Responding to Terry Wolfe (The Winter Christian) on the Sabbath
I recently released an extensive presentation on the ten commandments and their role in the Christian life according to the New Testament. As usual, people always come out of the woodwork when you dare talk about morality, obedience or, God forbid, even the Sabbath. So because Substack has a character limit in its replies, I am posting my reply here for everyone to read, and the comments have been enabled for anyone to comment.
So now, Terry. Terry, Terry, Terry. The amount of confidence you have, when unwittingly you are espousing Catholic doctrine, is quite impressive. But in your hasty confidence you make several unsubstantiated and false assertions that need to be corrected. Let’s take each of your claims and examine them carefully.
“I can tell you’re doing your best to reconcile the paradox of the new covenant replacing the old one, but I find your argument got convoluted pretty fast when you started advocating Sabbath keeping, rather than understanding the symbolic transformations of old things with higher principles.”
There is no paradox of the new covenant replacing the old one. The new covenant fulfilled the old one. A paradox is something that seems to contradict itself or go against common sense. There is nothing that is contradictory between the new and old covenants. The old covenant was fulfilled by Christ. However you hold to Catholic doctrine, which is that the Sabbath was part of the Mosaic covenant, when it can be easily proven that this is not the case. By holding to this doctrine, you relegate one of the moral commands to a symbol, and in so doing you espouse lawlessness because that command was never figurative just like the other 9 commands were never figurative. So no, I am not convoluted, you are (about to be) in this conversation because you are trying to defend something that isn’t true.
“Nobody keeps the Sabbath as it was instructed, not even the Jews of Jesus’ day. It was never an instruction to personally rest on that day, it was a holy land purification system with a direct command to kill anyone who did work on that day (Exodus 35:2, with Num 15:32 as a literal example commanded by the Lord). If you’re not killing those who decide to work, you’re also breaking the moral imperative behind that law. The moral principle is that of enforcing purity on the community, not personal “observation””
As expected you open with a barrage of false statements and claims based on taking the situations out of context. It was never an instruction to personally rest, but rather a holy land purification system? When was the Sabbath instituted Terry? With Moses or Joshua? No, the Sabbath was instituted in the first week of creation and God rested with man in paradise as a sign of the gospel and of the final reality. That was thousands of years before land covenants and purification rites. Even when the Sabbath was given to the Israelites, it was given over a month before the covenant on Sinai, which means it falls categorically outside of it. The Sabbath was given in Exodus 16 with the manna, before they were purifying anyone or killing other tribes or sacrificing animals, and it was a command to rest in your home (Exodus 16:23 says, ‘Tomorrow is a day of solemn REST, a holy Sabbath to the LORD.’). So your claim that the Sabbath was instituted with Israel and was specifically for land purification is bogus, much in line with your general tendency it seems to create wild theology based on your own fanciful contrivances (like when I had to rebuke you for teaching that women wouldn’t be resurrected).
As to the point on killing, you are wrong on that as well. The 4th commandment does not command you to kill all those who do not rest. In fact sojourners were commanded to rest when they passed by Israel so as to be grafted in. If someone was sinning with a high hand and disobeying God, then yes, they were stoned, like the guy who picked up sticks on the Sabbath. But why? Because God was physically present there and commanding things, and providing supernaturally, and these people still disobeyed. This is open rebellion to God, and God was setting a precedent for His holiness. The Sabbath furthermore is not the only command that, when you break it, you are guilty of death. James says that if you are guilty on one part of the law you are guilty on all of it (James 2:10), and God says that the soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18). It doesn’t say “The soul that doesn’t keep the Sabbath shall die” or “you need to go and kill everyone who isn’t keeping the Sabbath”. All sin leads to death (Romans 6:23) both through the curse and through judgment, and sin is transgression of the law (1 John 3:4).
Therefore your claim that if “you’re not killing those who work, you’re breaking the moral imperative of the law” is totally unsubstantiated. God did not command you to go and kill unbelievers for not keeping the Sabbath. God judged pagan tribes with Israel for all manner of sins. As of Christ that judging power has been handed to Jesus, and we are commanded to spread the gospel so that people repent. Yet part of believing the gospel, as I demonstrated patiently in collecting over 130+ examples from the New Testament, is a desire to follow God’s moral precepts. Ezekiel 36 and Jeremiah 31 both tell you that the new covenant is God writing His laws on your heart and causing you to obey, because His moral law is good. How then can you argue that the new covenant does away with one of the moral precepts and gives you license to sin? On top of that, the singular command out of all of them that begins with “Remember” and which alone was a picture of the gospel and eternity?
