The Sabbath Before Moses?
A common misunderstanding today is that Sabbath observance was first instituted as a Jewish custom at Mount Sinai, when Moses received the tablets containing the Ten Commandments. Is this so? No! Notice how your Bible describes what is called “creation week.” We read that God created man and woman on the sixth day. What, then, happened on the seventh day? “Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made” (Genesis 2:1–3).
Yes, the seventh-day Sabbath is a memorial of the creation—and it points to the true God and true Creator of the universe. It had meaning from the very creation, and it still has deep meaning for Christians today, who look at the seventh-day Sabbath as a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ’s thousand-year reign on the Earth during the soon-coming Millennium.
What did Jesus claim about His relationship to the Sabbath? Did He say He was Lord over Sunday—that Sunday was the Lord’s day? No! Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Therefore the Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27–28). If Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath, what day is the Lord’s day? Sunday? No! The Sabbath is the “Lord’s Day”—Jesus Himself said so! In fact, the expression “Lord’s Day” appears only once in the Bible, in Revelation 1:10. There, it refers to the prophetic period known as the Day of the Lord, which leads up to the Second Coming of Christ. It does not refer to a day of the week.