Isn’t the Sabbath for the Jews only?

Long before there was ever a Jew on this earth, God created the Sabbath. When people read the story of Creation, it is easy to assume that since Genesis was written by Moses and is part of the Old Testament, then our first parents must have been Jews. Yet the Hebrew nation did not even exist for another 2,500 years! The father of the Jewish nation was Abraham. Like the marriage institution, also established in Eden, the Sabbath was to be a blessing for all people.

The Decalogue is eternal and not bound to some particular race or people group. Though God succinctly presented His commandments most clearly through Moses, the ten laws are not limited to the Jews. They were given to the entire human race. The concept of a Jewish Sabbath makes about as much sense as saying there is a German law of gravity or a Chinese law of thermodynamics.

In Mark 2:27, we read how Jesus emphasized that the Sabbath was made for all human beings. It does not say, “The Sabbath was made for Jews.” We would be ridiculed in suggesting that the fifth commandment, to honor our parents, was only for people in New Zealand or that the eighth commandment, to not steal, applies only to Russians!

Some suggest that the Sabbath principle is to keep one day a week as a rest day. They believe any day will work and that we are not bound to the “seventh” day, which is supposedly of Jewish origin. But that line of thought falls short as well, since the creation account is repeatedly specific: “On the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made” (Genesis 2:2, 3, my emphasis). The fourth commandment even connects itself to the creation (Exodus 20:11).

Key Bible Texts

And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: (Mark 2:27 KJV)