Objection 33: The Old Testament prophets foretold that the time was coming when the Sabbath would be done away. (See, Hosea 2:11) In Amos 8:5 the question is asked, "When will the Sabbath be gone?" The prophet answers that this would take place when the sun went down at noon and the earth was darkened in a clear day. (Amos 8:9) The earth was darkened when Jesus was crucified. Hence the Sabbath came to an end at the cross.
To the credit of Sunday advocates, it should be said at the outset that this rather flimsy objection is not frequently presented against the Sabbath.
Hosea 2:11 reads as follows: “I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, and her Sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts.”
First, please note that Hosea 2:11 recites the same language we find in Colossians 2:16: “festival or a new moon or sabbaths” which we have shown in previous answers to be the ceremonial sabbaths, not the weekly Sabbath. This is clear from the immediate context in Colossians 2:17, which says that festivals, new moons, and sabbaths “are a shadow of the things to come, but the reality is found in Christ.” The festivals, new moons, and sabbaths were part of system of types and shadows that foreshadowed or symbolized Christ and his sacrifice to save us.
Another instance of this same language is found in Isaiah:
“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? Says the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. When you come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them. And when you spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when you make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil. ... If you be willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land.” Isa. 1:11-19
Note Isaiah’s language, “the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies,” the same language we have seen in Colossians and Hosea. Here, God’s prophet Isaiah is painting a picture of backsliding Israel, practicing idolatry, oppression, injustice, and every other evil, yet observing the forms of the ceremonial law, bringing the sacrifices to the temple and observing the annual feast days and ceremonial sabbaths. By observing the ceremonial law intended to prefigure Christ’s salvation while at the same time neglecting justice and morality, the Jews made a mockery of the ceremonies, and angered God.
[The analogy is to contemporary “cheap grace” Christians who keep invoking God’s grace and mercy without working, in response to grace, to reform their own lives and live in obedience to God’s moral law. —Ed.]
God declared that fearful judgments were to come upon them. No more would they engage in a round of services; no more would mirth or the sound of gladness be heard in the land. The very trees and vines were to be destroyed. (Hosea 2:12) God would shut His eyes from seeing them and His ears from hearing them.
When were these fearful prophecies fulfilled? In the destruction of the kingdom of Israel, with its capital in Samaria, and in the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple and the Babylonian captivity of Judah. Hence, these judgments came on Judah and Israel several centuries before the cross, and do not fit the objector’s theory that the Sabbath ended at the cross, and Sunday took its place.
Yes, the ceremonial sabbaths connected with the annual feasts ended at the cross, but Hosea is prophesying not the end of any law but, rather, the punishment of a rebellious people who would not do right, regardless of being God’s chosen people and having been given the law and the special blessings of God.
Now, what of Amos 8:5? The passage, including the immediately preceding and succeeding verses, reads:
Hear this, you who swallow up the needy,
And make the poor of the land fail, saying“When will the New Moon be past,
That we may sell grain?
And the Sabbath,
That we may trade wheat?
Making the ephah small and the shekel large,
Falsifying the scales by deceit,
That we may buy the poor for silver,
And the needy for a pair of sandals—
Even sell the bad wheat?”
Here, Amos describes a greedy, grasping mercantile class that oppresses the poor, cheats its customers with false scales, and even sells bad merchandise. It is clear that they value nothing but gain. Nothing was allowed to be sold on the Sabbath, so the merchants ask when the Sabbath would be over, down to the minute, so they can open their stores and re-start their crooked commerce. To argue that they are wanting to know when the Sabbath will be abolished, by the death of Christ even (!), is beyond absurd.
And what of the claim that Amos, in verses 9 and 10, is predicting the darkening of the sky at the crucifixion of Christ? Let Amos interpret his own words:
“Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? The day of the Lord is darkness, and not light. . . . Shall not the day of the Lord he darkness, and not light? Even very dark, and no brightness in it? I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. . . . Therefore will 1 cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts." Amos 5:18-21, 27.
It is evident that this darkening of the sun was a synonym for the fearful day of God’s judgment, and the sun's going down at noon on a clear day, a figurative way of describing the suddenness and unexpectedness of that awful judgment. And this judgment, this sudden blackness that was to envelop Israel, was their being led “into captivity beyond Damascus.” That judgment fell on the kingdom of Israel (the northern 10 tribes) about seven hundred years before the cross, when they were destroyed by the Assyrians.
It is obvious that the judgments on Israel and Judah did not abolish the Sabbath; God will always have created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day, and His moral character, as expressed in the Ten Commandments written by His own finger, could not be changed by Israel’s failure and the resulting judgment. But just to cement that point, we note that when Nehemiah was gathering the remnant of Judah from Babylon back to Jerusalem, one of the things he endeavored most valiantly to do was to revive the true keeping of the Sabbath. (See Neh. 13:15-22)