Was the Sabbath Changed from Saturday to Sunday? A Messianic Congregation Shema Yisrael Article

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Was the Sabbath Changed from Saturday to Sunday?

by James Pyles

Introduction

One of the issues that sometimes comes up is our congregation's observance of a Saturday Shabbat (Sabbath). Most Christian churches collectively worship on Sunday and believe that the Sabbath was formally changed from Saturday to Sunday after the death and resurrection of Jesus (Yeshua). While I don't take exception to believers who choose to worship on Sunday, the reverse isn't always true. Unfortunately some people take offense at our Saturday worship. Just to clarify our position, we believe the Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday (the beginning of the seventh day) and ends at sundown on Saturday (the beginning of the first day).

I can find several places in the Bible where the Almighty commanded the Children of Israel (and by inference, all who have been grafted into "the root of Jesse") are commanded to remember and observe the Shabbat (Exodus 31:15-17 comes to mind), but I can find no place in the Bible that explicitly states the Shabbat was formally changed from Saturday to Sunday.

A person who occasionally worships with us talked about this particular issue with me sometime ago. She attends a Sunday keeping church with her family but privately keeps a Saturday Shabbat (as best she can as she is the only one in her family who believes in a Saturday Shabbat). She had emailed her Pastor and presented her point of view about this subject. She expected that he would email her back with his response but instead, on the following Sunday, his entire message was devoted to the changing of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. While her name wasn't brought into it, she was still quite hurt that he would make her private query into such a public issue.

I felt inspired to write an article on the subject (which is why you are able to read this right now) but felt it had probably been done time and again by other, more talented and worthy writers. Nevertheless, the idea kept reoccurring to me and I finally went on Google and did a search. The results were quite illuminating...and dismaying.

The Complication

It seems that believers on both sides of the issue (at least those who can create websites) are very passionate about this issue and more than that, sometimes rude about it. Many of the sites I visited carried a tone of anger regarding those they disagreed with, regardless whether they were Saturday or Sunday worshipers. At one point, I had written a response to the author of one site and even published it to the Internet, but after a few hours, I removed it. It just didn't seem right to enter into some sort of debate on this issue and risk creating more bad feelings between Saturday and Sunday worshipers. I felt there had to be a better way.

The nature of this article will not be adversarial. I have no interest into getting into a "heated debate" with anyone over this issue. There's no point to it. As believers, we are supposed to live in peace with each other and support each other. Granted, we have theological differences including the issue of the Shabbat, but it's important to be able to discuss these differences without personalizing conflict. This article will not attempt to ridicule or defame anyone.

The Assumption

If we consider the Almighty to be eternal and unchanging (the same yesterday, today, and forever), why can't we consider that His Word should be the same? Why can't we believe that once the Almighty says something, that's the end of the story? We don't have to wait around and see if he'll rethink His decision, do we? People change their minds...not the Almighty. He doesn't make mistakes. He doesn't second guess His decisions. He is G-d.

With that in mind, this article assumes that whatever the Almighty establishes, He establishes forever unless there is irrefutable proof otherwise. That is, if anyone suggests that the Almighty established something, established it forever, and later changed it, the burden of proof is on the party that says the Almighty changed a decision He made. The only document we can directly examine that we can confidently state is the Word of G-d is the Bible. Other texts can yield important information but what was written by man cannot be held to the same standard as what was authored by the Almighty (through human authors). Thus the Bible will be our guide and our evidence. Let's apply what I've just written to the issue of worship on the seventh day.

Note

Unless otherwise noted, all passages from the Apostolic Scriptures will be taken from David H. Stern's translation, "The Complete Jewish Bible" (see the Sources section at the bottom of this page). All passages from the Tanakh or Old Testament are taken from Artscroll's Stone Edition of the Tanakh (see below again). Also, I'll use the names "Jesus" and "Yeshua" interchangeably in order to refer to the Messiah. The only difference between the two names is a translation issue (I'll write a separate article later on this).

Establishing the Seventh Day Shabbat

While the burden of proving a change in when the Shabbat occurs is not on my shoulders, I do need to establish that the seventh day Shabbat was originally instituted by the Almighty. Fortunately, that's not hard to do.

