In the last episode of this three-part series, pastors Derek and Cliff answer a few important questions about how Christians should celebrate the Lord’s Day every Sunday.
Transcript
Derek: Welcome to the With All Wisdom podcast. My name is Derek Brown. I’m here again today with Cliff McManis. We are both pastors and elders at Creekside Bible Church in Cupertino, California, and professors at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary in Vallejo, California, and we are here today on part three of asking the question, are Christians obligated to observe the Sabbath or to keep the Sabbath? And we’ve tried to answer that question as thoroughly as possible in episodes one and two, so we encourage you to go back and listen to those first two episodes in this series. Today, we are going to talk specifically about the Lord’s Day, how we know it’s on a Sunday, how we should celebrate it, how we should know where to get the information about how to celebrate it. So we’re going to answer those important questions today before we get to our topic. Just a reminder, check out withallwisdom.org if you haven’t done it before, or if you know about it and you get in our podcast from there, I encourage you to just look around, type some things in the search bar, topics that you’re interested in. We’ve got a lot of resources there, and we produce them for your edification and for your encouragement in the faith, and we seek to root them all in God’s word. So check out things at withallwisdom.org if you haven’t already. So we want to talk about the Lord’s Day. We ended last episode, Cliff. Appreciate how you wanted to end it, make it very clear. No Christians do not observe the Sabbath because the Sabbath is on a Saturday. So number one, and then number two, there is no teaching in the Bible that switches the Sabbath over to Sunday, as all Christians would agree that the Lord’s Day is…well, I need to be careful here. The Christians that we’re debating with in terms of the Presbyterians who have a view of the Christian Sabbath, they would say that the Lord’s Day is, in fact, on a Sunday, but that the Sabbath requirements have now transitioned to Sunday as the Lord’s Day, and so we need to revere the Lord’s Day like Israel would revere the Sabbath. So we want to talk specifically about the Lord’s Day. Just to make clear, is the Lord’s Day the new Sabbath, Cliff?
Cliff: The Lord’s Day, as in Sunday, the first day of the week. It is not the new Sabbath.
Derek: All right. So we’re clear on that. Okay, so if not, how do Christians know how to celebrate the Lord’s Day? That would be a question we’re going to reflect on here. Probably the first thing we want to ask, and we’ve alluded to it, I think, in the first episode, is how do we know that the Lord’s Day is on Sunday? We have a text in Revelation that John says he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, so we have that phrase there. We know that the early church, the New Testament church, was gathering on the day that Jesus rose from the dead, and all four Gospels indicate that Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday, and naturally, the church took that as their day of worship, and so they started to worship on a Sunday, and therefore, we can have clarity on this issue of the Lord’s Day being on Sunday. But we still need to ask, okay, that being the case, then, how do we know what to do on the Lord’s Day? How to celebrate it? Are we told in the New Testament, do we need to go back to the Old Testament and glean some information there about how to celebrate the Lord’s Day? Cliff, do you want to begin by offering a preliminary answer as to where do we find information, knowledge, revelation, biblical truth as to how to celebrate the Lord’s Day?
