Updated: 4/13/20
Remember the Sabbath day, to set it apart to me. You must labor and do all your work for six days. But the seventh day is a Sabbath for the Lord your God. On it you must not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, or your male servant, or your female servant, or your cattle, or the foreigner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and earth, the sea, and everything that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart (Exodus 20:8–11).One person values one day above another. Another values every day equally. Let each person be convinced in his own mind (Romans 14:5).
So then, let no one judge you in eating or in drinking, or about a feast day or a new moon, or about Sabbath days (Colossians 2:16).
Exodus 20 contains the Ten Commandments. The fourth commandment is the commandment not to work on the seventh day of the week. The reason given was that God created the cosmos in six days. He rested on the seventh day. The parallel list of ten was given by Moses to the generation of the conquest four decades later. The reason offered for the sabbath was different. “You will call to mind that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to keep the Sabbath day” (Deuteronomy 5:15). These reasons constituted a pair: creation and deliverance. This is consistent with the New Testament’s identification of the Creator as the Second Person of the Trinity, God’s Son, and the Redeemer/Deliverer as Jesus Christ, God’s Son.
The New Testament does not specify which day of the week is the Lord’s day, a day of rest. The early church identified this as the first day of the week. This was in the second century. Justin, sometimes called Justin Martyr, in his First Apology, wrote this of the day of worship. "And we afterwards continually remind each other of these things. And the wealthy among us help the needy; and we always keep together; and for all things wherewith we are supplied, we bless the Maker of all through His Son Jesus Christ, and through the Holy Ghost. And 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, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.” The members then took communion: the Lord’s Supper. Donated money was then given to widows and orphans “who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need. But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples, He taught them these things, which we have submitted to you also for your consideration” (Chapter 67). So, we see a break with the Mosaic law with respect to sabbath observance: from day seven to day one.
There was another change: the negative sanction for not obeying the sabbath. The Mosaic sanction was execution. “Then the Lord spoke to Moses and said, ‘Tell the Israelites: “You must certainly keep the Lord’s Sabbath days, for these will be a sign between him and you throughout your people’s generations so that you may know that he is the Lord, who sets you apart for himself. So you must keep the Sabbath, for it must be treated by you as holy, reserved for him. Everyone who defiles it must surely be put to death. Whoever works on the Sabbath, that person must surely be cut off from his people. Work will be done for six days, but the seventh day is to be a Sabbath of complete rest, holy before the Lord. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day must surely be put to death. Therefore the Israelites must keep the Sabbath. They must observe it throughout their people’s generations as a permanent law. The Sabbath will always be a sign between the Lord and the Israelites, for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed”’ (Exodus 31:12–17). This sanction was imposed at God’s command in Numbers 15.
The church has never argued that the correct sanction is execution. There has been a fundamental theological break between the Mosaic law in what is called the Lord’s day. The problem is this: theologians have not developed an explicit theology of this transition between the sabbath of the Hebrews and the Lord’s day of the Christians. There have been strict sabbatarians in the history of the church, especially in the tradition of Scottish Presbyterianism and Puritan New England Congregationalism in the seventeenth century. Scottish Presbyterians remained strict sabbatarians, meaning more strict than other ecclesiastical traditions, well into the twentieth century. But they found that fewer and fewer members would abide by the requirements, and there were fewer and fewer explicitly Calvinistic Scottish Presbyterian churches. The tradition of strict sabbatarianism faded away in the British Isles in the second half of the nineteenth century.
I dealt with these issues in my 1986 book, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments. I devoted Chapter 4 and Appendix A to the sabbath. I reprinted them in the 2012 edition: Authority and Dominion, Volume 2, Decalogue and Dominion, Chapter 24, and Volume 5, Appendix E: “The Economic Implications of The Sabbath.” If you are serious about exploring the theological and economic implications of the differences between the Sabbath law and the laws governing the Lord’s Day, I recommend that you read these chapters.
