A gracEmail subscriber wrote: “I challenge Seventh-day Adventists to come up with one quote which shows that any Christians kept the Jewish Sabbath prior to Constantine.”
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According to Acts 21:20, many thousands of Jews believed in Jesus as the Messiah, and continued to zealously observe Torah. These Jewish believers naturally continued to observe the Sabbath, though now with new meaning in view of Christ’s finished work of atonement (Matt. 11:28-30; Heb. 4:1-11). Further, the Apostle Paul expended considerable energy to demonstrate that he did not stand in their way (Acts 21:20-26). Torah observance (law-keeping) aroused Paul’s concern only when it became Law-depending and thus interfered with the gospel message of justification by grace through faith (Gal. 5:4).
In Christ, every day is dedicated to God (Acts 2:46; 1 Thes. 5:17). The gospel leaves decisions about preferential regard for days to the consciences of individual believers. So long as they trust in Jesus alone for salvation, there is no place for Christians to judge one another on the matter. The motive prompting observance of a particular day was the issue with Paul, not the observance of the day itself (contrast Galatians 4:10-11, opposing a legalistic observance, with Romans 14:5-6, approving an observance based only on pleasing Christ).
Seventh-day Adventists would rephrase your comment at the head of this piece to say, “We challenge Sunday-observing Christians to come up with any New Testament evidence that God changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.” To that extent, they are correct, for the Bible never speaks of Sunday as the Sabbath. The pertinent question is not whether Saturday is the Sabbath, but whether Scripture ever requires non-Jews who trust in Jesus to observe the Sabbath. To that question, the answer is clearly “No.” We thus have liberty to gather in honor of Christ on the first day of the week, as Gentile Christians have done since the first century, in commemoration of his resurrection on that day from among the dead.
