By Phil Harris
Prolog
While the questions revolving around the old covenant Sabbath command have been explored fully in many other venues, it seems worthwhile to do so here as a blog subject, because there may be some who read these blogs who haven’t resolved, from the biblical record, just what is our new covenant Sabbath Rest.
Since all other Christian doctrine revolves around and supports the gospel message of Jesus Christ, I will begin with the gospel and progress forward through what is faith versus the role of Old Covenant law before showing that our Sabbath Rest is simply freedom from slavery to sin through the work of Jesus our Messiah.
Overview
In both the books of Romans and Galatians, the Apostle Paul outlines the doctrine of New Covenant believers who came to be known as Christians (Acts 11:26). These believers Paul also calls “saints” in Romans 1:7, and after he greets them, he says this:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:16-17).
Paul preaches the gospel because through it God gives salvation to all who believe. Significantly, Paul connects the gospel to Habakkuk 2:4, “the righteous shall live by his faith”, showing that this gospel righteousness revealed “from faith for faith” is the same righteousness foretold in the Old Testament prophets.
In other words, the gospel is the realization of all God’s promises. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:20, “For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.”
After his introduction, Paul progresses farther into Romans. In chapter three Paul declares in verses 10–20 that none are righteous (without sin) and then says:
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin (Rom. 3:19-20).
In spite of what this passage of scripture says, Ellen G. White falsely teaches her followers to seek justification through works of the law, or at least parts of the law, by making the arbitrary non-biblical claim that certain parts are “universal moral laws”. In making this false argument, she wrongly makes the Sabbath command eternal. In fact, the Adventist practice of keeping the seventh-day Sabbath is not supported by Scripture.
Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith.For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also,since God is one—who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith.Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law (Rom. 3:27-31).
Paul explains how we are to “uphold the law” in Romans chapter seven by revealing the purpose of the law of the covenant Jesus fulfilled at Calvary. Furthermore, also according to Romans 7, Adventists are guilty of spiritual adultery for attempting to mix in and obey any part of the Old Covenant law.
To understand the biblical truth about our Sabbath Rest, however, we will begin with the gospel of our salvation:
And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom.For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling,and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (1 Cor. 2:1-5).
In this passage the Apostle Paul says he will “… know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified”. In other words, Paul centers all that he preaches on the gospel of Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.
Eternal rest from the penalty of sin
Adam was created perfect by God. Since God said; “Let’s make man in our image,” we can conclude that mankind was originally created to be a reflection of who our Creator is:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Gen. 1:26).
God gave two commands to Adam: one was “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion…” (Gen. 1:28), and the other command came with a condition:
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden,but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17).
When God speaks, whatever He says will happen, will take place exactly as He says it will. Adam (and Eve) did eat of the forbidden tree, and they did die on that very day. In Genesis 3:6-7 we see where they did eat of this forbidden tree and instantly knew they were naked. They sinned and died that very moment. In the cool of the evening they hid from the Lord God because they knew they were naked.
Contrary to Adventist belief, God had a plan for salvation for Adam’s fallen race long before the time of creation—that is, before Adam (and Eve) sinned. The Apostle Peter say this of our Savior:
He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of youwho through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God (1 Pet. 1:20-21).
The Apostle Paul says:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In lovehe predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will…(Eph. 1:3-5).
When God spoke the following words to the serpent in the garden, His plan for the salvation of Adam’s fallen race was foreknown, yet His words left the both serpent and fallen mankind wondering just how it would come to be fulfilled:
“I will put enmity between you and the woman,and between your offspring and her offspring;he shall bruise your head,and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15).
When Jesus the promised Messiah was conceived of the Holy Spirit, He was the eternal, perfect, and holy Son of God. As the son of Mary He became the only person of Adam’s flesh to be born without sin—a fact which made Him the only one qualified to die for the sins of the world. His perfection and qualification as the only sufficient sacrifice for sin, in fact, are explained in John 10:22-42 where Jesus reveals that he and the Father are one. He shares the same substance and attributes as the Father.
