COLLEEN TINKER
I had a poignant and perceptive email this week. The writer was a top student in an Adventist seminary (not in North America) when he began to look closely at the teachings of Adventism and to compare them to Scripture. After studying the biblical covenants, he understood that the Ten Commandments were part of the Mosaic covenant and not of the new, but he still struggles with questions about the Sabbath.
His email this week explains his frustration as he attempts to understand Scriptural truth through the indoctrination of the Adventist arguments:
You know, although we former Adventists do our best to overcome what we learned, Adventism is like some moss that catches our hearts and makes every single step a struggle as we try to walk out of the tangled mess. I come back to the beginning, Genesis. I read Dale Ratzlaff's book Sabbath In Christ, but I have a question. God created the earth in six days and, at the seventh, He rested. Adam also rested in the presence of God (I suppose). In the next week after the first, did Adam rest again, or not? How can I get out of this problem? Sometimes it is easier to get out of Adventism’s Daniel interpretations than its Sabbath worship. It’s their greatest Trojan horse! I can’t get easily get my thoughts around their arguments…really.
This writer is expressing a frustration common to former Adventists. Adventism has bound its members to its golden Sabbath calf by misusing Scripture and redefining words, and I feel this writer’s frustration. Because I know his question is common among us who have had to disentangle from Sabbath confusion, I am sharing my answer to him here.
My Answer
I agree with you completely: it is easier to get out of the twisted Daniel prophecies of Adventism than it is to give up the Sabbath.
As far as Genesis goes: God gave NO command to Adam to keep the Sabbath. At the end of creation week, God CEASED, or rested. His work was done. Significantly, the structure of the seventh day in Genesis is different from the first six days. At the end of each of the first six days, the Bible says, “And the evening and the morning were the _________ day.” (See Genesis 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 3.) Each day was bounded by an evening and a morning.
The seventh day, however, did not have an evening and a morning (Gen 2:2,3). It was simply the day God CEASED. No work was done because His work was complete. There was no ending to the seventh day because God didn’t start over with His work on the day after the seventh. He was simply DONE. He ceased from His work, and He didn’t take up His creation work again. His finished work was still finished. It wasn’t until Adam and Eve sinned that His perfect, finished work was tarnished.
Furthermore, there is no hint in Genesis that Adam observed every seventh day. Creation week ended with a finished work that did not end with the seventh day. God’s own rest continued, and Adam enjoyed personal communion with God every day of his life—until he sinned. Then his spirit died, and he no longer lived in God’s perfect rest. Instead, he had to work. God cursed the ground that He had made, and it bore thistles and weeds. Adam’s life became bound to hard work if he wanted to live. Yet even then, God did not give Adam the Sabbath. He did cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness and promised them a Savior who would destroy their tempter, but He did not give them a Sabbath command.
God created Adam INTO His rest, His completed work. Significantly, it was not ADAM’s rest, either. Adam entered into God’s rest. It is exactly this point that Hebrews 4 emphasizes. God has always invited His people into HIS rest; Sabbath was never man’s personal rest. It is not a mini-vacation.
Israel’s Sign
Furthermore, the Sabbath God gave Israel was a shadow of Christ (Col. 2:16-17). It was a shadow for Israel to observe, remembering that they were invited into God’s finished work. By refraining from their own work on Sabbath, they had to depend entirely upon God for their provision. Sabbath was never a TEST for Israel; it was a SIGN of their covenant with God. They were to remain in their tents every Sabbath, no matter what was happening: lentil harvest, lambing season, thunderstorms threatening the wheat harvest—they stayed in their tents. Observing this sign of the covenant meant that they would have to trust God for His care and provision even in times of crisis. Their pagan neighbors worked hard every single day. They had to please their gods; they had to work hard and sacrifice their eldest children to their gods, hoping for favor from them in the form of crops and livestock. Their lives were bound to endless work for their demanding gods.
Israel, on the other hand, was asked to observe the Sabbath. Their God took care of them instead of demanding their lives and children to please Him. And the miracle was that, if they observed the Sabbath as their act of trust in God and His covenant, God blessed them. In fact, He blessed them so abundantly that they far surpassed the pagan nations around them whose lives were enslaved to capricious, cruel gods. The pagans could see how Israel prospered, and they could see that Israel did not work to please God but received God’s blessings even on the day they rested. NO ONE—not the Israelites and not the pagan nations—could ever say that Israel prospered because they worked harder. Everyone could see that Israel prospered because their God worked for them!
No, God never gave Adam a command to keep Sabbath. He created Adam INTO His sanctified seventh day (and it was only Adam’s second day, by the way). Adam was placed into God’s perfection, and Adam lived in perfect, ceaseless oneness with God until He sinned. Not until Jesus died on the cross and cried “It Is Finished!” was God’s work declared done again. The Sabbath God gave the nation Israel was a shadow reminding them of His perfect, completed work at creation which mankind enjoyed until they distrusted God. It was also a shadow pointing forward to the completed work of atonement for the reconciliation and salvation of mankind.
The Sabbath was always a shadow of God’s finished work: the work of His perfect creation, and the work of His perfect, complete atonement for our sin. Now we rest in His finished work when we trust Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. When we trust His completed atonement, we cease from our labor. We no longer have to work to prove we love God. We are literally born again and transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of His Beloved Son (Col. 1:13). We cease from our labor; we enter HIS REST—His finished work. We are embraced by God in His life as Adam was on the seventh day of creation week. We cease from our labor. We are saved and loved and made new. We are at rest eternally because, when we believe, we enter eternal life (Jn. 5:24).
Contrary to Adventism, the Sabbath is NOT a “creation ordnance”. The Sabbath was given to Israel and was not mentioned prior to Exodus 16 when God gave them Sabbath rest along with manna, the symbol of the Bread of Life. In other words, He gave them God’s Rest along with the Bread of Life. The two are inseparable—and we find this shadow to be fulfilled when Jesus tells Israel that He is the Bread of Life, and He tells them also that the work of God is to believe in the One whom He sent. (See John 6.)
We do not find the Sabbath in Genesis. Rather, in Genesis we find God’s ceasing from His work as He gives mankind His perfect creation, His unbroken relationship with them. We don’t find the shadow of Sabbath until God gives it as the sign of His covenant with Israel, and we find the fulfillment of the shadow of Sabbath in the Lord Jesus who completed everything necessary for our reconciliation and forgiveness. He Himself is our Sabbath rest, the One in whom we find our own rest when we enter His finished work. †
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2 things I can comment on-
1. Did not Acts 15 Conference relieve Gentiles of any obligation to observe circumcision and anything that was distinctly Jewish? No other nation on earth observed the Jewish Sabbath and in requesting Gentiles to observe it would definitely have been problematics.
2. One very good Trojan Horse that Adventist use is to ask one what they think of the Ten Commandments. If one says he or she stands that believes in observing them, they then tell you that you do NOT observe the Sabbath commandment. Usually, those that have not studied this issue will have a problem. the Sabbath commandment is part of the Mosaic law in which those of the New Covenant have no obligation as our righteousness is that of Christ; not observing the law. However, God as a Father does discipline us if we do not conform to His will in our deeds or thoughts.
I agree!