"Thus the heaven and the earth were finished, and all their array. By the seventh day, G-d completed His work which He had done, and He abstained on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. G-d blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because on it He abstained from all His work which G-d created to make".
Genesis: 2:1-3

"For six days you may perform your work, but the seventh day is a complete Sabbath, holy to the L-RD ... it is an eternal sign that in six days, the L-RD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed".
Exodus 31:15-17

"Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it. Six days shall you labor and accomplish all your work; but the seventh day is Sabbath to Hashem, your G-d; you shall not do any work - you, your son, your daughter, your slave, your maidservant, your animal, and the stranger within your gates - for in six days Hashem made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day. Therefore Hashem blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it".
Exodus 20:8-11

So far, we can establish a connection between Genesis 2:1-3 and the two subsequent passages from Exodus. The Almighty established the Shabbat immediately after concluding creation and He then links His own "rest" to a the seventh day rest given to the Children of Israel in the Fourth Commandment. In fact, the sanctification of the seventh day is specified both in Genesis and in the Fourth Commandment. This is a day when we are to rest from our labors and turn to Him.

Did I say "we"? Wasn't the seventh day Sabbath given to the Jew? Yes and no. Yes, Moses brought the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments down from Sinai and presented them to the Children of Israel, so wasn't this a Jewish observance? When was the Shabbat established? In Genesis 2:1-3, a long, long time before Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. When the Almighty established the Shabbat, there were only two human beings on earth...Adam and Eve.

There are many other mentions of the Sabbath in the Tanakh (Old Testament) such as Leviticus 23:3 and Isaiah 58:13-14 but long story short, the Bible establishes the seventh day as the one day of the week that people are expected to put down their weekly labors and come together to worship the Almighty. I've established the seventh day Sabbath. So what's the problem?

For observant Jews today, there is no problem. The Shabbat has always been the Shabbat. Jews have preserved a seventh day Shabbat for thousands of years. There is absolutely no issue here for them. The issue that arises is for those of us who profess that Jesus or Yeshua if you will, was and is the Messiah...the Christ. The issue is for those of us who worship Him. In my little corner of the universe, my faith community believes like the traditional Jewish worshipers do; that the Shabbat is the Shabbat, just as it always was since the conclusion of creation. We can point to those parts of the Bible I've previously listed as proof. We who were grafted in as Paul writes in Romans 11 are just as much connected to the root as the natural branches. However, there are other opinions that must be addressed.

The Disagreement

Traditional Christian theology states that a great many things changed with the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Even when I attended a Sunday keeping church, I couldn't find where in the Bible it said those changes were made but I went along with what I was taught because I had faith that my teachers knew the truth and that I just didn't have the discernment to see what was there. Eventually (and after much study and prayer), I decided I couldn't accept these changes that I was told happened and yet couldn't see recorded in the Bible. That's where the burden of proof comes in. If the church is going to say that the Sabbath day was changed, they are going to have to point it out in the Bible. After all, the establishment of the Sabbath in Genesis is very plain. There's no mystery about it. Is there the same plain evidence in the Bible that the Sabbath was changed? Let's find out.

The Traditional Argument and the Nontraditional Response

In this section, I'll offer up the mainstream Christian theology establishing a change from a seventh day worship to a first day worship.

The backbone of the traditional Christian argument that the Sabbath was changed from Saturday to Sunday is the "Day of the L-rd" argument. In a nutshell, scripture establishes that after his death, Jesus wasn't seen alive again until sometime just before dawn on Sunday morning which is subsequently referred to as "The L-rd's Day".

"When Shabbat was over, Miryam of Magdala, Miryam the mother of Ya'akov, and Shlomit bought spices in order to go and anoint Yeshua (Jesus). Very early on Sunday, just after sunrise, they went to the tomb."
Mark 16:1-2

I certainly don't dispute what it says in the Bible, but does this event translate into the day of the Shabbat being changed? Well, not as of the moment Mark records in his writings since he says "When Shabbat was over..." which for Miryam would have been Saturday just after sundown. Still, is the day of the resurrection, the "Day of the L-rd"? John mentions the Day of the L-rd in Revelation 1:10 but is that the first day?

