Answered Scripture

I don’t know about you, but my day is full of things to do. We all have those honey-do lists, jobs that require our time of at least 8 hours, homes that need to be cleaned, dinners that need to be prepared, and it just goes on and on. We all look forward to our weekends, but even those usually involve some activity that is not restful. It’s no wonder why people have anxiety or depression. Our lives are non-stop, with only brief moments of quiet, and for some of us, that is only when we sleep…if we do sleep.

I can remember a time when everything, for the most part, was closed on the weekend. There would be some places open on Saturday, but never on Sunday; that was the day that most people would go off to church and then visit family. Today, everything, just about, is open. The only places that seem close today are usually some office environments. You can shop, eat, and be entertained anytime and any day. People plan to fill each day with things to do, especially on vacation. Even vacations, which are supposed to be downtime, have turned into “how much can we cram into a week?”

With all this go-go-go that we do, we don’t usually involve God in any of it. I’m not saying that some people don’t take an hour out of their busy schedule to attend church on Sunday. I’m sure some out there do, but is that all we should devote to God? What if I were to tell you that is not what God planned for us from the beginning? That there is a day we should devote to God, and yes, I said day.

We owe all we have to our Creator. What is one day out of a week? That is only 24 out of 168 hours that He has given us to live. Unfortunately, most think that even 1 hour at a service is too long. But if we were to devote those 24 hours to Him and rest from everything else, do you think that would impact your life? I’m here to tell you that it will significantly affect your life.

God created us with this day in mind. Even He stopped and rested on the seventh day from His work in creation. That wasn’t just some way to end the creation story; that was to be our example. We all need that downtime to keep going. One day out of the week, not working, not thinking about work or what needs to be done, no worrying about it either. It will change your life. You get a new perspective on priorities and the much-needed rest required.

Now that we know why we need to rest let’s talk about when we should rest. Again, we go back to the creation story in Genesis. God created the earth, sun, moon, animals, man, etc., in 6 days and rested on the 7th (Genesis 1:1 through 2:3). In verse 3, it states, “Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” The key word is “sanctified.” In Hebrew, the word here is qāḏaš, which is pronounced kaw-dash’, Strong’s H6942. Its meaning is to consecrate, sanctify, prepare, dedicate, be hallowed, holy, sanctified, and separate. Strong’s definition is to be (causatively, make, pronounce or observe as) clean (ceremonially or morally): — appoint, bid, consecrate, dedicate, defile, hallow, (be, keep)holy(-er, place), keep, prepare, proclaim, purify, sanctify(-ied one, self). In other words, He set it apart as holy.

The Sabbath or seventh day is not just a “Jewish” thing. As stated, God put this in place before the exodus from Egypt. As we all know, the week (as shown in most dictionaries, encyclopedias, or calendars) begins on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday, the first day of the week, to the seventh day. Going back to my article on the commandments, God commanded us to keep the Sabbath day. It states in Exodus 20:8-11, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”

This is where the picking and choosing happens when it comes to the commandments; this one is ignored the most. This is sad because, in reality, this one means a lot to God. So, if God stated that the Sabbath is the seventh day, how and why do most people attend church on Sunday? This is where we need to pull up the church’s history and its changes in time.

So, to start with, let’s be completely clear: nowhere in the Bible did God, Yehoshua, or any other figure, change the Sabbath from the seventh day (Saturday) to the first day (Sunday). This was a man-made change. Why, you may ask? Well, it started in the beginning after Yehoshua’s death and resurrection. Christianity was viewed as a sect of Judaism. Many practices of what we now call “Judaism” were practiced by the first Christians. So when the Roman Empire started to have hostility towards the “Jews,” many of the “Christian” churches abandoned some of these practices to put a separation between them, and one of those happened to be the observance of the seventh day of Sabbath.

Then Roman Emperor Constantine came along. He was a worshipper of the sun and disliked the Jews and their practices. An excerpt from a booklet, “Sunset to Sunset, Gods Sabbath Rest,” states, “… at the Council of Nicea (A.D. 325), church authorities essentially banned the biblical Passover observance. Endorsing this change, Constantine announced: “It appeared an unworthy thing that . . . we should follow the practice of the Jews, who have impiously defiled their hands with enormous sin, and are, therefore, deservedly afflicted with blindness of soul . . . Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd” (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3, chapter 18, quoted in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1979, Vol. 1, pp. 524-525).

It goes on to say, “In a bid to unify his empire, he established the first laws making Sunday the official day of rest. His A.D. 321 law, for example, stated: ‘On the venerable Day of the Sun [Sunday] let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed.’” Did you get that? It wasn’t until A.D. 321 that the observance of Sunday came to be. That is around 291 years that Christians and Jews alike kept the Sabbath on the seventh day, not Sunday (first day) of the week

Well, I need to wrap this up but if like a whole lot more information on this subject as what day, and how we should observe God’s Sabbath, please read https://www.ucg.org/learn/bible-study-aids/sunset-sunset-gods-sabbath-rest