Have you ever really read the Fourth Commandment?
Exodus 20:8-10
8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”
(Leviticus 19:3) Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father, and you shall keep my Sabbaths: I am the Lord your God.
(Deuteronomy 5:3)
“‘Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you.”
(Isaiah 56:2) “Blessed is the man who does this, and the son of man who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath, not profaning it, and keeps his hand from doing any evil.”
(Isaiah 56:6)
“And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, and holds fast my covenant—” (will be blessed).
Over and over for about 2 years, many many times God would highlight and bold the importance of keeping His Sabbath. As a person who attended church on Sunday, I was really confused by this. I had never had anyone – pastors or friends – mention this aspect of the 10 Commandments, and I really did not know what to think.
The conviction became stronger and stronger when we moved to Montana. I sought the counsel of the pastor and the lead elder of our church (which kept Sunday as the day of worship) and met with them several times continually asking them to help me to gain clarity on this issue. Neither one of them had any help. Scripturally there were not many verses they could send me to for a better understanding about why we worship on Sunday. The one verse they pointed to most frequently was the verse in Acts in which the believers shared a meal on Sunday (the first day of the week) in Acts 20:7.
I began to research churches that meet on Saturday (the scriptural Sabbath). Locally, there was a Messianic group who met on Saturdays, but after talking with the leader, I did not feel like it was a fit. Our only other option was the Seventh Day Adventist church, so we attended the congregation that met in a small town north of us on the Saturday following Thanksgiving 3 years ago.
A beautiful thing happened that first Saturday. There was a potluck following the church service and was seated next to a lovely elderly woman. As we talked, I began to ask her the many questions I had about the Sabbath (the questions I had asked my former pastor and elder). She treated me and my questions with respect and answered this way: That’s a good question. Let’s look at what the Bible says in answer to that question. She gave me the verses, and we looked them up together. We read them and then discussed what they said. Finally, she would say, “This is what I believe about that particular question, but you, Deb, need to pray and ask the LORD to give you His wisdom and clarity, and seek His answer to the question in His Word.”
Over and over, I asked my questions, and I was always met with kindness and respect. She spent about an hour and a half with me guiding me to what the Bible said about the many questions I peppered her with.
We continued to attend the Sunday church, but began also attending the Seventh Day Adventist church in Kalispell, Montana. We met many others who genuinely loved and studied the Bible, and there were many rich conversations about the Bible – and no question was ever met with disrespect. It was a wonderful season of growth in knowledge of the Word of God for me.
With that as the backstory, recently I had a very disorienting “ah-ha”.
I have loved education, science, medicine, the human body, and all of the elements of nature all of my life. I learned the theory of Darwinism and the elements of evolutionary theory. I learned the theory in which the universe began with a “big bang”, and after millennia, life forms began to evolve. None of this had raised any questions for me – most of my life I was an atheist and this theory seemed adequate to explain what I knew and what I saw around me.
Let’s return to the Fourth Commandment…. “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”
The “ah-ha” was this – when I worship on the Sabbath (Saturday, the Seventh Day), I am in my actions affirming my belief in what is said in the entire commandment. I am affirming that God has every right to ask me to worship Him as He would have me worship Him, on the day that He has called for me to worship. I am affirming that I believe in a God Who is powerful enough to create everything I see, and that which I cannot see – all things – over a period of 6 days. Oh my!
I have been rocked to my core. What I treated as a myth – that God created all things in six days – is not a myth. If this “myth” is not a myth, the God I worship is so awesome, so powerful, of such infinite intellect, such a God of wonder! Can I believe in and worship THAT God? Absolutely!!