Actually, there is evidence that early Gentile believers including Justin Martyr believed that the Day of the L-rd was the first day of the week (Sunday).

"But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead".

Early Church father Ignatius, bishop of Antioch wrote the following:

" During the Sabbath He continued under the earth in the tomb in which Joseph of Arimathaea had laid Him. At the dawning of the Lord's day He arose from the dead, according to what was spoken by Himself, "As Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of man also be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." The day of the preparation, then, comprises the passion; the Sabbath embraces the burial; the Lord's Day contains the resurrection"..

The Sunday Shabbat in Christianity was finally formalized by the Emperor Constantine in 321 CE when he declared that Sunday was to be a day of rest throughout the Roman Empire:

"On the venerable day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed. In the country however persons engaged in agriculture may freely and lawfully continue their pursuits because it often happens that another day is not suitable for grain-sowing or vine planting; lest by neglecting the proper moment for such operations the bounty of heaven should be lost.".

I have to point out here that Martyr's first reason for worshiping on the first day...that it was the day the Almighty began the creation is in direct contradiction to the opening passages in Genesis 2 where the Almighty Himself states that he blessed and sanctified the seventh day because He had concluded creation. No where in the Bible will you find that the first day is supposed to be a special worship day specifically because the Almighty initiated creation on that day. I also have to point out that even Ignatius states that "During the Sabbath He continued under the earth in the tomb in which Joseph of Arimathaea had laid Him. At the dawning of the Lord's day He arose from the dead", indicating that Jesus rose after the Sabbath...not on it.

While the evidence establishes that at least two early second century Gentile believers understood the Day of the L-rd to be Sunday based on the day of the resurrection, how this gets turned into the Sabbath is not clear. However, there are other arguments both for the specific establishment of Sunday as the Sabbath, and in support of the idea that Jesus didn't keep the Sabbath.

"After this, there was a Judean festival; and Yeshua went up to Jerusalem. In Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate is a pool called in Aramaic Beit-Zata in which lay a crowd of invalids...blind, lame, crippled. One man was there who had been ill for 38 years. Yeshua seeing this man and knowing that he had been there a long time said to him, "Do you want to be healed?" The sick man replied, "I have no one to put me in the pool when the water is disturbed; and while I'm trying to get there, someone goes in ahead of me." Yeshua said to him, "Get up, pick up your mat and walk." Immediately, the man was healed and he picked up his mat and walked.

Now that day was Shabbat so the Judeans said to the man who had been healed, "It's the Shabbat! It's against Torah for you to carry your mat". But he answered them, "The man who healed me...he's the one who told me "Pick up your mat and walk".
John 5:1-11

The idea here is that Jesus told the man to carry his mat in apparent contradiction to the Torah teaching of not working on the Shabbat (assuming that carrying a mat constitutes "working"). There are other examples of Jesus apparently disregarding the Shabbat including other acts of healing and gleaning in a field on the Shabbat. In those instances, Yeshua stated that he had not broken the Shabbat and it was the corrupt religious leaders of the day that had added extra burdens to the Shabbat not originally in the Torah of Moses (which may explain why carrying a mat is not breaking the Shabbat).

For example, when Jesus healed the man with the shriveled hand on the Shabbat as depicted in Mark 3:1-6, his defense for the act was that it's permitted to do acts of good on the Shabbat. While even today in the traditional Jewish community, performing an act of healing that saves a life is permitted on the Shabbat, performing healing in situations that are not life-threatening, or at least not severe, are not. Certainly, this man had lived with a shriveled hand for years and could have lived with it one more day. Then Yeshua could have healed him when it wasn't the Shabbat and avoided the whole argument. However Yeshua healed him on the Shabbat deliberately, to teach his audience (and us) what the true meaning of the Shabbat is.

Notice here that at no time did Yeshua defend himself by saying that the Shabbat had been annulled or revoked. He upheld the Shabbat in every instance where he was questioned about his actions on the Shabbat and never claimed that the Shabbat was going away or was going to be changed. His point in challenging the religious leaders was to establish the true nature of the Shabbat as originally given...not to do away with it.