Jesus explained what happened when Adam and Eve when they ate of the forbidden fruit and states what must happen in order for us to be reconciled to God:
Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).
Jesus continues and says:
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:14-16).
In other words, we have to receive life if we are to live with God. We cannot maneuver our way into being right with God; we have to receive life as a gift from God obtained only through trusting the gospel of His death, burial, and resurrection
In Gal. 1:6-9, the Apostle Paul teaches that there can only be one gospel of Jesus Christ, and he invokes a curse upon anyone who teaches otherwise. Moreover, in 1 Corinthians 15 he defines this gospel as centered on the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the remission of the sins of the world. When the Philippian jailer asked, “What must I do to be saved?” Paul and Silas told him,
“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31).
When we respond in faith to the finished atonement of Jesus’ shed blood at Calvary, Jesus gives us His gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit who brings our dead human spirits to life. In Ephesians 1:3 Christians are said to be “in Christ”, and verses 13 and 14 reveal this amazing truth about the Holy Spirit:
In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit,who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory (Eph. 3:13-14).
The words “in him” refer to Jesus Christ who is the author and finisher of our salvation. Our faith is founded upon nothing other than the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Israel’s failure to rest in faith
Scripture defines Christian faith to be the same as Abraham’s faith:
For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.”Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due.And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness (Rom. 4:3-5).
Following the time of Abraham and after 400 years of slavery endured by Abraham’s descendants, God appointed Moses to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt where they had found no rest. The ten plagues that forced Pharaoh to let them go were totally a work of God. The parting of the Red Sea resulting in the destruction of Pharaoh and his army was also totally a work of God. All of the people were saved solely by the power of God, yet when the twelve spies were sent in to reconnoiter the Promised Land, the people still lacked “the faith of Abraham” to believe and obey what God instructed them to do.
When Moses sent out the spies to reconnoiter ahead of them, their instructions were simply to report back on what they could learn about the Promised Land. Despite having experienced God’s overwhelming power, ten of the spies through lack of faith were more worried about “the giants of the land” than the sure promises and power of God. Their faithlessness resulted in what God the Lord said here:
Then the LORD said, “I have pardoned, according to your word.But truly, as I live, and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the LORD,none of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the test these ten times and have not obeyed my voice,shall see the land that I swore to give to their fathers. And none of those who despised me shall see it (Num. 14:20-23).
The spies’ lack of faith resulted in forty years of wandering in the desert where all those “twenty years old and upward” (Num. 14:29) would die except for Caleb and Joshua, the two who had the faith (the same faith as Abraham) to believe God.
Worship: true or false
Ellen G. White claims that her many “visions” came from her special “spirit guide”. It was upon this authority that she claimed “Sunday Keeping” was worshiping God on the wrong day, and that “true worship” (on the seventh-day Sabbath) during the end times preceding the return of the Savior will be a test that separates “the remnant church” (meaning: Seventh-day Adventists) from all others who only claim to be Christians. In other words, according to Adventist doctrine established on the authority of their prophetess Ellen White, what a person does determines whether or not they are saved. Keeping the Sabbath is the mark of being saved, not simply placing one’s faith upon the finished work of Jesus Christ.
Jesus specifically addressed the nature of true worship. In the Gospel of John, chapter four, Jesus was resting at a well outside the town of Sychar in Samaria when he met a woman who came to draw water. Their conversation soon led to the woman’s question: “Where is the right place to worship God?” From their conversation we learn that it was not a day but a place that troubled the woman. In other words, the Samaritan woman understood that her religion and Judaism had conflicting rules about where and how to worship God, but the issue was not about a day:
Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:21-24).
