NO SPECIAL DAY OF WORSHIP

Friday 17 January

There is an age-old discussion about which day we should designate as the day of worship. Jews argue that God rested on the seventh day which they say is the Sabbath or Saturday. The Christians argue that it should be Sunday because that is the day that Jesus rose from the dead.

There are even Christians that side with the Jews about Saturday being the appropriate day. There are other Christians that say that the Catholic Church are the ones who instigated Sunday worship. Who’s right? What if I told you that they are both wrong?

Genesis is the book of beginnings. Incidentally there are two phrases ‘before the foundation of the world’ and ‘from the foundation of the world’ that indicate that every truth about Christ is embedded in the book of Genesis. We will leave that for another time. So what can we learn from the six days of creation and then God rested?

It’s important to remember that although these truths are in Genesis, it takes the revelation of the scripture in the New Testament to reveal what has been concealed. For example, sin could not be spiritually defined in Genesis so Moses used a metaphor of eating fruit to describe it. Only in Romans 5:12 is the eating of the fruit called sin.

If you study the creation account, you will see God rested from his work on the Sabbath day. So what was the rest all about? Was God tired after making the sun, moon, stars and man? Isaiah 40:28 says by the Spirit of prophecy, no.

‘Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.’

What if it’s not resting FROM something but rather, resting IN something. Hebrews chapter 4 holds the answer. Verse 9 and 10 says

‘There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His.’

So there is a rest for the people of God. It’s called salvation in Christ. The writer of Hebrews implies it is a grace because He says when you’ve entered in you’ve ceased from your works. The works here represent religion. Ceasing from works is therefore grace which is salvation which confirms that salvation must be the Sabbath rest of God. I hope you’re catching this.

You may recall the time where Jesus was accused of working on the Sabbath because He healed the woman who was bent over. What was His final response? That the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath and that He is the Lord of the Sabbath. Think about this is context of salvation being the rest in Christ.

With this understanding in mind, we can begin to see that the six days were six dispensations and the Sabbath day was what we would now refer to as salvation in Christ. This was a prophetic statement about God’s salvation plan for mankind, not about a certain day to worship. Do we see this precedent anywhere else in the scriptures?

Jesus said He came to proclaim the ‘acceptable year or Jubilee of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:19). Did He mean a 365 day period or a dispensation? Answer: a dispensation that we call the day of grace. In Psalm 118:24a When David said this is the day that the Lord has made, did he mean a 24 hour period or a dispensation? Answer: a dispensation because the day he was prophetically referring to was the day of the church. Again, Jesus said something that enraged the Scribes and Pharisees when He told them in Luke 8:56a ‘your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day’. Was that day a 24 hour period or a dispensation? I think you know the answer by now.

So everyday is a day of grace where we can worship the Father in Spirit, that is reality. If only more Christians understood the Word of God in the light of Christ, the less we would have baseless discussions on ignorance. You can rest IN your salvation and help others to enter into that rest by introducing Jesus who said ‘I will give you rest’ as the man Christ Jesus and as the exalted Christ who IS the consummation of the Sabbath or rest of God.

APPLICATION

Read the whole chapter of Hebrews 4 to gain a greater insight of the rest we have come into in Christ and make a conscious effort to live from your position of rest in salvation.