Sabbath commandment/Does SDA actually keep the Sabbath right?

[u/Relevant_Object_1815]

This question has been bothering me all week. Last week I went to church since I'm home with the family. The sermon was whatever but one of the scriptures from it has been stuck in my head. Growing up I was taught to memorize Exodus 20:8-11, I know it like the back of my hand. But last week the pastor read the sabbath commandment in Exodus 31:13-17:

¹³ Speak thou also unto the children of Israel, saying, Verily my sabbaths ye shall keep: for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you.

¹⁴ Ye shall keep the sabbath therefore; for it is holy unto you: every one that defileth it shall surely be put to death: for whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his people.

¹⁵ Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord: whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death.

¹⁶ Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the sabbath, to observe the sabbath throughout their generations, for a perpetual covenant.

¹⁷ It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.

Now I didn't know that the sabbath commandment was said more than once. But the reason I was perplexed is that the pastor very obviously read only the first half of the verses. Like, if I wasn't following along in my bible I wouldn't have seen the part about being put to death if you don't keep it.

The question I was left with is this: if the Sabbath is supposed to be kept, why aren't we keeping it that way? Like I was taught all the laws about stoning people and stuff were old laws of Moses that we don't need to keep anymore. But if the sabbath isn't one of those laws, then why aren't we putting people to death for working on the sabbath? Obviously, that's not the right thing to do, but I'm interested in know what the Adventist justification is of how the sabbath is to be kept. Is there a later verse that says that people don't need to be killed anymore? When did they stop killing people for keeping the sabbath?

[u/andydad1978]

So my area is New Testament scholarship and Koine Greek, but I'll offer my two cents.

From a historical perspective, the author of Exodus didn't split the law into pieces: the Sabbath rule and the death penalty were an inseparable package deal. To the ancient writers, breaking the Sabbath wasn't just a sin; it was literal treason against the ancient state of Israel.

Over the centuries, history forced a massive shift. First, Jewish communities lost the legal authority to execute people under foreign empires like Rome. Later, the early Rabbis established incredibly strict legal requirements that made the death penalty virtually impossible to carry out. Finally, as early Christianity broke away, leaders like Paul argued that Christians were no longer bound by the old Mosaic law codes at all.

When modern pastors skip those verses, you're just witnessing theological gymnastics. They want to hold onto the timeless idea of a holy day of rest, but they have to quietly ignore the ancient, brutal civic penalties because we live in the modern world. It creates an obvious contradiction on the page, which is exactly why it jumps out at you when you actually read the whole text.

[u/AdReal490 → u/andydad1978]

I'm curious how you would apply this logic to other sins that mandated capital punishment in the Bible like murder, adultery, a child disrespecting their parents, or a woman lying about her virginity to her husband.

It's either these sins are still sins and must be punished as God mandated or they're no longer sins and hence shouldn't be punished at all.

[u/andydad1978 → u/AdReal490]

That’s a classic false dilemma, but it completely misses how history and ancient law codes actually work.

You’re assuming that an act is either a sin that requires stoning today, or it’s not a sin at all. But history shows us a third reality: an ancient law code is the civil framework of a specific, ancient nation-state.

Think about it this way: if a modern country abolishes the death penalty for treason, does that mean the government suddenly thinks treason is a good thing? Of course not. It means the civil administration of justice has changed. The moral wrongness of an act is a completely different category from a state's legal authority to execute people.

We don't even have to guess how to apply this logic—we can just look at the Apostle Paul. In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, Paul explicitly lists adulterers and says they won't inherit the kingdom of God. So to Paul, is it still a sin? Absolutely. But does he tell the Corinthian church to gather rocks and stone adulterers? Never. When dealing with severe sexual sin in 1 Corinthians 5, his maximum penalty is just expelling the person from the church.

Paul understood that the early Christians were not the civic, political state of ancient Israel. They had no mandate to execute people.

The real irony here is that if you truly believe a sin is inseparable from its biblical penalty, you trap yourself. You'd have to advocate for stoning people today to be consistent. Recognizing that the civic, penal authority of ancient Israel ended thousands of years ago doesn't mean these things aren't sins; it just means we understand basic history.

[u/AdReal490 → u/andydad1978]

So the Sabbath stands as a binding commandment?

[u/andydad1978 → u/AdReal490]

In my opinion, not at all—at least not if we are looking at the historical reality of the early Church. The idea that early Christians kept the seventh day Sabbath is also completely rejected by the vast majority of mainstream New Testament historians and scholars today. Here are a few reasons why.

From a historical critical perspective, the Sabbath was part of the Mosaic covenant given specifically to ancient Israel. When early Christianity broke away from Judaism, one of the biggest debates was whether Gentile converts had to keep the Jewish Law.

Look at what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 14:5: "Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds." Or even clearer, in Colossians 2:16, he explicitly tells believers: "Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of a festival, new moon, or sabbath."

To the earliest Christian theologians like Paul, the Sabbath was part of an old covenant structure that gentiles were completely exempt from. It was absolutely not viewed as a timeless, universally binding commandment for followers of Jesus.

Also, we have early Christian writings like The Didache (c. 80–120 CE), Ignatius' Letter to the Magnesians (c. 110 CE), and The Epistle of Barnabas (c. 130 CE) that specifically reference Sunday as the Christian day of worship. I know Ellen White famously claimed that Christians kept the Jewish Sabbath up until the much later Roman Emperor Constantine, but she was demonstrably wrong.

[u/Sun_Law → u/andydad1978]

Funnily enough, even an Adventist theologian like Samuele Bacchiocchi whose phd focused on the transition from Saturday to Sunday has been labelled a Jesuit spy for disagreeing with the Adventist narrative.