What Day Is God’s True Sabbath?

 Would it surprise you to know that the world has not always followed a seven-day week? That past civilizations often had no knowledge of the seven-day week we know today? Afterall, the seven-day week comes from God’s Word, and they didn’t have God’s Word.

Let’s start from the beginning.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Creation took six days. Then, in Gen. 2:1-3, we find this: “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.”

In the beginning, God established a seven-day week: six days for work, the seventh day for rest. He blessed and sanctified the seventh day, that is, He made it holy. As Ex. 20:11 reminds us, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”

And what does this mean for us? The preceding verses, Ex. 20:8-10, tell us, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates.”

Six days you shall work. The seventh day you shall rest. God set an example for us to follow.

And whatever God has created and blessed, Satan hates and tries to destroy. Marriage? The family? Honesty and truth? Basic morality? Whatever God loves, Satan hates.

So, of course, Satan hates the Sabbath, too.

From Creation till now, Satan has assailed and besieged God’s Sabbath, tried to bury it in lies and confusion, and spurred mankind to profane it and hate it. And no wonder, for Heb. 4 reveals that the Sabbath foreshadows God’s Kingdom, in which there’ll be no place for Satan, his demons, or any wickedness. Under Satan’s influence, carnal humans also hate the Sabbath, “because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be” (Rom. 8:7).

One of Satan’s tricks is to spread confusion about the Sabbath. Is it Saturday? Is it Sunday? Is it a day of our own choosing, as long as it's “one day in seven”? Is it based, not on a continuous seven-day week, but on the days of the month — the so-called “lunar Sabbath”?

Has God’s Sabbath ever changed? Has He preserved it unchanged from Creation until today?

We’ll prove from God’s Word that His Sabbath falls on “Saturday,” and that it stands solid and unchanging from Creation till now. In a manner of speaking, the dead will speak, too, for a multitude of ancient witnesses will come forward to affirm these truths. Establishing these truths will obliterate Sunday worship, the “lunar sabbath,” the “solar sabbath,” and any other idea that challenges God’s seventh-day Sabbath.

Let’s start with the basics.

The Sabbath Is the Seventh Day

Throughout the Bible, God calls the Sabbath the seventh day. In Gen. 1-2, God created the world in six days and rested the seventh. In Ex. 16, God commanded the Israelites to gather food day by day for six days, including a double portion on the sixth day, and to rest on the seventh day. In Ex. 20:9-10 and Deut. 5:13-14, God said, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath.”

God repeats, nearly verbatim, this command to work for six days and rest on the seventh day in Ex. 31:15, Ex. 34:21, Ex. 35:2, and Lev. 23:3. It’s repeated so often, we cannot mistake it. Work for six days, rest on the seventh day. Heb. 4:4, as well, affirms that the Sabbath is the seventh day.

The Sabbath is not the first day. It’s not the eighth day. It’s not the fifth day or the sixth day. The Sabbath is the seventh day.

If, at any time, there were more or less than six days between one Sabbath and another, then the Sabbath would no longer be the seventh day. Yet God’s Word tells us over and over again, from the Old Testament to the New, that the Sabbath is the seventh day.

This, in turn, establishes a never-ending seven-day cycle — a week — each one ending in a Sabbath. More on that in a moment.

First, it’s important to note that any “lunar sabbath” scheme would disrupt this seven-day cycle. Why? Because “lunar sabbath” proponents start a new cycle with each new moon, and no lunar month is evenly divisible by 7.

Here’s how it works. The moon orbits the earth in roughly 29.5 days, on average, so there are about 29.5 days between each new moon. Lunar months, then, alternate between 29 and 30 days, neither of which is evenly divisible by 7 days.

There are several “lunar sabbath” schemes, but the most common is to count from each new moon and set aside the 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th days of each month as a “sabbath.” If the 29th day is a Sabbath, by the “lunar sabbath” model, the next Sabbath wouldn’t be until the 8th day of the following month. That’s not seven days later; that’s either eight or nine days later, depending on whether the month is 29 or 30 days!

