For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. Romans 1:19-20 ESV
Nobody can look at the natural world without thinking that there must be a Creator. As Hebrews 3:4 says, “Every house is built by someone.” Numerous aspects of the palace of the natural world strongly imply the existence of a Creator a purpose:
Individual Complexity – The internal complexity of living things and the intricate balance of systems within systems requires a designer of extraordinary intelligence and foresight. Every lifeform is a self-repairing, self-replicating machine that becomes more complex, the closer you examine it, from the outer defenses of skin and bark all the way down to molecular factories beyond anything man has been able to copy with all of our technology. Individual organisms are so complex, even at the molecular level, that removing any one of thousands of different components or sub-systems will destroy the entire organism, yet those systems themselves are self-policing, removing, replacing, or repairing damaged components before they can cause significant harm. See Psalm 139:14.
Biome Complexity – The interplay between organisms, even across species, also testifies to the existence of an intelligent, deliberate creator. Trees warn each other of danger. Viruses, bacteria, fungi, grasses, herbivores, and the most complex predators all cooperate, without any apparent conscious intention, to feed each other and keep ecosystems healthy. As local conditions change, local lifeforms adjust populations, habitats, and even genetic expression to compensate. See Job 38:39-41.
Universal Fine Tuning – Physics demonstrates that our entire universe seems designed at every level to support life. A slight change in any number of values–some of which I could name, but won’t pretend to understand–would change the universe in such a way that life would become impossible. Stars and planets would cease to exist, let alone the minerals, seas, and atmosphere required by living organisms. See Psalm 19:1.
In the face of the overwhelming evidence for a Creator, his existence can only be denied by deliberate, continuous rejection and indoctrination. A child, left to himself, would assume that everything was created, and he must be trained to think otherwise.
One implication of this truth is that a person can attain a very basic knowledge of God’s identity without ever hearing the words YHWH, Jesus, Yeshua, Gospel, etc. All of those things are knowable, at least in conception, through the honest observation of Creation. If there is a Creator, then he has a purpose in creating. If he has a purpose for Creation, then he has a purpose for individual creatures. If he has a purpose for individual creatures, then he desires them to behave according to his plan. If his creatures will not behave according to his plan, then they should expect to be corrected, destroyed, or isolated so that they can’t interfere with the correct operation of the rest of Creation. Creatures who choose to act according to the Creator’s purposes can reasonably expect to be rewarded, although the Creator is under no obligation to do so. All of Creation, including every individual creature, belongs to the Creator and is dependent on him for its continued existence, and he is fully within his rights to use it however he wills, including destroying it.
Acceptance of the inevitability of God is in some ways more important than an academic knowledge about God, because a great deal can be learned of God’s character from the nature of what he has already done, apart from any special revelation or divinely inspired writings. As Job 12:7-9 says, “ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of YHWH has done this?”
YHWH Elohim took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. Genesis 2:15
Adam was not placed in the Garden merely to water plants. The Hebrew word translated as “to dress” in the KJV and “to work” in the ESV is abad. It’s the same word used throughout the Old Testament for the Hebrews serving God or a slave serving his master. “To keep it” follows in the same vein. This is the Hebrew word shamar which means to guard and protect. Adam was to serve the Garden by helping it become the best that it could be, and also to guard it against anything that might try to harm it.
The King James rendering of “to dress it and to keep it” could just as literally be translated “to serve it and to protect it”, interestingly very similar to a phrase found on many police cars in America: “To serve and protect.”
Scripture describes many different kinds of servant relationships, but “serve” in this context doesn’t mean that Adam was a slave to the Garden. In fact, Genesis 1:26 says that God intended to give mankind authority over the whole earth. Adam’s divinely appointed task of caring for the Garden didn’t make him subordinate to the Garden. Rather it was a consequence of his authority over it. All authority is given, in part, to enable the bearer to care for his charge.
Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls, being accountable for them to God. Allow them to do so with joy and not grief, because that wouldn’t be good for you either. Hebrews 13:17 (Paraphrased)
Mankind was never intended to be an absolute ruler over either the Garden or the rest of the earth. We were given authority over creation so that we might serve and protect it. The earth serves us, and we serve it, in turn.
God didn’t ad lib creation. His intentions didn’t change halfway through the week nor even after Adam was created. God programmed a drive to accomplish Adam’s first assignment into the very genetic code of mankind, both men and women. Men are driven to provide for and protect their wives and children. Women are driven to protect and nurture their children. We instinctively want to protect the vulnerable and help the weak become stronger.
In our sin-corrupted state, that drive is often abused, misdirected into tyranny. Some people may abuse the earth, destroying today with no care for tomorrow. Some men may dominate their families through physical intimidation and some women may treat their children as little more than annoying accessories to a lifestyle.
However, we can’t allow such abuses to rob us of the strengths that God intends for us to use. We have an obligation to use the resources that God has given us for his purposes. To neglect that obligation is as much a sin as it is to abuse it.
Genesis 1:28 says “And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it…”
The foremost question I want to answer concerning this verse is: “To what extent are we required by God to ‘be fruitful and multiply’?” I see three ways to argue the point.
1. God blessed us with fruitfulness, but did not necessarily command us to multiply.
The proximity of “God blessed” and “God said” (“And God blessed them, and God said unto them…”) appear to portray the two clauses as parts of a single act. God said “Be fruitful and multiply” two other times, once to the animals in v22 and once to Noah and his family in 9:1. In all three instances, the statement was intimately linked to a blessing. Therefore, the phrase “Be fruitful and multiply” is merely a blessing much as we might say, “Get well soon,” to a sick friend.
The problem with this argument is that there is a vital difference between the way that God blessed the fish and birds and the way that he blessed mankind. In v22, he does not appear to be speaking to the animals so much as over the animals: “God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply…” which could be reworded as “God blessed them by saying…” However, in the verse currently under consideration, Moses wrote “God blessed them, and God said unto them…” implying a qualitative difference in the nature of the blessing, as well as a logical division between the blessing and the “command.” But is this difference enough to make a command? I’m not convinced.
2. God categorically commanded mankind to be fruitful and multiply.
The qualitative difference demonstrated above, namely that God spoke directly to mankind and that the name “Elohim” is repeated as the subject of both clauses, certainly seems to support this interpretation. Elohim is Hebrew for “judges” or “rulers” and so it appears that, by repeating the name of the Creator, Moses was emphasizing the authority with which God spoke. The command is valid until the Kingdom in which men will become like the angels and no longer lawfully procreate. (At least that is the commonly accepted interpretation of Matthew 22:30.)
However, Yeshua said in Matthew 19:12 that some people are eunuchs from birth and some are eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul also recommended that unmarried Corinthians should remain unmarried if they are able. This means that we can’t say that every person who refrains from marrying and having children is disobeying this command from God. It can only be a command to mankind in general and not to each and every individual.
3. God commanded mankind to be fruitful and multiply, but only to a certain point.
God commanded us to multiply, but if the purpose of the command was to enable mankind to effectively govern the earth<1>, a point might come (or might have already come) at which further multiplication becomes unfruitful. “Replenish the earth” is an integral part of the command to multiply, so once we have populated the earth, the command may be considered fulfilled. This is the argument of the environmentalist who favors zero or negative population growth (and commonly also favors abortion and coercive measures to discourage growth, but these negative and ungodly attitudes are not inherent in the argument).
