If an old-covenant Israelite esteemed “all days alike,” he might be stoned to death (Numbers 15:32–36). Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Everyone who profanes it shall be put to death. You shall keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you. Consider Paul’s words here alongside a typical old-covenant statement about the Sabbath. Romans 14:5 holds a similarly striking claim. Rather, Paul says, “Let no one pass judgment on you.” And since Christ has now come, observing the Sabbath is no longer a matter of obedience or disobedience. All of these constitute shadows that anticipate the coming of Christ” ( 40 Questions About Christians and Biblical Law, 212). “What Paul says here is remarkable,” Tom Schreiner writes, “for he lumps the Sabbath together with food laws, festivals like Passover, and new moons. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. Two passages in particular from the apostle Paul spell out the implications of Jesus’s lordship over the Sabbath. In Jesus, something greater than the Sabbath is here. That Jesus Christ is Lord of the Sabbath is not only a messianic claim of grand proportions, but it raises the possibility of a future change or reinterpretation of the Sabbath, in precisely the same way that His professed superiority over the Temple raises certain possibilities about ritual law.
The rest offered on the Sabbath was now being offered in Christ.Ī grand claim lies behind this grand promise: “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8). If we could remove the chapter break between Matthew 11 and 12, we might notice, in the context immediately preceding the Sabbath controversies in Matthew 12:1–14, these arresting words: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Yet even though Jesus never broke the fourth commandment, he did hint that a change to the Sabbath may be coming. “Christ’s first coming did not abolish rest it ushered in a deeper kind of rest than the Sabbath could ever offer.” Jesus attacked such traditions with the vehemence of one who saw more clearly than any that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In their zeal to define exactly what a person could and could not do on the Sabbath, Jewish leaders laid on the people’s backs a spiritual burden heavier than any physical burden (Matthew 23:4). Strictly speaking, the only commandments Jesus broke on the Sabbath belonged to Jewish tradition, not divine law. The seventh day marks the setting of so many clashes between Jesus and the Pharisees that when we read something like, “Now it was a Sabbath day. Readers of the Gospels soon discover just how crucial the Sabbath was to the Jews of Jesus’s day. Yet strewn throughout the New Testament is telling evidence that, in Christ and the new covenant, the Sabbath has found its fulfillment. We keep commandments one to three and five to ten, don’t we? So why skip number four? Should Christians keep the Sabbath? The question may sound nonsensical to some. The question, then, is not whether Israel should have kept the Sabbath under the old covenant, but whether Christians should under the new. On the Sabbath, Israel declared total dependence on her covenant Lord, a Lord more than able to uphold his people even though, for one day in seven, they hung up their shovels, laid aside their plows, and rested from their labors. No, the Sabbath served as the covenant sign between Israel and her God, unfolding a weekly drama that testified to God as mighty Creator (Exodus 20:11) and merciful Redeemer (Deuteronomy 5:15). None of those who answer in the negative suggests the Sabbath was a second-tier command in the Decalogue, a good idea but not mandatory. Does the Sabbath commandment still hold today?
Of the Ten Commandments that God gave to Israel, perhaps none has provoked more controversy and debate than the fourth: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8).
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