Each and every month, the “lunar sabbath” model creates a Sabbath that is not the seventh day, as God commanded over and over again, but a “sabbath” that’s the eighth day or ninth day! Lunar sabbatarians try to resolve this discrepancy by claiming that the extra days simply don’t count. The sun sets, rises, and sets again, but apparently it’s not a real day and doesn’t count! This is — pardon the expression — lunacy.

No matter what day “lunar sabbath” folks begin their count each month, they will end up with some “sabbaths” that are eight or nine days apart. Seven-day weeks, as God established, simply don’t line up with lunar months! Nor do they line up with solar months, for that matter. This is why God, in His Word, never made any connection between the seventh-day Sabbath and the calculation of months — not ever.

But, as always, don’t just take my word for it. Search your Bibles, please, and see if there’s any mention, anywhere in the Old or New Testaments, of the seventh-day Sabbath being connected to the new moon or monthly calculations.

The Truth About the Seven-day Week

Speaking of seven-day weeks, is there any other kind? Pagan cultures in various times and places have adopted “weeks” of five days, eight days, ten days, or some other length. But this isn’t what God established at Creation or legislated for His people.

In Hebrew, the word “week” is shavua (Strong’s # H7620), and literally means “sevened, a period of seven.” It’s related to the Hebrew words shava (Strong’s # H7650), meaning “to swear or bind by an oath,” and sheva (Strong’s # H7651), which means “seven.”

From that, we can deduce that a shavua, a period of seven days, is an oath or binding of seven. In other words, it cannot vary. A week is always seven days. No more, no less.

If this isn’t enough, the Bible itself defines the word for us.

In Lev. 23:15-16, God gave His people these instructions for counting to the third annual Holy Day, Pentecost: “You shall count for yourselves from the day after the Sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave offering: seven Sabbaths shall be completed. Count fifty days to the day after the seventh Sabbath.”

What does it mean to count seven Sabbaths?

Deut. 16:9 helps us out with this: “You shall count seven weeks for yourself; begin to count the seven weeks from the time you begin to put the sickle to the grain.” Ah. Seven Sabbaths equals seven weeks, that is, 49 days. The 50th day, “the day after the seventh Sabbath,” is Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks.

There can be no Sabbath without a week, nor a week without a Sabbath. This, too, destroys the “lunar sabbath” theory, for under such a scheme, no period of 49 days will ever equal seven weeks.

Let’s look at another verse. Ezek. 45:21 tells us, “In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, you shall observe the Passover, a feast of seven days; unleavened bread shall be eaten.” Guess what the Hebrew word translated “seven” in this passage is? Shavua, or week!

Many, many passages establish that the Feast of Passover, or Unleavened Bread, is seven days (Ex. 12:15, 19; 13:6-7; 23:15; 34:18; Lev. 23:6; Num. 28:17; Deut. 16:3-4; 2 Chron. 30:21-23; 35:17; Ezra 6:22). It is a week of days, that is, seven days. Not six days, not eight days, but seven days. No more, no less.

The Old Testament’s Hebrew language teaches us that a week is precisely seven days. No more, and no less. It can never vary from seven days, nor can the Sabbath ever vary from being the seventh and final day of the week.

The Greek language of the New Testament teaches us the same lesson. In the New Testament, a “week” is Sabbaton (Strong’s # G4521), which means “Sabbath, seven days, week.”

Even in English, a week means seven days unless one adds some other distinction, such as “work week.” Here’s the definition of “week” according to Dictionary.com:

1. a period of seven successive days

2. the period of seven days from Sunday through Saturday, generally understood as the common representation of a week on a calendar

3. a period of seven successive days that begins with or includes an indicated day

4. (often initial capital letter) a period of seven successive days devoted to a particular celebration, honor, cause, etc.

5. the working days or working portion of the seven-day period; workweek

Almighty God never forgot what a week is. He never lost count of days and weeks. He preserved the seven-day week and the Sabbath from Creation until now, just as He preserved the Bible for us. The seven-day weekly cycle He created in Genesis 1-2 is the same weekly cycle we have today.

