Reforming the Church's Understanding of the OT (Post 98) – Problem Passages that Seem to Negate the Law of God (Part 17)

In the previous series of blog posts, we cited a number of historical leaders in the protestant church that saw the Law as having permanent significance. Those opposed to the Law of God in the New Testament era cite a number of passage they believe is favorable to their position.

Following the order of passages in Dr. Greg Bahnsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics, in chapter 10, Alleged Negative Passages, here is Greg’s next area of concern:

The Sabbath. The Sabbath is a creation ordinance (Gen. 2:2, 3) which men were obligated to observe even before the coming of the Mosaic law.7 Compare Exodus 20:10, 11 for its interpretation of Genesis 2:2, 3. All men are subject to the Sabbath law (note that Christ does not say that the Sabbath was made for Israelites in Mark 2:27, but for generic “man”). Man’s moral obligation to Sabbath observance is placed right along side the nine other universally moral words of the Decalogue, which was written by the very finger of God. When man
observes the Sabbath he is rightly imitating his Creator; the Sabbath rest is patterned after the creation rest of God. In the era of the New Covenant this creation rest becomes a sign of the Christian hope, his heavenly rest at the consummation of this age (Heb. 4). In the beginning God established His rest; Christ provides for and promises entrance to this rest, and in the eternal age we shall enjoy it. The Sabbath has universal extension and perpetual obligation. At the coming of Christ the Sabbath was purged of the legalistic accretions brought by the scribes and Pharisees (Luke 13:10-17; 14:1-6; Mark 3:1-6); the Sabbath had suffered corruption at the hands of the “autonomous” Pharisees just as numerous other moral precepts had (cf. Matt. 5:21-48). Moreover, the ceremonial and sacrificial aspects of the Older Testamental cycle of feast days (“new moon, sabbath year, Jubilee, etc.”), along with those cyclic observances of feasts, were “put out of gear” by Christ’s work of redemption. Hence Colossians 2:16 f. looses us from the ceremonial elements of the sabbath system (the passage seems to be referring specifically to feast offerings),8 and passages such as Romans 14:5 f. and Galatians 4:10 teach that we need not distinguish these ceremonial days any longer (as the Judaizers were apt to require). As Christ provides for entrance to the eternal Sabbath rest of God by His substitutionary death upon the cross, He makes the typological elements (e.g., offerings) of the Sabbath system irrelevant (things which
were a shadow of the coming substance according to Col. 2:17; cf. Heb. 10:1, 8). By accomplishing our redemption Christ also binds us to the observance of that weekly Sabbath which prefigures our eternal Sabbath (cf. Heb. 4).

Although ceremonial days are no longer to be distinguished, the New Testament does distinguish the first day of the week from the other six (1 Cor. 16:2; Acts 20:7) and denominates it “the Lord’s Day” (Rev. 1:20). In observing the weekly Sabbath we honor Christ who is the “Lord” of the Sabbath (Mark 2:28), and we anticipate the coming Sabbath rest which our Lord has secured for us (in this, parallels can be seen with the “Lord’s Supper”). In Mark 2:23-28, Christ and His disciples are accused of “doing what is not lawful” on the Sabbath, but because they had only violated a rabbinical tradition Christ does not bother to contest the accusation; it simply amounted to nothing. There was no contest, for Christ did not recognize the traditions of the elders as “lawful.” However, Christ does take this as an opportunity to assert that He is “Lord even of the Sabbath.” Thereby Christ definitely and positively confirmed the Sabbath; otherwise Christ would be grandly proclaiming His lordship over something which was nonexistent. The Sabbath did not pass away with Christ’s advent or Messianic work; until our eternal rest the weekly Sabbath continues to be “lorded” by Christ and is a type of the coming reality. “The Sabbath was made for man” (Mark 2:27), and man still needs the benefit of it. The issue of the Sabbath poses no contradiction to the abiding validity of God’s moral
law.

Bahnsen, Greg L. Theonomy in Christian Ethics. Covenant Media Press.

It is certainly worth nothing that Dr. Richard Gaffin makes a solid case against John Calvin that the Sabbath is a creation ordinance and, as a result, has not been abrogated:

The relation between the creation and redemptive Sabbaths may be further clarified along the following lines.

1) The weekly Sabbath instituted at creation is a type of eschatological rest. But, as we have also seen, as such and more concretely, it points to the order of the Spirit in its perfect, consummate finality. It therefore continues to serve a typical function until what it prefigures is realized. That eschatological consummation, 1 Corinthians 15, for one, makes clear, will not be until the resurrection of the body (vv. 42–49), until the time “when he [Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father …, so that God may be all in all” (vv. 24–28).

Certainly, believers have already received the Spirit as an actual deposit on their eschatological inheritance (Eph. 1:14); the blessings they enjoy are “semi-eschatological.” But to reason, on the basis of these incipiently enjoyed blessings, that the weekly Sabbath has ceased, reflects a greatly impoverished view of biblical eschatology. To conclude that the Sabbath institution has been abrogated because all the blessings of the eschatological order are in principle realized in the New Testament church, as if nothing essentially new remains to be realized, is to lose sight of the present incomprehensibility of the consummate glory of the new heavens and new earth that God, in Christ and through the Spirit, has prepared for his people, glory that neither eye has seen nor ear heard (1 Cor. 2:9). The weekly Sabbath is the type of that still future perfection and will continue to picture it until it becomes reality.

2) The Old Covenant redemptive Sabbath was not, strictly speaking, the Sabbath institution expressed in the fourth commandment, but the particular expression that creation ordinance took in redemptive history from the fall until Christ. Since the redemptive considerations it typified have been fulfilled in Christ, it is no longer in force. That fulfillment, however, has left an indelible imprint on the creation Sabbath. The fulfillment of the redemptive Sabbath was absolutely indispensable to realizing the ultimate outcome in view, typically, in the creation Sabbath. Without the redemptive rest brought by Christ, Spiritual rest would be an unobtainable goal for sinners. Confirmed redemption rest, achieved by Christ for believers, is their guarantee of the full realization of the eschatological rest in view already in the creation Sabbath.

To give a concluding focus to much of the preceding discussion, Scripture teaches that the weekly Sabbath was a creation ordinance and that it was given as the type par excellence of the eschatological state toward which creation is moving. To be sure, the realization of that Spiritual order cannot now be realized, given the fall, apart from redemption. But to fail to see the significance of the creation Sabbath before the fall and apart from redemption, is to render the fourth commandment largely meaningless. Calvin’s view is a clear illustration of that failure.

The typical element is a permanent aspect of the fourth commandment. The Lord’s Day, as the weekly Sabbath, remains a type until the present created order (the psychical) gives way to one that is consummately higher and better (the Pneumatic). To say that believers are still bound to keep this type is not to compromise the freedom brought by Christ. Rather, observing the Lord’s Day is an expression of that freedom. The weekly rest day, faithfully kept by the church, is a concrete witness to a watching world that Christians are not enmeshed in the turmoil of an impersonal historical process but look with confidence to sharing in the consummation of God’s purposes for the creation, a witness that there does indeed remain an eschatological Sabbath-rest for the people of God (Heb. 4:9).

Gaffin, Richard B. Calvin and the Sabbath: Mentor, 2009.

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