Uplifting the Sabbath

As a teenager in his native city of Rome, Samuele Bacchiocchi was frequently ridiculed and rejected for being a “heretic” Seventh-day Adventist who kept the Sabbath.

This challenged him to pursue an extensive, in-depth investigation of the history, theology, and meaning of the Sabbath.

The process reached its climax on June 14, 1974, when he defended his doctoral dissertation on the rise of Sunday observance in early Christianity at Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Italy. Bacchiocchi was indeed the first (and perhaps the only) non-Catholic to graduate from this prestigious university, founded in 1551 by Ignatius of Loyola. From his exhaustive investigation of the Bible and ancient historical sources, Bacchiocchi concluded that “the adoption of Sunday in place of the Sabbath did not occur in the primitive Church of Jerusalem by virtue of apostolic authority, but approximately a century later in the Church of Rome. An interplay of Jewish, pagan and Christian factors contributed to the abandonment of the Sabbath and adoption of Sunday observance instead.” Even so, many Christian authors still argue that the apostolic church began to keep Sunday shortly after Christ’s resurrection.

Yet, by reading the four Gospels’ account of the resurrection, written many years later, one can find only ordinary references to “the first day of the week” (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:1, 2; Luke 23:54–24:1; John 20:1, 19, 26), with no allusion whatsoever to Sunday worship. The disciples met together on that very same day with the doors shut, not to celebrate the resurrection but because they were afraid of the Jews (John 20:19, 26).

These and other pieces of biblical evidence confirm the abiding nature of the seventh-day Sabbath as the covenantal sign between God and His children.

The Sabbath was originally instituted for all humanity at the end of the Creation week (Genesis 2:1–3), it comes to us every week as God’s unchanged sanctuary in time (Isaiah 58:12–14), and it will continue to be observed after the world is restored to its original perfection (Isaiah 66:22, 23).

Every Sabbath, we are invited to enter God’s delightful rest and to receive its wonderful blessings (Hebrews 4:4, 9–11).