Does the 4th Commandment apply to Christians today? We will look at this in an extended note. It is in Genesis at the very beginning that God makes the sabbath and commands it. ‘Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day’ (Genesis 2:1-3). This is a creation ordinance. It is given long before the law of Moses and the Jewish sabbath. ‘And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it [made it holy and separate, something special] because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.’ So yes, it was to commemorate creation, to remind them that all that they touched and saw and knew was from God. But it is even more than that, and we note the words, ‘because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.’ The sabbath, which means ‘rest’ or ‘interval’ – a breaking off from the normal –was to commemorate rest, the rest of God. On the sabbath in olden times you did no work; your servants did no work; your labouring animals did no work; everything stopped. Why did God insist, no work on the sabbath? Because it's a picture; it's a lesson. That day on which you are going to be especially blessed by God with instruction from the word, with closeness to him in worship, and to be focused on him and blessings from him; it is a day in which you do no work. The sabbath is a picture of grace. Rest is grace. The way of salvation which will be unfolded in the Old Testament and more fully and wonderfully in the New is about grace. You cannot do anything to receive the blessing of God. You cannot earn it. You cannot deserve it. You work your way into God's acceptance and favour and into heaven. That's the chief and the first thing about the sabbath. In order to focus on him and enjoy him, you rest. Of course, you won't do that for most of the week. We have to work; we have to till the ground; we have to produce; we have to care for families; we have to keep ourselves: there is a great deal to do. Life is an endless round of labours. But on the sabbath the great picture is, no work to receive from God. Now it isn't a kind of them one hundred percent duty. You get up; you dress; you have meals. You prepare more simply on the Lord’s Day, but there are certain things you have got to do. It isn't total abstention from all labour and all work, but it's a laying down of all the normal exertions to earn our bread and to survive. So it is grace.
It's also a picture of eternity, and that's unfolded through the Scriptures too. The rest of God – after creation, after earth, and life on earth, there is something else, something that continues from that. There is a hereafter; there's an eternal rest. One day a week we remember eternal rest. This was the nature of the sabbath from the beginning.
You notice how desperate atheism, unbelieving mankind, is to get rid of God as Creator, and yet one of the things which must be done one day out of seven is to commemorate God as Creator. What we possess and enjoy and touch and see and feel and know: he made it all. The evolutionary theory and the rationalistic ideas of atheism hit at the very basis of everything: there is no Creator; God is not to be remembered, commemorated, thanked, thought of, for these things at all. This is the day which pictures eternal rest, the day when all labours will cease, when we are with the Lord in glory throughout the everlasting ages. Can you get through the Lord’s Day without giving some thought to what it signifies: eternal rest? It therefore became the day for worship and instruction. We worship and read the word every day, but this is the prime and special day for these things. With the deliverance from Egypt in the time of Moses, something else was added to the sabbath – to remember redemption, the deliverance from Egypt, and also it was a mark of the special government that God had with the Jewish nation until the coming of Christ.
Some people say, ‘O there is no Lord’s Day principle binding on us today. The sabbath isn't mentioned between Genesis chapter 2 and the giving of the law by Moses’, but that's not right. For one thing, the mention of the sabbath in Genesis chapter 2 is a creation ordinance. That stands over everything; that abides eternally. For another thing, you do see some signs of the sabbath. Take for instance the narrative of Noah and the flood, and if you read about the time when they were in the ark, you soon notice that major things happen at seven-day intervals. The seven-day week, the seven-day intervals – presumably the sabbath was recognised and was regulating society in the time of Noah. Where else did the seven-day pattern come from? It has been printed on all society ever since that time. There is another mention of the sabbath before the giving of the law under Moses in Exodus chapter 20, and that is in Exodus chapter 16. Before the giving of the law, the children of Israel were given the manna, and we remember that the manna wasn't given on the sabbath. A double portion was given on the sixth day because, as Moses reminded them, the seventh day is the sabbath on which they won't go out and collect. They will have been given a double portion which will not rot, deteriorate, or perish. So before the giving of the law through Moses, the sabbath is mentioned in connection with the giving of manna. And when Moses gives the sabbath commandment, the fourth commandment, he expressly says ‘Remember the sabbath’, remember it. In other words it was something which, though there is no greater mention of it, was kept and known by the people of God through those years. It may often have been neglected, and seriously, but it was still there, and it was still in their Scripture, and they still recognised it, and so Moses says. ‘Remember’; the sabbath predates the law.
