As church, Central is in the middle of a series called, “God,
I Have a Question.” The series was generated from questions asked by people in
the church during the spring of 2013. On September 29, as a part of the series,
we did a live Question and Answer night. More questions were submitted then
could be answered on that night, so I will try to answer more of the questions
through this blog.
Here is one of the questions: Why and how did the Sabbath
get changed to Sunday? It is not in the Bible. Shouldn’t we do what the Bible
says?
In answering this question, we should probably keep a couple
of things clear. First, the Sabbath never changed to Sunday or the Lord’s Day,
at least in the Bible. From the practice of the early church, both in Greek and
Jewish areas, suggests that they did not view the Lord’s Day as a fulfillment or
replacement of the Sabbath. The assessment
of a scholar by the name of R. J. Bauckham suggested that the idea of Sunday
replacing the Sabbath did not begin to show up until after Constantine, which
would be in the 300s AD, well after the early church began worshiping on Sundays.
Second, though the time or day of worship of the early
church does not get much attention in the New Testament, there is some
references we should note. Acts 20:7, 1 Corinthians 16:2, and Revelation 1:10 speak
either of the first day of the week – i.e. Sunday - or the Lord’s Day. We would
understand the expression the Lord’s Day or the day of the Lord as a reference
to Sunday, the day of the week on which the Lord Jesus rose again.
It would appear that the early followers of the Lord Jesus
began to gather together on Sundays to worship the Lord. There does not appear
to be any debate in early church history over when the church should meet –
they understood that the day of the Lord, the day of the Resurrection was a
very good time to meet.
To wrap up this answer, Sunday did not replace the Sabbath,
but our worshiping on Sundays does in fact seem to be something expressed in
the New Testament as the practice of the church, and early church history would
seem to support the practice.
