My Sabbath-keeping friends commonly believe that God instituted the Sabbath at Creation. This claim is important to them because it rescues the Sabbath from the charge of being only a command for the Jews. They call the Sabbath a “Creation ordinance” and believe that God made it at the beginning for all mankind.

Yes, Genesis 2:1-3 says that God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. But it says that God did so because HE rested on that day. There is no mention of God commanding Adam and Eve to rest or to keep the seventh day holy. Nor is there any indication that God then established a recurring weekly rest day for all mankind.

But doesn’t the fact that God made the seventh day holy mean that we should observe it now? Not necessarily. God made many things holy in the past that are not holy now. And he sanctified some things without ever saying what that means for us today. For example, in Exodus, God sanctified all the firstborn of man and beast (Ex. 13.2). What does it mean for a firstborn child to be sanctified? We don’t know; the Bible doesn’t tell us. But it would be silly to claim, based on this verse, that firstborn people are holier than other people because they were sanctified by God in Exodus.

God also called the Virgin Mary “blessed” (Lk. 1:28) and he sanctified her by literally putting his presence inside her (vs. 35). But does this mean Mary is to be revered forever because she was blessed and sanctified by God at one time for a particular purpose? I don’t think my Sabbath-keeping friends would say so.

But if God didn’t institute the weekly Sabbath at Creation, why did he bless and sanctify the seventh day? Well, consider the state of the world on the seventh day of Creation: everything was finished and it was all “very good.” There was no sin, no death, no separation between God and man. The entire Creation was in its gorgeous primeval nativity. Adam and Eve dwelt in perfect harmony with each other and with their Creator. The ground was not cursed. Adam did not have to wrest a living from the ground by the sweat of his brow. Eve was not subservient to Adam and was not cursed with the pains of labor in childbirth. They were both naked, being perfectly innocent. There was no lust, no vanity, no shame. For the first and only time in human history, God and man were in full communion with each other.

Was any day ever more worthy of blessing and sanctification than this primeval seventh day of peace following the Creation of the world?

So, yes, the fourth commandment harks back to God’s rest at Creation, but that does not prove God established the weekly Sabbath then. Rather, the commandment points Israel to that original perfect relationship between God and man as an example of the kind of relationship God desired to have with Israel in the Promised Land.

Consider too: if God had established the Sabbath at Creation, Moses could scarcely have failed to record that fact. Yet in the divinely inspired record given by God for the reproof, correction, and instruction of his servants for many ages to come, there is nothing concerning a Sabbath commandment in Genesis. Moses’s failure to record such an event is pretty good evidence that he did not believe that Adam was given the Sabbath.

If God had given the Sabbath to all of mankind at Creation, he could not thereafter have given it to Israel as a special covenant sign identifying them as God’s people (Ex. 31:13). Exodus 16:29 expressly says that God gave the Sabbath to Israel while they were in the wilderness. There is no scripture saying that God ever gave the Sabbath to anyone else before that time. Moses himself said, “The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day” (Dt. 5:3). He then recites the Ten Commandments. 

If any further evidence were needed, we could simply look to the New Testament where the time from Adam to Moses is described as a time when “there is no law” (Rom. 5:13-14). Paul wrote, “Until the law, sin was in the world” and “the law entered that the offence might abound” (Rom. 5:13, 20). Paul also said the law was 430 years after Abraham (Gal. 3:17). Could Paul have made these statements if God gave the Ten Commandments with the Sabbath law to Adam and Eve 2,500 years before Moses?

The apostle John said, “The law was given by Moses” (Jn. 1:17). And Jesus said, “Did not Moses give you the law?” (Jn. 7:19). In John 7:22 Jesus acknowledges that circumcision, though part of the law of Moses, actually originated earlier with Abraham, noting that it was “of the fathers.” But Jesus says nothing about the Sabbath originating from Creation.

It is very inconsistent for my Sabbath-keeping friends to claim the Sabbath existed in Genesis–where the Sabbath is never mentioned–and then dismiss the New Testament evidence for Sunday worship, even though a Sunday church service is actually described in Acts 20:7-11.

But that’s a topic for another time . . . .