Morgan Books

THE MEANING OF SABBATH

(Sabbath doesn't actually mean Saturday)

By Amos Morgan

THE MEANING OF SABBATH

(A careful reading of scripture tells us that Good Friday was a Sabbath.)

Most of my life was spent thinking that Sabbath meant Saturday, but that created problems in understanding some of the scriptures in the Bible for most of my life..

God created the heavens and the earth and all that therein is in six days. On the seventh day he rested from all the labors he had done and sanctified the seventh day and made it Holy.

When God gave the law to Moses at Mt. Sinai as recorded in Leviticus he told him to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy; no work may be done on the Sabbath. But then something else happened which eluded many of us non-Jewish people. God added seven more Sabbaths to all the Saturdays. Jewish people are well aware of this but it passed by many of the rest of us unnoticed and left us in a fog. Someone had a conversation with some Jewish believers, discoverer why we have some of these problems of understanding and then passed the answer on for us.

God told Moses that all the males must appear before the Lord three times in the year. Those times are:
• The Feast of Unleavened Bread
• The Feast of Weeks
• The Feast of Tabernacles

Then God assigned seven Sabbaths to these three feasts and to two other special days. These seven Sabbaths are sanctified, Holy Days, and no work may be done on them. Since one of these feasts and the two additional High, Holy Days occur in the seventh Jewish month Tishrei, lets look there first.

There is no way we can match our calendar to the Hebrew calendar. The closest we can do is to look at them side by side and to note that September 21, 2017 on our calendar is Rosh Hosanna which is the first day of the seventh Jewish month on the Jewish calendar. High, Holy Days (Sabbaths) are shown in yellow: now let's look in Leviticus;
• All Saturdays are Sabbaths: Lev 23:3. It is a day of rest; "ye shall do no work therein;"
• Tishrei 1 & 2; Rosh Hashanah. The first day of the seventh month is a Sabbath. "In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a Sabbath …" Lev. 23:24. It is the feast of blowing the trumpet; now called Rosh Hashanah. In 2017 (Jewish year 5778), the first day of Tishrei occurs on Thursday. There is a tradition of celebrating both the first and second day of Tishrei because in the distant past it was not always possible to declare when the new moon (the first of the month) occurred to people living far distance because only the priest could declare a new moon
• Tishrei 10; Yom Kippur. The tenth day of Tishrei is the Day of Atonement. Lev. 23:30-32. "It shall be unto you a Sabbath of rest." *Note that in 2017 the tenth day, the day of Atonement, occurs on a Saturday Sabbath, but this is not always the case.
• Tishrei 15 to 21-22; Sukkot. The fifteenth day of the seventh month is the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot). Lev. 23:39 "Ye shall keep a feast unto the Lord seven days: on the first day shall be a Sabbath, and on the eight day shall be a Sabbath." Note that a Sabbath occurs on the eighth day (following the seven day feast of Tabernacles).

Three more days are designates as Sabbaths in addition to those shown. From the foregoing we can see that Sabbath does not mean Saturday. It means a sanctified day, a day of rest, a Holy Day.

Learning about these seven Sabbaths solved a very long standing problem for me. Jesus said that as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly so would the Son of man be three days and three nights in the {tomb}. I could never make this work out; if he was crucified on Friday and rose again on Sunday morning; that's only two nights! Fortunately I had been taught that there are no contradictions in the Bible; that such illusions were because of flawed understanding on my part. I got that, but I struggled long and hard with the arithmetic and that the next day after the crucifixion was a Sabbath. But John 19:14, 31 makes it all very plain if you understand that the day after the crucifixion was a Sabbath because it was the first day of the Feast of unleavened Bread and not because it was a Saturday. This is a copy of the month in which the Passover was instituted and also the month in which Christ was crucified.

Now there are no more apparent conflicts! Jesus was in the tomb Thursday night, Friday night and Saturday night. And he rose on the third day as he said.

Jesus ate the ‘Family’ Passover with his disciples, not the Synagogue Passover of Leviticus. Remember that the Pascal lamb was served after it was slain, but the reasons and explanation is clear from Jewish websites and perhaps someday we'll add it here also.