I argue in favor of a discontinuity between the Mosaic law and Christian law. The fundamental discontinuity is this: the locus of enforcement. Under the Mosaic law, the civil government had the authority and the responsibility to impose the negative sanction of execution on Sabbath breakers. The New Testament does not lodge this authority in any institution. Why not? Theologically speaking, the answer should be clear: Paul’s clear announcement of a radical transformation in the locus of sovereignty. “One person values one day above another. Another values every day equally. Let each person be convinced in his own mind” (Romans 14:5). [North, Romans, ch. 14] “So then, let no one judge you in eating or in drinking, or about a feast day or a new moon, or about Sabbath days” (Colossians 2:16). Theologically speaking, these are the only two statements in the New Testament that justify a break in judicial continuity between the Mosaic Sabbath and the church’s Lord’s Day. This was a major discontinuity.
This discontinuity did not annul the principle of one day of rest in seven. With only a few minor exceptions in history, Christian theologians have acknowledged the legitimacy of a day of rest. Almost all of them have acknowledged that this day of rest is called Sunday in the Roman calendar. This is the first day of the week for Christians. They do not honor the explicit law of the Mosaic sabbath: day seven. This has to do with the nature of Adam’s rebellion in the nature of Christ’s redemption. Justin hinted at it: Christ was resurrected in the day after the Jewish sabbath. This is the symbolic eighth day of deliverance.
God in his sovereignty created the world in six days. Then He rested on the seventh day. Man was to do the same. If the rebellion took place on the seventh day, when God was absent from the garden, as I think it did, this was an opportunity for Adam to announce that he was autonomous from God. He would also be a creator on his first full day of life. He would not rest as a subordinate to God. He would not rest content with the capital which God had provided him. He would imitate God as a creator. For this, he was brought under negative sanctions. One of the sanctions was that he would have to work for six days before gaining his rest, just as God had. That sanction was removed by Christ at the resurrection. Covenant-keepers can now safely rest on the first day of the week, confident that their efforts will be successful over the next six days.
Paul announced the doctrine that men are not saved by works, but rather by grace. This was the central theme of his theology. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this did not come from you, it is the gift of God, not from works and so no one may boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good deeds that God planned long ago for us, so that we would walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8–10). This has to do with the salvation of souls. But the principle also applies to the salvation, or healing, or redemption of society. Grace precedes law. The day of rest precedes the day of work. The church’s one-six week reflects this doctrine.
Covenant-keepers acknowledge that they are not originally sovereign. They are derivatively sovereign. They possess lawful authority, but only because God has transferred this general authority to mankind through the dominion covenant. Because covenant-keepers have been adopted by grace into the family of God, they are now responsible for the extension of the kingdom of God in history. This extension of God’s kingdom in history is the means by which God’s redemptive process is extended to the institutions of society. God’s redemption is comprehensive. It is not limited merely to individual souls, Christian families, and Christian churches. It involves the whole of society. This is a gigantic task. It involves a willingness on the part of covenant-keepers to accept this responsibility.
To remind them on a weekly basis that they are not autonomous, and that they are not the source of the redemption of the world, there is a day of rest. The day of rest has the same function in New Testament times that it had in Old Testament times. It reminds men that it is not within their power to redeem the world. They are enabled to work out their salvation with fear and trembling, as Paul put it (Philippians 2:12), but only because their salvation has been granted to them by God’s grace. [North, Epistles, ch. 20] They are working out what was a gift. Grace precedes law. The structure of the Christian week reflects this arrangement.
The person who believes that all of his success is the work of his hands is a person who cannot rest free of charge. If he rests, he loses work time. He loses whatever productivity might have been generated by his labor. This imposes a cost on him. If he takes a day off, he must pay for it by forfeited output, which also means forfeited income. He must pay for every moment of rest that he takes. This is not true of a covenant-keeper. The covenant-keeper becomes the beneficiary of his own willingness to acknowledge that the power of his own hands is not the source of his wealth. This is the central teaching of Christian social theory, as I have repeatedly argued. Moses warned the generation of the conquest: “He fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors had never known, so that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end, but you may say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand acquired all this wealth.’ But you will call to mind the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the power to get wealth; that he may establish his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is today” (Deuteronomy 8:16–18). [North, Deuteronomy, ch. 22] This means that honoring the day of rest does not deplete the capital assets of the covenant-keeper. On the contrary, it is one of two ritual sacrifices that enable him to extend his dominion, thereby increasing his responsibility, thereby increasing his wealth. The other foundation is the tithe. It takes faith to understand this. It takes faith to abide by this. But this is how covenant-keepers acknowledge ritually before God that they are not autonomous, and therefore they are not the source of their wealth.
