Saturday, May 07, 2016

Bible silent on claims Sunday should be kept as day of rest





People may be fighting to keep Sunday as a day off but are they fighting for the wrong day?


05 May, 2016 00:59


Noel McCune writes (April 19) concerning the issue of Sunday trading citing the fact that he is an evangelical Christian, which would seem to emphasise his reason for the upkeep of current Sunday legislation is due to his belief in God. Despite the claimed benefits for families etc to spend time together on a Sunday, the claim for Sunday to be kept as a holy day or a day of rest is nowhere found in the Bible.

If any Christian anywhere can quote one Scripture verse where God, Jesus or any of the Apostles commanded Sunday, or the first day of the working week (according to the Bible), to be observed in any special fashion I would be most interested to learn of it. The only day cited clearly in Scripture to be remembered and kept holy, was the day sanctified by God at Creation, before the laws given at Sinai, when He rested on the seventh day, which He named ‘Shabbat’ or Sabbath, which means ‘rest’. This was further ratified in the Ten Commandments, being the longest of all the Commandments in its detail describing exactly the day and why it should be kept.

Many people fight within the ranks of the Church to ‘keep Sunday special’ when in fact it is the Sabbath (on Saturday) which is the Lord’s Day. It is the only day in the Bible which is given the title “of the Lord” – this is the Sabbath of the Lord your God.” Sunday is often referred to as the ‘Lord’s Day’ with ‘Lord’ in small letters denoting Jesus, whereas ‘LORD’ in capital letters in the Bible denotes God the Father, or YHVH, (Yahweh, Jehovah, the Hebrew Name of God).

However, Sunday is nowhere called ‘the Lord’s Day’ in Scripture, and the one verse where a tenuous link is claimed in Revelation 1:10 where the aged John the Apostle, the Disciple whom Jesus loved, said: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.” Nowhere does it say this was Sunday, or the first day of the week, or any other day. Some say it could be the Day of the LORD, the prophetic time before the return of the Lord, but the term is ‘Lord’s day’ not ‘Day of the LORD’, which appears elsewhere in both old and new testaments, but “Lord’s day” appears only this once, but most likely to be the one day which John would have observed as a Christian Jew, namely, the Sabbath of the LORD.

People may be fighting to keep Sunday as a day off but are they fighting for the wrong day?

COLIN NEVIN
Bangor, Co Down



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