Cliff: Yeah, I would start with, and you’ve referenced this a little bit, but why do we call Sunday the Lord’s Day in the first place? And the New Testament is clear. So every one of the four Gospels, as you said, on the resurrection account, without exception, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, beginning of each resurrection account, it says very clearly, after the Sabbath on the first day of the week. So Matthew 28, one would be an example, making it clear, the first day of the week. So all four Gospels, repeat it. Jesus rose on the first day of the week, first day of the week, first day of the week. And then significant things happened on the first day of the week, on Resurrection Sunday. Jesus appeared to every one of his inner circle of disciples and apostles, including the women, Mary Magdalene, 10 of the 11 living apostles. He gave the great commission on the first day of the week of the church. He rose from the dead on the first day of the week. He taught a Bible study in Luke 24, one of the longest expositions out of the Bible to two disciples on the road to Emmaus on Resurrection Sunday on the first day of the week. So there were some precedents that were established. Seven days later on the first day of the week, he appeared to Thomas as the resurrected man. Eight days later, so it was from one Sunday to the next, Jesus appeared to the 10, then he appears to Thomas for whatever reason he waits and does it on the first day of the week again. I’m like, well, what was he doing? What did Jesus do between those? Why did he let a week go by? So Jesus was actually the first one to set a precedent of a pattern of doing something significant on the first day of the week. He appears to the 10 apostles first, teaches, gives the great commission, and then a week later on the first day of the week, again, appears to Thomas, establishing an early pattern. And then we see the apostles take that over, or they worshiped just about every day, but to a point in terms of practicality, they had to limit it, and they limited it to the first day of the week. The apostle Paul took up that pattern in his ministry about maybe 10 years later. We see that in Acts chapter 20 on the first day of the week when they were breaking bread, and Paul was preaching, and he was preaching. He went on for hours, and they worshiped with the saints. That was on the first day of the week. 1 Corinthians 16 on the first day of the week. That was a command that God gave through Paul to the church. On the first day of the week, you needed to take a collection. So formal activity of the church was to be performed with respect to worship and the church of God on the first day of the week. That’s 1 Corinthians 16. And in all those instances, from the time Jesus rose from the dead that first day, all the way up to the ministry of the apostle Paul in Corinth, which is around 56 A.D., so this is like 15 years, the pattern historically has been set. We’re not celebrating the Sabbath anymore. That’s a shadow. We are now celebrating the risen Jesus Christ on the Lord’s Day, and we’re doing it formally and with regularity. Fast forward after the death of the apostle Paul in the mid-60s to John the apostle in 96 A.D. in Revelation. He formalizes it, and I think he does call the first day of the week the Lord’s Day with a definite article, Revelation 1:10. So by then, it had become an established Christian tradition of the early church that was authorized by the apostles and modeled by them. And that’s primarily where we get it from the New Testament, not as an explicit command. You must only meet on the Lord’s Day Sunday because we can meet any day. But we learn from the model of the apostles who were the foundation of the church, this is what they did. And there was no better day for the church to gather with regularity than on Resurrection Sunday to celebrate Jesus Christ because he’s the head of the church. And a little-known fact, when would you say is the birthday of the church, Derek? What day?
Derek: Pentecost.
Cliff: Pentecost, the day of Pentecost, Acts chapter two. Did you know that that was a Sunday, the Lord’s Day?
Derek: Yeah. Well, I learned that today.
Cliff: Yeah. So, wow! All the more, you’ve got the resurrection of the Savior of the church on Sunday, the Lord’s Day, and you’ve got the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy of the giving of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost to the church, Acts chapter two, on Sunday, the Lord’s Day. That is awesome. So that’s kind of the biblical background of the Lord’s Day and how John was the apostle who called it the Lord’s Day for the first time. And I think crystallizing it for all time, this is what it is. It is Jesus’s day.
Derek: Yeah, the Lord’s Day. So then I think you’ve already kind of implicitly, if not explicitly answered the question, where do we go to get information about how to celebrate the Lord’s Day? And because now we have transitioned from Old Covenant to New Covenant, where should we go? We should go to those New Covenant documents. And so where do we go? We go to the New Covenant. The New Testament. And what does the New Testament tell us we should be doing on the Lord’s Day? Well, I think you can look at Paul’s epistles, what he’s instructing Timothy about church life. You can look at the example of the early church and what they were doing in the book of Acts, recognizing, too, that Acts is a transitional book from, especially the Gospels. The Gospels are transitioning us from Old to New Testament, similar kind of thing in the book of Acts. But nevertheless, there are important lessons that can be learned there. And those important lessons, I think, are reiterated in the epistles as Paul is instructing the church on how to conduct their lives and lives outside the church and inside the church. So Cliff, a few things that the New Testament say about how to celebrate the Lord’s Day, what would you say? I’ll start. I think one of the things that was expected by the apostles that the church would be doing would be preaching and teaching the Word on the Lord’s Day. Would you agree?
