What day is the Lord’s day?
In the beginning...
In the beginning God the Father, through Jesus, made the world in six days and rested the seventh day. We read in Genesis 2:2-3 of the special blessing placed on His true Sabbath. This day of spiritual rest in Christ carries a three-fold glory:
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- He rested on the seventh day.
- He blessed the seventh day.
- He sanctified the seventh day.
The seventh-day Sabbath is the “Lord’s day” of the Bible because Jesus made the day with His threefold glory. Only the blessing of the Creator God can make any day holy. Apart from God, no man has any holiness which he can confer on anything.
The Fourth Commandment
God made the seventh day holy and gave it to man. It is the "set-apart" time of the week, when we are to experience the spiritual rest that comes from contact with God. In the fourth commandment itself God says: “But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God” (Exodus 20:10).
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The Lord’s day in Isaiah
Again God calls the seventh-day Sabbath “My holy day.” Isaiah 58:13 states, “If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words…”
Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath day
When Jesus lived on earth, He declared that He is the Lord of this seventh-day Sabbath. He said: “For the Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath day” (Matthew 12:8).
Now, if Jesus Christ made the seventh-day Sabbath, and it is clear that He did from reading John 1:1-3, He is by creative right the Lord of the Sabbath. In His own words, our text assures us that the Lord's day is the Sabbath of creation.
The Lord’s day in Revelation
The Holy Bible knows no other Sabbath day than the seventh day. When the apostle John was exiled to the Island of Patmos, he received the visions of the book of Revelation. His first vision evidently came to him on the Bible Sabbath, for he records: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet” (Revelation 1:10).
Nowhere in Holy Scripture is the first day of the week, Sunday, called the Lord's day.
