Random Thoughts on the Validity of a Saturday Sabbath

My personal belief thus far.

As a necessary first assumption I believe we must concede that whatever order of days God ordained has continued from the creation. I believe that not a single day has been “lost” (see Joshua’s long day below.) Therefore the order of days is the same today as it was for Adam in Eden, regardless of what each day is named. But how do we know what the order is?

The “oracles of God” were entrusted to the Jewish people and it is reasonable to believe that these oracles included when to keep Sabbath. God would not have commanded His people to keep the Sabbath if He did not also provide a means for doing so (Nehemiah 9:13-14; see also, Deut. 5:2-5a; 29:1). The Bible testifies that at least one purpose for the sun, moon and stars was for “signs and for seasons, and for days and years” (Gen. 1:14). This knowledge He passed on the Jewish people through Moses; they thereby became the authorized custodians of the sacred calendar. God gave the Sabbath to His people by communicating that day to Moses, “Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord” (Exo. 16:23, italics added). It is inconceivable that Moses and the people did not know what day “tomorrow” was. If the Sabbath could not be remembered—and therefore kept—then God’s Word proves to be errant, fallible and untrustworthy and God Himself insufficient in His knowledge and power. Therefore, God must have provided and continues to provide a means for such remembering and keeping of the moedim and Sabbath. Indeed, that means is in fact the Hebrew people, their culture, traditions, laws, and their religious awareness of themselves as God’s chosen people. An important concept, inherent to the Torah, is Halacha. This is the interpretation and application of Torah in the form of legal decisions. Halacha has always been operative as a principle within Judaism since Sinai. Halacha determines any kind of legal issue, including the recognition and timing of the Sabbath, along with all the other biblically mandated festivals, or “appointed times” (moedim).
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halakha).  

The Sabbath was kept faithfully by Christ and His apostles. The day known to Christ as the Sabbath was the day determined by custom and confirmed by the Jewish Halachic authorities (the Sanhedrin prior to 70 CE). If that day was sufficient for Christ, it is sufficient for me. In Israel, there has been no monolithic decision-making body since the demise of the Sanhedrin and the Temple. However, this is not the same as saying there has been no authority or continuity. Continuity (in the form of tradition) has always been extremely important to Israel, (even in the Diaspora). The modern Rabbis have continued essentially the same system of keeping track of time for cultic purposes as did the Rabbis of the Master’s day. The main difference being that the present Jewish calendar—probably created or at least authorized by Rabbi Hillel ll in the fourth century—is a mathematically calculated calendar, whereas its predecessor was based on physical observation by reliable witnesses who would pass along atmospheric and climactic information to the Sanhedrin (or more specifically, a “calendric committee” within the Sanhedrin. (Chabad.org is a contemporary example.) The Jewish people never “lost” their calendar and Hillel’s calendar was based on the earlier observed calendar. The shift from one calendar to the other was “transparent” and represented a transition, not a disruption.

If Jesus had not kept God’s ordained Sabbath He would have sinned, thus denying His divinity. Jesus (and His apostles) kept the same Sabbath as other Jews, including the Pharisees, therefore the day they kept (our Friday/Saturday) had to have been the divinely ordained Sabbath. By observing the seventh day Christ in effect ratified it with His divine authority (Matt. 12:8; pars).

Whenever Christ was in a confrontation with the Jewish authorities (especially when accusing them of keeping their own “traditions of the elders) He never once accused them of keeping a false or unbiblical Sabbath. There is no hint in Scripture that Christ thought the Jews were mistaken or deceitful in acknowledging the seventh day Sabbath. I cannot conceive of Him ignoring such an important issue and what would have been such a flagrant violation of revealed Scripture.

Traditionally, what have the Jews of the Diaspora practiced in determining the time of the Sabbath (and the other moedim)? The Jewish people of the Diaspora have always calculated the specific dates and times of Sabbath and the moedim using the Jerusalem calendar as their authority, and then transposing the dates of the Jewish calendar into the corresponding dates of the secular calendar that governed the country in which they resided. For the Jewish people of the Diaspora, the assumption was simply that the Jerusalem calendar was authoritative and that the dates and times which corresponded with this calendar were therefore also assumed to be legitimate. The fact of a rotating earth precludes a “same day” possibility for experiencing events. If the earth were flat then there would be no corresponding days. One day would occur at exactly the same moment for everyone. It is my belief that this fact should not deter anyone from considering the Jerusalem calendar as authoritative.

God made an earth that rotated once every 24 hours and God defined a day as a time of darkness followed by a time of light (Gen. 1:3-5) each continuing in succession as the result of the earth’s rotation on its axis. Therefore we must deduce that once God inaugurated the first Sabbath day as the last day in the pattern of seven days of creation, that the pattern would be maintained as the earth rotated. Genesis also describes a day as being composed of evening and morning or a period of increasing dark followed by a period of increasing light. In the NT, Jesus defines the day as being composed of twelve hours—leaving us to infer a night of twelve corresponding hours. But the beginning of the pattern was established by God in His act of creating the earth, as recounted by Moses in the first chapter of Genesis.

