I cannot remember knowing a Christian that observed the sabbath. Most seem to instead observe the lord’s day on Sundays, which is not the sabbath.
Do any of the branches of Christians follow the ten commandments? Are they required to follow all or just some?
I know that Seventh Day Adventists and their kin all observe the Sabbath. I also know a lot of Christians of every denomination that will not work on Saturday.
I, as a Christian, see Romans 14 as an indication that it doesn’t matter. Verse 5 lumps in viewing days as special as being as unimportant as what food you eat. The entire passage is about how unimportant it all is, but Paul clearly lumps himself in with the people who do not think it matters. He only honors it out of respect to the people he is with.
How is keeping the sabbath on Sunday a violation of a Commandment?
Regards,
Shodan
It is not the Sabbath anymore than Wednesday.
How did you determine that? There is nothing in the Bible that specifies Saturday as the day on which the sabbath must be kept.
Regards,
Shodan
We don’t know if God’s calendar starts the week on Sunday or Monday. 
Well the Jews wrote the bible, and they were celebrating the Sabbath on Saturday long before Jesus was even a twinkle in Mary’s ovary.
Remember, the Sabbath is the seventh day, the one God rested on. You can’t just say “any old day will work, as long as God gets his”. It has to be THE seventh day, so either the Jews or the Pope is wrong, it can’t be both ways. Personally, I would assume that the people and culture who invented the entire concept had it right for thousands of years, and the upstarts who came along later and changed it were the ones who got it wrong.
I realize it’s not an airtight argument, but I don’t care because it’s like arguing how many angels can dance on a pinhead. Pointless.
OK, how do you know that God started work on Sunday instead of Monday like the rest of us?
Regards,
Shodan
I just spelled out my argument: The Jews invented the concept, and they said so.
The OP asked if Christians followed the Ten Commandments, and gave celebrating the sabbath on Sunday instead of Saturday as an example. So where *in the Ten Commandments *do the Jews, or God, specify that it has to be Saturday?
Regards,
Shodan
The Sabbath is a concept invented by Jews, and in a book written by Jews (and taken by most Christians as the Word of God), it says we must keep the seventh day holy. The seventh day, according to the Jews, the very authors and progenitors of the concept of the Sabbath, is Saturday.
Again, it’s not an airtight argument, I admit. But let’s turn it around: Where in the ten commandments, or anywhere in Christian scripture for that matter, does it say “The Jews were all wrong for thousands of years, Sunday is the REAL Sabbath”?
My point is that the change requires explanation, not the business as usual. Or rather, the original Sabbath only requires one explanation (one I don’t think is valid and that’s why I don’t observe the Sabbath), the change from one day to the other requires two. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the original Sabbath justification was valid, there still isn’t any valid argument that I’ve seen for changing it from Saturday to Sunday.
From looking at the Catholic Encyclopedia, it looks like Catholics are pretty open about celebrating the Lord’s Day instead of the Sabbath:
emphasis added.
And from Catholic.com:
emphasis
It looks like Catholics, going back to at least St. Ignatius (born 50 AD died 98-117 AD), have said that they no longer observe the Sabbath.
I was raised in a cult known as the World Wide Church Of God, or as I now call it, The World Wide Church of God Damned Lies.
Observing the “Sabbath” (sundown Friday until sundown Saturday) was required. No work, no shopping/buying things, no television. They never mentioned fucking which was good as when I was 16 I was nailing a deacons teenage daughter when my family went to their house for Friday night prayer and fellowship.
Members that were found to be violating the sabbath got stern counseling from the elder ministers which could include being “disfellowshiped” (not being allowed to come to the church any more. At the time I prayed and prayed that would happen to me!).
You may have gotten wind of a little event that occurred on a Sunday that Christians think kind of shook things up a bit and changed the rules.
Googling “new Covenant” could be a good start.