In the Old Covenant God could only be worshiped by bringing a sacrifice which would represent the Messiah’s atonement for the remission of their sins, and that sacrifice was made only once a year on the Day of Atonement. Furthermore, that sacrifice had to be made at the temple in Jerusalem. Sacrifices made at any other location would not qualify for atonement. The Samaritan woman’s question inquired as to whether Samaritans could offer qualifying sacrifices at a certain mountain in Samaria, or did they have to be offered in Jerusalem in order to satisfy God? Significantly, this concern about location had nothing to do with the weekly Sabbath day of rest.
Jesus said, “the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” This statement reveals that Ellen G. White was wrong and that her spirit guide lied.
Jesus told the Samaritan woman what true worship is, and it has nothing to do with created places or times. New covenant believers do not have to go to certain places or meet at certain times: they worship anytime in spirit and in truth!
Traditions
This is the fourth command of the Old Covenant:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.Six days you shall labor, and do all your work,but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Ex. 20:8-11).
The command was that once a week on the sabbath day the people were to rest and do no work. Significantly, the fourth commandment made no mention of worshiping on the weekly Sabbath day. Under the old covenant, if Israelites had claimed the seventh day as a day of worship it would have been false worship, because true worship could only be done at the temple in Jerusalem on the Day of Atonement by bringing the prescribed sacrifice for the ritual remission of one’s sins.
So where did the idea of worshiping on the seventh day come from?
The Jewish religious leaders, on their own authority, developed two traditions that were in place during the time of Jesus’ ministry here on earth. The first was the concept of “the sabbath day’s walk”, and the other was the practice of synagogue attendance on the Sabbath day for the reading of the law. Being strict legalists, however, the religious leaders were not so foolish as to call this weekly meeting “worship”.
Furthermore, Adventism invents the non-biblical claim that there is something called the “eternal moral law of God” (which they identify as the Ten Commandments). Therefore, they argue, the Sabbath commandment is both eternal and moral. Because the fourth commandment refers to God’s ceasing His work at the end of creation, Adventists claim the Sabbath was established at creation as an eternal, moral requirement. This argument, however, is reading into the text what isn’t there.
When one reads the creation account in Genesis and compares that with the fourth commandment, it is clear that the the creation account is not establishing a requirement as does the fourth commandment. In Genesis, God “rested” (or ceased) eternally from His creation on the seventh day after the six days of creation. There was no command given for Adam and Eve to do likewise.
The Gospel of John gives us further understanding. In chapter one we see that Jesus is called our Creator; thus He is the one who rested eternally from His work of creation on the seventh day. Furthermore, we see that Jesus’ resting from His finished work of creation foreshadowed the eternal rest He gives to those who accept in faith His death at Calvary when He cried out, “It is finished!” (Jn. 19:30).
Adventism totally perverts the meaning of Jesus’ rest, or “ceasing” both at creation and at Calvary. The old covenant command to rest on the seventh day pointed to Jesus’ eternal rest, atonement of the sins of the world. When He completed His work, Jesus sat down at the side of the Father forever because atonement is complete, Heb. 10:1-14:
But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God,waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet.For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified (Heb. 10:12-14).
The nail that closes the Adventist coffin
Romans 7:1-6 makes the point that Jesus’ death at Calvary ended the old covenant. Those born-again as the Bride of Christ are now joined with Christ under a new covenant totally apart from the old.
Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God (Rom. 7:4).
Moreover, in verse three of this passage, it is clear that that Adventists are guilty of spiritual adultery for attempting to mix any of the obsolete old covenant with the new.
Jesus our eternal Sabbath Rest
Hebrews 4 articulates the fact that, because of His finished work of atonement, the Lord Jesus IS our eternal Sabbath rest. In the new covenant we do not worship on a day; our worship is in, to, and through our Lord Jesus who is now seated at the right hand of the Father! Here is the indisputable word of God on the matter:
Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened.For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said,
“As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest,’”
although his works were finished from the foundation of the world.For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.”And again in this passage he said, “They shall not enter my rest.”
Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he appoints a certain day, “Today,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted,
“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”
For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on.So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God,for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. (Heb. 4:1-10)
To Him be glory for ever and ever! †
All biblical references quoted from the ESV.
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