Cliff: Yeah, absolutely. And as I said earlier, that’s what Jesus did on the first Lord’s Day, the first Resurrection Sunday. He taught the Bible. He taught the Old Testament. And he pointed to himself as the fulfillment. So it’s preaching Christ. That’s what we should be doing on the Lord’s Day.
Derek: Okay. Preaching Christ on the Lord’s Day. And that’s not to say anything about how long your sermon should be or anything like that, but that an important piece of what you’re doing on that Lord’s Day is to preach the Word. And so, of course, in his grace and his wisdom, the Lord gives us freedom and how to do that and how to order things. It doesn’t have to be in the morning. In fact, when you planted a church years ago, Grace Bible Fellowship, you guys couldn’t meet in the morning. You had to meet in the afternoon. So it doesn’t have to be at a certain time of day even, praise God, in his wisdom. But the Word should be a primary part of that. What else? Well, I would say, given what we see the early church doing in Acts and even what is regularly commanded throughout the Epistles, I think prayer should be a vital part of that gathering. Praying together, praying to the Lord together, praying corporately. So we’re hearing the Word and we’re praying together. And again, flexibility. We have a certain way we do things at CBC, and I know plenty of churches that do things a little different and they have more prayer, they have less prayer. That’s fine. But we are, I think, to pray. That’s what’s expected and that’s what we should be doing on the Lord’s Day. Anything else that we should be doing on the Lord’s Day?
Cliff: Yeah, these formal prescriptions of what we should be doing on the Lord’s Day. You mentioned the Epistles of Timothy, which is good and significant because, I mean, when Paul wrote 1 and 2 Timothy, that was the end of his ministry. In other words, he’d been a pastor and church planter and preacher for like 20 years and it wasn’t until decades had gone by where finally God’s kind of codifying or formalizing church order. And by then, for Paul, it was the Lord’s Day. It was Sunday, it was the first day of the week. And so now we’ve got Scripture to inform what we should be doing on the first day of the week because there’s the model they set that they were meeting on the Lord’s Day regularly and then formally with 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and those other Epistles, here’s the specific things we should be doing among the church. The public reading of Scripture, he says there. Prayer, like you said, 1 Timothy 2. Breaking of bread is modeled on the Lord’s Day in Acts chapter 20 of the saints as they were meeting. Paul was preaching the Bible and they were having, they were breaking the bread, which I think could very well be taking communion, the ordinances.
Derek: So taking communion, celebrating the Lord’s table. Yep. Excellent.
Cliff: Fellowship. It’s just inherent in that. It’s just inherent. Well, also in Timothy where Paul says, and in Corinthians, it says you gather together as a body and you’re coming together corporately. And then that’s modeled in Acts 20 where the saints were together. So fellowship, that’s one of the sweetest blessings of the local church on the Lord’s Day is you had maybe a hard week at work and you’re out in the secular world or whatever, and you just look forward, man, I get to be with God’s people. I get to be with my family on the Lord’s Day, on Resurrection Sunday. There’s nothing more encouraging than being around other saints who are like-minded, filled with the Spirit, worshiping God together, hearing His Word, celebrating the ordinances. It’s awesome. It fills up your soul.
Derek: Yeah. Now, Paul mentions singing to one another in Ephesians and Colossians. Should we be singing, honestly?
Cliff: Absolutely singing. Singing, I believe that’s also in Acts chapter 2 where it outlines everything there that are priorities of the local church and singing or praising God is one. Or praising God.
Derek: Yep. So I think that anything else that we could, I mean, I think that covers the basic makeup of what the Lord’s Day should be about. Preaching, reading of scripture, prayer, fellowship, singing, taking the Lord’s table.
