Remember the Sabbath: Israel’s Covenant Sign Fulfilled in Christ, Part 1

The place, practice, and position of the Sabbath Rest in Christian theology have long been debated. Among Evangelicals, some traditions regard the Fourth Commandment as a perpetually binding moral ordinance transferred from the seventh day to the first day with the advent of Christ. Others, with variations, view the Sabbath as a ceremonial institution that reached its divinely ordained end with the advent of Christ. However, tracing the unfolding unity of God’s redemptive plan through the biblical covenants yields a richer and fuller understanding of Sabbath than either embracing Sabbatarianism or merely affirming its termination. The gospel itself calls for and provides for Sabbath-keeping.¹ The New Testament is more subtle about how New Covenant believers are to keep the Sabbath than the Apostle Paul’s express command concerning the combined Unleavened Bread and Passover: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the Festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:8).

The New Testament implicitly calls on Christians to do much more than simply abandon or dismiss the Sabbath as out-of-date and terminated with the arrival of Christ Jesus, but it also does not call New Covenant believers to observe the Sabbath by setting aside one day each week as holy as the Israelites were commanded, only shifting the day of observance from the seventh to the first day of the week. If the gospel beckons us to enter the gift of God’s Sabbath-Rest, provided in his Son Christ Jesus, how does one enter, and what must one cease doing to receive that rest?

This article proposes that the Sabbath, rightly understood, is neither abandoned nor merely repeated in the New Testament, but transformed by Christ who entered rest from his redemptive works when he declared from the cross, “It is finished!”

Sabbath in the Old Testament

The Bible unfolds a single coherent redemption story centered on Messiah Jesus. Every covenant contributes a chapter to that story, each with its own divinely appointed role within salvation history. The Mosaic Covenant occupies a unique self-testifying temporary role within God’s unfolding drama. It was not an eternal covenant governing God’s people in every age, but a covenant filled with earthly shadows of heavenly realities made specifically with and for Israel after the exodus from Egypt, designed to foreshadow and prepare the way for the coming Messiah.

If we hope to understand the New Testament’s teaching on the Sabbath correctly, we must first understand its role in the Old Testament. Although Christians rightly distinguish among the Mosaic Covenant’s moral, ceremonial, and civil dimensions of the Law Covenant for purposes of theological reflection, Scripture itself presents the Law Covenant as an indivisible, unified, and integrated whole. Moses never separates the covenant into segregated legal categories. Rather, the three discernible aspects of the covenant are thoroughly intermingled without confusion (see, e.g., Leviticus 18-19).

God’s Word presents the Decalogue, the Ten Words, as the covenant itself, as Moses explains, “And he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone” (Deuteronomy 4:13; 10:4). The duplicate stone tablets holding the Ten Words, the Lord’s covenant testimony, were secured in the Ark of the Covenant over which the mercy seat was placed and housed in the Tabernacle (Exodus 25:16, 21; 40:20; 37:1-9; Deuteronomy 10:2). Thus, we rightly acknowledge that the Decalogue functioned as God’s appointed summation of the entire Mosaic Covenant with all its requirements comprehensively administrating every aspect of Israel’s life—moral, civil, and ceremonial.²

Consequently, we must acknowledge the Mosaic Law for what it was. It was an integrated covenant comprising many cohesive commandments. Every commandment—including those within the Ten Commandments—belonged to the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai. This observation becomes especially significant when discussing the Sabbath Commandment.

Sabbath, the Sign of the Mosaic Covenant

The Fourth Commandment, concerning the weekly Sabbath Rest, was not merely one requirement among many. Within the Decalogue, it was distinctive. Though a human’s need for rest from labor is self-evident, unlike the other nine commandments, which prohibit self-evident sinful behavior, the Fourth Commandment is “positive law.” Thus, as an explicit divine decree, it required a direct revelation from God to be made known and binding: “Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy” (Exod. 20:8). Thus, the prophet Nehemiah explained,

You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them right rules and true laws, good statutes and commandments, and you made known to them your holy Sabbath and commanded them commandments and statutes and a law by Moses your servant. You gave them bread from heaven for their hunger and brought water for them out of the rock for their thirst, and you told them to go in to possess the land that you had sworn to give them (Neh. 9:13–15).