There are other scriptures that are typically used to support the idea that the disciples met and worshiped on Sunday:

"In the evening that same day, the first day of the week, when the disciples were gathered together behind locked doors out of fear of the Judeans, Yeshua came, stood in the middle and said "Shalom aleikhem"
John 20:19

"On Motzaei-Shabbat (Saturday evening, just after the end of the Shabbat), when we were gathered to break bread, Paul addressed them. Since he was going to leave the next day, he kept talking until midnight".
Acts 20:7

Every week on Motzaei-Shabbat, each of you should set some money aside, according to his resources, and save it up; so that when I come, I won't have to do fundraising".
1 Corinthians 16:2

I cheated a little by using the term "Motzaei-Shabbat" rather than "the first day of the week" which is how most Christian Bibles translate that phrase, however let me backtrack slightly.

The events recorded by John happened just hours after the resurrection and within days of the death of Jesus. It certainly doesn't look like the passage is describing a normal worship service being conducted by the disciples. Rather, it seems to describe them "hiding out", so to speak.

The events in Acts 20 aren't hard to figure out, either. Even to this day, at the end of the Shabbat (Saturday evening just after sundown), Jews gather together for a ceremony called Havdalah, which is a formal saying "goodbye" to the Shabbat and welcoming in a new week. As part of the ceremony, a braided candle is lit and a loaf of braided bread called "Challah" is broken and passed around.

The events in 1 Corinthians are also easy to explain. On the Shabbat, the worshipers would not have handled money and Paul knew this (since he was Jewish). So he'd direct them to make any monetary arrangements only after the Shabbat had ended which would have been after sundown on Saturday...the first day of the week.

There are a couple more "proof texts" we should look at:

"...do not let anyone judge you...with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ"
Colossians 2:16-17 (NIV)

"One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind."
Romans 14:5 (NIV)

I don't understand how the passage in Colossians is somehow anti-Shabbat. It appears that Paul is addressing a group of Gentile believers who have adopted the celebration of the New Moon festivals and the Shabbat not to let pagan Gentiles (perhaps their former companions) give them a hard time about obeying the Torah.

The use of the Romans passage to support a Sunday Sabbath is also hard to understand in this context. On the one hand, the body of information used by Sunday-keeping Christians tries to support that only Sunday is the formal day of worship and apparently, this was established by the early Church fathers and formalized by Constantine. On the other hand, Romans 14:5-6 is cited as stating we can decide for ourselves which day we want to consider the Sabbath. That is, I can decide that my personal Sabbath can be any day of the week. If I've got that much freedom, I can decide one week that my Shabbat is on a Tuesday and the next week that it's on a Thursday and so on. That's what happens when you take a verse out of context.

Looking at Romans 14:1:

"Now as for the person whose trust is weak, welcome him but not to get into arguments over opinions."

Paul goes on to discuss how to address a person in your faith community whose "trust is weak". Paul's main point isn't to establish that the Sabbath day is any day you want. In context, it appears his main point is to not make it such as big deal if the one whose trust is weak disagrees with you as far as "holy days". Romans 14:5 states that "One person considers some days more holy than others, while someone else regards them as being all alike". The worshipers of the Messiah were trying to incorporate new believers into their faith community. While the Jewish believers didn't hit much of a speed bump in the road (in terms of the Shabbat and the Festivals) by coming to faith in the long prophesied Jewish Messiah, the Gentiles did. They were all coming from some form of paganism...the worship of various Roman or Greek gods, and carried with them a lot of old theological baggage. They had all kinds of ideas about feasts and festivals that were inconsistent with the Word of G-d. In context, it seems more likely that Paul was telling those who were strong in their faith not to put too much pressure on newer, weaker brothers and sisters by arguing with them.

