In this episode of A Reasonable Response, Robert Bosley examines the claim that the fourth commandment no longer applies to Christians and argues that this conclusion cannot be sustained from Scripture.
Bosley contends that the Ten Commandments form a unified expression of God's moral law, including the enduring principle of one day in seven set apart for worship and rest. Rather than a burdensome legal requirement, the Christian Sabbath is presented as a gracious gift from God—a day to delight in worship, rest from ordinary labor, and perform works of mercy and necessity.
This episode calls believers to embrace the Lord's Day not as legalism, but as joyful obedience to God's enduring design.
Rest reminds us that we're not God. God rested. Why? Because he needed it? No, because we needed it.
No. So I'm thankful they included this section in this episode, even though it really is undercutting their whole claim. Welcome to Reasonable Response. I'm Robert Bosley, and the purpose of this podcast is to give a reasoned response to issues related to the Christian faith from a reformed Baptist perspective. This is not meant to be a replacement for the instruction you should receive in your local church.
Rather, it should be an additional resource that we hope is a help and a blessing to you. Today, the issue we're going to consider is the question, are Christians supposed to keep the Sabbath day? So now, onto the breakdown. Today We're going to be looking at an episode of the Living Waters podcast titled, Are Christians Supposed to Keep the Sabbath? Their primary argument is against those who claim that we should keep the seventh day Sabbath as the Jews do, or Seventh-day Adventists.
As a Reformed Baptist, I agree that we're not under an obligation to keep the seventh day, but I would disagree with most of what they argue in that there is still an ongoing obligation for Christians, even under the new covenant, to keep the fourth commandment that has been changed. It's been elevated to a different form of observance, but there is still an obligation for Christians to obey the command to keep the Sabbath day and to keep it holy before the Lord. So with that, let's look at clip one. Nine commandments is all you preach. You won't preach the one that's important to God.
And I think there is some genuine confusion amongst some believers because they'll look and they'll say, well, this is in the Ten Commandments. John MacArthur put it really well. The Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments. It is non-moral and purely ceremonial, and it was unique to the Old Covenant and to Israel. The other nine commandments, on the other hand, pertain to moral and spiritual absolutes and are repeated and expanded upon many places in the New Testament.
But Sabbath observance is never recommended to Christians, much less given as a command in the New Testament. Also, when Jesus spoke to the rich young ruler that ran to him, he didn't use the Sabbath commandment to bring the knowledge of sin. He named five commandments, but he didn't use the Sabbath. And I believe there's a reason for that. The commandments he pointed to are recognizable as sin by a natural mind.
Shall not steal, shall not lie, shall not commit adultery, shall not kill. But he didn't say Sabbath. Why? Because the Sabbath isn't clearly recognizable as a sin by the carnal mind. So starting off with the quote from John MacArthur, I mean, as a dispensationalist, we expect MacArthur to say that.
The problem is we don't need to have everything that's an obligation for us to be repeated in the New Testament. The Old Testament is still Christian scripture. It's still God's word to us. Now, yes, we have to understand it carefully. We don't bring everything over point by point.
We have to interpret it rightly. But just saying that it's not cited in the New Testament, therefore it's not for us, is not a good way to understand the Bible and it's really not a standard that even the dispensations hold to consistently. I also don't think it's actually entirely true. Jesus said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. That's in our New Testament and he ties it to creation.
The Sabbath is made for man, not Israel, and he doesn't tie it specifically to the Old Covenant. And the idea that the Sabbath is purely ceremonial, not moral, even though it's part of the Ten Commandments, is just kind of a strange way to understand the Ten Commandments. Clearly, the decalogue, the ten words as the Hebrew reflects, are meant to be understood as a unit. They are a consistent whole. Why would we assume that one of these in the middle is purely a different kind of law, that it's purely ceremonial, it has no moral component to it.
That seems to be a really severe case of special pleading, that you've already come to your conclusion and you're now just trying to come up with a rationalization for it. And Ray's point about Jesus' evangelism of the rich young ruler kind of ties into this. He says, well, Jesus only used commands from the second table of the law. He didn't reference the Sabbath command. Okay, but he also didn't reference the first commandment.