Notice how Nehemiah links God’s giving of the Sabbath to his earlier giving them “bread from heaven.” Is this not because, when the Lord gave the Sabbath to Israel, he linked the holy day to his first giving of bread from heaven to the Israelites in the wilderness, with explicit instructions to prepare them to “remember the Sabbath”? They were to gather two daily portions of heavenly bread on the sixth day because there would be none on the seventh day, which was to be “a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord” (Exod. 16:5, 22–30). They were to imitate the Creator, working for six days and resting from their labors on the seventh day, “a Sabbath to the Lord your God” (Exod. 20:9–10; cf. Gen. 2:1–3). The Lord’s giving of the seventh-day Sabbath was bound to his giving the Israelites manna. The weekly Sabbath was the first of ten Sabbaths the Lord gave Israel: seven with annual cycles, one with a seven-year cycle, and one with a seven-times-seven-year cycle (49 years). These ten appointed Sabbaths regulated Israel’s calendar marked off in sevens—weekly, annually, septennially, and even seven septennials. All reinforce the sanctity of God’s gift of time. The Sabbaths perpetually reminded Israel of this: that God was their Lord, whom they were to serve in every aspect of life.

The Lord’s double provision of bread from heaven on the sixth day in the wilderness foreshadowed the Seventh-Year Sabbath, when an abundant triple-harvest would occur in the sixth year once they entered the Promised Land. The Lord commanded through Moses, “When you come into the land that I give you, the land shall keep a Sabbath to the Lord” (Lev. 25:2). The Israelites were to plant crops, prune vineyards, and gather fruit for six years but give the land rest every seventh year. The Lord assured them that he would bless their sixth-year harvest so that it would provide enough food for three years until the next harvest (Lev. 25:20–22). The Lord warned Israel that if they obeyed him, their harvests would abound, but if not, He would drive them out of the land: “Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies’ land . . . it shall have rest, the rest it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were dwelling in it” (Lev. 26:34–35). As Israel obeyed the Lord’s commandments—prominent among them was the sign of the covenant—the Lord prospered the nation’s inhabitants, their relationships with neighboring nations, and the land the Lord gave them.

Sabbath Breaking and Exile

Hence, any discussion of Israel’s Sabbath is incomplete without devoting some attention to the Promised Land. Moses reminded the Israelites that they had not yet “come to the rest and to the inheritance that the Lord your God is giving you” (Deut. 12:9). He added that when they would cross the Jordan River, they would live in the land as an inheritance from God and enjoy rest from all their enemies, living in safety in the land where the Lord’s name will dwell (Deut. 12:10–11). Joshua reports the Lord’s promise fulfilled. He gave Israel all the land he promised and gave them rest on every side (Josh. 21:43–45).

The seventy-year exile of which the Lord warned Israel was not arbitrary. It took place at God’s appointed time, prophesied by Jeremiah concerning the repeated violation of the Lord’s command to release Hebrew slaves at the end of six years of service (20:11; 34:13–17).³ The Chronicler explains the Lord’s computation of Israel’s seventy-year exile. He implicitly links Israel’s failure to set free their fellow Hebrews who served as slaves for six years and the nation’s 490-years of not allowing the land its Sabbaths every seven years.

He took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years (2 Chron. 36:20–21).

Why did the Israelites’ many refusals to give the land its sabbatical year figure so prominently in the nation’s exile to Babylon? To violate the Lord’s appointed sign of his covenant with the nation was to violate the covenant. Scripture explicitly claims that the Lord designed the Sabbath as the Mosaic Covenant’s sign, placing it at the center of the Decalogue, with the weekly Sabbath representing the other nine, which occur on annual or multi-annual cycles. Just as God appointed the rainbow as a sign, testifying to his enduring covenant with Noah, promising never again to destroy the whole earth with water, and he designated circumcision of the flesh as the sign of the Abrahamic Covenant, so the Lord appointed the Seventh Day Sabbath, rest from labor as a weekly repeating tangible sign of the Mosaic Covenant. To keep the Sabbath was to keep covenant with God. In Exodus 31:12–17, the Lord repeatedly declares that the Sabbath “is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you” (Exod. 31:13). Given the Lord’s appointing the Sabbath as the covenant’s sign, the Sabbath’s primary function was not simply to provide physical rest, valuable though that was, but to mark Israel as the nation specially consecrated to the Lord under the Mosaic administration.