God never let any part of His truth be destroyed; He preserved everything we need to know. His truth isn’t hidden in a lost scroll in some secret cave. As we read in Deut. 30:11-14,

11 “For this commandment which I command you today is not too mysterious for you, nor is it far off.

12 “It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend into heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’

13 “Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’

14 “But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it.”

Again, in Isa. 45:19, God says, “I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth; I did not say to the seed of Jacob, ‘Seek Me in vain’; I, the LORD, speak righteousness, I declare things that are right.”

Finally, in Rom. 16:25-26, the Apostle Paul wrote that the gospel of Jesus Christ had been “kept secret since the world began but now made manifest, and by the prophetic Scriptures made known to all nations, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, for obedience to the faith.”

In the Old Testament, God committed His Word and His way of life to the Israelites, and later, after He exiled the northern ten tribes, to the Jews alone. As the Apostle Paul wrote of the Jews in Rom. 3:2, “to them were committed the oracles of God.” Outside of the Jews, most of the world didn’t have God’s Word.

But in the last two or three centuries before Christ’s birth, God indeed began to make His Scriptures available to all nations. And after Christ’s sacrifice, His disciples traveled far and wide spreading His Word, fulfilling their Master’s command to “make disciples of all the nations” (Mat. 28:19). Today, God’s Word is indeed “made known to all nations.”

So what about Old Testament times, before this happened? Without God’s Word to educate them, did the world’s people know about the Sabbath or the seven-day week?

Was the Week LOST?

Before Jesus Christ came to earth and died for our sins, much of the world forgot God’s ways, including the seventh-day Sabbath and the seven-day week. The Jews, the preservers of God’s Word, stood as the only notable exception.

The ancient Egyptians and Chinese are thought to have followed a ten-day cycle rather than God’s seven-day week. The Romans followed an eight-day cycle until coming into contact with the Jews, after which they adopted the seven-day week. These are only a few examples.

The ancient Babylonians followed a lunar sabbath system. They set aside the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th days of every lunar month as “evil days,” on which they prohibited certain activities but still allowed work. They called these days shabbatu, after the Hebrew Shabbat.

For reasons that are unclear to me, “lunar sabbath” proponents point to the heathen Babylonians and their lunar sabbaths as an example that we should follow. Does God’s Word tell us to follow the Babylonians?

Quite the contrary! In Rev. 17, God calls Babylon “Mystery Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the Earth,” and in Rev. 18:4 says, “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues.” Again, in Jer. 51:45, God warns His people about Babylon, “My people, go out of the midst of her! And let everyone deliver himself from the fierce anger of the LORD.”

We’ve already seen plenty of Scriptural evidence that the Babylonian lunar sabbath is contrary to God’s Word. Now, let’s call forward our first ancient witness: Philo, an Alexandrian Jew contemporary with Jesus Christ.

Philo contrasted the Biblical Sabbath with the lunar “sabbath” of the heathens, writing, “Now some states keep the holy festival only once in the month, counting from the new moon, as a day sacred to God; but the nation of the Jews keep every seventh day regularly, after each interval of six days” (The Decalogue, ch. 20).

In fact, many ancient witnesses testify to the regularity of the seventh-day Sabbath and the weekly cycle. We’ll examine a few of them. But first, what did Yeshua/Jesus do while He lived here on earth?

What Did Jesus Do?

It’s important to note that our Savior, Jesus Christ, observed the seventh-day Sabbath throughout His life on earth, for He Himself had created it! “Without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3).

Jesus reminded His hearers, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). When was the Sabbath made? At the very beginning, at Creation. And who made it? Jesus Himself, the “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28; Luke 6:5).

Throughout the New Testament, Yeshua/Jesus and all His followers kept the seventh-day Sabbath “according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56). Anyone who claims to follow Christ “ought himself also to walk just as He walked” (1 John 2:6).

Now, the Bible records no disagreement between Yeshua’s followers and the rest of the Jews about which day was the Sabbath, none whatsoever. On the contrary, He told His disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do, but do not do according to their works; for they say, and do not do” (Mat. 23:2-3).

So, then, what day did the Jews of Jesus’ day observe as the Sabbath? God’s Word tells that “by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established” (Mat. 18:16). We have many more witnesses than that!