Cliff: Fellowship, in light of, we’re post-COVID now kind of sort of.
Derek: Not everybody is. I know. I am. Yeah. How about you?
Cliff: I’m post-COVID. I’m post-COVID. Yes. But fellowship, literally coined in the, or sharing, and first and foremost that means as Christians, you’re sharing your lives together. Yeah. And you do that literally by gathering together, says Paul in Corinthians as a church. So you’ve got to gather, which is, that’s what I mean by fellowship. Not fellowshipping on a regular basis through Zoom or your laptop. Yeah. It’s being together with God’s people. That is modeled clearly in the New Testament. Physical proximity. Physical proximity and for long periods of time on the Lord’s Day. I think the Lord’s Day Sunday should just be given over in terms of your attitude in your heart to God. God and God’s people. On Sunday, I’m marking it out. I can do other things, but my priority is being with God and God’s people on Sunday. And when you go to some of these foreign countries that I’ve gone to, like in the Ukraine and even Russia and even in India, these little churches where I’ve been on the Lord’s Day Sunday, they look, it’s with great anticipation. They’re looking forward to Sunday, man. It’s a day of rest, a day of focusing on Christ, His church, the Word, and fellowship big time. And literally, when I’ve been to Ukraine several times with the churches there, they spend the entire day with the church. The entire day. You go in the morning, you got a long, all three, four hour church service. You know how our people complain about our long one hour services? Anyway, you go to church for four to five hours, and then you go to somebody’s house and you have a potluck, and then you spend the rest. They’re just there all day with the saints. They just love it.
Derek: Yeah, that’s great. So, let me ask this challenging question then, Cliff. I don’t know if I prepared you for this one, but I think you can handle it. Anything we shouldn’t do on the Lord’s Day, because at the beginning of this series, I did quote from a catechism that said there are certain things we should not do on the new Christian Sabbath, namely the Lord’s Day.
Cliff: Yes. That is a very important and practical question, because when you hear Sabbath, the first thing you shouldn’t be thinking of is prohibition or things you can’t do.
Derek: Wow. That’s a paradigm shifter.
Cliff: Yeah, because the first time the word is used in Hebrew, Shabbat, in Genesis 2:2, and then again in 2:3, the Hebrew word literally is rest. So, you shouldn’t be thinking of burden or prohibition or things you can’t do. That nuance or implication is not even in Genesis 2:3. It’s on rest, and that’s why Jesus said, I will give you rest. I will give you restoration. I will give you comfort. I will give you what you need to be restored physically and also in your soul. And that’s Hebrews 4. So, first of all, when you hear Sabbath, legitimately, you should be thinking rest. And when you go to the Mosaic ordinances listed six times in the book of Exodus, the emphasis is on rest, as it was used in Genesis 2:2 and 3. Not on, oh, you can’t do this, you can’t do this. Although God did say there are things you can’t do, but he wasn’t Pharisaical and giving 99 things you can’t do. He was very specific about what you couldn’t do, but it was also specific for the purpose was to give you rest. And in both in Exodus 20 and Exodus 23, where Moses speaking for God gives the commandment of the Sabbath to Israel, he says, not only is it rest for you, the Israelite, but also for your slaves, your employees, and your donkey, and your cattle. So that’s rest for the people. And then in Exodus 23, it gives a different Sabbath, and that’s the Sabbath year, not every seventh day, but every seventh year, and that is rest for the land. That has nothing to do with worshiping 360 days a year. It’s rest for the land. The land needs to be refreshed. So when I hear Sabbath, the first thing I’m thinking of is rest, blessing from God. That’s why Jesus said the Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath. What did he mean by that? What he meant was when God gave the Sabbath ordinance anyway in the Mosaic covenant, it was to bless people, not to burden them. And the Pharisees had turned it on its head. And the Sabbath was a burden to people because they went beyond scripture, and it was stifling and smothering. That’s