The primary meaning of rest is spiritual. A secondary meaning of rest is eschatological. The fourth chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews is devoted to the eschatological issue of rest. God promised rest to the Israelites, but they did not achieve it. “Therefore, because it is still reserved for some to enter his rest, and since many Israelites who heard the good news did not enter it because of disobedience, God has again set a certain day calling it ‘Today.’ After many days, he spoke through David, as it was earlier said, ‘Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts’” (Hebrews 4:6–7). Rest lies ahead of us. “For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken about another day. Therefore there is still a Sabbath rest reserved for God’s people. For he who enters into God’s rest has himself also rested from his deeds, just as God did from his. Therefore let us be eager to enter that rest, so that no one will fall into the kind of disobedience that they did” (Hebrews 4:8–11). We are to acknowledge ritually our commitment of faith in that coming eschatological rest beyond the grave and then in the new heavens and new earth. We do this by taking one day off per week.
The nature of this rest will be redeemed labor. This will be the result of the removal of the curse on mankind and also the creation. Paul wrote of the eschatological liberation that awaits the creation. “For the eager expectation of the creation waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of him who subjected it, in the certain hope that the creation itself will be delivered from slavery to decay, and that it will be brought into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors in pain together even now” (Romans 8:19–22). [North, Romans, ch. 5] Labor in the world beyond the grave will reflect the one-six pattern of the Christian week. It will begin with the rest, but work will not be cursed, unlike the situation in the post-fall world.
The day of rest for the covenant-keeper today should be manifested above all by confidence regarding the outcome of this day of rest. The day of rest reminds us that we must not waste time in the six days that follow. We should become more efficient. We should be better managers of the capital that God has entrusted to us, including the capital of time. But, once we have done this, we can rest in confidence. We can rely on God as the God of positive sanctions in history.
The Mosaic covenant’s weekly sabbath laws focused entirely on the day of rest. The law did not discuss mandatory worship. We know virtually nothing about mandatory worship under the Mosaic covenant, other than the required annual festivals. The synagogue system appeared after the Israelites’ return from captivity. There is evidence of the system in the third century B.C. But we do not know if Israelites worshiped weekly on the sabbath prior to the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities. In contrast, the New Testament inaugurated the system in which people worshiped together on the first day of the week. The book of Acts records this meeting of Paul and church members in the city of Troas. “On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul spoke to the believers. He was planning to leave the next day, so he kept speaking until midnight” (Acts 20:7). Paul wrote to the church at Corinth that the members should gather together on the first day of the week to collect the money that the church had promised to donate to the church at Jerusalem. “Now concerning the collection for the believers, as I directed the churches of Galatia, so you are to do. On the first day of the week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up as you are able. Do this so that there will be no collections when I come” (I Corinthians 16:1–2). The focus of the gentile New Testament church from the beginning was on worship on the Lord’s day, not rest. This continued in the early church up until the time of Constantine.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the one-six pattern of living was easier to maintain. There were no public utilities. There were no steel mills that must not be shut down. There were certain tasks that had to be conducted, such as milking cows. But society was not threatened with paralysis in rural areas if people honored the day of rest every Sunday. Yet there was work to be done. People had to walk to their churches or they had to hitch up their buggies and drive to church. After the invention of the coal stove in the second half of the eighteenth century, somebody had to start the fire in the winter. Those who defended a strict Sabbath always were able to find ways of redefining such labor as either mandatory and therefore legitimate, or else aspects of charity and therefore legitimate.
With the coming of urban life, it became necessary for strict Sabbatarians to begin to redefine legitimate labor in terms of a constant supply of services that are basic to society. With the development of the railroad after 1830, strict Sabbatarians in Great Britain unsuccessfully pressured the government to outlaw Sunday sightseeing tours that were profitable for the railroad companies. But by the end of the nineteenth century, all such criticism either fell on deaf ears or else disappeared.
Restaurants have remained targets of strict Sabbatarians. Families are not supposed to attend restaurants on Sundays. Yet what we find is that during the two hours after church services in those sections of the country that have large church attendance, restaurants fill up. Churchgoers feel no compunction about going out to eat on Sunday afternoon. The wives get a rest. Their husbands pay money to the restaurants for providing this break in the work week of wives.
