Posted on 12/27/2001 5:39:55 AM PST by X-USAF
At the Logos bookstore they sell Christian stuff. Books, Bibles, crosses, pictures, those little fish you put on the back of your car.
Stuff like that.
They’ve been doing it for 22 years.
And for 22 years they’ve been doing it six days a week. Monday through Saturday. They were always dark on Sunday.
The Lord’s Day. The Christian Sabbath. A day to worship and remember God’s blessings and the miracle of the resurrection and atonement. No work, no shopping, no doing business or raising heck.
Just keeping the Sabbath day holy.
For 22 years.
Until this year. Until about a month ago. November 25th. A Sunday. When they opened. Unlocked the door and turned on the lights and filled the cash register.
To get the Christmas shoppers.
A Christian bookstore. Open on Sunday.
And they’ve been open every Sunday since, and they might keep doing that into the new year, permanently. “The jury is still out,” the owner said.
A Christian bookstore. Open on Sunday.
If that don’t beat all.
If that doesn’t take a couple thousand years of practice and just turn it on its head.
Now, for most stores, this wouldn’t mean anything. Some 25 or 30 years ago the culture changed. The big chains came in and the Blue Laws went out and the mom-and-pops who wouldn’t think of opening on Sunday were replaced by bottom-liners who worshipped a different god.
The “OPEN” sign went up on Sunday in the window of American business a generation ago, kicking to the curb the traditional understanding of the commandment, “Thou shalt honor the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” Most of our grandparents wouldn’t have thought of working or shopping on Sunday, or encouraging others to, and now those things are a normal part of life.
But you kind of thought it’d be different at a Christian bookstore.
At a business whose stock-in-trade is religion, where the Ten Commandments would presumably be sacred, “the jury is still out” on a question God answered 4,000 years ago.
Don’t get me wrong. I live in a glass house on this one. Half the time, when faced with a shopping-on-Sunday decision, I choose yes. I’ll buy things, I’ll go out to eat.
And I was raised to believe both are wrong.
And I still believe both are wrong.
So I’m as big a hypocrite as anyone.
But I am able to point out that when even the Christian bookstores blow off the Fourth Commandment, we may want to consider declaring the Sabbath day officially dead.
If not in God’s eyes, then in America’s eyes.
Because who, outside of some Jews, Mormons, Mennonites, Amish and Seventh-day Adventists, even pays attention to it anymore?
We have made a major cultural change unconsciously. In the name of convenience and profit we have abandoned a belief and a practice that until 30 years ago typified the American faith experience.
Which we are allowed to do, but which we unfortunately did without noticing. Without thinking it through.
Without asking ourselves these questions: Why did God institute Sabbath observance, and why did we abandon it?
What exactly is our rationale for deciding that what the Lord wrote with his finger on a tablet of stone atop Mt. Sinai no longer applies? How exactly do we defend the notion that we are smarter than Him, and our ancestors?
And how can we wrap ourselves in the Ten Commandments and uniformly ignore one of them?
The answer is, I don’t think we can.
The fact that everybody is doing it, doesn’t make it right. The fact that a Christian bookstore is doing it, doesn’t make it right.
The fact that you and I are doing it, doesn’t make it right.
Usually, the Lord’s commandments carry with them specific blessings. If we fail to obey a commandment, we are unable to receive the blessings associated with it.
And what might those blessings be?
Well, we live in a society where people mourn the loss of values, where children are raised with no sense of right and wrong or proper social and moral conduct. Could the loss of a weekly day to learn and reflect on God’s teachings be a factor in that?
You bet it could.
We live in a society where the family unit, even in married, nuclear families, is steadily crumbling. Could the loss of a weekly day set aside for family togetherness be a factor in that?
You bet it could.
Keeping the Sabbath day holy was a great strength to our grandparents and those before them as they tried to stay close to God and their families.
But we have traded those things – the two most important things in life – for some shopping convenience and a bigger bottom line.
We traded God for gold, family for frittering. We have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage.
And now a Christian bookstore is doing it.
And why not. Most of its customers do.
I would love to hear spirited comments over this.
Almost forgot, I hope all had a very Merry Christmas!
So, what does "keep the Sabbath holy" mean for a Christian?
The big chains and the Blue Laws were only a symptom of a larger issue -- people who were supposedly "Christian" suddenly decided that shopping on Sunday was no big deal.
I have one rule when it comes to things like this -- I never go shopping on a day when I wouldn't want to go to work. This means Sundays as well as most civic holidays.
They're just out to make a buck off God, they may as well be open Sunday, they don't honor Him any other day.
1. Most large churches I know of have bookstands from which one can buy religious books any day of the week, including Sunday. They may call it "donation" on the bookrack, but we know what's being said.
2. Gentile Christian's Freedom from the old legal code of the Old Testament is something that most Christians fail to act on, even though many of them mouth things that show they know that they are dead to the law by the body of Christ. The Sabbath was NOT one of the Old Testament rules that the Acts 15 Jerusalem Council required the Gentile Christians to observe. Those four were:
Acts 15 28 It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: 29 You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell. 30 The men were sent off and went down to Antioch, where they gathered the church together and delivered the letter.
3. Paul emphasizes the above for Gentile Christians in his letter to the Colossians:
Colossians 2
15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. 16 Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. 17 These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.
He qualified this particular commandment, in this context, when the pharisees criticized his disciples for picking grain on the Sabbath.
As he was passing through a field of grain on the sabbath, his disciples began to make a path while picking the heads of grain.
At this the Pharisees said to him, "Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the sabbath?"
He said to them, "Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry?
How he went into the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of offering that only the priests could lawfully eat, and shared it with his companions?"
Then he said to them, "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.
That is why the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath."
Do you therefore think it is OK to generalize? All businesses in this line are the same?
You haven't commented on the scripture above. If you don't care to deal with the Acts and the Colossians passages, then you have inner dealings you must address before you can deal with what the bible says or doesn't say.
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