Ancient Witnesses

Both Jews and pagans recorded that the Jews kept the Sabbath every seventh day, and that it always fell on the day the Romans called “Saturn’s day,” or as we call it today, “Saturday.” I present these witnesses to you, not as Godly men, but as men whose testimony agrees with God’s Word and gives us a contemporary view of the life and times of our Savior.

Let’s continue with Philo. He testified, as we saw above, that “the Jews keep every seventh day regularly, after each interval of six days” (Decalogue, ch. 20). He also observed that the Sabbath is “the sacred seventh day after each recurring interval of six days” (The Special Laws, II, ch. 15).

Yet again, Philo wrote, “Not only that those who were free should abstain from all works on the seventh day, but also that their servants and handmaids should have a respite from their tasks, proclaiming a day of freedom to them also after every space of six days” (Ibid., ch. 16). Finally, “Every seventh day is sacred, which is called by the Hebrews the sabbath” (Ibid., ch. 19).

So Philo, whose life overlapped Jesus Christ’s own, testified that the seventh-day Sabbath follows a continuous weekly cycle without any regard to the month. The Sabbath of Jesus’ day, and the Sabbath of Creation, is every seven days — no ifs, ands, or buts about it!

The Greek historian Agatharchides (2nd-cent. BC) wrote, as quoted by Josephus, “There are a people called Jews; and dwell in a city the strongest of all other cities, which the inhabitants call Jerusalem; and are accustomed to rest on every seventh day. On which times they make no use of their arms, nor meddle with husbandry, nor take care of any affairs of life; but spread out their hands in their holy places, and pray till the evening” (Josephus, Against Apion, 1:1:22).

Speaking of Josephus, a Jewish priest born shortly after Jesus’ death, he, too, testified that the Sabbath is “every seventh day” (Antiquities of the Jews, 3:12:3 and 13:8:1; Wars of the Jews, 1:2:4). He further documented the Jews’ custom of beginning and ending the Sabbath with a trumpet blast, writing, “One of the priests stood of course, and gave a signal beforehand, with a trumpet at the beginning of every seventh day, in the evening twilight: as also at the evening, when that day was finished: as giving notice to the people when they were to leave off work, and when they were to go to work again” (Wars, 4:9:12).

Centuries before Josephus, King David had established Levitical divisions to serve in the temple (1 Chron. 23-24, 26). These men served from one Sabbath to another, coming on duty one Sabbath and going off duty on the next Sabbath (2 Kings 11:4-9; 2 Chron. 23:4-8). As 1 Chron. 9:22-25 notes, this meant each division served for a total of “seven days.”

Josephus, counting both the Sabbath the men went on duty as well as the Sabbath they went off duty, counted it as eight days (Antiquities, 7:14:7), each course overlapping with the next. He added that this custom had continued without interruption from David’s time down to his own, a span of more than 1,000 years.

This, of course, means that there was never an interruption in the weekly cycle, never a time when a Sabbath had been more than seven days from another Sabbath. God never allowed the seven-day week to change.

In AD 69, thirty-nine years after Yeshua/Jesus’ death in AD 30, the Jews rebelled against Rome, and the Roman general Vespasian invaded Judea to put down the revolt. A contemporary Roman soldier named Frontinus wrote, “Divus Augustus Vespasianus Iudaeos Saturni die, quo eis nefas est quicquam seriae rei agere, adortus superavit,” that is, “The divine Augustus Vespasian attacked the Jews on Saturn’s day, when it is wrong for them to do any business, and overcame them” (Frontinus, Strategems, 2:1:17). “Saturn’s day,” of course, is Saturday, the seventh-day Sabbath!

Perhaps the most famous of all Roman historians, Tacitus (1st-cent. AD), could barely contain his hatred and contempt for the Jews and wove ridiculous falsehoods into his “history” of them. Yet he, too, noted the Jews’ observance of the seventh-day Sabbath, which he linked to Saturn because of the day on which the Sabbath fell (Tacitus, The Histories, bk. 5, ch. 4).

