The Sabbath

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. Listed among the moedim in Lev 23. Col 2:16-17 relegates it to shadow. Not commanded for Christians, deeply wise anyway. Although, Beale argues the strongest case the other way.

Requirements

• Total cessation of work - further-reaching than most readers assume. No ploughing or harvesting (Exod 34:21), no baking or boiling (Exod 16:23), no lighting a fire (Exod 35:3), no gathering wood (Num 15:32-36).
  • Called šabbat šabbātôn, "a Sabbath of complete rest." Only the Sabbath and the Day of Atonement carry total prohibition - other festival days permit limited work.
• A holy convocation in every dwelling place, not only at the sanctuary. Unlike the three pilgrimage feasts, no travel required.
• Additional sacrifices: two extra yearling lambs beyond the daily tāmîd (Num 28:9-10), after the regular morning sacrifice.

Two Different Reasons

• Exod 20:11 grounds it in creation. God's work was complete, finished, and the people could add nothing to it.
  • Gentry & Wellum: "They were invited to enter his rest and enjoy his work. Hebrews applies this notion to the work of Christ (Heb. 3:7-4:11). We cannot do anything to add to the work of Jesus Christ. We are simply to enjoy it."
• Deut 5:15 grounds it in the exodus. You were slaves, God brought you out, so give your slaves a rest as you have one.
  • Old highlights the social dimension: "By releasing laborers and servants from servile work on the Sabbath, one celebrated release from slavery in Egypt."
• Sklar on the pastoral effect, quoting Harris: "What a boon a weekly rest must have been to the ancient laborer and farmer in his weary round of toil!"
  • Sklar's note on the grace of it: the Lord commands Israel to proclaim their loyalty in a way that brings them blessing - needed rest and refreshment.

Sign of the Covenant

the Sabbath was the sign between Yahweh and Israel of the old covenant, as is clearly stated in Exodus 31:12-18. Covenants often have a physical sign associated with them. The rainbow was given as a physical sign of God's promise in his covenant with Noah. Circumcision was commanded as a physical sign… Similarly, the Sabbath is stipulated as a permanent sign between Yahweh and Israel.

• Gentry & Wellum, Kingdom Through Covenant

• Covenant signs don't float free of their covenants. Circumcision was the sign of the Abrahamic covenant and its physical observance isn't required of the church - Paul spends Galatians establishing that.
• The Sabbath stands in the same structural relation to the Mosaic covenant.

ANE Background

• Attempts to find precursors in surrounding cultures "was entirely unsuccessful" (Gentry & Wellum). Hebrew šabbāt is not connected to Babylonian šabbatu, the fifteenth day of the month.
• What the ANE does supply is the concept of divine rest. Walton's six points, via Gentry & Wellum: divine rest achieved after conflict, after acts of creation establishing order, in the temple, characterised by ongoing rule and stability - and, the sharpest contrast, achieved by the gods creating people to do their work.

in the Old Testament people work for their own benefit and provision, rather than to meet the needs of God or to do his work for him. When commanded to share the rest of God on the Sabbath, it is not to participate in it per se, but to recognize His work of bringing and maintaining order.

• John Walton, quoted in Gentry & Wellum, Kingdom Through Covenant

• The temple parallel: "The framework of the account of creation in the Bible strongly suggests that the cosmos is constructed as a sanctuary/temple in which God may take up his rest." See Genre of Genesis 1.

Sabbath as the Architecture of the Calendar

• Not one item on the festival list - the module the whole list is built from.
• Morales notes the bracketing structure of Lev 23:1-4, where the Sabbath is inserted between two references to the appointed feasts, and argues this does the same work as placing Lev 24:1-9 between chs. 23 and 25.
• The Sabbath is the interpretive key to sacred time.

Jesus and the Sabbath

• Grudem: "We do not read of conflicts between Jesus and his opponents over the other nine commandments, but there were several conflicts about observing the Sabbath. We get the impression that he was deliberately provoking conflict over this law."
• Jesus heals on the Sabbath repeatedly (Mark 3:1ff.; Luke 13:10-13; 14:1-4; John 5:1-10; 9:1-8):

the frequency of healings might even suggest that Jesus very purposely chose to heal on the Sabbath. He did this not to shock people, not to break the law, not to show that the law was worn out and old-fashioned, but rather as a sign that the day of release had come… The Sabbath that the Messiah brought in was a day of release from the bondage of Satan… The old Sabbath rest was in fact a sign or type of the deeper Sabbath rest Jesus would bring.

• Hughes Oliphant Old, Worship

• Key text for the healing of the crooked-backed woman: "ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?"
• Then the two claims that settle it: "the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath" (Matt 12:8) and "something greater than the temple is here" (Matt 12:6).