Although most theologians and men of God whom I respect believe this is not the case, I am not convinced either way. Since “subdue the earth” is part of the same statement, governance of the earth is at least a major part of the purpose for man’s creation, so this argument can’t be easily dismissed.
How does this question effect real life?
Believing that “be fruitful” is a blessing and not a command might change how you affect family planning or if you attempt to plan the growth of your family at all.<2> Some people will see rejecting a blessing from God as too presumptuous, even if it isn’t commanded, and decide not to make any special attempt either to avoid or prevent children. Others might want to time the arrival of children at the moment they believe will maximize the blessing.
Since the command is ambiguous, no one should be ostracized or harassed because they choose to have a large or small family or no children at all. I believe that most economic reasons for not having children are petty and faithless, but there are many other reasons that I am not capable of judging, such as precarious health of the potential mother, genetic disorders in either parent, or any number of other circumstances.
Paul wrote that under certain circumstances it is better to remain unmarried, and it might be that under some circumstances it is better to remain childless or to stop conceiving children. I cannot say for certain what all of those circumstances are, but I am not willing to judge the hearts of other men and women based solely on how many children they have. God knows and judges the heart in such situations.
I believe that we can say definitively that celibacy is not morally superior in general to marriage, although it’s possible that it might be in very limited circumstances. A divine command (or even a bit of divine advice) to multiply is also a divine command to have sexual intercourse.
The misogynist, anti-sex tendencies of a great number of Christians are proved in the very first chapter of Genesis to be perversions. These tendencies were no doubt inherited at least in part from the pagan philosophies that were popular in the early centuries of the Church. The Manicheans of Augustine’s day believed the whole physical universe to be the product of the Evil Kingdom’s invasion of the good. They believed that sex, by causing the continuation of the physical and by being surrender to physical pleasures, is the ultimate evil.<3> Many prominent Christian teachers of that day, Augustine included, were never able to completely purge this heretical taint from their doctrines, and it has infected the Church to varying degrees ever since.<4>
What about subduing the earth?
If “be fruitful” is a command then so is “subdue it.” To subdue means to forcibly subjugate, but I don’t believe that any kind of brutality is intended. In fact, the requirement of a Sabbath for the land in Leviticus 25:1-7 and a Sabbath for domestic animals in Exodus 20:10 indicates the opposite.
The point of the command was not to grant permission to conquer, but to grant the authority over nature which we require to effectively govern it and to use it for our livelihood. We were not commanded to go out and conquer all of nature for the sake of the conquest itself, but we were blessed with the ability and the authority to reshape it and redirect it as necessary.
In all cases, possession of the authority to do something when necessary is not a requirement to do it whenever possible. Environmental extremism and pseudo-scientific theories of anthropogenic climate change aside, it is impossible to witness the methods and abuse heaped by some men upon nature and call it righteous. Excessive abuse of authority is justification for rebellion. If we abuse the authority that God gave us over the land, we will eventually be thrown off by it. There are many examples all over the world of exactly that happening. We are not to simply ignore all of nature either. Adam was placed in the Garden in order to tend, protect, and cultivate it. The maintenance of the Garden—and by extension the whole earth—was one of his very first tasks.
Mankind, men in particular, can rarely be truly fulfilled living in the concrete hives we call cities nor in a scarred, oily wasteland of pure industry. We will be most happy living close to the earth, earning at least a part of our living through work with our hands. I have experienced few sensations as gratifying as burying my bare hands in rich soil and shaping and encouraging the growth of new life. The personal anecdotes of many others testify to the same phenomenon in their own lives.
God gave mankind, both male and female, authority over the earth so that we might be able to support ourselves through it and effectively tend it and protect it. Like the ox treading the grain, we may extract comfort and sustenance from the earth, but to take from the land more than we can use merely for the accumulation of wealth is an abuse of our authority.
Authority over land and house
The authority which a husband has over his wife is similar to the authority mankind has over nature in that his authority does not exist for its own sake and must not be abused. Men were given that authority for a purpose: in order to effectively guide and protect their wives and to facilitate their role as fitting helpers. If mankind abuses its authority over the land, the land will reject him; this is justice. If a husband abuses his authority over his wife, she will reject him; this too is justice.
Dominion over the land does not mean that the land exists solely for mankind’s benefit, nor does a man’s authority in his house mean that the woman exists solely for his benefit. She exists to be a support to her husband in whatever task God has given him and to be a mother to her children, but not to be a slave to either one. I absolutely do not mean to excuse the wife from submitting herself to her husband in matters where he is not terribly abusive or where he does not demand immoral behavior of her, but a man who mistreats his wife for his own purposes is in rebellion against God’s purposes and has rejected the headship of Messiah over him. He has no right to demand submission of his wife when he refuses to submit to his own head.
All of these things–children, marriage, fertile soil, and the authority to make them productive–are blessings that necessarily incorporate some commands: Do not commit adultery. Do not covet your neighbor’s wife. Don’t muzzle an ox when it treads the grain. Etc. Whether in having children, loving your wife, obeying your husband, or cultivating a field in a manner that preserves it for future generations, living according to God’s design, trusting him and his good will towards his creations, brings blessings in the form of peace, personal fulfillment, and abundance.
<1> Although I doubt that he would have openly supported the idea which I wrote next, this is the view promoted by Rushdoony: “The meaning of the family is thus not to be sought in procreation but in a God-centered authority and responsibility in terms of man’s calling to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion over it.” Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law. (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1973.) 164.
<2> I do not mean abortion, abortifacients, oral contraceptives, or the self-centeredness which our society calls “family planning.”
<3> Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Books I-X. Trans. F. J. Sheed. (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942.)
<4> Many Christian and Jewish writings from the period extending several centuries in either direction of the Incarnation feature this heresy. The Books of Adam and Eve and the Shepherd of Hermas are notable examples.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26-27 ESV
Scripture never explains why God created mankind, but there are some clues we can discern from the Creation narrative.
We were created in his image, so our purpose requires being like him in some important ways.
Our first command was to “be fruitful and multiple and fill the earth and subdue it”, so our purpose requires a large enough number of us to fill the earth and be its master. (See Be Fruitful and Multiply.)
Adam’s first task was to inventory all the animals so that he would know he was unique and needed a helper of his own kind.
Eve’s first task was to assist Adam in his role as the keeper of God’s garden.
Humanity’s mission as God’s stewards over the earth requires us to act as his agents in the world, to be god-like to the plants and animals, much as Moses was to be like a god to Pharaoh (Exodus 7:1). To fill that role adequately, a man needs a wife, and through that relationship, together they act in another of God’s capacities: they create more people.
God created Adam first, and he was the only man to have been created directly in God’s image through divine action rather than through procreation. Even Yeshua, who is God in the flesh, had a body built cell-by-cell within the body of a woman. All others, including Eve, are created in God’s image by being created in Adam’s image.
Moses’ was deliberate and precise in his wording of Genesis 1:27. Consider this very literal translation:
God created the man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
The man in this verse is literally “the man”, ha adam in Hebrew, not “mankind”. While Scripture sometimes refers to mankind collectively as adam, only the first man is ever called Adam as an individual. Throughout Genesis 1 and 2, when Moses referred to the individual characters, he calls the man adam and the woman ishah. (The woman isn’t called “Eve” until the end of chapter 3.)