Still another Roman historian, Cassius Dio, testified that the Sabbath fell on “Saturn’s day” throughout the centuries. In 63 BC, when Pompey captured Jerusalem and brought the Jews under Roman rule, Cassius Dio noted that Pompey pressed his siege every “Saturn’s day” because of the Jews’ reluctance to fight on the Sabbath (Rome, bk. 37, ch. 16-17). Again in 37 BC, Mark Antony captured Jerusalem on “Saturn’s day” for the same reason (Ibid., bk. 49, ch. 22).

Finally, in AD 70, the Romans again captured Jerusalem, and this time they also destroyed the temple. Ancient Jewish writings say this happened on Sabbath, the 9th of Av, which is the 5th month on the Hebrew calendar. Cassius Dio confirms this was a Sabbath, writing, “Thus was Jerusalem destroyed on the very day of Saturn, which even now the Jews reverence most” (Rome, bk. 66, ch. 7).

At this point, we should note that the Sabbath bears no relationship to Saturn, a grotesque Roman deity corresponding to Baal and Molech in the Bible, as we’ve seen previously. God created the Sabbath when He created the world; the Romans labeled it “Saturday” thousands of years afterward. Likewise, God created the seven-day weekly cycle at Creation; the heathens attempted to profane it by naming the days after their pagan gods.

Yet the testimony of the Jews, Greeks, and Romans all affirm that the Sabbath fell on the seventh day of the week. When Jesus Christ walked this earth, He kept the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week, which the Romans called “Saturday.” Both He and the Jewish society He lived in shunned any notion of a “lunar sabbath” or of Sunday worship.

So why, then, does most of the Christian world keep Sunday instead of the seventh-day Sabbath? Why don’t they walk as Jesus walked? Let’s find out!

From Sabbath to Sunday?

As we’ve seen, Satan obscured the seven-day week from many ancient peoples. Yet God’s truth began to spread shortly before Jesus Christ came to earth, and afterward expanded exponentially as His disciples traveled far and wide preaching the gospel.

The apostles observed, “For Moses has had throughout many generations those who preach him in every city, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath” (Acts 15:21). Josephus, too, observed that, in his own day, “There is not any city of the Grecians, nor any of the barbarians, nor any nation whatsoever, whither our custom of resting on the seventh day hath not come” (Against Apion, 2:1:40).

So, as the seven-day week and the seventh-day Sabbath spread throughout the world, Satan turned to another means of perverting the Sabbath. What better challenge to the Sabbath, the seventh and last day of the week, than Sunday, the first day of the week? The day on which God’s creation had only begun, and the day on which “the earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2).

One of the early rivals to Christianity, as noted previously, was Mithraism, a sun-worshiping religion transmitted throughout the Roman Empire during the first century BC. The Mithraists worshiped the sun on Sunday and celebrated December 25th as the birthday of the sun god.

Like the Israelites of old, who adopted the practices of the heathen around them, so did the early church. Rather than following God’s Word or the example of their Savior and His disciples, many so-called Christians began worshiping on Sunday.

The heresy crept in slowly. No records mention Christians observing Sunday until AD 115, long after Yeshua/Jesus’ apostles were dead. Then, many Christians began celebrating both the Sabbath and Sunday, without resting on Sunday. Even as late as the 5th century AD, the church writer Sozomen mentioned Christians observing both days (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, 7:19).

Naturally, Christians tried to find Scriptural justification for adopting pagan customs. It’s human nature to justify oneself rather than admit wrongdoing and repent. In this case, they argued that, after Jesus’ resurrection, He appeared to His disciples on the first day of the week (Mat. 28:1; Mark 16:2; Luke 24:1; John 20).

Never mind the fact that Yeshua/Jesus never set aside the first day of the week, never made it holy, and never commanded us to commemorate it in any way! Such facts apparently don’t matter when one tries to justify adopting heathen customs.

In the 2nd century AD, “Christian” writer Justin Martyr tried to defend Sunday worship in place of the Sabbath, writing, “But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God… made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead” (Justin Martyr, The First Apology, ch. 67). He went on to contrast Sunday with “Saturn’s day,” that is, God’s seventh-day Sabbath.

