Does The Fourth Commandment Still Apply to Christians? - Andy Webb

 Exodus 20:8 " Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work,

10 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.

11 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.

 

Many people don’t realize that when the Ten Commandments were given at Sinai, this was not the first time they came into existence. When God gave them to Moses it was not an iteration, it was a reiteration. In a very real sense these Moral Laws had always been in existence because they were a description of the character of God and therefore a model for the character of the people of God. 

Now some may say at this point, “Ok we can see how God doesn’t lie, or steal, or blaspheme and so on. But how is the Sabbath a description of the nature of God?” Well, the God we worship, is a God who desires to give his people rest. In a very real sense from beginning to end the Bible is the story of the story of how God promises and then gives His people peace and true Sabbath rest. 

For instance, in the beginning when God created the world, He blessed man with two particular creation ordinances in the Garden, the first creation ordinance was marriage, and the other creation ordinance was the Sabbath. 

Gen. 2:3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.  We remember that even in the Garden man was supposed to be working, we read in Gen.2:15 Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And yes, that means that work is not a result of the fall it is a good thing, unless it becomes unending, never being completed, never accomplishing its goals. 

That unending, fruitless labor was the lot of God’s people while they were in slavery and bondage in Egypt. We read that the Egyptians had made their lives bitter with hard bondage. They toiled for their Egyptian task masters all day every day and received none of the profits of their labor. They had no rest, and they had no relief, and this situation continued for hundreds of years. Then they cried out to the Lord, and He delivered them by His Mighty right hand. 

 

One of the first things that God had done to bless His people, even before the giving of the Ten Commandments at Sinai, was to restore the Sabbath that their bondage in Egypt had obliterated. Old habits die hard, and we find they had difficulty breaking the slave mindset that they had left Egypt with: 

 

Exodus 16:23 Then he said to them, "This is what the LORD has said: 'Tomorrow is a Sabbath rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD. Bake what you will bake today, and boil what you will boil; and lay up for yourselves all that remains, to be kept until morning.' "

24 So they laid it up till morning, as Moses commanded; and it did not stink, nor were there any worms in it.

25 Then Moses said, "Eat that today, for today is a Sabbath to the LORD; today you will not find it in the field.

26 "Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, which is the Sabbath, there will be none."

27 Now it happened that some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather, but they found none.

28 And the LORD said to Moses, "How long do you refuse to keep My commandments and My laws?

29 "See! For the LORD has given you the Sabbath; therefore He gives you on the sixth day bread for two days. Let every man remain in his place; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day."

30 So the people rested on the seventh day.

Notice that here the Lord also uses the Sabbath to teach his people to depend on His provision not on what they can do, which is a lesson the Lord seeks to teach his people throughout scripture.

In Deuteronomy as the people are about to enter into the Promised Land, the command to honor the Sabbath is repeated by Moses, but with a difference:

Deut. 5:15 And remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.

God reminds them that they were slaves in Egypt, saying in essence, “You had no rest but I brought you out, I released you from your bondage, I delivered you. Therefore, do not go back to slavery, neither bring your children or your servants into the same kind of bondage that you were in.”

After they entered the Promised land, one of the signs that the people were falling away from the Lord and becoming like the godless Canaanite nations was their breaking of the Sabbath. In doing this they eliminated the day of rest that was meant to be a benefit, a blessing, and a holy day to them, and they entered into a materialistic idolatry where they depended upon their own labor and worshipped mammon. They also took away the memorial to the Lord’s work. As the Sabbath disappeared from their society, so did the remembrance of the Lord and his redemption. The Sabbath and religion were tied together and as one disappeared the other did as well. 

Now it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the World, the Flesh, and the Devil had a vested interest in erasing the Sabbath. As they did, they erased the remembrance of the Lord from amongst his people, they committed them to materialistic idolatry, and they laid a heavy yoke upon their shoulders that the Lord did not intend for them to bear. Erase observation of the Sabbath and you return God’s people to bondage and idolatry.

 

That is not only true for the ancient Israelites, Christians also have been given one day in seven as a day of rest and worship. The Christian Sabbath is the day called by John in Rev. 1:10 “The Lord’s Day”, it is the first day of the week.

The reason why the Christians celebrated Sunday and not Saturday as their one day in seven of rest is because Sunday was the day of the Resurrection. Sunday is the day when Jesus completed his work of rescuing his people from the slavery and oppression of sin. From that point onwards Sunday became a memorial to the turning point in the history of redemption. It marks the great transition in the bible from redemption promised to redemption accomplished. Thus Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, is still the day on which we celebrate our liberation and freedom from slavery to sin.

We remember that it was Jesus who told us:

Matthew 11:28 "Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

29 "Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

30 "For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."

Sunday is not just a day when we look back at the resurrection but also a day when we look forward to the rest that will come when we enter intothe fullness of the Kingdom. Here on earth our Sabbaths, as much as they are a blessing, are but a foretaste of the rest that is to come, namely the rest from our cross bearing and tribulation that Jesus has won for us.

 

Heb. 4:9 So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.

10 For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His.

 

For centuries the church remembered to keep to that pattern that God had fixed for us. Here in the West we remembered that day. It was practice of the Apostolic church to meet on Sunday. For instance, in Acts 20 we read:

“But we sailed away from Philippi after the Days of Unleavened Bread, and in five days joined them at Troas, where we stayed seven days. Now on the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul, ready to depart the next day, spoke to them and continued his message until midnight.” (NKJV Acts 20:6-7)

Paul and his traveling companions stayed seven days in Troas, but on which day did they come together for worship? On the first day of the week (Sunday)!

