Your Sabbath Questions Answered

Some teach that Hebrews 4 defines the seventh-day Sabbath commandment in the Decalogue as a shadow-type law pointing forward to a spiritual rest in Christ. They view the Sabbath in the same way the Old Testament sacrifices pointed forward to Christ’s atoning death on the cross. They teach that once we have found “spiritual rest” in Christ, we no longer need to observe the Sabbath day, and that keeping the seventh day is a form of bondage and an act of personal works.

It is true that the primary message of Hebrews 4 is to emphasize the believer’s rest of grace. The main ...

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Let’s first take a look at the apostle Paul's words in Colossians 2:14–17: “Having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. … So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ.”

When some read about the sabbath days that were shadows and that passed away at the cross, they think that Paul was referring to the weekly Sabbath, the fourth of the Ten Commandments. Is this accurate? It’s important to get this right, because ...

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Multitudes of Christians refer to the seventh-day Sabbath as the “Jewish Sabbath,” but there is no such expression in the Bible.

It is called “the Sabbath of the Lord” (Exodus 20:10), for instance, but never “the Sabbath of the Jews.” Luke was a Gentile writer of the New Testament and often made reference to things that were peculiarly Jewish—he wrote of the “nation of the Jews,” the people of the Jews, the “land of the Jews,” and the “synagogue of the Jews” (Acts 10:22; 12:11; 10:39; 14:1). However, Luke never referred to the “Sabbath of the Jews” although he mentioned ...

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