The Fourth Commandment - Remember the Sabbath.
I keep seeing people post in our forums here that the Law was done away with, that the Commandments of God are no longer in effect. What these people almost always mean is that the Sabbath, the fourth Commandment is no longer in effect. They will readily admit that we should keep the rest.
So I want to take a minute of time to look at the Commandment. What I am going to say will shock a lot of people, but keep reading. The fourth Commandment did not create/establish the Sabbath! That is right, the fourth Commandment did not establish the Sabbath!
Let us take a look at the Commandment using the KJV bible.
"Exo 20:8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Exo 20:9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
Exo 20:10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
Exo 20:11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. "
The first thing you will notice is it starts with the words remember the Sabbath. In other words when the fourth Commandment was written, the Sabbath already existed, it was not established at that point.
The next few statements are simply reminders and instructions on how to keep the Sabbath.
We then get to the end of the fourth Commandment, it tells us when it was created, it was created on the seventh day of creation. That is right, the Sabbath had existed for thousands of years when Moses was given the Ten Commandments.
The Commandment was simply a reminder to keep it.
The Sabbath was actually created on the Seventh Day of creation, here is the text
"Gen 2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
Gen 2:2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
Gen 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. "
So the next time someone tells you the Ten Commandments were done away with(although we know that is not true) and you only have to keep the new Commandments, and the Sabbath was not included in the new ones, you can remind them, that the Ten Commandments did not establish the Sabbath, the Sabbath Day existed for thousands of years before then, and the Ten Commandments were simply reminding us to keep the Sabbath Day. It exist entirely outside the Ten Commandments.