Conclusion

Has the state proved its case or in other words, has the Church proved that the Sabbath changed from Saturday to Sunday? Not according to the evidence they've presented. The burden on proof is on the party that the Almighty changed His eternal mind and word at some point after He established and sanctified the Shabbat. The proof does not seem to be there and their proof texts are easily refuted, especially by anyone with a Hebraic frame of reference. While the Bible makes it quite plain in textual examples that the Shabbat was established and remains on the seventh day, the proof texts for a first day Shabbat are murky at best and in the end, don't confirm a first day Sabbath. Christians believe that Sunday is the Shabbat because that's what they've been taught for centuries...not because the Bible establishes it.

I say "they" only to differentiate Sunday and Saturday keepers and remind whoever is reading this that we are all believers in the Messiah and the hope he brings in our lives. I say all this not as an attack but as a clarification for anyone who wants to read and consider these words.

Although I believe I've already "won my case", I will mention just in passing that Hebrews 4:4 and Hebrews 4:9-10 both support the fact that the Shabbat was upheld among the believing community and by the Almighty after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. If you read those passages, they speak of a continuing Shabbat rest. There are those that say that a Shabbat "rest" is not the same as "keeping" the Shabbat. A quick visit back to Genesis 2 dismisses that suggestion immediately. It's impossible to logically, theologically, and spiritually separate keeping the Shabbat from the Shabbat rest.

So how did the early "Church Fathers" miss the seventh day Shabbat? What would motivate them to go (apparently) through such great lengths to find Biblical passages that sort of, maybe alluded to a first day Shabbat? At this point, I can only guess but I think they're good guesses. You'll have to make up your mind if you agree or not. We can take a look at many of Paul's letters and see a picture of the difficulty there was integrating Gentiles into the family of Jewish believers in Yeshua. There was a lot of disagreement between Jews and Gentiles as to what had to be done to bring the Gentiles inside the community. It's possible that friction of this sort continued for decades and then centuries, fostering a schism between Gentile and Jew. As the body of Gentile believers continued to outgrow the Jews, it's possible that the Gentiles decided to distance themselves from the Jewish practices by performing "revisionist history" on certain parts of the Bible.

A casual glance at church history vs. the history of the Jews seems to indicate that the Jews consistently take a lot more heat from "the establishment" than the church (not to deny that the church has been persecuted in the past, but as of the time of Constantine, the church became "the establishment"). Since the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., the Jewish people have been exiles...outcasts as far as the rest of the world is concerned. You could make an argument that the Gentile church would want to distance themselves from that kind of "heat" and certainly the establishment of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches indicates that they were successful. The answer to my original question of why the Gentile church would want to distance itself from its Jewish roots would seem to be based on political and social rather than theological and Biblical issues.

Does it seem like I'm "church bashing"? I'm not. Pick up a copy of Michael L. Brown's "Our Hands are Stained with Blood" to get a picture of church history relative to the Jewish people. The truth isn't always pretty but that doesn't mean it's not the truth. In recent times, the relationship between the church and the Jews has improved. Many Sunday keeping churches are acknowledging and even embracing their Jewish roots and are supporting the Jewish people and the Land of Israel (see an example of this in the news story Christians, Jews in Holy Land alliance). Most Messianic communities are able to meet on the Shabbat thanks to churches who either volunteer to give them space in their buildings or rent space to them. No, I'm not church bashing and am grateful to the many Sunday keeping churches that they care about both their Messianic brothers and sisters and the traditional Jewish synagogue.

So what does all this mean? For one thing, it's the answer to the question people ask me about why I worship with my faith community on Saturday. It's the answer as to why I devote all of my waking moments within that 24 hour time frame on Him and His works in my life and the lives of all in the body of believers. It also means that the Almighty doesn't change His mind and He doesn't change "the rules". It means we can all trust His Word when He says that something is forever. It means that He and His powerful Word are the same yesterday, today, and for all eternity.

Afterword

Is this work exhaustive? Probably not. I tried to collect and respond to as many of the arguments for a first day Shabbat as I could but it's always possible I missed something. If I did or you just want to ask me a question or make a comment (remembering that we are all children of the Almighty and belong to the body of the Messiah...be nice), go to the Contact Us page on this site and email me. Please provide your Biblical references if you disagree with my comments based on the Word. Thank you.

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