But many, many Christians, who don't want to observe the Lord’s Day properly and fully, will tell you this: that the fourth commandment has been removed, that it no longer applies, that it is not repeated in the New Testament, so you're not bound by it. But that's a very serious claim to make: the fourth commandment has dropped out with the coming of Christ. There are now only nine commandments. You've got to have powerful authority to make such a statement. Have you authority to do that? Many preachers, who appear to love the Lord and believe the Scripture otherwise, do do that, and so they detract from the fourth commandment, the sabbath principle continuing in the Lord’s Day in the Christian era. But do they have the authority? On the contrary: whenever you find the commandments mentioned as a whole in the New Testament, there is no amendment, there is no specified omission of the sabbath. The commandments are honoured and mentioned as one. Break one; break them all. When James says that anyone who breaks one commandment has broken all of them, he doesn't add, but of course we omit the fourth commandment. We see this in John 14:15 where the Lord says, ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments, and I will pray the Father’: this refers to the Ten Commandments. There is no amendment; there is no pointing out an omission; there is no alteration of them. It is the same in verse 21: ‘He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me, and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father.’ Once again, John 15:10 says: ‘If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love, even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love’, and in 1 John 5:2, ‘By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments. 3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous’ (1 John 5:2-3).
The Puritan John Flavel had a number of things to say about this. ‘This 4th Commandment is the longest Commandment of the ten … This Commandment alone has a very solemn prefix, where it is announced in the decalogue. This Commandment is expressed (and it’s the only one like this) both in positive and negative terms.’ ‘Furthermore,’ Flavel pointed out, ‘the fourth Commandment has more arguments attached to it to support it and enforce it, than any other Commandment,’ and that is the one that they want to tear out of the Bible today and remove from the Ten Commandments. It is a very strange thing.
Those who want to do away with proper observance of the Lord’s Day turn to Romans 14:5. ‘One man’ says Paul, ‘esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day regardeth it unto the Lord, and he that regarded not the day, to the Lord he does not regard it.’ They take these words – but it's a very ignorant thing to do and it’s appalling interpretation – and they say, There you are; sabbath observance, Lord’s Day observance, is not pressed upon people in the New Testament age. But this is talking about Jewish converts, as Paul goes on to make clear. These are Jewish converts who have come to Christ. They have believed in salvation by grace alone; they have been converted. But their lifelong practice of observing the seventh day, the Sabbath day; they can't give it up. ‘We have always stopped everything on the seventh day, the sabbath day. Now the church into which I've been converted observes the first day of the week, the day of Christ's resurrection and honours that, and they pause, if they can – if they're not slaves, and compelled to work – on the first day and they assemble together and worship on that day. But we must pause on the seventh day also,’ said some converted Jews, ‘because we've always done it, and it feels all wrong to give it up.’ The apostle Paul is saying here and elsewhere, well, let them do that; that's what they've always done. As long as they don't believe that somehow it earns them credits for heaven. We will call it, says Paul, the weaker conscience, but let them do that. They are sincere Christians; they gather on the Lord’s Day also. They worship, and they seek God by grace alone, so we'll let them do that. He's not talking about the Lord’s Day; he is talking about the Jewish sabbath when he utters these words.
It's exactly the same in Galatians chapter 4; they appeal to this also. Galatians 4:9 reads, ‘But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn you again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereby ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days and months and times and years. I'm afraid of you.’ Oh, say some, you don't have to observe the Lord’s Day, but Paul here is talking about the Jewish sabbath. ‘You Galatians:: some of you are turning back to your Jewish ways altogether. I'm in despair of you. Why do you want to go back to that?’ He is not talking about the Lord’s Day when he disparages the observing of days; he is talking about the Jewish sabbath and the Jewish feast days.
So too in Colossians 2:16. The arguments of those who want to relax the Lord’s Day are very weak. ‘Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or the sabbath days.’ This is about the Jewish sabbath. Let no man judge you Gentile Christians, because you don't keep the Jewish sabbath. You don't have to keep the Jewish sabbath; we have the Christian sabbath, the Lord’s Day. It doesn't have all those onerous rules attached to it, but it does say, as far as you can that you desist from your normal work, and you focus on the Lord. It doesn't have the rabbis’ crazy rules that they had invented, that tell you how far you should walk, how heavy an article has got to be before it's banned from being picked up because it counts as work; it doesn't have all that attached to it, but where we can we desist from ordinary work.
To be practical about this, all kinds of emergencies arise, and you may have to break the Lord’s Day because you've been disorganised, or because something has gone wrong. You may have to work, sometimes on the Lord’s Day. Of course works of compassion; they can be done. You carry on as a doctor or a nurse. There are many activities that can be carried on and must be on the Lord’s Day. If you're called into work once in a while in an emergency and you would lose your job if you didn't go, you may have to go, but as far as it's down to you, if you can, you leave off normal activities for the Lord. That’s the Lord’s Day. We yield to him. We give it to him. The sabbath principle goes on: that we rest from our usual activities as much as we can. If you're a student, and there is something you suddenly discover you have got to do, an assignment you've got a complete you may have to do it; you won't be morally sinning, but maybe you should have been better organised as a Christian. Maybe you should have worked your week out better. Maybe you helped yourself to a shade too much leisure, dare I say, so plans went wrong, but do what you have to do and try not to do it again. It isn't some terrible moral sin, but the best of our efforts will go to observing the Lord’s Day. It isn't a shopping day. It isn't a day for entertainment on the television. Watch the new, but it isn’t a day for entertainment. It isn't a day for complete diversions.