Thinking Rightly about the Sabbath within God’s Ordered Redemptive History

The Sabbath’s function as a God-appointed covenantal sign should prevent anyone from isolating the Fourth Commandment from its full old covenant setting, including Israel’s presence in the land. Because the Sabbath serves as the sign of the Mosaic Covenant, its authority cannot be divorced from the God-given covenant to which it belongs. Just as no one can insist that circumcision of the flesh, the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham, is binding on Christians (Gal. 6:15), so one cannot rightly affirm that the Mosaic Covenant has passed away and at the same time insist that its covenant sign is still legally binding on Christians in the same manner as under the old covenant, except with a change of days (Eph. 2:14–16).⁴ Such an approach, which assumes the Fourth Commandment’s permanency in its Old Covenant form because it is in the Decalogue, flattens the covenantal contours of the biblical storyline and embellishes the continuity between the Old and New Covenants.⁵

Yet, anyone who dismisses the Sabbath as a relic of the bygone era of the Old Covenant, with no enduring relevance since Christ Jesus has come, overstates the discontinuity between the Old and New Covenants. It is true that the Decalogue’s Sabbath command does not bind the Christian’s conscience to regard one day more holy than another (Rom. 14:5–6). However, exaggerating either the continuity or discontinuity between the Old and New Covenants tends to focus on the individual Christian’s behavior instead of that to which the whole former covenant points, namely Messiah Jesus, who consummates the entire Sabbath institution consisting of ten Sabbaths, not just the weekly Sabbath featured in the Fourth Commandment. The New Testament’s teaching concerning the Sabbath is neither its mere continuation with a day change nor its abandonment but Messiah’s transformative fulfillment of it for his New Covenant people.

Conclusion

God gave Israel its Sabbaths, neither as a bare requirement for periodic rest nor detachable from the covenant. The Sabbath stood at the heart of the Decalogue as the sign of the Mosaic Covenant, binding Israel’s weekly rhythm, her annual festivals, sabbatical years, and jubilee cycles to the nation’s fidelity to the Lord who redeemed her from Egypt. The Promised Land’s own septennial sabbaths, ignored through many generations of disobedience, were repaid in the desolation of seventy years of exile—proof that the Sabbath sign was no peripheral ceremony but a covenant obligation whose violation carried covenant consequences. To read the Fourth Commandment rightly, then, requires reading it within this frame: as Israel’s sign, bound to Israel’s covenant, situated within Israel’s land.

This covenantal frame guards against two equal and opposite errors. One is the temptation to lift the Sabbath commandment out of its Mosaic Covenant setting and carry it forward essentially unchanged, except to move it to the first day of the week, as though a God-given sign could outlive the covenant it signified. The other temptation is to declare the Sabbath a relic safely discarded, as if the fourth of the Ten Words, the sign of the covenant, anchored in God’s rest from his creative work on the seventh day, carries no enduring significance. Both moves, for different reasons, sever the Sabbath from the very thing that gives Scripture’s unfolding storyline its coherence: God’s singular redemptive plan, advancing through successive covenants toward Messiah Jesus.

If the Sabbath’s meaning was never self-referential but always pointed beyond itself, then the question Part 1 has been building toward is not whether Christians must keep a Sabbath day holy, nor whether Christ Jesus has canceled it, but what it means for Christ to fulfill the whole of Israel’s Sabbath institution—the weekly rest, the annual sabbath festivals, the sabbatical year, and the year of jubilee—as the reality to which all of them pointed. Part 2 turns to that question, tracing how the New Testament Gospel writers understand Jesus as the one who grants, and himself embodies, the Sabbath Rest that Israel’s Sabbaths could only foreshadow.