The Hebrew words used for male and female in v27 are also illustrative. Zakar, the Hebrew for male, comes from a root that means “remembered” or “memorial”, and what is an image but an imprinted memory of something else? Nekevah, the Hebrew for female, is derived from nekev, which means “to pierce”. It might be derived from the wearing of rings, especially in the context of betrothal, or it might be a sexual reference, as crude as that seems to our Western sensibilities. It’s a more functionally oriented word and describes more of who the woman is rather than who she resembles.
Adam was created from dust and the breath of God, while Eve was created from Adam. In 1 Corinthians 11:7-9 Paul pointed out that all mankind as a whole bears the image of God, but men more specifically are that image: “…he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.”
Despite all this, the very first task God put to Adam was to learn how incomplete he was without Ishah.
God is neither male nor female, but he has something of both the masculine and the feminine within him; else how could Eve have been created from Adam, who was created in the image of God? When the first part of the substance of Eve was extracted from Adam, both feminine and masculine traits, which he had inherited from God, were passed on to Eve, but in a very different balance. Both men and women have masculine and feminine attributes, and in this they both bear God’s image, but each in different ways and degrees
For example, Adam is the law-giver and protector (inadequate as he might have been in both of those roles) and Eve is the mother and helper. But they are only able to be fully God’s agents in Creation when they are together, not as man and man or woman and woman, but Adam and Eve. They are complements, not Lego blocks that can be swapped out for each other at will.
By God’s original design, a man is unable to be a woman and a woman is unable to be a man. They can fill in for each other in a crippled, temporary sort of way, but one will never be complete without the other. If either disregards their role for any length of time, like any well-designed machine, malfunctions will begin to accumulate in every system: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. A person can compensate for that damage for a time through drugs, entertainment and distractions, but that won’t stop the degeneration. It only hides it, enabling a cascade of failures until the whole person is drowning in utter misery.
Hollywood, the legacy media, the National Education Association, and Washington, D.C. are all intent on convincing the world that the only loving thing to do is to encourage injured people to go on destroying their lives. I can’t help but believe they know the damage they are causing and that they actually hate all those they claim to love.
For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Romans 13:9 ESV
True love isn’t making people feel good about this moment at the expense of the rest of their lives. It’s teaching them to keep God’s commandments, including those that concern sexuality and “gender roles”. If you love your neighbor, you must support the Biblical example of marriage as male and female joined together and oppose the world’s twisted counterfeit.
Some topics are more personal than others and tend to trigger more emotional reactions. Food and holidays, for example. Or “is that dress white and gold or blue and black” and, of course, marriage and sexual relations.
Although the Bible has a lot to say about marriage, it never explicitly answers the question, “What is marriage?” Probably for the same reason it doesn’t give a precise definition for travel, war, and sacrifice. Everyone in the Bible’s original audience already knew what marriage was, so why waste expensive paper and ink explaining it.
Our world, on the other hand, has become so full of confusion that we need to spell out even the most basic ideas. So, let me begin at the beginning…
Adam gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field, but the man could not find a helper fit for him. So YHWH God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that YHWH God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman (ishah), because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Genesis 2:20-24
This passage gives us the three most important elements of the definition of marriage.
Marriage exists to help a man fulfill his assigned role in Creation.
Marriage is meant to be a lifelong union of a man and woman.
Marriage was instituted by God from the very beginning.
Marriage Exists to Help Man Fulfill His Mission
Although Genesis 1:28 records that the first collective mission of mankind was to be a caretaker over the earth and all life on it, Adam’s first individual assignment was to evaluate all of the other creatures to see if one of them might serve as a special helper for him. Of course, God knew that none of them would, but he had Adam go through this process so that the man would also know. When Adam was satisfied that none of the animals would meet his requirements, God created a woman, whom Adam named Eve.
Adam and most other creatures were created from the ground, but Eve was created directly from Adam. God didn’t create Eve from Adam’s head or foot, but from his side, showing that she wasn’t supposed to rule over him nor be his slave, but was supposed to be a peer. The woman was to be more like the man than any other creature in heaven or earth, a counterpart who would rule over and care for the earth together with him.
Eve wasn’t created to be exactly like Adam, though, or else God would have created another man and made them hermaphrodites or capable of parthenogenesis. Woman shares in the collective purpose of mankind as God’s stewards on earth, but each woman does so primarily by assisting her husband in his individual mission.
For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. 1 Corinthians 11:8-9 ESV
I know that doesn’t sit well with many people, but it is the plain teaching of Scripture. Eve was created specifically to be a helper for Adam, and Paul asserts that this principle applies within all marriages.
While the original task of humanity was to be a caretaker of God’s creation, the Fall necessitated a change in mission parameters. Our task now is to expand the Kingdom of God through procreation, evangelism, establishing justice, and generally doing good works according to God’s standards of justice and good. How each individual and family participates in this mission varies in as many ways as there are individuals and families, but you can know this with absolute certainty: A woman’s divinely appointed mission will never be at odds with her husband’s.
All kinds of things can prevent us from fulfilling marriage’s full purpose: illness and other circumstances that might be out of our control, the husband isn’t fulfilling his calling, or the wife isn’t fulfilling hers. However, our circumstances and failings can’t change the reason God created marriage.
Marriage Is a Lifelong Union
Genesis 2:24 says that the relationship of Adam and Eve is to be a pattern for all marriages, that a new marriage is inaugurated when a man leaves his father and mother to become one flesh with his wife.
“One flesh” implies that they are united in a way that would be painful and unnatural to separate and Yeshua confirmed this understanding when he said “They are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (See Matthew 19:4-6 and Mark 10:6-9.)
“Leaves his father and mother” doesn’t necessarily mean that he physically leaves their dwelling place. The Scriptural example is for extended families normally to live close together, frequently on the same land, and obedience to God’s instructions for the use of the land in Israel requires this. What this statement actually means is that the man steps outside of the nuclear family unit into which he was born and creates a new family still under the broad umbrella of his father’s clan and tribe.
This also doesn’t mean that marriage cannot be ended. God hates both divorce and death, but both happen, whether for good or bad, and both end a marriage. I’ll write more about this another time, but the Torah, Prophets, Yeshua, and Apostles all discuss when it is and is not appropriate to end a marriage. Divorce should be avoided because it breaks something that God didn’t want to be broken, but it is still possible.
Marriage Was Instituted by God
From the very beginning, God intended mankind to be male and female and to be joined in a union that he uses as a metaphor of his relationship with Israel.
Like the Sabbath, marriage was created for mankind’s benefit. Both parties, as well as their children, benefit from the arrangement, especially if it is conducted according to all of God’s instructions. However, also like the Sabbath, God created marriage because it suited his purposes. Every good master provides his servants with the tools necessary to accomplish his assigned tasks. The servant benefits because his job is made easier and more enjoyable. The master benefits because the servant is able to do a better job with greater economy.
Also like the Sabbath, marriage is not a man-made custom and man doesn’t get to define it. People today insist that they can make marriage whatever they want it to be: a man and another man, a woman and herself, and every other perversion one can imagine. Yet, Yeshua said that marriage is “what God has joined together”, so there can be no real question on this score. God makes the rules, not us.
Marriage was the very first government and was created by God to serve as the core of ministry, labor, justice, and civilization. It is a model of God and of our relationship to God and, as God is one (Hebrew echad), man and woman are to be one in spirit and flesh. Marriage benefits us and was created to help us in the work for which we were created, but ultimately both we and marriage belong to God and we have a responsibility to him to protect and honor it.
Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Genesis 2:18
Men and Women are Not the Same
According to Adam Clarke (Commentary on the Bible), the Hebrew for “help meet for him,” ezer kenegdo, “implies that the woman was to be a perfect resemblance of the man, possessing neither inferiority nor superiority, but being in all things like and equal to himself.” He was right to an extent.
Mankind, both male and female, is unique among God’s breathing creations, those beings that Scripture calls nephesh, or souls. This is confusing to many English speakers because we often use the terms “soul” and “spirit” interchangeably, but they don’t mean the same thing in the Bible. A soul is a living being, while a spirit is the incorporeal part of a person that carries on the essence of the person after the body dies.1
Eve was like Adam in that she was of the same kind of being, mankind, somewhere between angel and beast. Like Adam, Eve was a living soul in possession of a body, spirit, and mind. She shared his divine mission of caring for the Garden and, by extension, the whole Earth. She shared in his authority and in his role as a connection between the eternal Creator and his temporal creation.
But Eve was never “a perfect resemblance of the man, possessing neither inferiority nor superiority.”2 The physical differences between men and women are obvious. Sane people do not allow men to compete in women’s athletic events, even if those men are pretending to be women. Every society that has every existed has recognized the sexual dimorphism of humanity, sorting men and women into activities that are best suited to their capabilities. Among hunter-gatherers, men almost always do the hunting, fighting, and heavy lifting, while women almost always do the gardening and textile work, which might be even more challenging in their ways, but don’t require the same strength or speed.3
The mental differences are intuitively apparent to most people. Think of the joke about men being a machine with a single switch and women being another machine covered in switches, dials, gauges, and buttons without a hint of what they’re supposed to do. The joke is an exaggeration, of course, but still close enough to the truth to be funny. The mind is significantly more opaque than the body, so the differences between the sexes is harder to quantify, but the work of many reputable researchers, astute observers of human behavior, and less reputable (but possibly more effective) proponents of dating Game, have established their existence and general parameters beyond reasonable argument.
The spiritual differences between men and women are not so obvious. They are evident, however, in the spiritual and hierarchical roles into which men and women have almost universally organized their activities, in the Creation story of Genesis, and in the many scriptural examples of and references to the differently ordained roles of men and women.
Consider just a handful of many dozens of examples:
God repeatedly chose a younger son to inherit the covenants and promises of Abraham, never a daughter, although their wives and daughters certainly participated in those covenants. (Genesis)
When God chose someone to lead Israel out of Egypt, he chose Moses rather than Miriam. Only men were appointed by Moses as leaders over the people at God’s direction. Only the sons of Levi are permitted to serve at the Tabernacle and only the sons of Aaron to serve at the altar, although their wives and daughters enjoy some of the benefits of that service. (Exodus, Numbers)
The land of Israel is passed from father to son and only to a daughter if the man had no sons. A woman joins the tribe of her husband–never the other way around–and so a daughter who inherits her fathers land must marry a man of her own tribe in order to keep the land intact. (Numbers)
God gave fathers the explicit right to annul the vows of their wives and daughters, but not of their sons, and Paul twice wrote of the obligation of wives to respect and obey their husbands. (Numbers 30, Ephesians, Colossians)
At about this point, some readers might be thinking to themselves, “My! What a misogynist!” But how so? If I say that elms make better shade than palms, does that mean I am somehow anti-palm trees? If I say that dump trucks haul more rocks than do refrigerated panel vans, am I saying anything against refrigerated panel vans? Of course not, to both questions. I am merely pointing out that some things are better at one thing than another.
I am also not saying that women have no legitimate role in ministry or leadership. Although men are more suited to many kinds of leadership and a preponderance of women in leadership is almost certainly a symptom of a society in trouble, God never said, “Thou shalt not suffer a woman to lead.” Scripture records a number of prophetesses and one God-ordained woman who served as the national Judge of Israel at a time when men were weak and cowardly.
Men and women are different physically, mentally, and spiritually, and it would be impossible for them to be equally suitable to performing the same tasks or filling the same roles. To insist otherwise is actually anti-man and anti-woman by disregarding their unique strengths and weaknesses.
A Help Meet for Him
If it’s not clear already, the term “help meet” (often mistakenly given as “help mate”) doesn’t mean that Eve was created to be Adam’s slave. In fact, Moses and David both used the same word to refer to God as their own helper. (Exodus 18:4, Psalm 33:20, 70:5) Surely they didn’t think of YHVH as a personal servant to be summoned and ordered about at will! God is the indisputable superior in those relationships, yet he is still called a helper.
In Ezekiel 12:14, God refers to the personal attendants–whether guards, aides, or mercenaries–of the King of Judah with this same word. So ezer ultimately implies neither inferiority nor superiority. Rather than a servant, ezer implies an ally, an indispensable supporter, and even a rescuer.
The Hebrew phrase ezer kenegdo literally translates to “a helper suitable to him”–“Meet” is an archaic English synonym of “suitable”–and by itself the word doesn’t necessarily imply any kind of hierarchal relationship at all.
So then what does it mean for Eve to be a help meet for Adam?
The fact that she was made specifically for Adam’s purposes, and not for her own, demonstrates that God’s intended purpose for her was to assist Adam in his divinely appointed mission, not to launch a separate mission of her own.
Genesis 2:15 says that God placed Adam in the Garden to keep it, but he immediately recognized that Adam could not effectively perform the task unaided, and so v18 says “It is not good that the man should be alone.” Before God created Eve, he brought all of the animals to Adam to examine and name them. The naming is explicit in the text, while the examination is implied by the context and the ancient Hebrew practice of naming a thing according to its character and behavior.
The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. Genesis 2:20
A Perfect Complement
One of the purposes of this naming exercise was to demonstrate to Adam that none of these lesser creatures could ever be an adequate help in Adam’s primary task of caring for the Garden. God created Eve immediately afterward and, from God’s reaction, we can know that Adam was acutely aware of the animals’ entire deficiency:
Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Genesis 2:23
Eve was like Adam in a manner that no other creature could approach. She walked on two feet and manipulated the world with hands, fingers, and opposable thumbs, just like Adam. She spoke, laughed, reasoned, and loved like Adam, and, like Adam, she was, in her being, the image of God and carried within her the same breath that God exhaled into him.
God didn’t create Eve merely to be Adam’s friend, but she was his friend more profoundly than any of the animals could ever be. A horse can bear a man across country, a dog can show him affection, and an ox can help him plow a field, but none of these can carry on a conversation, help him solve a complex problem, bear his children, or offer him any wisdom. A wife can do all of these things and more.
Eve was Adam’s perfect complement.
It is abnormal for a woman to lead a nation or to be a spiritual teacher over men, but it is certainly no sin, and it is sometimes quite necessary. When a woman steps into a leadership role because the man who should be there is unavailable, unable, or unwilling, she is, in fact, fulfilling her purpose as a “helper suitable to Adam”. It’s a long way from God’s original ideal, but, in his wisdom, his plan included remedies for less than ideal conditions, and we should all thank God for women who are willing to step up to leadership roles when men fail!
God created Adam and appointed him to a task before he created Eve. From this we know that Eve’s purpose is to aid Adam. But God also purposefully created Adam incomplete and unable to perform the task to which he had been set, so that he would love Eve and fully appreciate his need for her.
