I’m not sure why all the capital lettering? but anyway…

Comment on Christians and the Sabbath by Sean Pitman.

I’m not sure why all the capital lettering? but anyway… I appreciate your thoughts. Obviously, however, I just don’t agree.

Jesus could have said that the Sabbath was made for the Jews, but He didn’t do that. He specifically said that the Sabbath was made for “anthropos” (mankind), and followed up by explaining that He had personally created the day Himself and was the Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:27-28). Even Martin Luther wrote that the Sabbath had originally been created in Eden for Adam and Eve and that they taught their own children to observe the Sabbath – and that the Sabbath would have continued for eternity in this world if Adam and Eve had not fallen into sin. The Talmud also says the same thing regarding Sabbath observance before the time of Moses – as do many other well-known theologians (all detailed in my article above).

Jesus also personally kept the Sabbath His entire life as God originally intended it to be kept. Even in death, He honored the Sabbath – as did His disciples. It is explained that they all rested on the Sabbath in “obedience to the commandment.” (Luke 23:56). Clearly then, no one believed that the Sabbath commandment had been “done away with” at the cross. And, as explained in detail in my article, when Jesus “broke” the Sabbath He wasn’t breaking the Law regarding Sabbath observance. The Jews themselves were well aware that the Sabbath law could be lawfully broken in certain situations – to include the relief of the suffering of man or beast. Jesus Himself pointed out that everything that He did on the Sabbath was in fact “lawful” according to God and even the Jews themselves (Matthew 12:12). Please read more about this in the article above…

And, after Jesus was raised and went back to heaven, his followers continued to maintain the “custom” of worshiping on Sabbath – including Paul. It was his custom to worship on the Sabbath day. Yes, the Apostles were teaching people about Jesus, but they did this customarily on the Sabbath in particular with both Jews and gentiles. There simply is no mention in the Bible of the Apostles teaching that people should no longer observe one of the Ten Commandments. On the contrary, the entire moral Law was still held in high esteem and taught to the people as binding for the Christian. This is reflected in the fact that the early Christian Church continued to keep the Sabbath for many hundreds of years throughout the majority of Christendom.

As far as “The Beast” “thinking to change times and laws”:
How has the papacy tried to change God’s laws? In three different ways: In her catechisms she has (1) omitted the second commandment against veneration of images, and (2) shortened the fourth (Sabbath) commandment from 94 words to just eight. The Sabbath commandment (Exodus 20:8-11) clearly specifies Sabbath as the seventh day of the week. As changed by the papacy, the commandment reads: “Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day.” Written thus, it can refer to any day. And, finally, she (3) divided the tenth commandment into two commandments. How has the papacy attempted to change God’s times? In two ways: (1) She has changed the time of the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first day. (2) She has also changed God’s “timing” for the beginning and closing hours of the Sabbath. Instead of counting the Sabbath day from sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday night as God mandates (Leviticus 23:32), she adopted the pagan Roman custom of counting the day from midnight Saturday night to midnight Sunday night. God predicted these “changes” would be attempted by the beast, or Antichrist.

“You will tell me that Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath, but that the Christian Sabbath has been changed to Sunday. Changed! but by whom? Who has authority to change an express commandment of Almighty God? When God has spoken and said, Thou shalt keep holy the seventh day, who shall dare to say, Nay, thou mayest work and do all manner of worldly business on the seventh day but thou shalt keep holy the first day in its stead? This is a most important question, which I know not how you can answer. You are a Protestant, and you profess to go by the Bible and the Bible only and yet in so important a matter as the observance of one day in seven as a holy day, you go against the plain letter of the Bible, and put another day in the place of that day which the Bible has commanded.

The command to keep holy the seventh day is one of the ten commandments you believe that the other nine are still binding who gave you authority to tamper with the fourth? If you are consistent with your own principles, if you really follow the Bible and the Bible only, you ought to be able to produce some portion of the New Testament in which this fourth commandment is expressly altered.”

Library of Christian Doctrine: Why Don’t You Keep Holy the Sabbath-Day? (London: Burns and Oates, Ltd.), pp. 3, 4.

Now, as far as salvation is concerned, the Bible is quite clear that if a person knows and understands the will of God on a certain matter, yet rejects what God has made clear to that person and consistently resists the Holy Spirit, that person is in a state of deliberate rebellion against God. Such a person who continues in such a state of deliberate rebellion cannot be saved. I’m really not sure why you or anyone else would suggest otherwise? Remember, it’s not me who judges you. I don’t know what you honestly know and understand regarding the Sabbath. For all I know you are most likely honestly confused on this issue. And, if you are honestly confused, if you are not deliberately rebelling against something that you know is the truth or the desire of God, then you are in a saving relationship with God.

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Christians and the Sabbath
Response to a comment of a friend of mine posted in another forum:

“Before the way of FAITH IN CHRIST was available to us, we were placed under guard by the law. We were kept in protective custody, so to speak, UNTIL the way of faith was revealed. The law was our guardian UNTIL Christ came; it protected us UNTIL we could be made right with God through FAITH. And now that the way of FAITH has come, we no longer need the law as our guardian. For you are all children of God through FAITH IN CHRIST JESUS.” Gal3:23-26

Faith is certainly what saves. This has always been true since the very beginning. Even those righteous persons who lived before Jesus was born into this world as a human being, even Moses or David for instance, were not saved by the works of the Law, but by Faith. The purpose of the Law was never to save, but to convict the sinner of a need of a Savior – since all have sinned against the “Royal Law.” It is faith in the Savior that saves. The work of the Law, carefully considered, is to lead us to know that our only hope of salvation is faith in what Jesus, our Savior, did for us and is doing for us. Yet, this faith does not nullify the Law or make the Law pointless when it comes to its job to constantly remind us of our need of a Savior – a saving Power outside of ourselves. Rather, the Power realized through this faith actually enables us to keep the Spirit of the Law as it was originally intended to be kept – through selfless love for God and for our neighbors.