About this time, or shortly afterward, another church writer named Tertullian also tried to defend Sunday worship. He claimed that Christians devoted “Sun-day to rejoicing, from a far different reason than Sun-worship” (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 16). In the same work, he, too, contrasted Sunday with “Saturn’s day,” God’s seventh-day Sabbath.

In another document, Tertullian recorded that Christians were often accused of sun worship: “Others, with greater regard to good manners, it must be confessed, suppose that the sun is the god of the Christians, because it is a well-known fact that we pray towards the east, or because we make Sunday a day of festivity.” (Ad Nationes, bk. 1, ch. 13). But he barely seemed bothered by being labeled a sun worshiper, continuing, “What then? Do you do less than this? Do not many among you, with an affectation of sometimes worshiping the heavenly bodies likewise, move your lips in the direction of the sunrise? It is you, at all events, who have even admitted the sun into the calendar of the week; and you have selected its day, in preference to the preceding day as the most suitable in the week” (Ibid.).

Ah, yes. Forsaking God’s truth and appropriating the sun worship of the heathens was okay because others did it, too. Such a familiar, childish excuse!

As noted previously, the blending of sun worship with Christianity resulted in Pope Leo I, during the 5th century AD, complaining about church-goers worshiping the sun on the very steps of his church (Leo I, Sermon 27: On the Feast of the Nativity, VII [Pt. IV]).

Centuries later, Francis of Assissi cemented the blending of sun-worship with Christianity, writing in his “Canticle of the Sun,” “Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness."

In AD 321, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, the first “Christian” emperor, decreed that Sunday would be the Roman “sabbath.”. His edict reads, “On the venerable Day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed.”

This attempt “to change times and law” (Dan. 7:25), to transfer God’s seventh-day Sabbath to “the venerable Day of the Sun,” was applauded by apostate Christians. The church historian Eusebius boasted, without a shred of Scriptural evidence, that the Sabbath had been transferred to Sunday.

In AD 363, at the Council of Laodicea, the church prohibited observance of God’s Sabbath and ruled that church members should keep Sunday instead! The church’s ruling reads, “Christians must not Judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord’s Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians.  But if any shall be found to be Judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ.”

What blasphemy! What unmitigated gall these puny mortals had to think they could change God’s laws and replace them with the laws of the pagans at their own whim!

Yet numerous Catholics and Protestants have admitted that the church, acting on its own authority and without any Scriptural justification, replaced the seventh-day Sabbath with Sunday. Let’s take a look at some of these eye-popping confessions!

Catholic and Protestant Confessions About Sunday

The Bible Sabbath Association compiled a long list of “Roman Catholic and Protestant Confessions About Sunday,” along with exhaustive documentation. I’ve reproduced some of these quotes here.

For the Catholic Church, James Cardinal Gibbons wrote, “But you may read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and you will not find a single line authorizing the sanctification of Sunday. The Scriptures enforce the religious observance of Saturday, a day which we never sanctify” (The Faith of our Fathers, 88th ed., p. 89).

Another Catholic, Stephen Keenan, writing in A Doctrinal Catechism, addressed the question, “Have you any other way of proving that the Church has power to institute festivals of precept?” He responded as follows: “Had she not such power, she could not have done that in which all modern religionists agree with her — she could not have substituted the observance of Sunday, the first day of the week, for the observance of Saturday, the seventh day, a change for which there is no Scriptural authority” (A Doctrinal Catechism, 3rd ed., p. 174).

The Catholic Virginian observed, “For example, nowhere in the Bible do we find that Christ or the Apostles ordered that the Sabbath be changed from Saturday to Sunday. We have the commandment of God given to Moses to keep holy the Sabbath day, that is the 7th day of the week, Saturday. Today most Christians keep Sunday because it has been revealed to us by the [Roman Catholic] church outside the Bible” (Catholic Virginian, Oct. 3, 1947, p. 9, art. “To Tell You the Truth”).

