Lunar Sabbaths

Dear Sir.

Check out this web site ______ and take some time to study into it at your convenience. Does this mean that the Adventist church is no longer a commandment keeping church or do you foresee the church converting over to this biblical Sabbath observance?? This is based on Gen. 1:14 Sun and moon as the only time pieces that we have but the Gregorian weekly cycle is not based on this scriptural reckoning but devised by man.

thanks. Joseph

Hi Bob,

This lunar Sabbath notion is foolishness. A friend tried to explain it to me last week, so I've actually heard of this already. By this theory the weekly Sabbaths are all set by the new moon every month. Here is how it works. The new moon is a Sabbath -- a day when no work is to be done and the Temple is open for worship. Every month begins with a new moon. The first work day is the second day of the week followed by 5 more work days. That gets you through the 7th day of the month (new moon day plus 6 work days). The 8th day of the month is the first weekly Sabbath of the month. Six more days of work gets you to the 15th as the next weekly Sabbath. Six more days of work gets you to the 22nd of the month as the 3rd weekly Sabbath. Six more days of work gets you to the 29th of the month, which is the last weekly Sabbath in the month. This is a total of 29 days. The time from one new moon to the next new moon is roughly 29.5 days so that would be just about ready for the next new moon, which is a not a work day but is a Sabbath, but not a weekly Sabbath. Thus the weekly Sabbaths will always land on the 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th days of month. Some months will end with the weekly Sabbath on the 29th followed by the new moon Sabbath the next day. Some months will need an extra day in between the 29th and the new moon day.

According to this theory, the annual Sabbaths will always coincide with the weekly Sabbaths because the festivals always begin on the 15th of the month under this calculation. Therefore, we know that throughout antiquity people everywhere could know when to celebrate the Sabbath because it was tied to the new moon.

Except for the fact that there is a new moon day and it is not a work day and the Temple is open for worship, Everything else related to this notion is hogwash! First off, this plan requires there to be 4 full weeks every month, but after the 4th Sabbath there will either be a one day interruption in the 7 day weekly cycle for the new moon or a one day "week," followed by a new moon that resets the new weekly cycle. In either event, the weekly cycle from one month to the next gets shoved down by one or two days with every new month. There is no such interruption in the weekly cycle in God's plan. Leviticus 23:3 states "For six days labor may be preformed, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of complete rest, a holy convocation when you do no work at all. It is a Sabbath to the Lord in all your dwellings." The Hebrew word for "seventh" day is the ordinal number for 7. Every seventh day since creation we are to rest and worship. No interruptions are envisioned by this definition or any other of the places where the seventh day Sabbath is described. But by the theory that the Sabbaths are set by the new moon every month, the pattern of rest and worship every seventh day is destroyed. The actual seventh day Sabbath gets lost in the shuffle.

Second, there is no provision in the weekly Sabbath commandment or anywhere in scripture for a short one or two day adjustment to the "week" when the new moon occurs. This short time before resetting the weeks according to the new moon each month is what destroys the weekly seventh day pattern of celebrating God's creative power for life and redemptive, recreative power of salvation in our lives. Sabbath keeping looses it meaning under this plan and ends up being done for no reason except rote behavior.

Third, the proponents of the lunar Sabbath plan say that the annual Sabbaths always begin on the 15th of the month and, therefore, all the annual Sabbaths will coincide with the weekly Sabbaths. This is nonsense. The Feast of Unleavened Bread begins on the 15th and ends on the 21st. The 15th matches their plan, but the 21st doesn't. Their weekly Sabbath is always on the 22nd. Then the Feast of Weeks (Harvest Festival or Pentecost) is after the seventh Sabbath following the Sabbath that falls within the Feast of Unleavened Bread. This is 50 days after that Sabbath. The day after the Sabbath will always be the first day of the week on what we call Sunday. The day of Pentecost will always be on Sunday. That certainly doesn't match the lunar Sabbath plan where all the Sabbaths, both the seventh day Sabbath and the annual Sabbaths, will fall on the 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th days of the month.

From the earliest days of Satan's war against God, God's system of worship has been under attack. It still is in many ways. This is just another angle on the attack to get people to jump to a cunningly devised fable and give up worshiping God as He has instructed us to.

The pictures were of objects (trees, cars, a fence by the sea, a few boats) covered by really thick ice. These were supposedly on a lake in Switzerland. What I noticed is that it was only the objects that were right along the shore line that were covered in ice and the ice was several inches thick. But none of the objects that were more than 75 feet or so away from shore were affected. Maybe the high winds off the lake could do that, but it looked like it was part of a Hollywood stage setup.

Cordially,
Jerry