(SECTION 1)LUNAR sabbaths VERSUS WEEKLY SABBATH:WHERE IS THE CONNECTION?WHERE IS THE CONFUSION?WHERE DOES DANGER LURK? AN EXPOSITION 0F THE BIBLICAL TRUTH and supporting facts from various sources.This discourse comes from my lectures I conducted in some churches some years back.I brought this because I was asked by a few saints to clarify,from a Biblical standpoint,a few grey areas that ring with loud uncertainty connotations!In my research,vast research by doing comparative study,I discovered my earlier belief was in error!Truth indeed is never sent to embarrass,it is not given to offend nor condemn,but to enlighten and edify,correct and guide!I will try to compress this study as much as possible to be concise!Please follow this study if you are in the dark.If you are predisposed to a certain idea,throw it away until ypu have read the entire overview!To Lunar Sabbatarians I say,I love you!Make up your mind after the last segment!I do not intend to contend but to share the truth!God bless you all! THE LUNAR SABBATH GIST: MATHMATICAL ARGUMENT AND BACKGROUND OF LUNAR SABBATH: The Lunar Sabbath is a fringe Christian belief that the sabbath day is not fixed at the 7th day of the week but is dependent on the phase of the moon, Since seven does not divide evenly into the 29.5 day lunar cycle, it requires some days of the month not to be counted.(If this is not the proper understanding of it,then it is because there is a cross spectrum of divergent views among lunar sabbatarians!) Yet if an interpretation of the Bible requires you to change how you count to seven in order to fit Scripture, could it really be what God meant?Thats the gauntlet we are throwing in the mix. If you are a sabbath keeper, you may one day encounter the Lunar Sabbath or Lunar Shabat doctrine. This theory says that the fixed traditionally Jewish timing for keeping sabbath of Friday sunset through Saturday sunset is a corruption of an original Biblically instructed reckoning of Sabbath based on the lunar cycle.Others say the current calender by the Papacy is so corrupt that the days have been mixed up and hence the Sabbath is lost!So they therefore turn to(the moon,which is undefiled,to locate the true sabbath)Therefore, Under (one version) of this model, the sabbath falls on the 8th, 15th, 22st and 29th day of each lunar month, or at the first quarter, full moon, last quarter, and new moon. The claim is made that God intended that one can just look up in the sky and know when the sabbath is. Hopefully using the sky as your calendar is easier than it sounds, because the lunar sabbath can fall on any day of the week, and with each new lunar month, it falls a day or two later in the week than the last month. As a result, to follow this system one must deal with the difficult, if not impractical, situation of having to take a day off from work during the five day work week over 70% of the weeks—on a rotating schedule, no less.(Thats the aweful reality that comes with such belief) Of course, the fact that a commandment of God is hard to follow would not be a valid reason to discount it or doubt it. But if you are sensing already that something does not sound right with this theory, you are not alone. In my experience much false doctrine comes from breaking the rules of how to properly read the Bible. We will see that is exactly the case here. WHEN LOGIC,COMMON SENSE,REASON---(Three usually unreliliable witnesses) in spiritual realm are called!!Did the Sabbath come before the Lunar reckoning?If yes,why should we rely now on Lunar to calculate a weekly Sabbath?Lunar sabbaths derives its existence from the Feasts given By YHWEH and if indeed from feasts ,how does it aunthenticate what preceeded it---The fourth commandment SABBATH to ascertain it?What is the difference between Ceremonial and Memorial or Commemorative?Between the weekly SABBATH and the feast sabbaths? Can God let his day be lost?Where in scripture does it say we should observe the weekly Sabbath through the lunar calender? FATAL FLAW: Lets review the biblical instruction for reckoning the sabbath: Exodus 20:9–11— 9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: 10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of YHWH thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: 11 For in six days YHWH made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore YHWH blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. At first glance, the Lunar Sabbaths on the 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th, spaced 7 days apart, resemble the biblically prescribed seven day sabbath cycle. However, this resemblance ends once you pass a month boundary. Instead of there being the required six intervening work days between one sabbath and next, you instead have alternately seven or eight days between the last sabbath of the month on the 29th and the first sabbath of the next month on the 8th. This is due to the fact that the lunar cycle averages 29.5 days, instead of the needed 28 days to make this idea work. This should be a fairly obvious death knell to the Lunar Sabbath theory. You may wonder how anyone could answer this clear mathematical impasse? Proponents sidestep it by claiming that those one or two extra days at the end of the month while the moon is dark do not count because hidden days are void days. In other words, the seven or eight days interval between sabbaths at month boundaries are equated with the required six day interval. If this sounds irrational to you then you are not alone. The other explanation I have been given, which stunned me even more, was that Scripture never says that shabbat is a cycle of seven, just that we are to accomplish our work in six days and rest in the seventh. It is never stated that we must go back to work the next day This comment comes from the author of a book on Lunar Sabbath, an authority on the subject. Yet, if God was not describing a seven day cycle, then why does he say things like... Leviticus 23:15-16— And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the Sabbath, from the day that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven Sabbaths shall be complete: Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number fifty days... ...which naturally cause most of us to reasonably conclude that the sabbath is the last day of a repeating seven day weekly cycle? Is God capricious and prone to playing tricks on us to trip up sincere truth seekers? Why not just tell us, You shall surely keep one day every quarter of the moon as a sabbath unto me instead of explicitly describing a repeating seven day weekly cycle for reckoning sabbath? Obviously, these are irrational answers to the clear conflict between Lunar Sabbath and the Bible. When a doctrine is in conflict with pretty clear and explicit Scripture, it should be rejected, without fear. When this theory is so easily proven false mathematically just by following it across the month boundary, then it must be rejected.Egoes aside,pride aside,arrogance aside! It is not necessary to hear any more of the mountains of support usually presented for the theory. The God of the Bible does not expect us to use irrational logic to interpret his words. How We Approach the Bible Makes All The Difference And this is exactly the point where most people misstep in evaluating the Lunar Sabbath. They accept (at least momentarily) the irrational math to make it fit a seven day cycle, and keep listening to the rest of the inferred scriptural support offered for it. And there are entire books full of evidence for this error, in fact. This should be no surprise, though. If you have been around long enough, you probably have heard the Bible used to support many things it was never intended to. Indeed, anything is possible when you abandon the proper and reasonable approach to handling the Bible. As a matter of fact, over the years I have adopted a guideline regarding this. Once I realize a person is using different rules of interpretation for the Bible, I end discussion with that person. For example, proponents will claim, every single Shabbat in the entire Bible which can be pointed to a specific date, occurred on 8-15-22-29 - EVERY one. Coincidence? Some even offer cash bounties to anyone who can find a case in the Bible that contradicts this claim. But, to do this would be an exercise in futility. Whether it is true or not that all the sabbaths fall on those days, this, once again, is not how to properly determine the timing of sabbath. There are clear scriptures telling us explicitly when it is, and those should be our foundation (along with consistent universal counting from the number one to seven), not circumstantial evidence. And if you somehow did get them to admit this claim is erroneous, they have dozens of other arguments left waiting to be disproved. Its better to learn to spot the key false assumption that all false doctrines have and avoid getting lost in a sea of side issues.We continue with an indepth discussion..in section two!Be blessed!
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 11:58:12 +0000
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