If you did, we wouldn’t discuss it today; however, in all their meetings with the religious leaders of their people, he accuses them of preventing him from doing good on Saturdays, especially when it comes to healing people. never heals anyone whose life is in imminent danger. A woman had been inclined for eighteen years (Luke 13:10-11). A man had been disabled for thirty-eight years (John 5. 5, 9).
We can imagine the Pharisees arguing with Christ: surely he could wait another day to heal these people, so as not to desecrate the divine Sabbath. Jesus’ disciples once harvested corn cobs in a field on a Saturday, probably to eat them, but nothing. implies that they were on the brink of hunger (Mark 2:23). However, Jesus’ defense of his behavior sets a broad precedent for change: “Was the Sabbath established because of man, not man because of the Sabbath?”(Mark 2. 27).
By healing a man with a dry hand on a Sabbath, Jesus teaches that it is permissible to do good on Saturday (Mark 3. 4). Any behavior that helps someone, that beautifies the world, that promotes God’s will, that promotes honest work, or that provides leisure or pleasure to God’s people?in the Bible and, therefore, it is lawful to do so on a Saturday. It was the attitude that gave the first generation of Christians the freedom to transfer service from the Jewish Sabbath. from the seventh day to Sunday, the first day of the week (Acts 20. 7; 1 Corinthians 16. 2) Is that what led you to call Sunday on Saturday?(Revelation 1. 10).
But Christians have in no way transferred everything from Jewish Saturday to Sunday; pagan believers, who constituted most of the church since the middle of the 1st century, did not have a weekly rest day in their communities. they had several holidays per month, according to the different festive religious calendars that followed; However, unless one of these holidays fell on Sunday, pagan Christians had to work all day on the first day of the week and adapt to worship and fraternity either on Sunday morning, before sunrise, or on Saturday night or Sunday after dark. It was only after Constantine became the first Christian emperor, in the early 4th century, that Sunday was legalized as a sacred day (and therefore a feast) in the Roman Empire.
Many Christian writers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries even referred to the Sabbath guard as a “Jew”. This led to the legalism that Christ had come to abolish. It was probably an overreaction, unless the people who kept Saturday, whether Saturday or Sunday, were trying to force others to follow them. After all, in Romans 14. 5, Paul wrote: “One makes the difference between day and day; another thinks the same thing every day. Do you all have a well-defined view in your This mandate takes place in the context of the rest of Chapter 14, in which Paul addresses the problems that divided Christians in Rome. At the heart of the debate were Saturday and other feasts, as well as food laws, which Paul says, in a word: stop judging each other (v. 13).
Colossses 2:16 is even clearer: “No one shall therefore judge you by food and drink, or on the holiday, or the new moon, or on Saturdays, for all this has been the shadow of what will come; But it is Let us see here the usual Jewish triad of the annual holy days such as Easter, tabernacles, or the day of atonement; monthly weekly holidays and Saturdays; Christians are free to celebrate them or not, and other Christians should not judge them by their choices. The incarnation of Christ is the reality proclaimed by the holy days. Jesus’ disciples come to him and rest “24 hours a week,” as we say today, because his yoke is soft and his load light. (Matthew 11:28-30) Our whole life is a gap year, foreshadowing our eternal rest (Hebrews 4:4-11).
Am I saying that worship and rest are optional for Christians? No way. We need both and we need them often. What I am saying is that the New Testament insists that we dare not legislate or require a seven day for these things. Each person’s body is different, as are their professional demands, their opportunities to meet other believers, and their overall spiritual needs. In a world full of work that often fragments families and churches, let us have the rest we need and worship often with God’s people. And that the churches create more services, on Saturday nights or other days of the week, for those who cannot or do not come on Sunday. In fact, let’s get more and more creative in reaching the displaced and those in need of salvation. But we cannot affirm that the panacea for our problems in the Church and in society lies in a return to a supposedly idyllic Saturday that, above all and in large part, was an invention of the Puritans.
note:
[1] NE: Salu is the Portuguese transliteration of the Hebrew term. Some texts use Saturday or Saturday. We chose Saba because it is a Portuguese term and different from the day of the week. However, it should not be confused with Queen. Sabá of 1 Kings 10: 4.
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This article is part of the series “Sabbath: The Tireless Debate”, in which articles will be published defending different positions so that our reader has a more complete understanding of the topic, so the publication of a specific position does not indicate the official position of that department See the list of articles on the subject:
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By: Craig L. Blomberg. © 2014 Minsiterio Ligonier
This article is part of Tabletalk magazine.
Translation: Vin-cius Silva Pimentel Review: Vin-cius Musselman Pimentel © 2014 Faithful Ministério. All rights reserved. Website: MinistryFiel. com. br. Original: Saturday fulfilled.