Are we not under obligation to worship only the true God? That's a very bizarre standard. Just because we don't have a written record of Jesus mentioning the Sabbath to the rich young ruler doesn't mean that there's no abiding implications or applications of the command to keep the Sabbath holy. It's a very strange way to argue and not something that anyone can hold to consistently. Otherwise, we'd have to throw out entire swaths of clearly moral commands from the Old Testament.
It just doesn't work. When we look at Colossians 2, 16 to 17, it says, so let no one judge you in food or in drink or regarding a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come but the substances of Christ. So there's not really an argument presented here. And this is something we see repeatedly with this video, just things that are thrown out without any real argument made. But obviously the argument that they're trying to provide here is, well, Colossians 2 says, refers to Sabbaths and therefore these things aren't important, they're not necessary for the Christian, therefore the Sabbath has been abolished according to Colossians 2.
The problem is that this passage, Romans 14, Galatians 4, these three are kind of the dominant New Testament passages that talk about days. And yes, Colossians 2 does mention Sabbaths. The problem is, if you look in the context, there's a clear case to be made that these are talking about the ceremonial law, additional Sabbaths. Colossians who is the only one that actually uses the word Sabbath, these are not talking about the weekly seven day repeated pattern that's established in the Ten Commandments. These are additional feasts that were considered a kind of Sabbath in addition to the weekly required day of rest and worship.
If you look in other passages, this order presented here in Colossians 2 of festival or feast days, new moons and Sabbaths. This is repeated several times in the Old Testament passages such as Ezekiel 45, Hosea 2, 1 Chronicles 23, to describe the ceremonial feast days that were celebrated throughout the year in addition to the seventh day observance of the Sabbath among Israel. So therefore when the Apostle Paul is writing about these things and he uses the same phrasing that we see in the Old Testament, the conclusion should be he's not overturning one of the Ten Commandments, but rather that he is pointing out that the ceremonial aspects of the expanded law that was unique to Israel, that has passed away, that has been fulfilled in Christ and done away with. We are not under an obligation to keep feasts such as Pentecost, Feast of Trumpets, or these other different feast days that were a kind of Sabbath. God rests on the seventh day.
And one theologian that I was reading, he points out that on the seventh day doesn't repeat the language evening and morning. And the reason why he pointed out is that there's a sense in which God intended in the garden that there would be this perpetual rest. Not that there was no work because certainly work is pre endemic fall, work is good, but there is this rest in the presence of God that is intended to happen. But of course, Adam and Eve sin against the Lord, kicked out of the garden. And then what ends up happening is that God intends to restore humanity back to a place of rest with Him.
Christ is our perpetual rest. He is our Shabbat, our Shalom. We find our ultimate place of rest in Christ. So they point out that God blessed and sanctified the seventh day in Genesis in the account of creation. I think that if we see that in Genesis that God set aside the seventh day, he blessed it, he rested from his works, and then the Ten Commandments itself in Exodus picks up this language and uses that as the ground of the Sabbath command.
I think the necessary conclusion is that it's not only a command for Israel, it's grounded in creation. It is part of what God did when he made the world, not merely when he brought Israel out of Egypt. Therefore, it's a command for all of humanity. There's also an interesting typology that seems to be happening in the seventh day in creation. If we think about it, Adam is created on day six.
So the seventh day, the day of God's rest, is Adam's first full day. So Adam's first full day of life is God's day of rest. So his first day of existence, he's entering into God's rest. And this seems to point forward to the fulfillment, the second Adam rising from the dead, creating a new covenant people. And they gather together on the first day of the week and from their rest and worship then they live out the rest of their week.
There seems to be some typological significance to that. Also the idea brought up that Christ is our Sabbath, He's the fulfillment of it for us. That's absolutely true. We find true rest in Christ and in Christ alone. But at the same time, Christ is my perfect fulfillment of all of God's law, not just the Sabbath command.
Christ is the fulfillment of my obedience to God in worship and in obedience, in not committing murder, not committing adultery, all these things. Christ fulfills all the law all the times that I failed, He fulfills it for me. That doesn't mean then that that law is abolished or that there's no obligation now for my obedience to it just because Christ has fulfilled it on my behalf. It's a very inconsistent standard that's applied only to the Sabbath command. You won't hear them argue this same way about any other law.