Basically, Christians believe God had a first covenant with the Israelites and that was fine, but then (as foretold by Jeremiah and maybe others) – they renegotiated the deal. Happens in the NFL all the time. And while the New Covenant applied to the Jews/Israelites, it became clear early on that the apostles thought it applied more universally, so the rules that had worked for the Hebrews were not sine qua nons. No one really thought, for instance, that you had to keep the rules of Kashrut if you were a formerly Jewish Christian, or non-Jewish convert. Heck, Paul intimated that he really didn’t think eating the meat of animals sacrificed to false gods was any big deal, which of course a pre-Resurrection Jew worth his salt would have freaked the Hell out about, properly interpreting the scriptures. Changing the observance of the Sabbath to the day of the Resurrection is hardly more “illegitimate” than overthrowing a bunch of rules from the Pentatuch.
P.S. The Israelites changed the rules themselves, sort of, when Jews decided all of the purification and sacrificing turtle dove rules were no longer really workable (I know it goes back to the Temple and is more complex than that, my point is that “hardcore orthodox Judaism,” including the Talmud, has always recognized that sometimes the rules could evolve).
P.P.S. One of the bigger criticisms Jesus encountered was being jumped on by Saducees or whoever for curing people on the Sabbath. Again consistent with a New Covenant and with Jesus (otherwise generally regarded as a good Jewish boy; they did call him “rabbi”) showing flexibility of substance over form.
I should note that in the many discussions I’ve had about religion, I’ve heard practicing Jews criticize or question this or that aspect of Christianity (divinity of Christ, obviously, Immaculate Conception, the Papacy) or the modern Church (confession, corruption, the pro-life doctrine). I have to say that not once has a self-identifying Jew quibbled or complained that Christianity as practiced today had corrupted or distorted the Sabbath. Among the real Orthodox, I’ve heard criticism that Christians aren’t observant enough because they work seven days a week, but unless I’m badly mistaken most Jewish people would acknowledge that the Christians, despite having backed the wrong horse for Messiah, did practice/observe a sabbath and (at least observant Christians) had their own forms of special prayers and observances/sacraments that were not different in kind or in spirit or appropriate reverence from that of the old-skool Friday sabbath.
I don’t know for sure the religious background/lack of anyone posting here, but wouldn’t it be passing strange to insist that Christians were fundamentally wrong/hypocritical as to the Sabbath, by reliance on Jewish laws/observances that even practicing Jews don’t see as the fundamental disconnect between the two religions? Put differently, who has standing to insist on purer-than-pure application of the Old Jewish Ways?
Shodan, the Gospel writers all agreed that the Sabbath was Saturday, and that Sunday was the first day of the week. We had this discussion last year, when Siam Sam was grumbling about Thai calendars starting the week on Monday. See this post and this post, quoting all four of the Evangelists: Jesus was crucified on Good Friday, and his body taken down in the evening and hastily entombed, before the Sabbath started. Then, early on the first day of the week, Sunday, the women came to the tomb, to prepared the body properly, and well, you know the rest…
But none that changes day of the week that is the Sabbath. It is fine to say Christians no longer need to observe the Sabbath, but they cannot change the Sabbath. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, early Christians decided to celebrate the Lord’s Day and not the Sabbath.
It seems the majority of Christians continue this practice, observing the Lord’s day instead of Sabbath, with a few exceptions.
No, but the Sabbath is a Jewish thing (at least originally), and Jews have been observing every seventh day as the Sabbath since ancient times and have never, so far as we know, lost count of the days.
There is a theory that originally the Sabbath was a monthly full-moon festival and that the Jews learned to make it a weekly one during their exile among the Babylonians, who counted seven planets (sun and moon included) and who invented the custom of counting the days by sevens; a different discussion.
Depends on what you mean by “observing.” Only some Christians consider it impious to do any work at all on a Sunday, the way observant Jews will not work from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday (and have filled volumes of commentary about what does or does not count as “work”).
I’m not sure why this is so hard. Christians want the 10 Commandments to be posted on the walls at schools, insist that our judicial system is based on it, and bring it out anytime they think they can use it to buttress their mean-spirited political views, but when it is inconvenient they say we have a new covenant and it’s actually OK to play football on Friday nights with a ball made from pig skin while they sit in the stands with their girlfriend after divorcing their first two wives and wear clothes made with mixed fibers and talk smack about the religion of the guy they worship. Just business as usual.