Question:
Good morning Hank, I just finished listening to your call in show and was rather disappointed in your caller Jacob.While I’m sure with your experience, you knew from around the 2nd or 3rd question that he was trying to set you up by answering his carefully chosen questions with out him making a single comment, and at the same time get you to admit that the Sabbath is still in effect for all Christians, and therefore you are deceived by not keeping it.He was either a Seventh Day Adventist or one of the spin off churches from the now defunct World Wide Church of God.I have been a believer in the seventh day rest for over 40 years, and have studied it from every angle, plus debated it on a religious online forum many times, and can advise you with all confidence, that those who argue that Christians no longer keep the 4th Commandment, will win the argument everytime.As you pointed out to Jacob the caller, that the Sabbath was given to the Jews and not the Gentile believers is the truth, but of course this will have no effect on them, because they will point out that Paul kept the Sabbath countless times during his ministry .The debate will always come down to this, the “rest day” that God created in Gen 2, is still the same rest day He gave Israel and called it the Sabbath, and it still falls on Saturday to this day.What they don’t realize is that Christians no longer keep the Sabbath, they now keep a separate day of worship, which falls on Sunday, or the 1st day of the week, and they don’t pretend it is a new Sabbath, but a separate day all together.When Jacob was trying to lead you in the question of why God told Israel to “remember the Sabbath day,” he was trying to point out that it had been in effect since creation, and God was reminding Israel they had stopped keeping it, and were sinning by loosing it, and now He was re-instituting it as a Commandment.What he is forgetting is that the day of rest had been in effect since creation, but the Sabbath was not instituted until God gave it to Israel in Exo 14.The Sabbath and the “rest day” were two separate things even though they were the same day. The rest day was just that, a day to rest and to do no work, to be thankful and to reflect on God’s love, and nothing else, but when the Sabbath was given, it was the hallmark of the Jewish people, and they than turned it from a simple rest day into a religion all of it’s own, and added 100’s of other laws to it, to make it more binding and in the hopes of guaranteeing it would be kept, but in doing so they changed the Sabbath into a laborious day of laws and ordinances that ended up loosing the whole meaning of why God gave it to them, and turned it into a day that Christ himself told them, that it was originally made for them, and that they were not made for the Sabbath.The Sabbath argument can catch many off guard unless you have recently done an up to date study on all the new arguments that they have, and believe me they know their subject.If you would like me to give you a great website that does a fairly good job of asking and answering all the questions on the Sabbath V’s Sunday question, let me know, and I’ll give it to you.I didn’t mean to write such a long letter, but believe me, you have not heard the last call on this matter, and you would be wise to be updated on the answers that will quench their arguments.Let me know if I can be of any further help in this matter.In Christ, Jim Hoskinson, Clearwater, Fl
Answer:
Good job!