 

As RC Sproul put it – “In Christian history the sacred time of the Sabbath has three distinct orientations. The first is the commemoration of God’s work of creation. The second is the celebration of God’s work of redemption. The third is the celebration of the future promise of the consummation of redemption when we enter our Sabbath rest in heaven. Thus the whole scope of redemptive history, from start to finish, is made sacred in the observance of the Sabbath.”

 

Christians held to this pattern for centuries.

 

For instance, the Didache – which dates back to either the late 1st or early 2nd century states, “Chapter 14. Christian Assembly on the Lord’s Day. But every Lord’s Day gather yourselves together, and break bread, and give thanksgiving after having confessed your transgressions, that your sacrifice may be pure.”

 

Ignatius, the celebrated martyred bishop of Antioch, says, in his epistle to the Magnesians, written sometime between 107-116 AD, that this is, “the Lord’s Day, the day consecrated to the resurrection the queen and chief of all the days.”

 

Justin Martyr, who died about 160 AD says that the Christians “neither celebrated the Jewish festivals, nor observed their Sabbaths, nor practiced circumcision.” And in another place, he wrote that “they, both those who lived in the city and those who lived in the country, were all accustomed to meet on the day which is denominated Sunday, for the reading of the Scriptures, prayer, exhortation and communion. The assembly met on Sunday, because this is the first day on which God, having changed the darkness and the elements, created the world; and because Jesus our Lord on this day rose from the dead.”

 

One of the first acts of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, was to enact a law in 321 AD that followed the Scripture pattern and the practice of the church and made Sunday the empire’s day of rest and worship. 

For centuries after that Western Civilization followed that pattern. Most of you who are over 40 will remember as you were growing up that the stores, banks, and non-essential services were all closed on Sunday. Butwe are seeing in our own day that both Creation ordinances, marriage and the Sabbath are being quickly deleted from our society. This bodes extremely ill for us for as Williams S. Plumer put it, “There is no example of any community, large or small, ancient or modern, continuing virtuous or happy for a considerable time, if they slighted either marriage of the Sabbath-day.”

 

Sunday has gone from being the Lord’s Day to just another day of the week, and that change rather than being resisted by Christians (and even pastors) is being encouraged. But have we stopped to ask ourselves, what the long-term effects of this change will be? Today it is mostly retail and food service workers whom we cause to work on Sundays by going out for meals or going shopping, but the trend is affecting other businesses as well. We seldom stop to consider when the person providing us with our Sunday after-service brunch is going to go to worship, but will we be quite as indifferent to the question when it is our employer who expects us to be at work at 11:00 AM on Sunday Morning? Church, as some commentators have noted, is already in danger of becoming solely the domain of women and children and do we expect that situation to improve when the only people free to attend are stay at home moms and their children? If things continue, I believe that in a couple of decades the Lord’s Day just might be something as alien to our culture as it is to Islamic nations, and we will have returned to precisely the kind of bondage God delivered Israel from. We are rapidly progressing towards a society in which we spend all our time seeking after Mammon and pleasure and never realize the blessing we have forfeited or the heavy yoke we have put on our shoulders.

 

William Plumer had it right when he wrote, “Just in proportion as churches decline in the practice and power of godliness, become unsound in doctrine, licentious in life, and lax in discipline, wedded to human inventions, and heedless of the law of God in other respects, in the same proportion do they lightly esteem the Sabbath of the Lord. No Sabbath, no church, is the rule laid down in scripture. It is a correct rule. Without that holy day, all true religion would soon vanish from the earth.”

Don’t let that happen in your life brothers and sisters, remembering the Christian Sabbath is not just a commandment it is priceless gift! Robert Murray M’cheyne described it this way:

It is also the type of heaven. When a believer lays aside his pen or loom, brushes aside his worldly cares, leaving them behind him with his weekday clothes, and comes up to the house of God, it is like the morning of the resurrection, the day when we shall come out of great tribulation into the presence of God and the Lamb. When he sits under the preached Word, and hears the voice of the shepherd leading and feeding his soul, it reminds him of the day when the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne shal1 feed him and lead him to living fountains of waters. When he joins in the psalm of praise, it reminds him of the day when his hands shall strike the harp of God—

Where congregations never break up,

And Sabbaths have no end.

When he retires, and meets with God in secret in his closet, or, like Isaac, in some favorite spot near his dwelling, it reminds him of the day when “he shall be a pillar in the house of our God, and go no more out.”

This is the reason we love the Lord’s Day. This is the reason we “call the Sabbath a delight.” A well–spent Sabbath we feel to be a day of heaven upon earth. 

 

Shouldn't we have the same kind of view of the Sabbath as M’cheyne had?Let us therefore heed the wise advice of Bible commentator Matthew Henry:

“If we call the sabbath a delight, then shall we delight ourselves in the Lord; he will more and more manifest himself to us as the delightful subject of our thoughts and meditations and the delightful object of our best affections. Note, The more pleasure we take in serving God the more pleasure we shall find in it. If we go about duty with cheerfulness, we shall go from it with satisfaction and shall have reason to say, "It is good to be here, good to draw near to God.”