legalism. So you’ve got to have a proper view of the Sabbath. Carrying that over to the Lord’s Day on Resurrection Sunday. Sunday is not the Sabbath. So it’s the Lord’s Day, so there’s no, are there things we shouldn’t be doing? I think that question is answered by, well, what should we be doing on the Lord’s Day? And that is, it’s God’s Day, it’s Jesus’s Day, it’s the day to celebrate God with God’s people. That’s the priority. And if you have any other agenda as a Christian, then you’re out of balance. Well, I’m around people all week long. Sunday’s my day. I mean, I’ve heard Christians say that. And so they don’t want to be around, they don’t want to go hang out with fellowship after church or whatever. It’s just, I want to get the sermon in and go home. This is my day. You’ve got the wrong attitude of the Lord’s Day. The Lord’s Day is about God and His people. It’s about worshiping Him, giving Him His due, His recognition. And one of the ways you do that is being around His people because He even through His Spirit dwells among His people, His presence. So I think, are there things we shouldn’t do on the Lord’s Day Sunday? If you’re a Christian, yeah, you should have, you shouldn’t have the wrong attitude about it. It’s not your time. So we shouldn’t be selfish about how we’re going to spend.
Derek: Shouldn’t isolate yourself.
Cliff: You should not isolate yourself, absolutely. And then, and you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t be out of kilter and be missing the Lord’s Day on a regular basis. And I think Hebrews 10, even though it doesn’t say the Lord’s Day, it does give the command, don’t forsake the gathering of God’s people. And for us, that is on Sunday, the Lord’s Day. So there’ll be two things I say we shouldn’t be doing.
Derek: The reason I ask, and that was very helpful, and pointing it to the fellowship and having the right attitude and not isolating yourself, that was very helpful. The reason I ask is because years ago, and you’ll remember this because you were my supervising pastor, I served as the minister to the youth, to these middle school students at a church in the area. And I can’t remember, I think someone had just kind of a side comment about, we would take the students to the park, you know, here in the Bay Area during the spring and summer, weather is just perfect. And you kind of want to be outside all the time. And so after church, we would take the youth group over and we would, we’re all together, we’re all the believers together, we’re all Christians together. And we’re playing ultimate, we would play ultimate frisbee and we would grill hamburgers on the grill. And I’m telling you, we were doing that every single Sunday. And I remember someone kind of just in a side comment like, you sure you should be doing that on the Sabbath? And I started to feel guilty about, well, this actually seems like the best thing you could be doing after, right? You go, you hear the word, you’re having fellowship at church and you come over and you’re having more fellowship, but you’re having fun together and you’re playing, enjoying God’s creation. I mean, the whole thing was quite restful, honestly, I enjoyed it. And, but this kind of, this person just kind of stuck that in, and it became kind of a hindrance in my own thinking, my own conscience. And that’s why I wanted to circle back and talk about this issue that Paul’s talking about in Colossians 2 about not allowing someone to pass judgment, because where God has provided freedom, you don’t want to hinder someone’s freedom and joy in their worship of the Lord by placing a burden on them that God never has. So I think that’s why I asked you that question, just kind of because of that experience. And then to point out that this is kind of a big deal in the sense that we’re not saying it’s salvific, but it is a matter of potentially burdening somebody’s conscience in a way that God has not. So if you are someone who is convinced in your own mind, and I did want to talk about Romans 14 here to close out, if you are convinced that you should be honoring one day over the other, and that you should be framing it a certain way, and you think that the Lord’s Day is the new Christian Sabbath, I disagree with you. But you’re convinced in your own mind, okay, you can celebrate that that’s fine, but you can’t articulate in a way that requires me as a Christian to do that.
