Should Christians Observe Sabbath – Pt 1 – Jim Staley

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August 2, 2013 by Jim Staley

Should Christians Observe Sabbath – Pt 1 – Jim Staley

I get an enormous amount of e-mails, a lot of phone calls and people have been asking me to do a particular teaching for over six years now. So every year I say to myself, “I’m going to get around and do this teaching but for whatever reasons, I have not. But now I decided that this is the year to teach on the Sabbath. So for whatever reason, the Lord is having me do this and I’m excited about it. We are going to determine what the Sabbath is, what it means for us today and how do we keep it and if we’re supposed to keep it. So let’s get started talking about the Sabbath and work through the Scriptures and see what they have to say. Let’s start with some verses in the book of Exodus.

(Ex 31:16-17) says, “Therefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between me and the children of Israel forever; for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he rested and he was refreshed.” So think about it this way, first of all Jeremiah 11 says that Israel’s an olive tree, Ephesians 2 says you who were once far off and now ahve been brought near and you’ve been made fellow citizens with the household of God, Romans 11 talks about being grafted and also talks about the two olive trees. Two Olive trees and the wild olive tree gets grafted back into the cultivated olive tree. Let’s substitute the correct word in Jeremiah 11 “is cultivated back into Israel” so these Gentiles actually are no longer Gentiles.

Do you realize that the word gentile means out of covenant so if you consider yourself a Gentile Christian what you’re really saying is you’re an out of covenant Christian and that’s an oxymoron you can’t have that either you are in covenant and you’re part of the Messiah or you’re out of covenant and you will spend eternity away from him. So you are Israelite in heritage and now have access to the covenants, he doesn’t say covenant as if there’s only one covenant called the new covenant Middle Eastern covenants layered on one another.

More Myths About the Sabbath

If you recognize who you are and that you are Israel then it makes way more sense and its more relevant to continue our topic because the Sabbath was given to Israel and it says it was given for all eternity. So now we have completely dispelled the myth that says it was only given to the Jews because it wasn’t, it was given to all Israel. Now we understand that it was given to anyone who is calling himself a child of God which is anyone that believes the Messiah.

Jeremiah 31:31, this is the new covenant chapter of the entire Bible and it says this, “Behold, the days come says Yahweh, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.” The bible doesn’t say that there is going to be a covenant with the Gentiles. There is one people of God and this is the house of Israel, the northern kingdom, and is the house of Israel the southern kingdom which split under King Solomon which at some point He will bring back and make all Israel one again. He says that He is going to make a new covenant with one people and He calls them the house of Israel and the house of Judah. So you must be one of those two kingdoms or you cannot be in the new covenant. The new covenant is completely illegitimate, it’s a moot point for you if you do not consider yourself Israel then you have no covenant there is no new covenant and there is no blood shed for your sins and you will die in your sins on Judgment Day.

Another Myth says that the Christian Sabbath is Sunday. Well let’s walk right into this. The Roman Emperor Constantine said this about Sunday on March 7, 321 A.D. He passed his famous national Sunday law and I quote “let all judges and townspeople and occupations of all trades rest on the venerable day of the Sun” I could literally go on for several more quotes from Constantine which he said in other places that have anybody is caught resting on what he calls the Jewish Sabbath, see how it got messed up all the way back then because he is a gentile and he hated the Jews, that if anyone’s caught resting on the Jewish Sabbath with was Saturday or the seventh day they would be excommunicated from the church or killed if they did not stop.

What Day Sabbath Really Is

The Catholics completely admit the change. This is coming from “This Rock” magazine of Catholic Apologetic 1997 and it says this “Of course these two old quotations are exactly correct. The Catholic Church designated Sunday as the day for corporate worship and gets full credit or blame for that change.”

They also said this, “Perhaps the boldest thing the most revolutionary change the church ever did, the Catholic Church that is, happened in the first century. The holy day, the Sabbath, was changed from Saturday to Sunday. “The day of the Lord was chosen not for many directions noted in the Scriptures but from the church’s sense of its own power.”

Right here we’re seeing quotes from the Catholic Church admitting that they changed the day. Let’s continue, another one, this is from the Centennial Pastor’s page, St. Catherine Catholic Church in Michigan in 1995 which says this, The day of resurrection the day of Pentecost, 50 days later, came on the first day of the week. So this would be the new Sabbath, “People who think that the Scriptures should be the sole authority, should logically become Seventh-day Adventists, and keep Saturday holy.”

They are admitting and then they go on to say that anyone that keeps, anyone that calls Sunday, the first of the week, the Sabbath actually falls under the jurisdiction of the holy Roman Catholic Church. So we see right here that they even admit that the only logical people that are consistent with the Sabbath, if you’re going to be called a Sabbatharian, they say that you should be a Seventh-day Adventist. Now I’m not a Seventh-day Adventist, I’m not advocating that you become a Seventh-day Adventist but I am advocating that we look heavily into the Scriptures and uncover these drapes over the windows when the light was supposed to be coming in. We need to open it back up and find out what’s been concealed this whole time. Did they really change the Sabbath and turn it into Sunday when it used to be on Saturday. Do we have any evidence that Christians were early believers in Yeshua kept the Sabbath on the biblical day that’s commanded on Saturday?

Who Changed it?

One quote says, “The Roman Catholic Church changed the observance of the Sabbath to Sunday by right of the divine, infallible authority given to her by founder, Yeshua or Jesus Christ. The Protestant claiming that the Bible to be the only guide to faith has not warrant for observing Sunday. In this matter the Seventh-day Adventist is the only consistent Protestant.” Now I would disagree with that because there are a lot of us out there that believe in the Saturday Sabbath but that happens to be one the most popular of denominations that are out there.

Look at this, one of the most incredible quote of all time that I have ever found on the subject is from Socrates Scholasticus  in the fifth century says this, he’s a church historian, “For although almost all churches throughout the world celebrate the sacred mysteries of the Lord’s supper on the Sabbath every week, yet the Christians of Alexandria and at Rome, on account of some ancient tradition can have ceased to do this.” Another historian confirm‎ing this states, “The people of Constantinople and almost everywhere assembled together on the Sabbath as well as on the first day of the week, which custom is never observed at Rome or at Alexandria.”

What these historians are saying is that believers everywhere kept the Sabbath on the seventh day, they met that Saturday night late in the evening. They met on the first of the week as well sometimes but nobody in Rome or Alexandria did that so let me ask you question that will really drive home my point. Who ended up ruling the world? Rome! It was Rome that made all the decrees for the rest of mankind, the known world at that time. It was Rome that made these changes and so that’s where why we do what we do today is because of the decrees and the changes of the laws that happen so long ago and we literally have never turnaround. We’ve never audit ourselves, we need to audit what we believe because we are human where mere man and you give us enough time and just a little bit off, one half of the degree 2000 years becomes hundreds of miles and that’s what we’re trying to do at Passion for Truth ministries we are trying to get back to the truth because the truth can only do one thing and what is that? Set us free.