Yet another Catholic lecturer boasted, “I have repeatedly offered $1,000 to anyone who can prove to me from the Bible alone that I am bound to keep Sunday holy. There is no such law in the Bible. It is a law of the holy Catholic Church alone. The Bible says, ‘Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.’ The Catholic Church says: ‘No. By my divine power I abolish the Sabbath day and command you to keep holy the first day of the week.’ And lo! The entire civilized world bows down in a reverent obedience to the command of the holy Catholic Church” (T. Enright, C.S.S.R., in a lecture at Hartford, Kansas, Feb. 18,1884).

The Lutherans admitted that, “We have seen how gradually the impression of the Jewish sabbath faded from the mind of the Christian Church, and how completely the newer thought underlying the observance of the first day took possession of the church. We have seen that the Christians of the first three centuries never confused one with the other, but for a time celebrated both” (The Sunday Problem, a study book of the United Lutheran Church [1923], p. 36).

Again, they acknowledged, “They [Roman Catholics] refer to the Sabbath Day, as having been changed into the Lord’s Day, contrary to the Decalogue, as it seems. Neither is there any example whereof they make more than concerning the changing of the Sabbath Day. Great, say they, is the power of the Church, since it has dispensed with one of the Ten Commandments!” (Augsburg Confession of Faith art. 28; written by Melanchthon, approved by Martin Luther, 1530; as published in The Book of Concord of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Henry Jacobs, ed. [1911], p. 63).

Another denomination, the Disciples of Christ, acknowledged, “The first day of the week is commonly called the Sabbath. This is a mistake. The Sabbath of the Bible was the day just preceding the first day of the week. The first day of the week is never called the Sabbath anywhere in the entire Scriptures. It is also an error to talk about the change of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. There is not in any place in the Bible any intimation of such a change” (First Day Observance, pp. 17, 19).

As for the Baptists, Dr. Edward T. Hiscox proclaimed at a New York ministers’ conference on Nov. 13, 1893,

“There was and is a commandment to keep holy the Sabbath day, but that Sabbath day was not Sunday. It will be said, however, and with some show of triumph, that the Sabbath was transferred from the seventh to the first day of the week …. Where can the record of such a transaction be found? Not in the New Testament absolutely not.

“To me it seems unaccountable that Jesus, during three years’ intercourse with His disciples, often conversing with them upon the Sabbath question . . . never alluded to any transference of the day; also, that during forty days of His resurrection life, no such thing was intimated.

“Of course, I quite well know that Sunday did come into use in early Christian history…. But what a pity it comes branded with the mark of paganism, and christened with the name of the sun god, adopted and sanctioned by the papal apostasy, and bequeathed as a sacred legacy to Protestantism!”

There are many more such quotes, which you may find at the Bible Sabbath Association website. For our purposes, this should suffice.

The mainstream Christian world goes to church on Sunday and profanes the Sabbath, not because God authorized them to do so, but because, long after Yeshua/Jesus’ original disciples had died, the church decided to adopt the customs of the heathen. The modern Catholic and Protestant churches have followed in their footsteps and continue to worship on “the venerable Day of the Sun” rather than on God’s seventh-day Sabbath.

Conclusion

Those of us who seek to follow Jesus Christ, who call ourselves by His name — that is, Christians — should “walk just as He walked” (1 John 2:6). He created the seventh-day Sabbath when He created the world, He commanded His people in the Old Testament to keep it holy, and He kept it holy as long as He walked on this earth. Nowhere, anywhere in the Bible, does God proclaim any other weekday holy.

From Creation until now, God has preserved the seven-day week and the seventh-day Sabbath, unbroken and unchanged. Every effort of mortal man to adopt some other system has failed.

In fact, to this very day, many of the world’s languages call the seventh day by some variation of the word “Sabbath,” as you can see in the picture here.

God’s truth isn’t hidden. It’s there for anyone to see who has eyes to see.

Despite Satan’s efforts to confuse people about the seven-day week or about the seventh-day Sabbath, God has preserved His truth. Remember, “God is not the author of confusion but of peace” (1 Cor. 14:33). Chaos and confusion is Satan’s way, not God’s. Therefore, any confusion over the Sabbath stems from Satan and not from God.

Let us cast off the lunar Sabbath lunacy and the Sunday sun worship and obey our Creator’s commandments as He gave them to us!