The Seventh Day Sabbath: How Important is it Really?

“Another article about the Sabbath? Haven’t you already written enough articles about

the Sabbath?” Apparently not, because the majority of Christians are still not keeping the Sabbath.

I don’t have to write articles against stealing or murder, because all Christians agree that stealing and murder are wrong, and Christians don’t steal or murder. Or if they do, they at least know it’s wrong and they feel guilty about it. But the vast majority of Christians ignore the commandment to keep the seventh day holy, and they are convinced that there is nothing wrong with this. Christians use their Saturdays for working and for shopping instead of abstaining from these activities and attending a holy convocation like the Bible says to do. And they do not feel the least bit guilty about it.

"So, Daniel, you want to make Christians feel guilty? You want to guilt them into keeping the Sabbath?”

No. I get no pleasure watching people squirm under condemnation. But if they are guilty of breaking one of God’s Ten Commandments every Saturday, I want to do my best to help them realize this so they can start obeying this commandment and be blessed by our heavenly Father. I don’t write about the Sabbath to minister condemnation, but I do pray that some old fashioned Holy Ghost conviction will occur so that Christians will be convinced to obey the Sabbath commandment and be blessed, as so many of us Sabbath keepers have been.

“But how important is it, really? Why is it so important to you, Daniel?”

The question you need to ask yourself is not how important is it to Daniel Botkin, but how important is it to God. To God, the Sabbath commandment is apparently even more important than the commandment to not steal. Why do I say this? Because the penalty God prescribed for stealing was to have the thief pay restitution, but the penalty God prescribed for Sabbath breaking was death:

“Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, holy to Yahweh: whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death” (Ex. 31:15).

In Numbers 15, a man was stoned to death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath. This brutal execution was not Moses’ idea; it was expressly ordered by God. We do not live in a theocracy now, so we obviously cannot stone Sabbath breakers (nor adulterers, nor rapists, nor sodomites) while living under a human government. Nevertheless, this shows how seriously God views the sanctity of the seventh day.

I believe the main reason most Christians think the Sabbath can be ignored is simply because the majority of Christians do not keep it. A new Christian in a Sunday church looks at all the other Christians around him and he does not see any of them keeping the seventh day holy. In most cases, a new Christian is not even aware of a Bible commandment to keep the seventh day holy. Or if he is, he mistakenly thinks that Sunday is the seventh day of the week, even though the calendar on his wall shows that Sunday is the first day of the week. By the time he learns that some Christians keep the Sabbath on Saturday, he has already been programmed to think it’s unnecessary. After all, the vast majority of Christians don’t do it, so how important can it be? So he concludes it’s not important.

This immature, unwise Christian is basing his premature conclusion on a faulty assumption. He is assuming that the majority must be right. He does not consider the very real possibility that the majority can be (and often are) mistaken.

This is one thing I had to contend with when I was coming into an understanding of the Sabbath many years ago. The more I read the plain, simple truth about the Sabbath in the Bible, the more obvious it became to me that we should keep it. Duh! However, this raised questions in my mind: “How could so many good Christians be wrong about something so important? How could the great men of God I admire - A.W. Tozer, Watchman Nee, Leonard Ravenhill, Charles Finney, William Booth, and countless other preachers and missionaries of the past - how could these great men of God not have seen that God still wants His people to keep the seventh day holy? Am I so arrogant and presumptuous to think that I see more than these great men did? How could they be wrong and I be right?”

Two important truths helped me overcome these barriers to believing it. Truth number one: Truth is not determined by the opinion of the majority. The truth is the truth, regardless of how many people believe it. There was a time when the majority believed that the earth was flat, but that did not change the shape of our planet. If the Bible teaches that God wants His people to keep the Sabbath, then that is the truth, whether the majority of His people believe it or not. “Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar” (Rom. 3:4).

Truth number two: If we see spiritual truths that past generations of Christians did not see, it is because we stand on their shoulders. The realization of this truth cuts away any pride people might have about seeing spiritual truths that were not seen by deep Christians of the past like A.W. Tozer and others. If I see truths that were unseen by great men of God in the past, it is because I was instructed and inspired by these great men to seek a deeper, closer walk with the Lord and to pursue further revelation from the Scriptures. So even though these men did not see the revelation of the Sabbath in their lifetimes, they indirectly helped me to see it by inspiring me to a closer walk with God.

If you still hesitate to believe in keeping the Sabbath only because the majority of Christians in your church don’t believe it, what are you going to do if the majority of Christians in your church come to the conclusion that homosexual “marriage” is not wrong? Will you still think the majority must be right, and go along with this idea? Or what if the majority of Christians in your church decide that abortion is okay? Will you go along with this simply because it’s what the majority of your peers believe?

The majority of Jewish captives in Babylon ate King Nebuchadnezzar’s unkosher food and bowed down to his idol. There were only four young men who refused to go along with the majority. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. These young men did not look at what the other Jewish captives were doing. They did not rationalize disobedience simply because everyone else was doing it. “Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the king’s meat” (Dan. 1:8), and he inspired his three friends to purpose the same thing in their hearts.

I’m no Daniel, even though I bear his name. But I hope I can inspire some of my brothers and sisters to purpose in their hearts to obey God’s commandment to keep the seventh day holy.

| DB

Image: Moses by Daniel Botkin from his Portraits of Prophets Gallery. See all of Daniel’s artwork on his art website, DanielBotkin.com.