Paul, in his letter to the Romans, makes this point particularly clear:

Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law. – Romans 3:31

For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but it is the doers of the law who will be declared righteous. Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts… If a man who is not circumcised keeps the requirements of the law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? – Romans 2:13-15, 26

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! – Romans 6:15

What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” … So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good… For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. – Romans 7:7, 11, 22-25

For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit… The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. – Romans 8:3-4, 7

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. – Romans 13:8-10

Christians and the Sabbath
The Mishnah Superior to the rest of the Talmud?
According to the authors of “Lying for God” (Kerry Wynne and Larry Dean), the Mishnah was considered superior to the rest of the Talmud:

Recall that the Pharisees rejected the Talmud as merely the production of Human opinion, although the stewards of the oral law had, in their minds, placed the Mishnah within the body of Jewish oral law call the Talmud. When Jesus told His followers to obey the teachings of the Pharisees, by the process of elimination we have no other possibility left than that Jesus instructed His followers to obey the teachings of the Mishnah and to reject all ther parts of the oral law.

The Mishnah rejects the idea that the Torah existed before Moses. (Link)

This argument seems a bit strange for several reasons. First off, the Mishnah was collected and committed to writing about 200 AD and forms the first part of the Talmud. Orthodox Judaism believes that Moses received the Torah (the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) from God and that he wrote down everything God spoke to him. However, they also believe that God gave Moses explanations and examples of how to interpret the Law that Moses did not write down. These unwritten explanations are known in Judaism as the Oral Torah. The Oral Torah was supposedly passed down from Moses to Joshua and then to the rabbis until the advent of Christianity when it was finally written down as the legal authority called Halakha (“the walk”). The two main sections of the Oral Torah are the Mishnah and the Gemara.

The Mishnah (משנה, “repetition”) essentially records the debates of the post-temple sages from AD 70—200 (called the Tannaim) and is considered the first major work of “Rabbinical Judaism.” It is composed of six orders (sedarim), arranged topically…

After the Mishnah was published, it was studied exhaustively by generations of rabbis in both Babylonia and Israel. From AD 200—500, additional commentaries on the Mishnah were compiled and put together as the Gemara. Actually, there are two different versions of the Gemara, one compiled by scholars in Israel (c. 400 AD) and the other by the scholars of Babylonia (c. 500 AD). Together, the Mishnah and the Gemara form the Talmud (Link).

Clearly, then, the Mishnah was not in written existence until after the time of Jesus. The claim, then, that Jesus recognized the Mishnah as authoritative, but not the rest of the Talmud, isn’t entirely accurate. Beyond this, Jesus rejected many of the traditions of the Pharisees in His own day as being inconsistent with the Law of Love and the original intent of God for His own Laws. This is the reason that Jesus was in constant conflict with the Pharisees and their burdensome laws.

The fact of the matter is that the Gemaric part of the Talmud does, in fact, recognize the existence of the Torah, including the Sabbath, before the time of Moses. And, there is no reason to selectively reject certain views proposed by the Talmud. Beyond this, the Mishnah itself also directly claims that Abraham, despite having lived many generations before Moses, had already been a follower of the laws that were eventually delivered on Sinai – in their entirety:

We find that Father Avraham observed the Torah [hatorah] in its entirety before it was given, as it is said: “Since Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my observances, commandments, statutes and my teachings [toratai]. (Gen. 26:5).

M Qiddushin (Kiddushin) 4:14 (Link – starting at 9:00 of 9:25)

This, of course, directly undermines the above-cited claim that, “The Mishnah rejects the idea that the Torah existed before Moses.” Rather, the Mishnah specifically argues that Abraham observed the entire Torah before it was given to Moses – including the Sabbath.

Christians and the Sabbath
@Kerry Wynne:

You also argue that:

“ANOTHER PROBLEM FOR DR. PITMAN IS THAT THE NAZARENES WERE KNOWN TO HAVE KEPT THE SABBATH ACCORDING TO THE LUNAR CALENDAR. THEIR SABBATHS WERE VARIABLE/ADJUSTABLE.

And, what evidence do you give for this claim? – in your latest LFG book? As far as I can tell, it is based largely on John Keyser’s book, “From Sabbath to Saturday” where a statement from Clement of Alexandria is referenced as follows:

“Neither worship as the Jews; for they, thinking that they only know God, do not know Him, adoring as they do angels and archangels, the month and the moon. And if the moon be not visible, they do not hold the Sabbath, which is called the first; nor do they hold the new moon, nor the feast of unleavened bread, nor the feast, nor the great day.” (Stromata, Chap. 5)

In your latest edition of LFG, you interpret this statement as follows:

This clearly indicates that at this time the weekly Sabbath was still dictated by the moon’s course.

Well, not quite. Certainly, this passage does not trump the numerous statements from many authors concerning the regular weekly cycle of 7 fixed days followed by the early Christians (including the Nazarenes) – along with a fixed Sabbath day every 7th day. Therefore, what Clement is most likely talking about here is one of the annual sabbaths – like the “Feast of Trumpets” (which happens to fall on “the first” day of the month of Tishrei).

Again, the evidence against the whole “Lunar Sabbath” concept for the Jews and early Christians is so strong that your continued promotion of it further undermines your overall credibility.