The Pharisees added to the law, 613 were not enough. Let us improve on those. Then what ends up happening inevitably is you get hypocrisy. You get loopholes. I can't keep this, but I've instituted it.
What do I do now? You're not allowed to carry your clothes out of your house if it was burning on the Sabbath. But if you put them all on, you're good to go. You can't travel a certain amount of distance away from your house on the Sabbath, but if you deposited food in a bush that far away from your house, that becomes your home away from home, and now you can travel. Are you serious?
That what they say? Oh yeah, these were. Yeah, this is historic. That means you could put food on a motorbike and just drive anywhere you want. Jesus made it clear.
The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. So in the context of talking about the Pharisees and the traditions that had been added to the law, Of course, we fully agree that this was a misuse of God's law. This is one of the things Jesus called them out for all the time is substituting commandments of men for the commandments of God. That's what Jesus violated. Jesus never broke God's law.
If he didn't keep the Sabbath, if he violated the Ten Commandments, he would not have been able to be our perfect Savior, the spotless Lamb, the sinless one who died in the place of sinners. So no, Jesus did not violate the law. He did not violate the Sabbath. He kept it perfectly. He violated their standards for the Sabbath because they were additional legalistic requirements that God never commanded.
That's what Jesus violated. And he showed us that, yes, it is totally proper to do acts of mercy and acts of necessity on the Sabbath day. And even our Reformed confessions reflect that as the Second London Confession, chapter 22, paragraph 8 states at the end, talking about what the day is for, but are also taken up the whole time in public and private exercises of his worship and in the duties of necessity and mercy. So I agree, we shouldn't have legalistic restrictions on what we do on the Sabbath day. That's not what we're talking about.
Obedience is not legalism. And that is the problem that we have to get people to think through. Calling people to obey God's law rightly is not the same thing as imposing Legalistic obligations that God never commanded different thing. Let's stop confusing the two Basically, we're looking at Sabbath as a way for us to rest in Christ delight in his creation and reorient our hearts on who He intends for us to be. Kevin DeYoung put it well.
He said, we should rest in Christ alone for our salvation. But along with that, there is still an abiding principle that we ought to worship on the Lord's day and trust God enough to have a weekly routine where we cease from our normal labors. He made the Sabbath for man, not man for the Sabbath, which we quoted. God gave us Sabbath as a gift. It's an island of get to and a sea of have to.
Wow. That's really good. Isn't that powerful? He also offers us Sabbath as a test. It's an opportunity to trust God's work more than our own.
When I go weeks without taking adequate time off, I may or may not be disobeying the fourth commandment, but I'm certainly too convinced of my own importance and more than a little foolish. If my goal is God glorifying productivity over a lifetime of hard work, there are few things I need more than a regular rhythm of rest. So I'm kind of confused. I really don't understand why they have this quotation from Kevin DeYoung because he's actually arguing against their stated position. Think about all they've said so far, that the Quotient MacArthur, the Sabbath law is purely ceremonial.
It's been abolished. It's been fulfilled. Christ is our fulfillment. There's no obligation. The days of the old covenant are all abolished.
There's nothing for us. But what does Kevin say? Or what does Pastor DeYoung say? We should rest in Christ alone for our salvation. But along with that, there is an abiding principle that we ought to worship on the Lord's day and trust God enough to have a weekly routine where we cease from our normal labors.
Think about the words he used there, an abiding principle, talking about from the command to keep Sabbath, that we ought, there's an obligation to worship on the Lord's Day and trust God to have a day of rest in our weekly routine. That's completely contrary to everything they've been saying. Now He's, you know, as a reformed theologian, putting it in categories that we would hold to. He's not arguing for a seventh day observance of the Pharisaical traditions. So maybe That's what they're arguing against, but his point is contrary to everything else they've been saying.
There is a continuing validity to the fourth command. Christians ought to lay aside one day out of seven on the Lord's day to rest from their laborers, worship God, and this is how we keep the Sabbath command as Christians. And when he talks about, you know, when I go weeks without taking adequate time off, I may or may not be disobeying the fourth commandment, I think he's talking about himself. He's not questioning whether or not we can disobey the fourth commandment. I think he's talking about himself.