I suspect that we would all live happier, more fulfilling lives if we didn’t fight so hard against God’s plan and instead used it as a blueprint for our marriages, families, and civil governments.
End Notes
1 Major tangent: Like God, man is a tripartite being, a living soul, made up of body, spirit, and mind. Our bodies are made up of numerous, complex organs and systems that are also made up of complex, interconnected systems. Our consciousnesses, the part of our thoughts and minds that can’t be dissected and objectively measured, also appear to contain separate systems and components. What about our spirits? We know almost nothing about them, and anyone who claims otherwise is most likely either a con-artist or under demonic influence. However, we do know that God’s Spirit is seven-fold in some manner (Isaiah 11:2; Revelation 1:4, 3:1, etc.) and probably more complex in ways that we couldn’t possibly understand. What might that say about our own spirits? Or about the anatomy (for lack of a better word) of the rest of God? Purely academic questions, of course. There’s no way to answer them and probably little value in spending a lot of time thinking about it.
2 I’m sure Clarke never meant to imply that men and women are equal in a mathematical sense, but many people to day really do believe his statement to be literally true despite all evidence and reason.
3 Goldberg, Stephen. The Inevitability of Patriarchy. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1974. 228. “…the central fact is that men and women are different from each other from the gene to the thought to the act and that emotions that underpin masculinity and femininity, that make reality as experienced by the male eternally different from that experienced by the female, flow from the biological natures of man and woman…the women of every society have taken the paths they have not because they were forced by men but because they have followed their own imperatives.”
Get Your Hands Dirty – Adam was created to be a gardener. Dirt is part of who we are in our core, and people will tend to be happier and healthier if they get their hands dirty now and then.
Proverbs 18:1 – You weren’t meant to be alone – Whether you are a loner, introvert, or extravert, you weren’t created to be alone. You need family and community to be healthy and to fully meet your purpose in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Genesis 2:1-3 – The Sabbath Predates Creation – Everything God does is planned; everything is in order. He created the world on a timetable with each element created on a specific day for a purpose. God could have made everything in a single instant, yet he designed a process that required seven days. He didn’t reach the end of the sixth day and say to himself, “Whew! I need a break!” The Seventh Day Sabbath (not the first day or the fourth day) was an inherent part of God’s perfect plan from before Creation.
Marriage and Divorce in Matthew 19:3-9 – God’s Law as given through Moses explicitly allows divorce for sexual immorality, but that right shouldn’t be exercised until all other options have been exhausted. God hates divorce, just like he hates death, but both are still necessary in extreme cases. Yeshua’s main point was this: God instituted marriage. Don’t treat it casually. If you love God, then you will protect and cultivate your marriage.
Proverbs 31:1-9 and the Burdens of Authority – King Lemuel’s mother warned him against any indulgences in pleasures that might compromise his judgment, specifically women and alcohol. There’s nothing especially wrong with either one, but it’s important to keep everything in it’s proper time and proportion. And the greater your authority, the more disciplined you need to be.
Sin, Grace, and Law in Romans 5:20-21 – Adam’s sin brought death to all men, and that corruption leads all men to sin, subjecting them to the power of sin and death, which is the power of the Law to condemn. On the other hand, Yeshua’s death enables God’s grace to forgive our sin, releasing us from the Law’s power to condemn, but not from its power to teach us right from wrong.
Are You under Law or Under Grace? Romans 6:14 – Being “under law” is the same as being under the dominion of sin. If you are an unrepentant sinner, then you are under law. If you have repented of sin and been forgiven, then you are set free from the dominion of sin and are no longer under law. This doesn’t mean that the Law is no longer a guide to righteous behavior as v15 states plainly, but that it no longer has authority to condemn you.
Romans 8:18-23 and the Resurrection of Creation – Several places in Scripture talk about how Creation longs for the day when God judges the world and everything is restored. Paul and John tell us that Creation won’t just be restored, but will be resurrected and glorified just like us. The end is a mirror image of the beginning, but bigger and better!
A Little Bitter Makes Your Whole Life Sweeter – People are resilient. They tend to adapt and become accustomed to whatever circumstances life puts them in. Because of this, a life of too much ease creates weak men. If you want to be happy, strong, and able to withstand whatever curve balls come your way, you’re better off seeking out challenges and hardships in measured, controlled doses before truly hard times come and knock you on your backside. A lesson from Proverbs 27:7.
The Book of the Genesis of Jesus – The Gospel of Matthew begins with a clear reference to Genesis 5, but you can only see it in the Greek. One of the lessons we can derive from these two genealogies is that God knew we would fail from the very beginning and he planned for our redemption, telling us all about it through his interaction with mankind in history.
Divine Genocide in Joshua 11 – God said, “Thou shall not kill”, but he told Joshua to kill every living person in Canaan. What’s up with that?
Paul’s Obligation of Service in Romans 1:14 – The world is chaos and our assignment is to bring spiritual order by restoring people to their Creator. When God gives you a task, he necessarily gives you the authority required to carry out that task. Always keep in mind that such authority is never inherent in the person and that it is always given for the benefit of the Kingdom of God and its citizens.
And I will make boys their princes, and infants shall rule over them. And the people will oppress one another, every one his fellow and every one his neighbor; the youth will be insolent to the elder, and the despised to the honorable. For a man will take hold of his brother in the house of his father, saying: “You have a cloak; you shall be our leader, and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule”; in that day he will speak out, saying: “I will not be a healer; in my house there is neither bread nor cloak; you shall not make me leader of the people.”
…My people—infants are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, your guides mislead you and they have swallowed up the course of your paths. The LORD has taken his place to contend; he stands to judge peoples. The LORD will enter into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: “It is you who have devoured the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?” declares the Lord GOD of hosts. The LORD said: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with outstretched necks, glancing wantonly with their eyes, mincing along as they go, tinkling with their feet, therefore the Lord will strike with a scab the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the LORD will lay bare their secret parts….Your men shall fall by the sword and your mighty men in battle. And her gates shall lament and mourn; empty, she shall sit on the ground.
And seven women shall take hold of one man in that day, saying, “We will eat our own bread and wear our own clothes, only let us be called by your name; take away our reproach.” In that day the branch of the LORD shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honor of the survivors of Israel. And he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem, when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning. Then the LORD will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night; for over all the glory there will be a canopy. There will be a booth for shade by day from the heat, and for a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain.
Isaiah 3:4-4:6 (abbreviated)
A Nation of Weak Men
This prophecy in Isaiah concerned the ancient nations of Israel and Judah as well as the coming Messiah and His Kingdom, but there are still lessons for us to learn from the example. Look at the sins that brought about this punishment from God: men refusing to take leadership, teachers leading the people astray, oppression by selfish rulers, oppression of neighbor against neighbor, promiscuity, vanity and dominion of women.
When the men God called to leadership refuse to take it, women, children, and fools take it instead. God brings down the proud and avenges the oppressed. He will not sit idly by forever. In time, God will purge His people so that only those worthy and those willing to accept His ways will survive. Men will accept the role that God assigned to them as the heads of their families and the leaders of their people. Women will accept the role that God assigned to them as their husbands’ assistants and supporters.
