Yesterday I posted a question about the Sabbath: “Which day of the week is the Sabbath?” It generated a lot of response. As you can see in the post below, most of the responses were “Saturday”, with which I wholeheartedly agree. But one commenter may have hit on a more “academically-correct” answer when she wrote that the Bible “…never says the word Saturday or Sunday”. Let’s look into this. First, know that the English Bibles we all read (regardless of translation/version) are just that, translations. The bottom line is that we lose a bit of the true meaning in any translation from any language to any language. But we have the English versions, so we go with it. However, we do have access to tools (such as Blue Letter Bible) that help us discover the original language and thus help us find the original meaning. It’s imperative that we learn to use them… To make the example, let’s talk about the Name of God. We don’t know what it is. It is lost because of whoever decided in the past to stop saying it. There is a lot of study going on in the world today to determine His Name and the proper way to pronounce it, but we don’t truly know. Jews use this as an excuse not to even use the Name, and I disagree with that (they say it will degrade His Name to mispronounce it, and they even call it an act of breaking the commandment about using His Name in vain). I have several grandchildren and one of the most wonderful things in the world to me is hearing them try to pronounce my name (they call me Sabba, the Hebrew word for Grandfather). They can’t pronounce it perfectly at first (they learn as they grow), but it is wonderful to me just to hear them try! I love it!! And you had better believe that YHWH loves it when we try to pronounce His Name as well! He knows our predicament. He knows we don’t know. And He loves that we try! Let’s restore His Name – it is YHWH (Yahweh or Jehovah – Jehovah being pronounced with a /Y/ - Yehovah) to the best of what we have studied. “God” is his title…His Name is YHWH! Use it! Getting back to the Sabbath: the commenter was correct in that we don’t TRULY know. But, like the Name, we absolutely MUST take the most appropriate solution to our knowledge. Even the Gregorian calendars that we use (and all churches use) show Saturday as the last day of the week. God created the world in 6 days and then rested. The best knowledge we have is that the week begins on Sunday and ends on Saturday. The church has taken it from “work six then rest” to “rest then work six.” This is a Facebook post – not an academic study – so I don’t have a lot of room for embellishment. Along those lines, we don’t ask that you blindly accept this stance. On the contrary, we usually invoke Acts 17:11 in which Paul commends the Bereans for searching the Scriptures daily to prove what they were learning. Do the same. We don’t ask you to accept anything here blindly - we ask that you receive and then study for yourself. The words Saturday or Sunday do not appear in the Bible that we read. They don’t even appear in the original Scriptures (in fact, days were numbered by God, not named, and NO DAY named after another god would ever be set up by Him as holy). So, Saturday, Sunday, Monday? Who knows? We have to use what we have to the best knowledge that we can gather. Period. Our best is to do what we think is MOST RIGHT with what we have, and there is NO REASON to believe that Sunday, as defined as the first day of the week, is the Sabbath. That, plus the fact that the Catholic church admits to have changed the day from Saturday to Sunday back in the year 336 AD. More on that later… (yeah, that’s a shameless plug to get you to come back tomorrow when I’ll post more about the history of change of which we are aware – we aren’t just for recognizing Saturday as the Sabbath for kicks…there really are events and notes that give us a hint as to the best way to worship). Stay tuned for more tomorrow, and please comment all you want below.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 17:00:54 +0000