4. "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping 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, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy."the sabbath..what a day! what does this even mean anymore? who knows what it means to not work and to honor the sabbath anymore? more and more people work 7 days and honor the Lord none. but again, does this apply to everyone else, or does it apply to me? is everyone else the problem, or am i? how do i become the solution? how do you...how do we?
2 comments:
"how do you...how do we?"
This is a good and appropriate question to ask about the fourth commandment. The fourth commandment is one of the most controversial (the other controversial commandment is the second commandment).
Few people on this earth disagree with the fifth commandment, the sixth commandment, the seventh, the eighth, etc., even though many men do not obey those commandments. There is at least the recognition that the not murdering, stealing, etc. are good standards for a society to maintain. But there is not such agreement about the Sabbath. Societies without the Bible do not recognize a moral obligation to rest on the seventh day of the week, and even in nations that have the Ten Commandments, there is disagreement about this command.
Catholics and most protestants observe the first day of the week as a day of rest and worship. Jews and some churches such as the Seventh-Day Adventists and some Churches of God recognize the seventh day as a day of rest and worship.
Some say that the Sabbath was changed from the Seventh Day of the week to Sunday by the first century church. Some churches even say that the Ten Commandments including the fourth commandment were abolished after Jesus Christ died. I recently had a debate in my blog with someone who took this position. He said that Jesus Christ came to fulfill the law and that the Ten Commandments existed only until Jesus fulfilled them by obeying them, and then they were abolished.
I think the fourth commandment has a connection with faith that the other commandments do not have. In other words, it takes faith to understand the fourth commandment, especially for someone not raised in a Sabbath keeping tradition.
Faith includes believing what God says. Abraham excercised faith when he believed and obeyed what God told him (Romans 4:3, 9-12, 16-25, James 2:21-26, Genesis 15:4-6, Isaiah 51:1-2). Faith is actually part of God's spiritual law because Jesus said that faith is one of the weightier matters of the law (Matthew 23:23).
The connection between the Sabbath and faith is that we cannot know that we should keep the Sabbath without believing what God says, because it is only God's command that teaches us to rest on the Sabbath. This isn't something man can reason out on his own.
have you read "keeping the sabbath wholly" by marva dawn? excellent book study on the sabbath. gives a great understanding about what it means to have a day set apart for God in contemporary society.
Post a Comment