“In that day, seven women will take hold of one man,” the prophet says, and today’s western Christian immediately recoils in horror at the thought. “What!? Women subjecting themselves to the authority of a man?” But this is not a part of the sin, this is a part of the healing process. When men turn to God and accept the leadership He desires for them, and when women turn to their men and accept the headship that God has placed over them, then we will begin to truly see what God can do with His people.
The Symptoms of Decline
These things are specifically listed in Chapter 3 as being
good things that God would take away as punishment for their sins; they are the
support and sustenance of a nation:
Food and water
Strong men and soldiers
Judges, prophets, administrators, elders,
military commanders, honorable men, skilled craftsmen, and eloquent speakers
These things are listed as either sinful or the terrible
consequences of the absence of those things listed above:
Government by women, children, and weak-minded men
Infighting
Disrespect for elders
Elevation of the disreputable above the honorable
Prideful and vain women
The pattern should be obvious. The first list is typical of a well-ordered, patriarchal society. The second is typical of a feminized democracy. Except for the judgeship of Deborah when no man was willing to stand up for the whole people, God’s mandated leadership throughout all of Israel’s history was masculine. Every one of God’s specially appointed kings, priests, elders, and judges (with that one exception) was a man. The only times when women led the nation were times of turmoil and weak-willed men.
Feminism Is an Effect, not the Cause of Trouble
I do not mean that no woman should ever be in a leadership
position, or that it is somehow a sin for a woman to have authority over men.
Some women are well suited for leadership, and some leadership positions are
best occupied by women, and there is no command in God’s Law against women
holding leadership positions. We should thank Him that there are competent and
willing women available to take charge when all of the men have advocated their
responsibilities!
None the less, any society with a significant percentage of its leadership positions–civil, business, family, or religious–occupied by women is already in serious trouble. A healthy society will always be governed primarily by godly men.
Humble Righteousness Is the Cure
If weak and selfish men are the disease and feminism a symptom, what is the cure?
Repentance.
In Isaiah 4, the healing begins with the repentance of women, but if that’s as far as it went, then there would have been no real healing at all. Ultimately, national healing requires the humble repentance of men.
We could take back the reins of power, take the vote away from women, and re-establish men-only universities and clubs… But without godliness, that would only replace one tyranny with another.
The solution to crime, corruption, and decaying public morality isn’t patriarchy in itself, but humble, righteous men picking up their divinely appointed staffs and mantles in their homes, churches, and synagogues. Be the men that God intended for you to be. Live righteously. Keep the commandments. Ensure justice for the oppressed–the legitimately oppressed, not people who merely imagine themselves to be oppressed–the widows and orphans.
When we obey God, when we follow his standards in our personal lives and in our homes, the rest will fall into place naturally.
And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. Genesis 2:2-3
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Exodus 20:8-11
Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep It Holy
God rested on the seventh day, blessed it, and separated it from other days (made it holy). Then he commanded Israel to “Remember the Sabbath day” in order to keep it separate through refraining from our work. God’s work during the first week was creation, so on the Sabbath, he stopped creating. He very deliberately made that day different from the previous six days, and commanded Israel to continue what he had begun by resting every seventh day.
Almost everyone around the world believes that the day we call Saturday in English is the seventh day of the week and, therefore, the Sabbath that God said to remember. In fact, many languages from different linguistic families and regions have a name for that day that is very similar to our word Sabbath, which comes from the Hebrew word Shabbat. Here are just a few examples:
Hebrew – Shabbat
Spanish – Sabado
Russian – Subbota
Somali – Sabti
Javanese – Sabtu
Arabic – Alsabt
Across Europe, Asia, and Africa, people of many different tongues use a word very similar to the Hebrew word, Shabbat, to describe the day we call Saturday, and some of those words can be traced back to the most ancient texts of the language. While this doesn’t prove that Saturday is the original Sabbath, it does show that people all over the world have believed so for thousands years.
However, billions of people believing something doesn’t make their belief true, and there are some competing theories. For example, despite calling the seventh day some variation of “Sabbath”, for almost 2000 years, most Christians have actually kept the first day of the week, Sunday, as the “Christian Sabbath”.
After so much time has passed, does it really matter all that much?
God thought the Sabbath was so important that he mandated the death penalty for Israelites who refused to take the day off from their work. The Bible says that those who love God will keep his commandments. So it seems to me that every Israelite who loves both God and his own life ought also to consider keeping the Sabbath a very important matter, and how can you keep it if you don’t even know what day it is?
Competing Claims for the Sabbath
Despite the linguistic and traditional evidence that Saturday is the Sabbath that God wants us to remember and keep, there are at least three competing theories that claim otherwise.
1. The Unknowable Sabbath 2. The Lunar Sabbath 3. The Christian Sabbath
Before I address these different ideas, I want to make a vital point. Don’t skip this. Everything else depends on it.
Yeshua kept the Sabbath and kept it perfectly. If he didn’t, then he wasn’t sinless, wasn’t the Messiah, and died for nothing.
Nothing.
Yeshua kept the same Sabbath that all Jews of his day kept. We can know this because he had many arguments with the lawyers and teachers of his day about the Sabbath, but all of their arguments were about how to keep the Sabbath. They never argued about when. Therefore, we know that the Jews of Yeshua’s day kept the Sabbath on the right day because they kept it on the same day that Yeshua did.
Can We Really Know Which Day of the Week is the 7th Day?
The Egyptians had a calendar, the Babylonians had a different one, and the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and Hebrews all had theirs. Today, most of the world uses a calendar derived from the Romans, mostly due to their 600 year dominance of the western world. However, our calendar is only superficially similar to the one used by the ancient Republic. It used to have 304 days and 10 months until Julius Caesar corrected it to the 365 days and 12 months that we still have today. More corrections were made over the centuries to fine tune the calendar year to sync with the actual time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun. The most recent significant update was the Gregorian calendar in 1582, which the British Empire, including America, didn’t adopt until 1752.
So with all of these calendar changes, how do we know that the day we call Saturday is the same as the day the ancient Jews called Shabbat? The answer is actually quite simple…perhaps too simple to satisfy some of the more conspiracy minded readers.
We don’t need to track the week all the way back to creation. As I stated above, we only need to establish how Yeshua did it. If today’s seventh day is the same as the seventh day of Yeshua’s time, then that’s all we need to know.
The calendars of the Ancient Near East, including Babylon, Assyria, and Israel at the very least, have used a seven-day week since before the Assyrian invasion of Israel in the eighth century BC. At that time, Rome was using an eight-day week, but in the first-century BC, Rome began using the continuous seven-day week as well (“continuous” meaning that the seventh day of one week is always followed by the first day of the next week), only renaming the days after their own gods.
By the time of Christ, the seven-day week was in common use from Britain to Persia. From the writings of various Roman and Jewish historians, we know that the day that the Hebrews called Shabbat was the same that the Romans called Saturn’s Day, what we call Saturday. (See the list of ancient sources at the end.)
Paperwork is the hallmark of all bureaucracies everywhere, and bureaucracy was one of the greatest secrets of Roman success. They were famous record keepers. The further back in time one goes, of course, the sketchier the records get, but by the first century AD, Rome was writing nearly everything down.
Over the ensuing centuries, with so many cultures adopting the Roman calendar, including the seven-day week that Rome had adopted from the Near East, it became impossible to make any changes without reams of records and massive coordination across thousands of miles, dozens of administrative borders, and armies of bureaucrats. Calendar changes were big deals. They had to be debated, analyzed, discussed, and planned before they could be implemented. They left league-long paper trails, and so every calendar change left its mark in history.