Cliff: Yeah. There’s three things wrong with that of the person that may have said that to you as a youth pastor. You shouldn’t be playing frisbee on the Sabbath when actually it’s Sunday. I just keep going back to that. Well, first of all, this is not the Sabbath, this is Sunday. I’m just not going to let them get away with it. Calling Sunday the Sabbath, because never in the Bible is that true. Also, another thing we didn’t talk about that I think is important, God didn’t just give one Sabbath to Israel in terms of just the only Sabbath to be concerned about is one day a week. God gave many Sabbaths to Israel. There was the Sabbath month. There was the Sabbath year. There was the Sabbath, the first day of the year, the month of Nisan. There was the middle of Nisan, which was also called the Lord’s Sabbath. So God gave Moses and Israel several Sabbaths, not just regarding the day of the week. So which Sabbath are you talking about? Which one is based on the creation ordinance? Which one is supposedly a moral universal law of the heart? Which of the 10 different Sabbaths in the Old Testament or the Mosaic Code are you talking about? Because you keep only emphasizing one. That’s the Sabbath day, the seventh day of the week. There are many other Sabbaths. There’s Sabbath months, Sabbath years, Sabbath feast days. So Sunday is not the Sabbath. Secondly, there’s nothing in the Bible that says, I can’t play frisbee on Sunday.
Derek: Thank you. Thank you. I needed that.
Cliff: Yeah, that’s legalism.
Derek: It is legalism.
Cliff: That is the opposite of rest.
Derek: That’s exactly right. And I think one of the reasons I wanted to do this podcast with you, Cliff, is because I am quite confident that there are Christians out there, even Christians at our church, who probably even the back of their minds have certain restrictions on their celebration of the Lord’s Day that are born not out of New Testament truth, but some sort of legalistic requirement that they’ve picked up somewhere from somebody that hinders even their joy and their freedom on a Sunday to really enjoy fellowship, worship, and just to set aside that day as a wonderful day of joy in the Lord.
Cliff: Yeah. Well, the worst thing that you can do as a Christian parent is ingrain that mentality into your kids about Sunday. Because for your children, you’re teaching them that, oh, by the way, Sunday is the day we can’t do stuff. Sunday is the day we can’t go anywhere. That’s going to make your kids bitter. Why would they like Christianity or the church? They’re just going to grow up looking back with a sour taste in their mouth when they get in high school or in college and say, here’s all the things my parents didn’t let me do on Sunday.
Derek: You know, it’s funny you say that because what we’ve tried to do is make Sunday a special day where there are a little, actually, a few more privileges. And so, like, we’ll say, yeah, you know, you can have this special treat because it’s a Sunday. Or, of course, you can have that doughnut. It’s a Sunday. Or we’ll have some more ice cream. It’s a Sunday. And eventually, the kids picked up on that. And my daughter would start to ask for certain things, and she would say, but it’s a Sunday. But we think that’s a good way. We can err in that direction. That’s fine. But to show that Sunday is a really special day. It’s the best day of the week. It’s, let’s have joy. Let’s have worship. Let’s have fellowship. Let’s have fun. Let’s have some special treats. And we think that’s how you should celebrate the Lord’s Day.
Cliff: Celebrate.
Derek: Celebrate.
Cliff: Key word. Celebrate.
Derek: Last thing I wanted to end with is, do you think, Cliff, there is wisdom in what God has laid out in creation in terms of six days of work, one day of rest? Do Christians need to rest or should we work seven days a week, just constant work, never take a break?
Cliff: Yeah, this is where Calvin does a good job. For the most part, on dealing with the Sabbath. He does a lousy job regarding baptism, on infant baptism, but he does a pretty good job on the Sabbath, his view of it. He says in the Institutes categorically that with the coming of Jesus, the Sabbath ordinance of Moses was abrogated. That’s the word he used, abrogated, because Jesus fulfills it. The Sabbath was a type that Christ fulfilled. And then Calvin also took Colossians 2:16 literally and seriously, that we can’t be foisting this shadow on other Christians, which, contrary to this book that you and I both were reading, Perspectives on the Sabbath, four views, and one of the views is the Reformed Christian-Sabretarian view that says that Sunday is the new Lord Christian Sabbath.
