Question:
Your answer about Seventh Day Adventists and the Sabbath (Megiddo Message, November, 1994, page 20) seems to wander around quite a bit. So what do you do with the whole nation of Jews?
Do you mean to tell me they all slept through some Sabbaths? Or maybe a whole nation forgot what day it was? Sometimes one person may get the days of the week mixed up, but the whole nation? No. From the time in Genesis 2:3 when God blessed the day and hallowed it, the week has never been lost. It has come down to us from creation, and the Sabbath with it.
Believe me, you are missing a blessing by not observing it. As for commands, it is very plain in the Fourth Commandment. Do me a favor, and before you pray read Prov. 28:9.
Answer:
Our correspondent is confident that the existence of succession of seven-day weeks can be traced and proven from the time of the creation, via the nation of Jews. It is our firm position that evidence for that position is totally lacking.
Such a belief most likely assumes that the literal creation of this planet took place approximately 6000 years ago—an assumption which cannot be proved either by the Bible or by scientific evidence. On the contrary, there is copious evidence giving testimony to the earth being thousands of millions of years old.
But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that the earth is only 6000 years old, then there is still a problem with stating the Jews, being Sabbath keepers, kept accurate track of the succession of Sabbaths from the time of creation. The Jews were not called as a nation (Exodus 16) and did not even exist as a people until two-thousand and some odd hundreds of years after our proposed “original Sabbath.” We do not believe in a Sabbath date passed down from creation, but even if we did, it could not have been the nation of Jews that preserved it. Abraham, father of the Jews, did not enter the scene until the nineteenth century B.C.
As far as any blessing we may be missing by not observing it, we feel no obligation to observe a law which was expressly given only to the nation of Israel and which was terminated with Christ. Furthermore, every law that God gives is, in reality, a law to govern the heart, not merely the outward form. Paul warned that no one should judge another “in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come” (Col. 2:16-17). Many aspects of the Israelite law were temporary institutions, given to train and discipline the people and to bring them to Christ, while at the same time revealing important parts of God’s great plan of salvation. Hebrews 4 speaks clearly of the significance of the Sabbath, “For if Joshua had given them rest, then He would not afterward have spoken of another day. There remains therefore a rest [Sabbath] for the people of God…. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience” (Heb. 4:8, 11). The Sabbath observance, the setting aside of one day in seven, was a prototype of God’s plan to give His people a thousand-year rest, during which all evil would be brought under control and the earth would come under the direct supervision of God’s chosen rulers (Rev. 20:4; Luke 1:31-33; Zech. 14:9; Rev. 5:9-10). This is a rest far greater than was promised to those observing the literal Sabbath ordinance of Moses’ law.
We hope our correspondent can appreciate these facts and regret if she cannot; but we must adhere to what the Lord has written and we observe one day a week, not as the holy Sabbath but as a day of worship to the Lord.