He's not questioning whether or not we can disobey the fourth commandment. I think he's saying that there may be times where he could work, especially as a pastor, and not have any time off, which may not be a violation of the Fourth Commandment. I don't think he's saying that there's no obedience required by the Fourth Commandment. But listen to what his conclusion is. That is because he's too convinced of his own importance and more than a little foolish.
In other words, the Sabbath is a gift to man. It is God's grace to you to remind you that you are not what everything is all about. That you need, as a finite creature, this time, to rest from your work, refocus on the Lord, and to be reinvigorated for another week of your normal routine. Everything in this statement is completely contrary to what they've been saying. And it just is a little strange that they've included it here.
I'm thankful for it though, because it's a great summary of the reformed view of the Christian Sabbath. I have a family member who works seven days a week and he works 12 hours a day and he's done it for years. You are setting yourself up for failure. Come aside and rest. Rest reminds us that we're not God.
God rested, why? Because he needed it? No, because we needed it. And if we needed it before the fall, how much more do we need it now after the fall? I think often if you think about like, oh well I always need to be doing something, you could fall in the trap as I am important.
And rest means I'm not God. Rest reminds us the important work has been done for us. Rest reminds us ultimately that we are human, that we are frail, and that we are limited. We need to work at resting. Ah!
So I'm thankful they included this section in this episode, even though it really is undercutting their whole claim, because their whole point is here that as finite creatures, even before the fall, we needed rest. And that's absolutely true, but how much more so after the fall? This is why the Sabbath debate is so perplexing to me that the command that so many Christians have the most problem with is the one that tells you to take a day off. We have so much pride and arrogance in ourselves that we think that we don't need this day to rest, to reflect, to reset our hearts on the Lord. And that's just simply not true because that's not what we are, that's not how we're made.
We're finite, limited creatures. We can't do everything. And that's one of the great gifts of the Sabbath. That's one of the great gifts of the Lord's day. It is a constant reminder that no, you can't do everything.
You don't need to try and do everything. Rest in your Savior. And that's why it's such a sad thing that so many Christians reject the continuing validity of the fourth commandment because it's really ultimately rooted in a hard, selfish, and prideful attitude of, no, I don't need this day. I can do everything on my own. It's in many ways a reflection of an idolatry of self where you think all your time, all your effort, all your energy is centered on you.
When God says, no, you need to take this time, rest and focus on me. Romans 14, five to six. One person esteems one day above another, another esteems every day alike. Let each be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day observes it to the Lord.
He who does not observe the day to the Lord, he does not observe it. He who eats, eats to the Lord. He gives God thanks. He who does not eat to the Lord does not eat, gives God's thanks. We need to be convinced in our own minds and not be judgmental.
We've got tremendous liberty as Christians. Someone says to me, you're not keeping the Sabbath. I write back to them and say, if you can find one verse in the New Testament where Christians are commanded to keep the Sabbath, I will keep it and I'll tell others to also knock it off. People are going to hell. This is silly.
Read Romans 14. As I mentioned earlier, Romans 14 is one of the primary passages that's always brought up. But if you look at it in context, there's no mention of the Sabbath command itself. It's pretty clear that this is talking about either the ceremonial feast days from the law that was given specifically to Israel, things like Passover and Feast of Booths and things like that, or these are additional days that were beginning to be brought in, such as days of fasting or days of feasting, ceremonial observances that were being brought into the church, kind of akin to our modern conceptions of Easter or Christmas, things like that. That's what Romans 14 applies to.
Do we celebrate Christmas? Do we celebrate December 25th or January 6th, like those in the East? Or things like this. There's nothing there about keeping the natural law, as the confession puts it, of resting and worshiping on one day each week. That is the example set for us even in the creation account.
It's really a misapplication of Romans 14 to apply it to the Fourth Commandment and say the Fourth Commandment has no bearing on us today. It's a foreshadow. Hebrews 4 talked about Christ being our Sabbath rest. So therefore, since the promise remains of entering his rest, let us fear, lest any of you seem to have come short of it. For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them, but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it.