There is a distinction economically between a business that stays open seven days a week and an employee who is required by the employer to work seven days a week. The Old Testament did not allow businesses to remain open on the sabbath (Nehemiah 13:19–22). Churches have not enforced such a requirement. But an employee should not be required to work seven days a week. He should not accept a job that requires him to do this. He is breaking the pattern of the Lord’s day. Even if he is given days off to make up for the break in the sabbatical pattern, he should not accept the job.
The New Testament speaks of the Lord’s day. “I, John—your brother and the one who shares with you in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are in Jesus—was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony about Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day. I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet” (Revelation 1:9–10). It is a day of worship. It is not spoken of as a day of rest. It is a special day. An individual has the right to take full responsibility for his behavior on the Lord’s day. We should take seriously Paul’s injunction. The locus of enforcement authority has been transferred by God to the individual. But church officers should remind men or women who constantly violate the one-six pattern of the Christian work week that such behavior is not pleasing to God. Christians are supposed to worship together on Sundays. “Let us not stop meeting together, as some have done. Instead, encourage one another more and more, and all the more as you see the day coming closer” (Hebrews 10:25). The fact that no negative sanctions are brought against them is not the same as saying that no warnings should be issued. God will eventually bring the sanctions. People should be warned about this. To break the pattern of the Christian week is to assert autonomy from God.
There was a unique law that applied only to Mosaic Israel. It did not exist under the patriarchs. It appears in Leviticus 25, the chapter on what is known as the Jubilee year.
The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘When you come into the land that I give you, then the land must be made to keep a Sabbath for the Lord. You must plant your field for six years, and for six years you must prune your vineyard and gather the produce. But in the seventh year, a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land must be observed, a Sabbath for the Lord. You must not plant your field or prune your vineyard. You must not conduct an organized harvest of whatever grows by itself, and you must not conduct an organized harvest of whatever grapes grow on your unpruned vines. This will be a year of solemn rest for the land. Whatever the unworked land grows during the Sabbath year will be food for you. You, your male and female servants, your hired servants and the foreigners who live with you may gather food, and your livestock and also wild animals may eat whatever the land produces”’ (vv. 1–7).
This law was never enforced. We know this because Jeremiah told the people of Judah that the reason God was going to send them into captivity was to give the land of Israel its rest. “The king carried away to Babylon those who had escaped the sword. They became servants for him and his sons until the rule of the kingdom of Persia. This happened to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land should have enjoyed its Sabbath rests. It observed its Sabbath for as long as it lay abandoned, in order to pass seventy years in this way” (II Chronicles 36:20–21). That was the fulfilment of Moses’ warning: “I will scatter you among the nations, and I will draw out my sword and follow you. Your land will be abandoned, and your cities will be ruined. Then the land will enjoy its Sabbaths for as long as it lies abandoned and you are in your enemies' lands. During that time, the land will rest and enjoy its Sabbaths” (Leviticus 26:33–34).
The six-one pattern of the Jewish week required that families store up wood during the week so they would not have to start a fire on the Sabbath. It was illegal to start a fire on the sabbath. Similarly, had this law been enforced, families would have had to save up food, meaning seeds and grain, for six years in preparation for the seventh year of rest for the land. The Sabbath forced future-orientation on the people of Israel. It forced a program of thrift on them.
Deuteronomy 15:1–6 set forth a law that all bondservants who were serving because of their failure to repay an interest-free charitable loan had to be released in the seventh year. All loans, meaning charitable loans, had to be forgiven in that year. This was a year of release from bondage, including the bondage of debt. The law also mandated an ethical requirement. Someone who wanted to borrow money was not to be turned down simply because the year of release was approaching (Deuteronomy 15:7–10). [North, Deuteronomy, ch. 36] : These laws did not exist prior to God’s gift of the land to the nation. They were part of the land laws of Israel. Leviticus 25:8–13 specified that in year 49, meaning the seventh of seven sabbatical years, land that had been owned by non-Levitical families at the time of the conquest must be returned to those families. This did not apply to housing inside walled cities. It only applied to rural land. [North, Leviticus, ch. 24]
These laws disappeared after the Israelites returned to the land after the years of exile. This had been predicted by the prophet Ezekiel. “In this way you will divide this land for yourselves, for the tribes of Israel. So you will distribute the inheritances for yourselves and for the foreigners in your midst, those who have given birth to children in your midst and who are, with you, like the native born people of Israel. You will cast lots for inheritances among the tribes of Israel. Then it will happen that the foreigner will be with the tribe among whom he is living. You must give him an inheritance—this is the Lord's declaration” (Ezekiel 47:21–23). [North, Prophets, ch. 22] That ended the Jubilee year laws. It clearly ended the sabbatical year, because the foreigners were not Israelites. The nation after the captivity was never again ruled by Israelites. It was ruled by a series of empires: Medo-Persian, Greek, and Roman. They did not honor the land laws that Moses had revealed to the people.
