A Brief History of the Sabbath

The first recorded commandment related to the Sabbath Day was in the Law of Moses given to the children of Israel.  The accounts of the creation of course teach us that God rested on the seventh day, but we don’t have any record of the ancient patriarchs (Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, etc.) actually observing the Sabbath Day.  The Bible Dictionary makes this comment: “We have no evidence of its observance in patriarchal times. This is no doubt due to the scantiness of the record, for the Sabbath is an eternal principle and would have existed from the days of Adam, whenever the gospel was on the earth among men.”  In the Law of Moses the Israelites were commanded to make the seventh day of the week, which would correspond to our Saturday, sacred: “But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work….  The Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it” (Exodus 20:10-11).  The observance of the Sabbath of course was a very important part of the religious life of the children of Israel from the time of Moses down to the coming of the Savior in the flesh.  He certainly emphasized the Sabbath in His teaching and sought to restore the true purpose of the Sabbath.  “It is lawful to do well on the sabbath days,” He taught in response to the people’s obsession with keeping the excessive traditions that had been built up around the sabbath (Matt. 12:12).  He encouraged true worship on the Sabbath that included serving others, but He also kept the law as He gave it to Moses.  The Bible Dictionary summarizes: “Jesus obeyed the letter and the spirit of the Sabbath, but was not obligated to follow the traditions of the elders of the Jews.”

               When the Savior died, it was the day before the Sabbath.  The perpetrators were worried about His body on the cross on the Sabbath day: “The Jews therefore, because it was the preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath day, (for that sabbath day was an high day,) besought Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away” (John 19:31).  Perhaps the best way to describe this outrageous hypocrisy—killing the King who gave them the law of the Sabbath and then still worrying about not letting his dead body cause a violation of the Sabbath—is with the condemnation of the Savior Himself: “Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” (Matt. 23:24).  The Savior’s body was in the tomb on the Sabbath, and then the day after (i.e. Sunday) He was resurrected: “The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulcher.”  It was this day that the Risen Lord came to her, declaring, “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:1, 17).  Over time it appears that the disciples changed their weekly worship from the seventh day to the first day in honor of this fact that the Savior was resurrected the first day.  For example, Luke recorded this event during one of Paul’s missions, “And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready to depart on the morrow” (Acts 20:7).  They partook of the Lord’s supper on the first day of the week, and not on the Sabbath day (the seventh).  This first day of the week was called “the Lord’s day” as suggested by John: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day” (Revelation 1:10).  As the Bible Dictionary summarizes, “After the Ascension of Christ, the members of the Church, whether Jews or Gentiles, kept holy the first day of the week (the Lord’s day) as a weekly commemoration of our Lord’s Resurrection; and by degrees the observance of the seventh day was discontinued.”

               The Bible Dictionary also suggests that the Lord’s Day (Sunday) and the Sabbath Day (Saturday) were originally not conflated to be the same thing: “The first day of the week is meant, being the day of our Lord’s Resurrection and also the day on which the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles….  It was never confounded with the Sabbath, but carefully distinguished from it.”  Today we generally make no such distinction and freely call Sunday the Sabbath.  It is interesting to note, though, that in the first revelation to Joseph Smith to address this commandment, the Lord called it “the Lord’s day.”  We read, “And that thou mayest more fully keep thyself unspotted from the world, thou shalt go to the house of prayer and offer up thy sacraments upon my holy day….  But remember that on this, the Lord’s day, thou shalt offer thine oblations and thy sacraments unto the Most High” (D&C 59:9, 12).  And yet the Lord later called it the Sabbath, perhaps our indication that the Lord’s day and the Sabbath are one and the same now for us: “And the inhabitants of Zion shall also observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy” (D&C 68:29).  The actual day of the week we observe it is of course of far less importance than how we honor the Lord on that day.  Whether we are in the Middle East and observe it on Friday (as LDS congregations there do) or in Israel and observe it on Saturday (as LDS congregations there do) or honor the Sabbath on Sunday, what counts is how we hallow His day and the “sign” that we give God through our actions that day (Exodus 31:13).