For we who have believed do enter that rest, as he said. So I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest, although the works were finished from the foundation of the world, for he has spoken in a certain place of the seventh day in this way, and God rested on the seventh day from all his works, and again in this place they shall not enter my rest." And in verse 9 it says, there remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered his rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience." We've ceased from work. We've ceased from trying to earn God's favor.
He bore his wrath in our place. He's our substitute. And Now we have uninterrupted and eternal rest. So the passage in Hebrews four is a very interesting one because both sides on the Sabbath debate appeal to it. And as a reformed Baptist and a sabbatarian in the reform sense, I think it's actually a passage that defends the position that there is an ongoing principle of the Sabbath day that we are as Christians supposed to keep.
Because think of what the argument is that's being made, that the Old covenant never gave the full rest that was required. Joshua leading the people into Israel wasn't able to give the nation full rest from their enemies. There was this ongoing expectation because there's still warfare, there's still fighting, there's still struggles, that there is a greater rest coming, even though they had a picture of rest by finally being in the land. And the wording that the writer to the Hebrew uses, the word used, he uses the noun form and the verb form, katapalsis or katapao, this is just the generic word for rest. But then you reach the kind of the climax of his argument in Hebrews 4.9, therefore there remains, and most translations simply say a rest or sometimes a Sabbath rest for the people of God, he uses a different word.
It's sabbatismos. And I think this is significant that he changes the wording that he uses. Now, sometimes synonyms or words can be used interchangeably. John's writings are especially filled with this, where he'll use two words synonymously, interchangeably with no distinction in meaning. Other writers in the New Testament are different.
They have different ways of writing. Paul is typically more precise. The writer to the Hebrews, even more precise. He likes to use the same word consistently. And so when he switches here, I think there's significance to it.
He uses a term sabbatismos, which is only used here. And that ismos ending is a suffix that indicates this noun is an activity or it's a practice or a process. We see the same ending in, for instance, the word baptismos, talking about baptism. It's not talking about the state of being underwater, but it's the process of being baptized. Sabbatismos is not about the state of rest, but a practice or a process of entering into a state of restfulness and it is derived from the verb to keep Sabbath.
And so that's why some grammarians argue that this should be translated a Sabbath keeping or a Sabbath observance. That seems to be the idea behind the word sabbatismos. And so it seems to me that The argument being made here is that there was no full rest. There was always something pointing forward. And we're still, even in the New Covenant, waiting for the full consummation of God's rest.
And so we, just like Israel under the Old Covenant, we're looking to a greater rest, and so there's still a Sabbath keeping for the people of God. Because we're still looking to this great fulfillment of God's rest, there is at this time still a Sabbath observance for the people of God, not the legalistic requirements of the Pharisees, not even on the ceremonial aspects that were part of the Old Covenant, but there's this abiding principle all the way from creation where we keep a time of rest while we look forward to the full rest that we will have in the consummation, in the fulfillment of the kingdom of God. Hebrews 4.9 doesn't overturn the Sabbath command, it reinforces it for us today. One of the questions that I get is, why don't we rest on the seventh day, Saturday? Why is it on the first day, a big transition happens in the New Testament, a new covenant is established with God.
When Jesus resurrected on Sunday, the Christians in Acts and moving forward began to worship and gather because of the resurrection. This is actually really important. The early church treated Sundays the way that we, the United States, treat Easter Sunday. Easter Sunday is a big thing for us. We all put our Sunday best on, everyone goes, we take pictures.
It's this big celebration. That was every Sunday. What we see in Acts is that it shifts from Saturday to Sunday for the purpose of celebration in the new covenant. He points out that the book of Acts records Christians meeting on the first day of the week, that there was a change in emphasis from Saturday to Sunday. And he's absolutely right.
And this is due to the resurrection of Christ on the first day of the week. It's also the day that the Spirit was poured out on Pentecost was the first day of the week. And so from that the church as recorded by Luke meets on the first day and there's this assumption in Acts and even in Paul's letters where the church will gather on the first day of the week. The book of Revelation interestingly, John refers to the Lord's Day, being in the spirit on the Lord's Day and almost everyone agrees that this is a reference to Sunday and that language is very quickly used in church history to describe Sunday, the Lord's Day. And the language used there is very interesting.