The Israelite sabbath was different from the church’s Lord’s day. The Israelite sabbath was focused exclusively on rest. The Christian church’s Lord’s day is focused on both rest and worship. There is nothing in the New Testament that specifically prohibits work on the first day of the week. What was required was worship, but even in this case, it was the Greek churches that honored this requirement. There is no indication that, in the Jerusalem church, Christians avoided work on the Lord’s day. They avoided work on the Israelite sabbath because they were still participants in the synagogue and temple system. They did not take two days a week off for rest.
The day of rest is a way for covenant-keepers to acknowledge that they are not autonomous. They do not imitate God. God worked for six days, and He rested on the seventh day. God’s seventh day, meaning man’s first day, was supposed to have been a day of rest for Adam, but he sinned on that day. So, God’s eighth day has become man’s first day covenantally, meaning the day after the day of rebellion. It has become the day of rest for Christians. It is symbolically the eighth day. In terms of the structure of God’s week, it is the first day for man. Man’s first day was the day that Adam should have rested. Instead, he stole from God’s tree, and then he labored to make fig leaves for himself to cover his sin. So did his wife. They should have eaten from the tree of life to celebrate their initial day of rest. Their communion meal would have gained them eternal life. That would have ended the test of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because it would have ended the threat of the negative sanction associated with the tree: death. Christ’s resurrection on the day after the seventh day made it the first day of the week.
The Lord’s day reminds covenant-keepers that God is the source of their wealth. Therefore, they do not lose wealth by honoring the Lord’s day requirement that they do not work at their income-producing jobs. In contrast, covenant-breakers regard a day of rest as a day of loss. They lose the income that they could have earned. This outlook is a curse of autonomy. They believe that they are the source of their wealth (Deuteronomy 8:17), and therefore when they rest from profit-seeking enterprises and salaried jobs, they must forfeit the income that their labor would have produced. They do not see the day of rest as obedience to God. They do not believe that obedience to God’s law brings wealth. They do not see economic cause and effect as governed by biblical law and enforced by a sovereign God. So, they pay twice. First, they do not enjoy God’s gift of rest. Second, they do not enjoy the blessings that they would have enjoyed, had they obeyed God’s law governing the Lord’s day.
In the modern world, where two days off per week is normal, covenant-breakers who are salaried enjoy both days off. They receive the same salary even though they do not work seven days a week. They do not understand that, if they negotiated to work seven days a week, they could gain larger salaries. Instead, they take their income in the form of leisure, which is not taxable. They are political supporters of additional holidays at their employers’ expense. They approve it when national governments add an extra day off in the year. This is a way to redistribute wealth from their employers, especially if their employer is the national government.
The enforcement of the Lord’s day prohibition against work is self-enforcement. Paul made this clear. It is not a matter of civil law. It is not a matter of ecclesiastical law. Therefore, the attempt of civil governments to restrict certain activities on Sundays is a violation of Paul’s express announcement regarding self-enforcement. Observance is a matter of conscience, not legality.
In Great Britain during the nineteenth century, there were attempts by sabbatarian Christians to gain political support for legislated restrictions on certain kinds of activities. A book on these efforts is John Wiggan’s The Rise and Fall of Victorian Sunday (1980). I discuss this book at length in Volume 5 of Authority and Dominion, Appendix E: “The Economic Implications of The Sabbath.” By the end of the nineteenth century, most of these laws were no longer enforced. Public opinion had changed. Modern industrial production had made such restrictions economically destructive. The division of labor that is required to sustain a modern economy does not allow a day of interruption every week for many industries. These attempts had always been theologically misguided. By the end of the 1800s, they were no longer taken seriously by politicians.
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