The most significant factor in all of these calendar changes for our purposes, is that the continuous cycle of the days of the week was never impacted. Not even once. And believe me, we would know if it had been. The week went from Saturday to Sunday every single week for more than two thousand years without a single break.
Can you imagine the confusion that would have resulted from one city being on Monday and the next city being on Tuesday on the same day? Even at the depths of the so-called Dark Ages, scribes, merchants, and bureaucrats kept voluminous records, and although they certainly had to deal with the days of the week having different names in some regions, (e.g. Shabbat vs Saturday), they never had to deal with one day being Friday and the next day being Thursday.
We would know from a hundred different sources if the cycle of the days of the week had been interrupted anytime in the last two thousand years, and it hasn’t. The day we call Saturday is the same day of the week that the Romans called Saturn’s Day, and is therefore still the seventh day of the week today.
Of course, some will insist that the conspiracy to hide God’s true Sabbath must have involved erasing all of the records from history, but that would require digging up all of the records no matter how insignificant, forging them using the original papers, inks, and carbon content, and then re-hiding them in their original locations so they could be found by historians and archaeologists centuries later. If you believe that, you might as well believe that the world was created the day you were born and all of history was manufactured just for you. A person can imagine anything they want and make up fantasies to justify it, but I think I’ll stick with the available evidence.
Is the Lunar Sabbath the Real Sabbath?
All ancient peoples defined a month as a single lunar cycle, from new moon to no moon. The word, month, comes from the word, moon. Among the variations of the seven-day week in the Ancient Near East, there were some calendars that divided each lunar month up into three seven-day weeks, plus a fourth week of seven to nine days, depending on when people were able to see the new moon.
There is a theory in some circles that the continuous cycle of seven-day weeks without any connection to the lunar cycle is a Babylonian invention, while the original Hebrew week was linked to the moon. According to this idea, the first week of the month began on the day after the new moon, or on the same day, depending on who you ask. The day of the new moon would be a Sabbath, then the seventh-day Sabbath would be seven days later, typically on the eighth day of the month, and again each seventh day after until the next new moon reset the clock. So the first, eighth, fifteenth, twenty-second, and twenty-ninth days of each lunar month would be Sabbaths. If there was a day or two between the twenty-ninth day and the first day of the next month, those would be extra days or non-days, again, depending on who you ask.
Here is what a sample month on a lunar Sabbath calendar might look like. If the New Moon falls on a Sunday, then all of the Sundays in that month would be “seventh day” Sabbaths. Notice that the second New Moon at the bottom of the calendar is on a Tuesday. All of the weekly Sabbaths for that month/moon would then fall on Tuesdays.
Sun
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thurs
Fri
Sat
1 New Moon Sabbath
2
3
4
5
6
7
8 Sabbath
9
10
11
12
13
14
15 Sabbath
16
17
18
19
20
21
22 Sabbath
23
24
25
26
27
28
29 Sabbath
30
1 New Moon Sabbath
2
3
4
5
The obvious problem is that there isn’t a single place in the entire Bible that even hints at such a scheme. Except for the Feast of Trumpets, there is no command to rest on a new moon, and except for other high Sabbaths (Yom Kippur, Sukkot, etc.), there is no command to rest on any day except the seventh. While the Bible refers to the Sabbath as “the seventh day”, it never refers to it as the seventh day of the month, or the eighth or fifteenth day of the month or anything else of that sort. It is always and only “the seventh day”, and never of the month.
There is only one place in the Bible on which a weekly Sabbath can be pinpointed to a date in a month: Exodus 16, which describes the first time God gave the Hebrews manna to eat in the wilderness. The story begins on the fifteenth of the month, which is indeed a Sabbath, but that single instance isn’t evidence (let alone proof!) that every fifteenth of every month must therefore be a Sabbath. In the traditional, continuous seven-day week, the weekly Sabbath will fall on some fifteenth day of some month, many, many times.
On the other hand, there are several places that the Bible strongly hints that the first and fifteenth days of every month are not normally Sabbaths, and there is one place that makes the lunar sabbath idea impossible.
To the first point, Israel was commanded to rest on the first day of the seventh month for the Feast of Trumpets (Leviticus 23:24), and on the fifteenth days of the first and seventh months for the Feasts of Unleavened Bread (Numbers 28:18) and Sukkot (Leviticus 23:39), respectively. If those days of the month were always Sabbaths, there would have been no need to tell anyone to rest. Everyone would already be resting for the weekly Sabbath.
To the second point, according to Leviticus 23:15-16, the Feast of Shavuot (aka Pentecost) is calculated by counting seven Sabbaths (or weeks) from the day after the first Sabbath of Unleavened Bread. The day after that seventh Sabbath is Shavuot, itself a special Sabbath day, and must be the 50th day of the count. In the lunar sabbath calendar, it would be impossible to count seven sabbaths plus one day to reach 50 days. A lunar month is always longer than 28 days, so the count after seven Sabbaths will always be greater than 50 days.
A third proof comes from the Jewish and Roman historians I mentioned earlier.
Josephus was a Jewish historian who wrote to a Greek and Roman audience and frequently referred to the Jewish day of rest as “the seventh day” or “Sabbath”, but never as the eighth or fifteenth day or in relation to a new moon. Since the Greeks and Romans didn’t tie their week days to the lunar cycle, surely he would have been obligated to explain what he meant by “the seventh day”. He didn’t, which means he assumed his readers would know what it meant, which means it almost certainly wasn’t tied to the lunar cycle.
Philo was another Jewish historian. He lived at the same time as Yeshua and wrote extensive commentaries on Scripture and Jewish practice. He wrote of a continuous cycle of six days of labor and one day of rest with no hint that he was even aware of another system in use by the first century Jews. (See this post for several quotes from his commentary on the Torah.)
Cassius Dio and Sextus Julius Frontinus were Roman historians who wrote of the first century BC conquest of Judea. Both of them recorded that the Jews rested every week on the day that the Romans called “Saturn’s Day”. If the Jews of that time kept a lunar Sabbath, then their week could not have been synced to the Roman week, and their Sabbath would not have been identified with Saturn’s Day any more than with the Sun’s Day (Sunday) or Mercury’s Day (Wednesday), because the Sabbath could have been on any of those Roman days depending on when the new moon came around.
These facts seem to me to be conclusive proof that the lunar Sabbath is incorrect.
Is the “Christian Sabbath” the Real Sabbath?
By far, the most common objection I have heard to our Saturday being the same as God’s commanded Sabbath day is that the Sabbath has been changed to Sunday as the new “Christian Sabbath”.
I have one, simple request: Show it to me in the Bible.
These are the facts that you will find in the New Testament regarding the first and seventh days of the week:
1. Yeshua kept the weekly Sabbath on the seventh day, including attending synagogue and studying the scriptures. 2. Yeshua, Paul, and others denounced man-made doctrines concerning the Sabbath that placed excessive burdens on people that God did not intend. 3. Keeping the Sabbath is not a prerequisite for obtaining eternal salvation. 4. The Apostles frequently attended synagogue or Temple services on the seventh day. 5. The Apostles frequently gathered for prayer, worship, teaching, and fellowship on the first day of the week. 6. Neither Yeshua nor any of the Apostles mentioned anything about a “Christian Sabbath” or changing the weekly Sabbath from the seventh day to the first day.