It's not the normal term that would be used for something like, say, the similar phrase, the day of the Lord. This is a word in Revelation 1 10, kuriaqe. This is that suffix there has this idea of especially belonging to or pertaining to in this case the Lord. So the Lord's Day is a day that uniquely or especially belongs to or pertains to the Lord. The only other time this word is used is in 1st Corinthians referring to the Lord's Supper.
It's a supper, a meal that belongs specially to the Lord. So even in the Book of Revelation we have this day that is set apart belonging specially to the Lord Jesus. The Book of Acts and the New Testament epistles talk about the Christians meeting consistently on Sunday. Yes, they go to the synagogue, but that's for the purpose of evangelism because that's where the scriptures are read and you have a group of people who already believe in God and the idea is to pull them along and bring them to a fuller revelation of God's truth because Christ has now come. But the Christians gather on Sunday.
This change of the day is seen organically in the New Testament. And so we don't need a specific command given to meet on Sunday. It's just part of Christian experience. As God's people, We gather together to worship, to celebrate the sacraments, to hear from God in His Word, to pray together, to fellowship together, all these experiences that the people of God have known throughout all of history. This is now done on the first day of the week, because that's the day that Christ rose from the dead, accomplishing redemption for us, and therefore what other day would we meet on?
It's just a natural intuitive part of Christian consciousness and Christian worship that we would meet on this day to worship our risen Savior. And this is reflected in the Reformed Confessions, the Second London Confession, chapter 22, paragraph seven, as it is the law of nature that in general, a proportion of time by God's appointment be set apart for the worship of God. And so they're wrong when they say there's no moral intuition that we should set aside a day to worship. There's a reason why all cultures have been religious. We all know that there is an obligation on us to set aside time to worship God.
Even the pagans who have that sense twisted and corrupted by sin have a knowledge that they have an obligation to worship God. That's innate. That's part of us, our nature as creatures. So it's by a law of nature by God's appointment that time be set apart for the worship of God and so by his word in a positive moral and perpetual command binding on all men in all ages he is particularly appointed one day in seven to be a Sabbath kept holy unto him which from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ was the last day of the week, and from the resurrection of Christ, as seen in the book of Acts, and throughout the New Testament, was changed to the first day of the week, which is called the Lord's Day, and is to be continued to the end of the world as the Christian Sabbath, the observance of the last day of the week being abolished. And so all of this we can see and defend from the New Testament as clarifying and shining greater light on what is already established in the Old.
As Christians, as Paul says in Romans 3, we don't abolish the law or overturn the law by our faith in Christ, rather, we establish the law. In other words, we are able to fulfill it and keep it rightly as Christians. So in summary, what do we see here? Their arguments, their claims really aren't persuasive. They fall flat.
Yes, we do not keep the Sabbath as the Jews had under the Old Covenant. We don't adhere to the legalistic traditions from the Pharisees that even the Jews keep today. As a Reformed Baptist, I don't think we should keep the Seventh Day like the Seventh-Day Adventists argue. But the idea that the Fourth Commandment is not for us in any fashion is just not a persuasive claim. The New Testament does not support this idea that fundamentally there are only nine commandments for us.
No, the ten commandments are a unit, they are a whole, they reflect the moral standards of God for His people. And so there is an ongoing validity and principle behind the fourth commandment that we are to keep today. We still worship God on one day in seven, that day now being the first day of the week, the day that Christians have always gathered together to worship God, to rest from their labors and to do acts of mercy and necessity. This is not legalism. It's simply a call to obedience and holiness before the Lord, and it is a day of delight.
It is a gift to God's people from a loving father, not a heavy obligation to be rejected, but rather a wonderful gift to be received with joy. Well that's all the time we have for today. If you'd like to connect with me personally, I'm on X at R. Bosley 1689. If you'd like to learn more about church and family life, you can do so at churchandfamilylife.com.
Remember, let your reasonableness be known to all men. Thanks, see you