This is what happens when you spend too much time in your head and formulate your theology on guesses and hunches rather than proper exegesis.
“People who claim to keep the Sabbath are always hypocrites. They enjoy all the benefits of others working on the Sabbath and cause them to work. The Sabbath was universal and absolute for a reason. Police, fire departments, hospitals, utility companies, restaurants, logistics are always working, are they not able to be Christian? Is it “immoral” to have emergency services? And remember, even cooking your own food was a sin, so don’t use the microwave. Deciding where the “moral” line in the sand is makes this arbitrary and contrary to the pattern of the new covenant, which is to strive for far higher and more spiritual life than the old laws.”
By default everyone is a hypocrite because we claim to believe in God or even love God yet we continue to fail every single day. You don’t need to invoke the Sabbath to be a hypocrite. You’re a hypocrite already Terry, and so am I and so is every Christian if we invoke the absolute. So your charge is meaningless and moot. As for “enjoying all the benefits and making others work” -- also a non-sequitur. It does not follow that because I keep the Sabbath you need to work and provide for me. In fact that assigns provision to man rather than to God, which is part of your error. God provides always, and when we rest from our work He provides just like He provided for the Israelites in the wilderness. I do not go out to restaurants and make others work for me while I am on the Sabbath, because that is breaking the moral imperative. So your argument hinges on the assumption that someone who is resting is taking advantage of others who are not, but that’s not what keeping the Sabbath is. Therefore your argument is a straw man of our position.
As for emergency services, it was true in Israel that you had people watching the city on the Sabbath. The Sabbath does not mean cessation of all activity, it means resting. That rest is a dance between two things revealed in scripture over the course of thousands of years, and clarified in the ministry of Christ. The first are obvious things like work and commerce. Those you can abstain from objectively and they are easy to label. But the other side of that are good works and honoring God. Jesus did many healings and preaching on the Sabbath explicitly, not because He was breaking the Sabbath or redefining it, but rather revealing the mystery and dance between two things. On one side you are to abstain from work and commerce because in so doing you show your faith in God’s provision physically. On the other side, doing good works, helping others, preaching, are all good things to do. So the Sabbath was never about cessation of activity or legalism, but about living life in the most godly way possible. The Pharisees had turned it into a legalistic burden by putting the “don’ts” ahead of honoring God and your neighbor, and they were hypocrites because they still untied their oxen and donkeys to let them drink or helped it out of a hole if it fell on the Sabbath. That doesn’t mean the Sabbath is figurative, that means “rest” is a nuanced conversation because God doesn’t command you to abstain from all activity whatsoever. People who want to cite kindling a fire as the basis for the Sabbath ignore that a lot of people live in cold environments and God would never command you not to have heat in your home so you can survive. The context of these verses has to be taken into consideration, which people such as yourself do not often do because you operate according to biases rather than evidence.
“We have the Greater Sabbath that replaces the old one. Look at Hebrews 4, the Sabbath “rest” is a state of being that persists constantly, no longer literal. The principle of the Law of Christ, the Law of Liberty, is that the old covenant has a better replacement in the new covenant. Instead of performing blood sacrifices, Jesus gave us one sacrifice for all humanity, forever. Instead of pretending to keep the Sabbath holy (which nobody does) we rest in Christ and treat every day as a time to do works, to pray, to rest, and to serve however we are individually called, according to our gifts.”
Hebrews was written to Jews on the fence between Christianity and Judaism. The entire context of Hebrews is arguing from the scriptures why Jesus is the Messiah and the most Jewish thing they can do is believe in Him. To believe that a “selling point” of this critical letter, something the Jews who did not believe spent centuries corrupting the Masoretic text for (so as to discredit the verses being cited in this letter to the Jews) -- to believe that a selling point of this letter was that they no longer had to keep the Sabbath because of Jesus is completely absurd.
