Dr Paul Allen

I suspect most of us have heard the 1981 song by the band Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It came into a second life around 2007, and for the last fifteen years, it has reached a level of popularity it didn’t first have. The song has a memorable tune that makes the main line, “Don’t stop believin’” (which doesn’t come till the last minute), seem so powerful. Yet if you analyze the words — as a pastor who likes classic rock might be prone to do — you find out how disappointing and thin the lyrics are. For one, “Don’t stop believing” in what? What’s the object of belief? The story behind the song is that one band member “went to the band with the iconic line ‘Don’t stop believin’; hold on to that feeling’ with the vague idea that Steve Perry [the voice] would want to sing it. Perry loved it,” reports one site, “and the band went on to improvise and jam until they had dialled in a workable version of the song.” A side note about the line “Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit...

THE SABBATH POLICE Sometimes, when we read through the Gospels, we’ll see passages where Jesus does something remarkable, then everyone gets mad. On occasion, the Gospel writers explain why people got angry, but often we don’t get much overt explanation—which causes some twenty-first-century Bible readers to scratch their heads. In the excerpt below from the brand-new Signs of the Messiah, Andreas J. Köstenberger unpacks the John 5 passage in which Jesus heals a paralyzed man, then faces persecution. . . . the narrative (in John 5:5–9a) focuses on one such invalid, a man who had been in this condition for thirty-eight years. This must-have seemed like an eternity for the man to be languishing without a realistic chance of being healed. One of the reasons John may have chosen to include this sign is that there was virtually no way this miracle could have been staged. The man had been lying there for thirty-eight years, and countless people had seen him. This is not an individual who had...

The question of Sabbath observation, historically, has provoked many debates and controversies involving separate issues. The first great debate about the Sabbath is whether, as an Old Testament ordinance particularly emphasized in the Mosaic covenant, it is still obligatory in the context of new covenant Christianity.  Augustine, for example, believed that nine of the Ten Commandments (the so-called “moral law” of the Old Testament) were still intact and imposed obligations upon the Christian church. His lone exception with the commandment with respect to the Sabbath day.  Since Paul spoke about keeping Sabbaths or not keeping Sabbaths as a matter adiaphorous (indifferent), Augustine was persuaded that the Old Testament Sabbath law had been abrogated. Others have argued that because the Sabbath was instituted originally not in the Mosaic economy but in creation, it maintains its status of moral law as long as the creation is intact. The second major controversy is the questi...

At the outset, I have to acknowledge that the issues of when to observe the Sabbath and how we observe the Sabbath have not drawn much attention from Lutherans over the years. To this day, Lutherans are guided in large part by the way in which Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer, interpreted the Sabbath commandment in his Small and Large Catechisms. In the Small Catechism, Luther renders the biblical text, “You shall sanctify the day of rest” (for the texts of Luther’s catechisms, see The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2000]). As you can see, it looks a bit different than how we are perhaps accustomed to reading it. To better grasp the Lutheran view of the Sabbath day, we need to consider both its history and its current understanding. THE GOSPEL AND THE SABBATH Every tradition is shaped by the formative era from which it emerged. This is true also for Lutheranism. When Luther rediscovered the gospel, he stripped...

From the time of the Reformation until the mid-twentieth century, the great majority of Protestant Christians held fairly strict views regarding the observance of Sunday. With the encroachment of liberalism, the rise of dispensationalism, and the ubiquitous presence of the television, this practice has so declined that today only a small minority of Christians in the West hold this position. Most Christians argue that Sunday is a day of worship, but because the Sabbath commandment served as a covenant sign only for Israel (Ex. 31:13ff.), the Christian is not obligated to observe it. The role of the Sabbath, however, was not unique in the experience of Israel; it was instituted by God before the fall in Genesis 2:1–3. Along with work (Gen. 1:28; 2:15) and marriage (Gen. 2:18–25), God instituted the Sabbath to govern the lives of all mankind. Just as the ordinances of work and marriage are permanent (and are incorporated into the Ten Commandments), so is the ordinance of the Sabbath. In ...

