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Show SABBATH DAY OF REST AND WORSHIP At the lime Moses was given the Ten Commandments the Sabbath day was the seventh day of the week, one of the feast days. After he had re-I re-I ceived the Commandments, the Sabbath Sab-bath day was observed as a day of rest and worship. It was to this ancient an-cient Jewish Sabbath that the Fourth Commandment referred. The association of Sunday with the true Sabbath and its development as a day of rest came about with the dawn of Christianity. From the beginning be-ginning many Christians commemorated commemo-rated the first day of the week as Resurrection day, or Lord's day. There does not seem to be any evidence evi-dence that the first day was originally original-ly intended as a substitute for the Jewish Sabbath. In fact, most of the early Christians observed both the Sabbath and the Lord's day. The tendency to observe the first day of the week was confirmed by the Koman emperor Constantine in 321 A. D., when he issued the civil decree that "all the judges and townspeople, and the occupation of all traders," should "rest on the venerable day of the sun." As time passed and the Christian church grew in strength, the majority of them paid less attention atten-tion to the Sabbath day and more to the Lord's day, until it finally supplanted sup-planted the Sabbath. Many took the position that the first day of the week bad divine sanction and that the Fourth Commandment was applicable ap-plicable to it instead of to the Scriptural Scrip-tural Sabbath of the Hebrews. |