God, I Have a Question Follow-up

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.