Joshua 10:13 describes one of the greatest miracles since creation began, “And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.” Based on this verse (and a similar verse from Isaiah 38) many people have claimed that because the sun and moon stood still for approximately a whole day (either 12 or 24 hours) that a day was “lost.” This would mean that the Sabbath would no longer be in the same temporal position in relation to the other days. And that in turn would mean the traditional Sabbath cannot be correct. But God elsewhere says, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22). In this verse, the word translated “cease” is the Hebrew Shabbat which commonly means resting from work. In other words, the sun and moon shall not rest from their work. But what is that work? We know from Gen. 1:14 that the work is for creating and controlling “signs [appointed times, including the Sabbath] and…seasons, and…days and years.” So we have God decreeing that the luminaries will not rest. They will continue in their work until the last judgement. If this is the case, then the Bible cannot also be testifying in Joshua 10:13 that God in fact allowed—even caused—the reverse to happen, thus contradicting Himself.
      We must understand that the Bible is not a scientific textbook; it is written in such a way that its recipients—including the Hebrew people of Moses time—would have little difficulty in understanding it. Accounts of nature in the Bible are written from the position or vantage point of common, everyday perception. The author of Joshua 10:13 writes of the setting of the sun. This word is an expression stemming from common, ordinary human experience. In fact the sun does not “set” by moving below the horizon, but that’s what it looks like to us, even to the most sophisticated astronomer, who really knows better. So what is the way out of our dilemma?
       I believe in miracles in general and I believe in Joshua’s miracle in particular. But for people of faith, the miracle cannot be what it appears at face value. Certainly, it seemed to Joshua that the sun stood still; it seemed to rest from its work, but if that were so then the verse quoted above (Gen. 8:22) would not be true. Rather, the miracle was such that it seemed to Joshua that the sun really had rested for a day, thus causing a day to disappear because the sun did not “create” the next day. A chunk of time equivalent to a day was lost, thus putting the days of the week out of sequence. Rather, God caused a miracle to occur that only seemed to Joshua to be one thing from his observational frame of reference[1]. This was something he could conceive based on his own experience. From Joshua’s frame of reference, the sun really did stand still or rest from its work. What was the miracle that really took place? I have no idea, but would not be surprised if it had something to do with the refraction of light.
      In any event, there was no day lost. Instead, the day on which the sun and moon stood still was an extended or lengthened day. The sequence of days remained the same, only one day was made—or at least appeared to be made—longer than normal. It was a longer day, but it was the same day and did not alter the sequence established by God on day four of creation.

Believing Gentiles have been grafted into Israel (Rom. 11; Eph. 2-3). To my mind, this indicates a degree of agreement and alignment with the traditions of Israel and the OT, including the calendar used by Jesus for determining and celebrating the moedim and Sabbath. Since believing Gentiles have been grafted into Israel, her sacred calendar is our sacred calendar. Therefore we have a moral and spiritual privilege (see next point) to keep the Sabbath, not necessarily in the same way as Jewish people, but at the time determined by Judaism, taking it as our own “reference marker” to accommodate for the earth’s rotation, and which determines the actual time that we observe the Sabbath. I believe that observing the Sabbath at a different solar time than those in Israel is acceptable to God as He created the spherical, rotating planet that forces this condition upon us.

In a related way, we can resolve the issue of long days and nights toward the poles. For instance, in the northern latitudes during the summer, the sun never really appears to set. It is light virtually all the time. In the winter months, just the opposite is true, the sun never seems to rise and so it is dark during that part of the year, even when to the south both light and dark occur over any twenty-four hour period. This is caused by the angle of the axis of the earth relative to the sun as well as the travelling of the earth in orbit around the sun over the course of a year. But both of these conditions were determined by God. Given that fact as well as the fact that God has determined the seventh day as His Sabbath, it is reasonable to conclude that any determination of Sabbath commencement which is based on the arguments already given above, e.g. the rotating earth, will be acceptable to God who has created all these conditions. If we use the time determined for Jerusalem (or thereabouts) as our reference point and determine a time appropriate for our situation then this would seem to be an acceptable course of action.

Having said all this, especially the previous point, I believe it’s critically important to understand the issue of the Sabbath for Gentiles in the context of Acts 15, especially verses 19-21. As I understand it, the Jerusalem Council (in effect the “Sanhedrin” of the Apostolic Church) did not impose Sabbath observance as a legal and binding requirement. Because circumcision was a covenant sign between God and Israel, when the Pharisee’s demand for circumcision was refuted by the Council it indicated that—for Gentiles—there was no requirement to adopt Sabbath observance (or the rest of the Torah for that matter), with the exception of the four stipulations given in these verses: idolatry, sexual immorality, improperly slaughtered meat (i.e. not kosher), and eating blood.  Verse 21 indicates the idea that these minimum requirements would allow Jewish and Gentile believers to maintain communion, therefore allowing the Gentiles to remain in the synagogues, hear the Torah preached, come to understand it and consequently come to a gradual and voluntary adoption of it. The nature of this adoption would vary, some Gentiles being stricter than others in their adoption and observance. However, it was taken for granted, as a given, that anyone observing the Sabbath would do so on the last Jewish day of the week. This was the only day understood by the Hebrew people (not to mention Christ) to be the God-ordained Sabbath consequently the believing Gentiles within the synagogues would automatically keep the last day of the week as their Sabbath as well.