Meeting, worshiping, studying, fasting, feasting, or resting on any day of the week doesn’t make it the weekly Sabbath. It only means you’re doing those things on another day of the week.
However, there are two passages in the Old Testament that talk about men who try to move one or more of God’s appointed times, such as the Sabbath, to a new day.
In 1 Kings 12, King Jeroboam of Israel needed to break the hold of the Temple over the rebellious northern Kingdom of Israel to cement his power and prevent the people’s loyalties from returning to Rehoboam, King of Judah. He used the same tactic that the Roman Catholic Church has used in converting pagan peoples to Christianity. He created an alternative holiday with all the same themes and traditions, but changed the date and location. Instead of going to the Temple in Jerusalem in the seventh month for the Feast of Tabernacles, he made his people go to a new altar and temple in Bethel in the eighth month. He claimed the authority to change God’s appointed times, but he was only a man, and a wicked man at that.
In Daniel 7, a prophesied eleventh king, a type of anti-Christ, “shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and shall think to change the times and the law…” Attempting to change the appointed times of God is the habit of wicked kings, not of righteous servants. If anyone claims to have the authority to change the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, then he is in league with this wicked king of Daniel 7:25, and not on the side of the righteous.
In short, there is no Christian Sabbath in the Bible, and creating one puts the creator squarely in the camp of all of the anti-Christs of history.
What Day Is the REAL Sabbath?
We can be certain that Yeshua kept the Sabbath on the correct day and in the correct way. According to Scripture, sin is transgression of God’s Law, which includes violating the Sabbath. Also according to Scripture, Yeshua lived a perfectly sinless life, We know beyond any reasonable doubt on which day of the week he kept it, and we can also be certain–as certain as anything historical can be–that the seventh day of the week in the first century BC is still the seventh day of the week in the twenty-first century.
Yeshua told the Pharisees that they must not elevate their own traditions above the commandments of God, but that doesn’t mean that all traditions are bad. Without some traditions–historical and linguistic understandings, especially–we wouldn’t even be able to read the Scriptures. Although I wish we could change the names of the days of the week to remove references to pagan gods, the order of the days of the week is still sound.
Sunday is the first day of the week. Saturday is the seventh day of the week and still the Sabbath that God told the Israelites to keep as a sign of his covenant with them.
But…. Does the Sabbath Start at Sunset, Midnight, or Sunrise?
I have seen a number of arguments based on a couple of verses that a biblical “day” is actually only from sunrise to sunset, so night time doesn’t count. Every one of them was a case of eisegesis, reading a foregone conclusion back into the text, when a plain reading of what the text actually says would never lead one there. There will always be another objection from people who want to do things differently from everyone else.
I’ll give you two verses–although there are others–that show the biblical Sabbath starts and ends at sunset.
The First Day
God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Genesis 1:5
The very first day consisted of evening and then morning, in that order, not morning and then evening.
In the Face of the Sabbath
As soon as it began to grow dark at the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I commanded that the doors should be shut and gave orders that they should not be opened until after the Sabbath. And I stationed some of my servants at the gates, that no load might be brought in on the Sabbath day. Nehemiah 13:19
In order to keep the merchants of Jerusalem from violating the Sabbath, Nehemiah closed the gates as soon as the light began to fail at the gates “before the Sabbath”. The Hebrew is l’pani haShabbat, which literally means “in the face of the Sabbath”. In other words, when the sun was low enough that the gates began to get dark, the Sabbath was imminent. (H/T Matthew Janzen)
Why Do You Do What You Do?
We have all been sold a bill of religious goods. When a person first realizes it, his natural reaction is often to assume that everything is a lie, and understandably so. But that’s a lie too, one intended to keep you separated from the rest of God’s people, locked up in your own little cage of special knowledge.
I know that everyone, who insists that the biblical Sabbath must be kept some way other than what everyone else is doing, isn’t doing it just to be different. Most truly believe that they are doing the right thing.
It’s fine to question everything. Just don’t reject everything by default. Most of the great Christian and Jewish theologians are right about most things in the Bible, even if they get some important things wrong. Everyone is wrong about something, but nobody is wrong about everything.
ANCIENT SOURCES FOR THE JEWISH SABBATH DAY IN THE 1ST CENTURY
Josephus, Cassius Dio, and Sextus Julius Frontinus are the most prominent ancient historians that discussed the Jewish Sabbath in relation to the Roman calendar. See the following works:
If you explored a mysterious cave in the depths of an unexplored jungle and found something there with all of these qualities, you might believe some lost civilization or advanced intelligence had made it.
Multiple, networked information storage and retrieval systems
Complex, interdependent systems
Materials with properties beyond anything our best engineering can duplicate
Flight capabilities with greater speed and maneuverability at low speeds than any bird
In-flight sensing systems that can detect and track multiple tiny objects simultaneously and calculate trajectories with pinpoint accuracy
Such a discovery would be undeniable proof of advanced intelligence, but really it’s just a bat like many that I’m sure you’ve seen before. They live in caves, barns, and forests, and under bridges all over the world. Bats are powerful evidence of God’s hand in the world, but as amazing as bats are, they are far from God’s most astonishing creatures. If you’re curious, look up glass frogs, compass termites, and blue whales.
Now move your attention to something bigger. Much, much bigger.
There are things in our universe that are so massive, so powerful, that we can only hold them in our minds if we imagine them to be much tinier than they are.
Think of yourself as the size of a grain of sand. The earth would be the size of an enormous mountain in comparison, and the sun would be the size of a large country. Now imagine the energy generated by all the wind, solar, hydro, coal, and nuclear power plants that have ever existed. Now add the power released by every nuclear device ever exploded. The sun releases millions of time more energy every single second than humans have produced throughout our entire history.
On the galactic scale, the sun isn’t very impressive.
The size of many other stars is as much greater than the sun’s as the sun’s is greater than the earth’s. The sun’s energy output is mind boggling, but a neutron star can release as much energy in a single second as the sun does in a million years. The Milky Way galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars.
Hundreds of billions of stars.
And on the universal scale, the Milky Way isn’t a big deal.
It’s breathtaking. Astounding. There aren’t enough superlative adjectives in the English language–or any language–to describe the wonders of God’s creation on any scale you might use. The mind blowing complexity of the subatomic, quantum world, and the crushing grandiosity of the universe that is so big that no human will ever, ever see the light from the most distant stars.
And the most awesome thing is this: God spoke it all into existence.
We are awed by thunderstorms, but a thunderstorm doesn’t even rise to the level of a single spark compared to the power of the sun, which is, itself, a mere speck of dust compared to the Milky Way, which is….
You get the picture. We serve an awesome God indeed.
No wonder it’s so hard for some people to believe in God. He is so far beyond our comprehension that it’s simpler for many people to pretend that bats and black holes just happened all on their own.
By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.
Hebrews 11:3
We are incapable of comprehending God. His existence is more than our tiny minds can handle. It is only by faith that we are able to see what ought to be obvious and incorporate it into our worldview: the existence of the Creator and the evidence of his handiwork in absolutely everything that is.
And it is only by faith that we are able to comprehend what is even more incomprehensible than all of this: The Creator of heaven and earth sees us. He knows us. He cares about us.
