What day is the Sabbath?
If we follow exactly what the Bible specifies several times, the Sabbath is the 7th day of the week.
It started when God sanctified the seventh day in Genesis 2, after He finished creating the world. Later, God’s Word confirms the Saturday Sabbath in Exodus 16, even before the Ten Commandments were written.
When the Israelites were gathering food, God commanded them to gather for six days, “but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none” (Exodus 16:26, CSB).
When discussing the Sabbath, the Bible never assigns any other day to this title. Nowhere in the Bible does it say the Sabbath day was changed.
While there are many Christian denominations that decided to make Sunday, the “Lord’s Day” (honoring Christ’s resurrection), the weekly time to go to church and spend time with family, there was no command in Scripture to do as such.
Keeping the Sabbath is the 4th commandment found in God’s eternal moral law. This change of the Sabbath was foretold in the Bible by the prophet Daniel.
“He shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and shall think to change the times and the law…” Daniel 7:25
When Jesus lived here on earth He kept the seventh-day Sabbath. However, just a few hundred years after His death and resurrection, early Christians began keeping Sunday as their day of worship just as Daniel foretold.
The change of the Sabbath as the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday happened in the year 321 A.D. The Roman Emperor Constantine issued a decree that all Christians were to begin observing Sunday as a day of rest.
In the verse above, Daniel was saying there would be a kingdom who would try to change God’s law. But God’s law is eternal. And the Sabbath was made for all mankind for all eternity.
“And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Mark 2:27 ESV
Anyone can keep Sabbath by refraining from work and focusing on God. That also makes it a fitting time to go to church. We find in the Bible that Jesus typically went to the synagogue on Sabbath.
“And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read” (Luke 4:16, ESV).
“And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished…” (Mark 6:2, ESV).
The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week, according to the Bible. We can follow Jesus’ example by refraining from our regular daily work to focus on Him and His creation.