Sabbath is always the sticking point when people leave Adventism. In fact, Adventist teaching has so bound the day into the Adventist conscience that Adventists generally worry more about disrespecting the Sabbath than they do about disrespecting Jesus.
Furthermore, Adventism has attached Sabbath-keeping to worshiping God. They believe that unless they keep the Sabbath holy, they are not truly worshiping the God of Scripture. Even more, they believe that if they worship on Sunday, they are honoring Satan and are taking onto themselves the mark of the beast.
It is not surprising, therefore, that people who are in the process of leaving Adventism become confused with the biblical Sabbath commands. Because Adventism does not teach the biblical covenants, it fails to explain to its members that the Sabbath was the sign of a conditional covenant which came to an end when the Lord Jesus rose from death (see Gal. 3:17–19). Consequently, reading passages such as Exodus 16 where God gave Israel Sabbath along with the manna can throw a newly-seeking Adventist into a tailspin of doubt and guilt.
We received an email this week that asked about this very passage. The writer said,
The main point that is bothering me is the manna account as it was pre-Sinai. The Israelites were told to collect a double portion of manna on the sixth day and none on the seventh in order to observe that day as a Sabbath. It sounds as though Sabbath may have already been instituted prior to the Ten Commandments. If you have any further understanding of this, I would be pleased to hear from you.
I understand the writer’s concern; Adventism has done a great job of appropriating what God did for Israel and saying those things were universal. Context, however, is essential to understand this account.
Exodus 16 tells of Israel in the desert growing petulant about not having meat and not having water. The events in Exodus 16 occurred about one month before the giving of the law. Israel had recently come miraculously through the Red Sea after being released from Egypt by the hand of God. He had protected their own firstborn children under the blood on the doorposts while He took the lives of the Egyptian firstborn children, and when Pharaoh realized what had happened, he commanded Israel to leave immediately.
The Israelites knew they had been delivered from hopeless slavery by the hand of Yahweh. They KNEW…but in the misery of the desert, they began to complain about God and His leading and about their own discomfort. So, in Exodus 16, we learn that God gave them two signs of Himself simultaneously: the manna and the Sabbath. The manna represented Him as the Bread of life, and the Sabbath represented Him as their Rest. Each of these two provisions foreshadowed the Lord Jesus who would be the manifestation of the Bread of Life, and the One who would open the way to entering God’s own rest through faith in what He did.
There is no mention of the Sabbath before Exodus 16; we cannot claim it was eternal or pre-existing on the basis of silence. Silence is not proof. No…Moses (who wrote the Torah) is telling the story of God’s giving Israel God’s provision for them: the Bread of Life and Rest in Him…and the two are inseparable. They could not have the bread of life without embracing His rest. If they tried to grab the bread without honoring God’s command to them to rest, they would not get the bread on that day. For Israel, these symbols were very physical provisions accompanied by clear commands. On this side of the cross, the symbolism becomes very clear: both the manna and the Sabbath were shadows of the Lord Jesus who gave all who believe the true Bread of Life and entrance into God’s rest—and God’s rest and the Bread of Life were given to Israel together, as an inseparable unit.
In fact, the manna, like the Sabbath, was a temporary shadow. We learn in Joshua 5 that the manna was God’s provision for Israel for the entire 40 years they wandered in the wilderness, but when they entered the Promised Land and harvested their first harvest, the manna ceased. Joshua 5:10–12 says this:
While the people of Israel were encamped at Gilgal, they kept the Passover on the fourteenth day of the month in the evening on the plains of Jericho. And the day after the Passover, on that very day, they ate of the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. And the manna ceased the day after they ate of the produce of the land. And there was no longer manna for the people of Israel, but they ate of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.
In other words, God’s provision for Israel in the Promised Land was realized, and the interim provision could cease. God continued to provide them with the bread of life, but He did it in the context of His promise that they would inherit the land which flowed with milk and honey. Further, we learn in John 6:35, right after Jesus fed the 5,000, that the Lord Jesus Himself is the bread of life:
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).
In other words, the manna continued to be a shadow of the Lord Jesus, and He pointed out that He has fulfilled the iconic symbol of the Israelites’ desert wandering. Just as God gave Israel the manna to keep them alive during their suffering, so Jesus Himself is now offering life to all who are struggling in the darkness of sin.
The Sabbath day, however, continued because Jesus had not yet come to die and rise again to reconcile us to God and to open a new, living way to God. Now that Jesus has completed the atonement by offering His blood as the propitiation for sin, now that He has broken sin’s curse by shattering death, the Sabbath day has become obsolete along with the entire old covenant (of which Sabbath was the sign). Hebrews 8 clearly states that because of Jesus, the old covenant has become obsolete.
Making sense of it all
God created the nation of Israel on the basis of His promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He created a nation to whom He gave His oracles and the covenants of promise (Rom. 3:1, 2; Eph. 2:11, 12). In His covenant with Israel given on Mount Sinai, God gave Israel the law which was “a shadow of the good things to come” (Heb. 10:1) and a witness to the righteousness of God (Rom. 3:21).
Even before God met Moses on Sinai, He provided for the nation by giving them the intertwined shadows of the eternal bread of life and of rest in Christ. Neither the manna nor the Sabbath occurred prior to Exodus 16, and neither of them was permanent. The manna lasted until the nation entered the Promised Land and harvested its first crop, and the Sabbath lasted until Jesus came and fulfilled the law by dying on the cross, being buried, and rising on the third day, thus fulfilling every shadow of the Mosaic covenant.
The fact that the Sabbath appears prior to the giving of the law is not proof that it predated the nation of Israel. We cannot assume that God gave Sabbath before His word tells us He gave it. Rather, that first provision of manna and Sabbath rest was God’s mercy on the fledgling nation that still had Egypt in its heart. By the time God gave the law through Moses a month later, Israel already knew that the God who displayed Himself in fire and smoke and earthquake on Mt. Sinai was the God who heard their complaint and provided them with a consistent supply of food and with a day of rest that would require them to depend upon Him for what they needed to get through the day.
Furthermore, God gave the symbol of rest as the sign of the Mosaic covenant. In other words, by the time God gave the law, Israel already associated the Sabbath with God doing everything needed for their survival on that day. In fact, if they tried to gather their own food on the Sabbath, they would go hungry because no manna fell on Sabbath. They had to depend entirely on God.
It was that day of dependence, that day of resting in God’s provision—that day associated with God’s providing their bread of life—that became the sign of their covenant with their God. It was a day that had no previous application to humanity, but it was God’s provision for a desert-bound nation who had to learn to trust God after a history of slavery to a pagan king. The Sabbath was a shadow of perfect trust in God’s provision for all they needed, not only for temporal life but also for eternal life—and that shadow was realized when the Messiah came and became their true Sabbath rest.
When we begin to see that the Bible is not man-centered but God-centered, the accounts of the nation of Israel begin to make sense. The law was not an eternal document applied to humanity; it was a provision of God for a nation that couldn’t provide for itself. The law was God’s way of showing Israel that they were sinners and needed saving. It was God’s way of revealing His holiness and mercy, His wrath and grace, and it was a promise that One was coming who would reconcile and restore His people to Himself.
In Jesus we experience the fulfillment of the Sabbath. The day is not eternal, and it did not predate Israel. Jesus, however, IS eternal. When we trust Him, we enter God’s full provision and His rest. In Jesus the shadow is fully realized. †
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