You are dealing with an audience that desperately wanted to be right with God, and knew their history of God judging Israel for forgetting the Sabbath and judging Israel ON the Sabbath for this exact reason. And you’re going to tell me that the author is trying to persuade these people by telling them that this central aspect of Jewish life and God’s moral imperatives has been changed? Do you realize not a single theologian for the majority of Church history thought like you? Actually a few did, but their theology was gnostic and horrible, like Clement of Alexandria. Eventually they believed the Sabbath had been changed to Sunday, but the Church always held that the 10 commandments were binding on the Christian life because the apostles make dozens upon dozens of imperatives according to them, as I just documented.
So the Church kept the 7th day Sabbath for 1000+ years, in fact this is one of the reasons why the Great Schism happened. I have documented this abundantly for anyone that wants to learn in my Lord’s Day series. They kept the Sabbath because the apostles kept the Sabbath and were commanding their disciples to do so, and because the first Christians were Jews and Jews kept the Sabbath. Hebrews is therefore not about God suddenly changing how He interprets morality but rather invoking the Sabbath as a poetic reminder that a) it was pointing to Christ this entire time b) you can’t continue to keep the Sabbath yet reject Christ, because true rest is found in belief in God’s promises (AND IMPORTANTLY) c) the most Jewish thing we can do is keep the Sabbath and now it has its fullest meaning, so that is why a “Sabbath rest remains for the people of God.” Premise A and B do not invalidate premise C, they support it. And given the context of this letter it is crassly ignorant to believe what you believe about it.
If the apostles were teaching people to forsake the Sabbath and gnosticize it such as yourself, that God’s law was now “transformed” and allegorized (despite thousands of years of literalism and judgments), then where is your evidence? In the book of Acts there is evidence they brought witnesses against them to falsely testify, yet not a single time were any of them accused of breaking the Sabbath, which is exactly what you would expect if they were teaching people this gnostic understanding. Furthermore, we see nothing from rabbinic commentary or history or Josephus or anyone from that time that the early Christians (Jews) were now doing this gnostic “Every day is the Sabbath” or “Jesus is my Sabbath” practice. Had they been doing such a thing, the very people that hated them (rabbinic Jews) would be the first to pounce on the opportunity to document such a thing. Yet it is absent from history. Why? Because people kept the Sabbath and they got that from the apostles.
And because the apostles invoked the Decalogue 130+ times in the New Testament as binding for the Christian life, it is careless and ignorant to try to argue that one of those commands, by virtue of silence, was done away with or never expected. On the contrary, it went without saying that people would keep the Sabbath, as per the Jerusalem council in Acts 15. Nobody in their right mind would believe that God’s holy day, the one set aside at creation and designed to be a physical picture of the gospel, would now be done away with.
But historically the institution who does believe this is the Catholic Church. And because of your elevation of the Jews as the eschatological antichrist, which you are wrong on, you are even more inclined to take the bait that the Sabbath was just a burdensome Jewish thing and done away with by Christ. But this is Catholic theology, and that same theology is going to impose its will on you very shortly. In a few more years you will see America taken over by Catholic Social Teaching, and you will have to come to terms with the fact that you’ve pointed not only yourself but many others at the wrong enemy.
The Jews will convert, Israel is going to be reshaped, the Middle East redesigned and Islam will be integrated also. The power of this world sits in Rome, and Rome has always preached two things: obedience to the Pontiff as necessary for salvation and that the Sabbath has been done away with in favor of Sunday. To obey the Pontiff is to cease from work on a different day than God commanded you, and because Rome has changed times and laws it will enforce these times and laws as part of the final test of faith. Sunday will unite all the denominations, it will solve the problems of capitalism, it will bring religion back, it will be great for the environment and it will fuse the secular with the religious. And those who refuse it on moral grounds will be persecuted, called a Jew or Judaizer and ostracized, because most of the Christian world believes what you believe, which is what Rome believes, and that’s why they will be deceived on this issue.
It will never cease to amaze me how obstinate people become when you talk about morality or, even worse, resting one day out of the week. Your knee-jerk reaction to the command to rest shows a heart problem, because spending a day out of the week to enjoy nature, quiet time, resting, meditating on God’s word, gratitude, etc., is for your good in many ways. You eagerly call people hypocrites, but it is you that has the greater hypocrisy in claiming to love God yet refusing to physically demonstrate that love through trusting rest and mindful quality time with God. If you were in a relationship and refused to spend time with that person, would you not be a hypocrite for claiming you love them? How much more then with God?
