“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.” Exodus 20:8-11
Allow me to next give a bit of historical argumentation for the perpetuity of the Sabbath, though changed from the seventh to the first day of the week.
Jesus claimed to be the Lord of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:8, Mark 2:28, & Luke 6:5). Is He the Lord of something that as passed away? (1)
Jesus rose on the first day of the week, a day we observe not only on Easter, but weekly, every Lord’s Day.
1 Corinthians 16:1-2 states that the believers met for worship weekly on the first day of the week—the day that came to be called the Lord’s Day. John referred to the Lord’s Day in Revelation 1:10.
The early Church Fathers (the first generations after the Apostles), kept and taught the Lord’s day as a Christian Sabbath. (Examples include, but are not limited to: Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Athanasius.)
The chief theologian of the Middle Ages (sometimes referred to as the Medieval Age) was Thomas Aquinas. He taught that the Ten Commandments is an expression of natural law which binds all men, and therefore the Sabbath commandment is a moral requirement along with the other nine, and was to be observed on Sundays. The Roman Catholic Church to this day refers to Sunday as a “Holy Day of Obligation.” (2)
The Reformers in the16th century observed and taught the Lord’s Day as a Christian Sabbath. (Examples include, but are not limited to: Luther, Calvin, Beza, and Knox.) The same was true of the 17th century (the century of the great Confessions, Puritanism, and the spread of Christianity to the New World).
More Christians for more of Church history observed and taught the Christian Sabbath than not. In fact, the greatest departure from observing the Christian Sabbath was due to a new theology in the 19th century that is based on a separation of Israel and the Church, the Old and New Testaments, and subsequent rejection of the Law. This has and continues to greatly influence the rejection of the Sabbath day.
Notes:
(1) Some argue from Hebrews 3:7-19, that the Christian Sabbath is not a day, but a new relationship with God that is not dependent on works. These say our relationship with Christ is our Sabbath rest. I do not disagree with the thought of the Christian life as a life of rest. But does that negate the Sabbath Day? If so, does the Christian life lived in light of Christ’s sacrifice negate the special observance of the Lord’s Supper? It does not. We would therefore affirm that the Christian life of rest is punctuated by the special observance of the Sabbath Day of rest, but does not negate the observance of the Sabbath Day.
(2) This fact is cited not to base biblical truth on the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church (which are unbiblical in many ways), but merely to demonstrate that “Christianity” has consistently associated the Lord’s Day with the fourth commandment.