Anonymous Asks (399)

“What principles can we put into practice when it comes to Sabbath rest?”

I am finding this question and variations on it increasingly common in online forums with large numbers of younger commenters from theological systems in which Replacement Theology is a major tenet. In a way this makes sense for them. If indeed, as their system teaches, the people of God are a continuum from Abraham (or earlier) to present day — if the Church is Israel and Israel the Church — then why not practice Israel’s Sabbath rest in some form?

Simple or More Complicated?

So they do, and figuring out exactly how to go about it gives them conniptions. Interpreting scripture through a supersessionist lens may neatly simplify some aspects of the word of God in a way that appears to satisfy to a certain cast of mind, but it definitely complicates others. It produces questions like:

“It seems obvious that a calm walk around the neighborhood seems fine, but how can we examine the gray areas, say, playing golf, or basketball?”

and

“What would you say the answer to Question 60 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism means by the word ‘recreational’? Is watching a movie with the family not permitted? Playing a board game? What are practical standards you employ for yourself and your family in light of this?”

It produces dubious assertions like:

“When it comes to immorality and the gays, or sabbath observance we should continue to implement the law of Moses.”

and

“If God sees the sabbath within the Roman hours, you (and I) displease Him as we act unlawfully on Sunday at 8pm.”

When you lay out specific examples of this sort of thinking in large numbers, there’s one word that comes to mind for me, and that word is legalism.

Back to Another Era

Christians who fret about whether or not they can play golf or basketball, watch movies with their families or play board games on a Sunday (which is not the original Sabbath day in any case) are putting themselves under a randomized version of the Law of Moses. Christians who fret about displeasing God because they are using the Jewish calendar rather than the Roman calendar are in a similar position. It’s all arbitrary. They are not going up to Jerusalem annually. They are not offering animal sacrifices for sin. They are not tithing their herbs. They will wear a denim jacket with a leather collar in good conscience. Most are not being circumcised; at least they have read Galatians.

A literal Sabbath is one of many, many commands that belong to another era of God’s dealings with humanity. Don’t get me wrong, the folks worrying about it are to be commended for their desire to please the Lord. But when Gentiles muddle together the Church and Israel, they are perilously close to putting themselves under a law that those to whom it was given could never keep. No right-thinking believer should want to live like that.

The New Testament Record

When we use the Law (or for that matter, the Sermon on the Mount, which also belongs to another era) as our standard for Christian behavior, we are reading someone else’s instruction book as if it were our own. Christian standards come from the apostles and writers of NT scripture, not from the Law of Moses. The law usefully illustrates some of these concepts and principles and helps us to understand the character of God more completely, but it does not bind us like an apostolic command.

Outside the historical record in the New Testament, the Sabbath is most notable by its absence. As Immanuel Can noted in a recent post, the apostles and other NT writers were not shy about telling the first century believers they made and discipled how best to live out their faith, giving them something over 1,000 instructions about what they ought to do and not do, many of which restated OT commands. Despite all that, it’s interesting that they never commanded believers to observe the Sabbath. In fact, the elders and apostles at the Jerusalem Council were concerned to lay no extra burdens on Gentile believers, warning that the Law of Moses had been a yoke no Jew could bear and no Gentile should be expected to. If these men did not command Gentiles to observe the Sabbath, why are Gentile Christians today worrying about it?

The Sabbath Shadow

Of all these instructional passages in the NT, there is precisely one written for Christians about observing the Sabbath. Consider the words of the apostle Paul on this subject:

“Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ … If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations — ‘Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch’ (referring to things that all perish as they are used) — according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.”

What does Paul say? If I may paraphrase, he’s saying don’t let anybody guilt you into legalistic, self-imposed bondage to rule-keeping. The Sabbath was a shadow. It pointed to something else, and that something has now arrived. Paul puts the Sabbath institution alongside questions of food and drink, new moons and festivals, meaning perhaps the OT feasts of YHWH. The Christian who insists on mechanically observing a literal Sabbath today ought, for the sake of consistency, to start thinking about how he should practice the observance of new moons. Oddly, we do not find anybody doing that.

For Freedom

As Paul put it to the Galatians in a discussion of observing circumcision, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” That’s what the Law of Moses, improperly understood, so easily produces.

My own conviction is that Christians are under no obligation to practice any sort of literal Sabbath rest. I am fond of Sundays. I love the opportunity to slow down and do something different and more peaceful than the mad scramble that seems to comprise too many days of my life. I love the idea of a day set apart for worship and fellowship with the people of God. I love quiet conversations with Christians of an afternoon when I can get them. I think resting one day of a week when you can do it in good conscience is truly enjoyable. But I see nothing whatsoever in the New Testament that obligates me to twist myself into knots over whether to play sports or watch movies, and certainly nothing to make me calculate the precise hour my self-enforced respite from activity should begin and end.

More importantly, still less do I see any reason to impose my views about it on other Christians. The believer whose troubled conscience makes him perform these little rituals is welcome to them. I remember some of my schoolteachers fondly. I have also outgrown them. They accomplished the task assigned to them. A literal Sabbath is much the same.

The Sabbath rest into which the Christian has entered is not a new way to keep the law one day a week. It’s a state of mind we carry with us 24/7/365. It’s a gift, not another item in a long list of spiritual obligations.