Derek: Yeah, that’s right.
Cliff: And this author, I just want to read this one sentence from this author. Joseph, is it Pipa?
Derek: I do not know.
Cliff: Okay. Well, anyway, Presbyterian scholar, pastor, he represents the Christian Sabbath view of a Sunday. And he says, from the time of the Reformation until the 1950s, the great majority of Protestant Christians held fairly strict views regarding the use of Sunday. And he goes on to argue that from the time of the Reformation until the 1950s, the great majority of Protestant Christians agreed with his view that Sunday was the Sabbath.
Derek: Interesting.
Cliff: So when he says from the time of the Reformation, when he heard the word Reformation, who do you think of?
Derek: John Calvin.
Cliff: Yeah, John Calvin and Martin Luther. Ironically, John Calvin and Martin Luther do not hold the same view that this guy holds.
Derek: That is ironic.
Cliff: And then he says the great majority of Protestant Christians would say that’s not true. And then he says the problem was where all this changed and why Christians now no longer view Sunday as the Christian Sabbath is because of religious liberalism, wrong views of religious liberalism, and also the ubiquitous presence of television, which has made us numb to the priority of Sunday. And the church, for the most part, doesn’t honor Sunday as the Christian Sabbath anymore because of dispensationalism. So those are the three evils. Liberal theology, television, and dispensationalism. That’s guilt by association. That’s a logical fallacy. But anyway, I was just contrasting him because he claims John Calvin is his authority when, if you actually look at what Calvin says, Calvin has a pretty biblical view of the Sabbath.
Derek: Good reminder to go back to the primary sources.
Cliff: Yes, which takes me back to–what was your original question?
Derek: Just, is there wisdom in a day of rest?
Cliff: Oh, yeah. So this is my point. So I was just going to say what Calvin said. So Calvin said you got to understand three things about the Sabbath as given by Moses. Number one, it was first and foremost primarily for the theocracy of Israel and a type of the coming Christ. And when Christ came, he fulfilled it, and therefore the church is no longer obligated to obey it the way that Moses did, and it was on the seventh day.
Derek: Amen.
Cliff: And then he even quotes from Romans 14.
Derek: Boom.
Cliff: Boom. Yeah. He says, but there are these other considerations regarding patterns that God has laid out beginning in Genesis two of the fact of the matter is God did create the world in six days and rested on the seventh. That happened in the beginning. And the mosaic law of the Sabbath was based on that creation ordinance. So there must be some significance or carryover or something we can be blessed from or edified by Genesis two, two, and two, three. And that is Calvin basically says that when God blessed the seventh day, he set it apart as holy and sacred for a few practical purposes. Number one, to remind us that He’s the creator and that we are contingent. In other words, we are weak. We need a break. We need a rest. So Calvin kind of takes that, there is practical wisdom in the church adopting a seventh day or one day out of seven to rest and get God his due to worship him, to be with the saints, to rest, to be refreshed. And he’s not legalistic about it, but I think that’s legit. And it’s from the very beginning of creation.
Derek: Yeah. That’s good. And that’s where I’m at.
Cliff: Me too.
Derek: And I think that’s wise and that’s very helpful.
Cliff: So I’d say me and you are probably more Calvinistic than the reformers of today, of reformed theologians today.
Derek: That would not please some of those reformed theologians. They would not be happy to hear that. But apparently it might be the case. Great. Well, Cliff, this has been a fantastic discussion and we hope it’s been helpful for you. Our listeners, we hope that it’s actually brought some freedom, even as you’ve listened to these episodes, some freedom for maybe some hidden legalism that you’re wrestling with due to something that you’d heard or read in the past. So we pray that it’s been helpful. And we ask that you would check out withallwisdom.org if you haven’t already. And until next time, keep seeking the Lord in his word.
