FAQ: Seventh Day Sabbath

Q It has been preached that folks observe the 10 Commandments, but if they are attending church on Sunday, does this mean G-d will condemn them to hell?

A. Thsdat is a common question so let's look at this. It is inconsistent to tell people to follow the 10 Commandments, and then say the 7th day Sabbath has been "done away". How did this happen. If you go back into history, you will see that the 1st century believers in Yeshua were Jewish, and followed the Torah. They would have never considered not observing the Sabbath. Yeshua did, Paul did and when Gentiles came into the faith, they went to the synagogues to learn the Torah, wherever they were (Acts 15.21). These Gentiles came to faith in Yeshua and kept the commandments. As time went on, more and more Gentiles came into the faith out of paganism, and kept some of the pagan practices they had. In the roman Empire, Jews were not very well liked, and to participate in what was deemed "Judaism" came to be seen as unpatriotic toward Rome. The Gentile voice outnumbered the Jewish voice the further you got away from Israel, called the "diaspora" or dispersion. As time went on, these people began to totally seperate form the Messianic Jews and formed what was to become "Christianity".

Doctrines were created, using pagan backrounds, to formulate creeds and doctrines. One of these was changing the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. The purpose was to root out the last vestiges of Judaism from this new faith (Constantine, Council of Nicea) because of the mistaken belief that G-d had discarded the Jewish peole and their" religion" and was forming something else. This is what is called Replacement Theology, that G-d replaced Israel with "the church". Several hundred years after Yeshua, it became official that Sunday was the Christian Sabbath and L-rd's Day and if one celebrated the 7th day Sabbath, you did so against the will of the state and could be put to death. Eventually, it just came to be done and nobody questioned it.

The only authority for changing it to Sunday came from the Catholic Church and Protestants still follow the Catholics on this one, and other doctrines. There is much information on this. There have been articles in the past dealing with the exact quotes from Catholic and Protestant leaders stating that the Sabbath is the 7th day, and Sunday is a tradition not based in Scripture. Log on to the web site Yashanet.com and click on the article "Why the Protestant Reformation failed" and you will see it centered on Luthers "scripture only" belief, but he still kept Sunday and the Catholic Church leaders pointed this out and that the only authority to do came from the Catholic Church, so Luthers premise was shown to be invalid, and the Reformation died right there. Now, it is clear that the 10 Commandments refer to the 7th day Sabbath.

Secondly, man does not have the authority to invalidate a command of G-d by his tradition. One does not get condemned to hell for breaking a commandment, but because of unbelief. Breaking a commandment is called "sin" (1Jn 3.4).Your unbelief is evidenced by what you do.

One who does not believe will not keep the commandments, and he does not keep the commandments because he does not know G-d (1Jn 2.1-4). If one does believe, he will keep the will of G-d, which is His word, the Torah, but Torah does not mean Law, it means "teaching and instruction. The Torah was put into Greek and they used the Greek word "nomos" for Torah and that is how it was translated into Englis. The Torah is the intstruction of G-d on how to live, on how to know Him and so on. This gives new meaning to the phrase "not under Law" What G-d hears is "not under My instruction" which is not a good position to take with Him.

Thirdly, people are at different levels of their understanding. If one believes that the Law has been "done away with", then he does not understand. By "Law "I mean the Torah. There is not one Christian who really believes that, but they teach it anyway because they get to pick and choose what they want to obey. The "law" they are taught that has been done away are the "Jewish ones" like Sabbath, festivals,food laws (ever noticed that?)and they have replaced it with man-made traditions. It is this unbelief in the whole counsel of G-d that is the problem.

They will say they believe in the Word of G-d, but then teach against it using traditions that go back centuries to prove it. It is this unbelief that is a problem before the L-rd, demonstrated by their lack of fruit in obedience to the L-rd. Faith without works (Hebrew word for commandments is "mitzvot" or works) is dead. One has faith in G-d, is deemed righteous by faith, then follows the Word to show G-d that he believes. There are other questions along this line we will deal with next week, so make sure you don't miss next week's column. Now, go and study!