I don’t try to resolve it that way. Jesus was led by the Spirit on Earth, and He quite often “worked” on the Sabbath. He gave the illustrations of watering your livestock (Lk 13:15), pulling an animal out of the well on the Sabbath (Lk 14:5), or the priests laboring in the temple on the Sabbath (Matt 12:5), and concluded that, “It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” (Matt 12:12) So here is how I resolve it. I look at all of God’s written laws as outward pictures of deeper spiritual truths, and I study them, not to bind myself under them, but to learn the wisdom behind them so I can delight my Lord by learning to love what He loves and hate what He hates.

For example, those dietary laws I mentioned. I don’t throw them out any more than I throw the Ten Commandments out. I learn from them. For example, people who eat “kosher” (according to those laws) don’t get most kinds of cancers. So I avoid eating the “unclean” animals like pig and shellfish.

My favorite example is the old ceremonial laws, including those on the Feasts of Israel. That’s what I wrote my book about! No, we are not bound by those laws to celebrate the Feasts, but if we will humble ourselves to learn from them, we will discover much wisdom concerning God, His Plan of the Ages, our own purpose in life, and our destiny.

And the Ten Commandments – they’re not just a list of “Thou shalt nots.” They teach us about things God likes and things He hates, so we can have a closer relationship with Him and become like Him. For example, the fifth Commandment teaches us how He loves families, with children submitting to and honoring their father and mother. The sixth Commandment teaches us how He values human life as uniquely sacred and hates murder, especially of the innocent (as in abortion). The seventh, eighth, and ninth Commandments teach us how He hates immorality, theft, and lies, thus valuing faithfulness and integrity.

So, back to the Sabbath and my original questions. No. Sunday is not the Christian Sabbath. The seventh day is, always has been, and always will be the Sabbath. It begins on our Friday evening at sundown, and ends on our Saturday at sundown. No Scriptural injunction can be construed to authorize the change to Sunday. That happened at the beginning of the old Roman Catholic perversions of Scripture which led to the Dark Ages.

And no, we who are being led by the Spirit are not bound under it, any more than we are bound under any of God’s Law. Many of us are led by God’s Spirit to attend a church fellowship which meets on Sunday or some other day. That is not “breaking” the Sabbath Commandment any more than Jesus broke it by healing someone on the Sabbath. Gathering for worship and fellowship is something that God loves, and He loves it on any day that we who love what He loves do it.

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