Rightly understood and observed, the seventh-day Sabbath (Saturday) is a precious gift from God. Millions of Christians in my faith community experience it as such. At creation, “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy” (Gen. 2:3; italics supplied); the Sabbath commandment echoes, “The Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Ex. 20:11). The Sabbath is also God’s chosen sign of creation and redemption: “that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you” (Ex. 31:13); thus, rightly understood and observed, the Sabbath remains a perpetual antidote to both the theory of naturalistic evolution and to legalism.  Finally, the Sabbath is God’s designated day for rest and worship, “a Sabbath of solemn rest, a holy convocation” (Lev. 23:3). Scripture never attributes any of these sacred pronouncements, or explicitly assigns any meaning whatsoever, to any day of the week other than the seventh-day Sabbath. The New Testament upholds the Ten Commandments, including the seventh-day Sa...

Increasingly, few Christians reserve one day each week for both worship and rest from all forms of work. Should we be disturbed by this? Seventh-day Adventists and Seventh-day Baptists answer “yes,” and claim that the Sabbath day must be Saturday. Certain kinds of Presbyterians and Reformed Christians, along with others influenced by the legacy of the Puritans, equally adamantly answer “yes,” but they insist that Sunday is the Christian Sabbath. Still, others argue for the principle of resting one day in seven but don’t worry about which day of the week it is, since preachers, for example, can scarcely rest on the day they lead worship services. Are any of these three perspectives right? Not really. Jesus declared, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them” (Matt. 5:17; NIV here and throughout). It’s an unusual contrast. Normally, if someone says he is not abolishing something, he goes on to say he is preservin...

The anonymous author of Hebrews found different ways of describing the superiority of the Lord Jesus Christ. One of them, which forms the underlying motif of chapters 3 and 4, is that Jesus Christ gives the rest that neither Moses nor Joshua could provide.   Under Moses, the people of God were disobedient and failed to enter into God’s rest (3:18). Psalm 95:11 (quoted in Hebrews 4:3) implies that Joshua could not have given the people “real rest” since “through David” God speaks about the rest he will give on another day (Heb. 4:7). This, in turn, implies that “There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God” (Heb. 4:9). In speaking of this rest (3:18; 4:1, 3-6, 8) the author consistently used the same word for “rest” (katapausis). Suddenly, in speaking about the “rest” that remains for the people of God, he uses a different word (sabbatismos, used only here in the NT) meaning specifically a Sabbath rest. In the context of his teaching, this refers fundamentally to the “...

Within the Christian church there are three leading options for answering the question regarding the Sabbath today. Some Christians believe that the Sabbath was an Old Testament ordinance and has no application to the New Testament church.  No less a giant than Saint Augustine took the position that the Sabbath was not carried over into the New Testament community and therefore has been fulfilled and was done away with through the work of Christ. There are Christians who feel that there is no particular significance to Sabbath keeping today, although they make up a very small minority. For the most part, Christian people, while they may disagree as to what day is the Sabbath--the sixth or the seventh day and all that--and how we observe it, still maintain that the Sabbath is to be observed somehow in the Christian community.  God ordained the Sabbath, not at Mt. Sinai with Moses and the people of Israel, but at Creation. The later books of the Law certainly fille...

The first four commandments of the law teach us how to love God, even how to love Him in worship on the day of His choosing. It is important for us to understand the fourth commandment, in which God gives His command for the day of His worship: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy" (Ex. 20:8). How are we as Christians to observe this commandment? From Creation to Re-Creation From creation until Christ, the people of God worked six days and then rested on the seventh day. This was a picture of their looking forward to eternal rest; the seventh day of creation was not structured with an "evening and morning" as the previous six days (Gen. 2:1–3), which signified that the seventh day had no end and was thus a foretaste of eternity itself. On the other hand, from the work of Christ until the consummation, the people of God rest on the first day and work the next six, looking back on the finished work of Christ. Yet we too look forward to the full consu...