Colossians 2:16-17

• Counter-reading: only Sabbath observance inappropriately connected to a wider syncretistic system is condemned, not Sabbath observance as such.
• Moo: these interpreters "are quite right to emphasise the importance of interpreting contextually and historically," and grants the Colossian teaching had probably been absorbed into a syncretistic mix.
• But he doesn't think it survives v.17: "The language and logic of v. 17 suggest that the primary problem with Sabbath observance was a failure to reckon with the 'fulfillment' of such institutions in the new era of salvation."

That Paul without any qualification can relegate Sabbaths to shadows certainly indicates that he does not see them as binding and makes it extremely unlikely that he could have seen the Christian first day as a continuation of the Sabbath.

• Andrew Lincoln, quoted in Douglas J. Moo, Colossians and Philemon (PNTC)

• Moo's conclusion: Col 2:16 "can validly be used, we think, to conclude that the observance of a Sabbath day is no longer a requirement of God's people in the new realm."
• Corroboration (Grudem): Rom 14:5-6 leaves it to conscience; Gal 4:10-11 sharper still - "You observe days and months and seasons and years! I am afraid I may have laboured over you in vain."

there is no doubt that by the Lord Christ's coming the ceremonial part of this commandment was abolished… He is, I say, the true fulfillment of the Sabbath… This is not confined within a single day but extends throughout the whole course of our life, until, completely dead to ourselves, we are filled with the life of God.

• John Calvin, Institutes II.viii.28-31

• Grudem's argument is the hardest to answer. Each commandment summarises related detailed laws. The Sabbath command summarises the weekly day, the sabbatical year, the Jubilee and the whole festival calendar.
  • "If the command about the Sabbath day requires the same observance by Christians today as it did by the Jewish people in the nation of Israel, then it is hard to see why the Sabbath year and the Year of Jubilee are not also morally binding on us today."
  • See The Sabbatical Year (Shmita), The Year of Jubilee.

Beale's Counter-Case

Beale argues for an ongoing Sabbath rooted not in the Mosaic covenant but in the creation ordinance of Gen 2:2-3, which precedes Sinai and therefore survives it.

• Christ has fulfilled the eschatological rest of the last Adam and inaugurated Sabbath rest for those identified with His resurrection. But since consummate rest isn't yet possessed bodily, "there is, therefore, still a one-day special observance on Sunday for the church, the purpose of which is to look forward to the consummation of end-time rest."
• Non-Sabbatarians who nonetheless hold Sunday as normative "have no explicit exegetical or theological evidence for why the weekly worship of God's people has been changed from the last day of the week to the first."
• He catches Lincoln conceding that the early church retained "the sabbatical sequence of time," worshipping weekly rather than monthly or annually. Beale's question follows: "If the early church carried over the 'sabbatical sequence of time,' why would not this broad calendrical continuity include a one-in-seven special day of commemoration and worship?"
• Beale admits that his conclusion is biblical-theological rather than exegetical: "there is no NT text that says that Christ achieved latter-day rest at his resurrection and that this rest represents others who identify with him."

Two Reasons Not to Follow Him

1. His admission is decisive against him. Col 2:16 is an explicit text; Beale's reconstruction is an inference. Where the two conflict, the explicit text should govern.
2. His best argument establishes weekly rhythm, not weekly obligation. Different claims. The church can meet on the first day because Christ rose on it (which is the actual reason - Acts 20:7; 1 Cor 16:2; Rev 1:10) without that meeting being a Sabbath in the covenantal sense.

Conclusion

Because Christ fulfills the typical aspect of the Sabbath, he does not render Sabbath keeping irrelevant. Although the people of God are no longer distinctive by their Sabbath keeping, most of the reasons for keeping the Sabbath are still valid. Though we are not under law, and the Bible does not command a Christian to keep a Sabbath, it is in our hearts to set apart a day, sanctifying it for worship and reflection. A person who feels inclined to work seven days a week should examine what god he or she worships.

• Bruce K. Waltke, An Old Testament Theology

• Not commanded, and deeply wise. The obligation has gone; the creational reason a human being needs a day hasn't, and neither has the reason a congregation needs to gather.
• Calvin's practical approach is the same: the abrogation still leaves occasion "to assemble on stated days for the hearing of the word, the breaking of the mystical bread, and for public prayers" and "to give surcease from labor to servants and workmen."
• The deeper rest is what Hebrews is arguing for. "So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his" (Heb 4:9-10).
  • From Gentry & Wellum: we cannot add anything to the work of Jesus Christ; we are simply to enjoy it.
  • That's what a day off is for now - and it's why insisting on it as a law gets the theology backwards.