Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Noah and the Sabbath Principle

Noah and the Ark
A major argument used by anti-sabbatarians to support their claim that the Sabbath was a Jewish ceremony and not for Christians is that the Sabbath didn't appear in Scripture before the giving of the Ten Commandments. That reasoning equates the doctrine with the word, like the cults that deny the Trinity, just because the word doesn't appear in Scripture. 

But the question they avoid is whether the concept appears before Exodus 20. As I say here, it first appears in Genesis 2:2-3, when God blesses the seventh day in honor of His completion of the Creation. But, as I will argue in this post, that verse is not the only place that we find the Sabbath in the pre-Mosaic scriptures. 

One of the antinomian views is that non-Jews are obligated to obey only the Noahide laws, i. e., those rules given to Noah, the progenitor of the postdiluvian humanity. While I deny that assertion, in this case it is actually self-refuting. 

In Genesis 5:28-29, we have this part of the account of Noah: "When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying, 'Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.'" Lameck, the father of Noah, prophesies that his son would bring relief from work and toil to his descendants. Notice the exact language of Genesis 3:18-19, God's curse on Adam: "Thorns and thistles it [i. e., the ground] shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

How is this not a Sabbath rest? And does that not make the Sabbath a part of the so-called Noahide laws?

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