It amazes me how much hot air has, over the years
gone into arguments about which day of the week is the proper on e on which to rest...
in accordance with the Ten Commandments.
This is particularly silly when you know that there is no day of the week mentioned in the entire Bible...
at least not any ENGLISH day of the week.
In Hebrew, they are just called, "first day", "second day", etc. up to seven days, and then you start over.
So which day is the seventh day?
Well, it's wherever you land after counting to seven since the last time you had a rest.
A seven-day cycle is all that the Ten Commandments prescribe.
No mention of where to start your counting.
"Take a rest, every seven days." That is pretty much what the rule says.
But somewhere along the line, SOMEONE
(obviously not anyone who spoke Hebrew)
decided to give different names for seven different days
and that is when the arguments began in earnest.
"Saturday is the seventh!", some said.
"No, Sunday is the seventh!", others said.
I think the Muslims even argue, "You're both wrong. FRIDAY is the seventh."
Well, TRADITION (and that's all the sort of things people came up with AFTER the Bible was put together)...
tradition said that Saturn represented the holy "seventh day", and not the Sun.
Have you heard the sabbatarians arguing that Sunday was named after the Sun God, making it evil?
Why don't they seem bothered by the fact that THEIR favorite day was named after the Roman god of agriculture, Saturnus?
The beauty of the Ten Commandments is that God wasn't really interested at all in what you choose to CALL your seventh day
as long as you rest every seven days.
THAT is the significance and focus of the fourth commandment...
an emphasis on rest from the rat race... at least once every seven days.
Jesus, of course, turned the entire commandment upside-down
by teaching that the kind of work that his Father, he himself, and his followers do
is so restful that we can work every day and rest every day at the same time.
The horror of the rat race was just that it had been built around the root of all evil: labouring for the meat that perishes.
There IS no rat race in the kingdom of heaven.
When all those people who labour for the meat that perishes
break the yoke or curse that the devil has put on mankind ever since the Fall
and when we take up the yoke that Jesus offers, where he worries about our material needs
and we just concentrate on things like faith and love...
when we do that, we will discover real REST for our soul.
We will "enter into God's sabbath" as the writer to the Hebrews put it so eloquently.
Elsewhere on this channel, we have a couple of videos on the Epistle to the Hebrews
and one of the great themes in that book is this concept of God's rest or God's sabbath.
Please watch it if you haven't already done so.
The word "sabbath" just means rest, by the way
which is why I keep using them interchangeably.
You see, the subject of the fourth commandment was rest from the unholy rat race... sabbath.
It's not about what name you give to the day on which you take that rest.
But of course, as anyone who has read even one of the four gospels would know
the religious leaders in Jesus' day had the same problem that so many religious leaders have today.
They strained at gnats about such things as what name you give to a day that has no name
while even turning their worship into yet another way to make money.
The root of all evil is not resting on the wrong day.
The root of all evil is what people are doing all week long, as they chase after mammon...
or money, and all that money can buy.
Jesus came to change all that.
Now here is another radical observation, about the Seventh Day Adventists in particular.
Do you know what they call the "Mark of the Beast"?
They call it "worshiping God".
That's right.
If you worship God, you are guilty of the worst possible sin.
Listen closely to them.
They have been teaching for more than a century now, that one day
the devil is going to make a rule telling the whole world to worship God
and, if you obey that rule, then you will be taking on the dreaded Mark of the Beast
for which you will never be forgiven by God.
Listen closely to what they are saying, and you will see that I am not exaggerating.
Now, if the devil came out with a rule that says you CANNOT worship God
then it would make sense to see that as evil and to encourage people to disobey such a rule.
But that is not what the Seventh Day Adventists have predicted for so many decades.
You would imagine that SDAs, who go through various religious rituals on Saturday
would say that one day an evil world ruler will say that you cannot worship God on Saturday.
But that is not what they teach.
They teach that an evil world ruler is going to teach that people that they not only SHOULD worship God
but that they MUST worship God.
In particular, the devil will try to force people to worship God on Sunday.
In other words, they have altered the fourth commandment to read something like this:
"Remember the first day of the week, to keep it unholy.
"Unholiness on the first day of the week will be a perpetual sign between you and your God.
"Don't ever worship God on Sunday."
According to good Seventh Day Adventist teaching
no amount of worship on Saturday will save you if you succumb to worshiping God on any other day as well.
For the command, as they understand it, is not just that you must be unholy on Sunday
but that you should be unholy EVERY other day except Saturday.
That is just how far they have gone in turning the entire command inside-out.
Well, there you have it:
Two ridiculous teachings that are both fundamentally unscriptural
and both totally inconsistent with what is actually written in the Ten Commandments.
One is that the Bible supposedly says to worship God on Saturday, when it never says that
and the other is that God says NOT to worship him any other day.
A sizable portion of the religious world has been sucked in by these teachings
simply because we don't know how to think for ourselves on such matters.
We let blind guides lead us, and we both fall into a ditch because of it
like Jesus said of the religious leaders in his day as well.
Don't fall for it.
Open your Bible and read what Jesus actually said in the four gospels
taking special note of what his position was, as opposed to the position of the people who had him killed
and it could turn your whole understanding about the sabbath debate on its ear.
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God bless you, and thank you for listening.