Objection 43: The apostle John calls Sunday the "Lord's day," (Revelation 1:10) and declares that he was in the Spirit on that day. This proves that Sunday is the sacred weekly rest day of the Christian church and that the Sabbath has been abolished.
In Revelation 1:10, John says, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet.”
The question is, what day does John mean by “the Lord’s day”? There is no reason to imagine that John meant Sunday, but even if John called Sunday “the Lord’s day,” that would not provide sufficient proof that the fourth commandment of the Ten Commandments had been abolished or changed. Let that fact be clear at the outset.
So how do Sunday advocates attempt to prove that John meant Sunday? They declare that the phrase “Lord’s day,” began to be used as a synonym for Sunday by church fathers in their writings very soon after John's death, and that therefore he used the phrase in the same sense.
What are the facts? There have come down to us certain writings attributed to “church fathers” who lived in the generations immediately following that of the apostles. Many of these writings are spurious, and of those that are genuine, most are so garbled or emended by later writers that it is almost impossible to know what portion was written by the original author. This, coupled with the fact that some of these earliest fathers employed unusual, if not incoherent, literary constructions, has caused scholars great uncertainty as to the true meaning of many passages in those writings.
The church German church historian Augustus Neander sums up the problem:
“The writings of the so-called apostolic Fathers have unhappily, for the most part, come down to us in a condition very little worthy of confidence. Partly because under the name of these men, so highly venerated in the church, writings were early forged for the purpose of giving authority to particular opinions or principles. And partly because their own writings which were extant, became interpolated in subservience to a Jewish hierarchical interest, which aimed to crush the free spirit of the gospel.” -- General History of the Christian Religion and Church (1854), vol. 1, Appendix, sec. 4, p. 657.
The reader can see that any argument based on what the “church fathers” are supposed to have said is on shaky ground. Only if we are ready to add a little wishful thinking to our translation of certain questionable passages can we accept the claim that the phrase “Lord's day” began to be used by the church fathers shortly after John's death.
We believe that there is no clear use of that phrase in any writings of the fathers until near the end of the second century. And if that be true, the argument for Sunday based on John's use of the phrase stretches out so thin—for it must stretch out over nearly a century—that it cannot carry the weight of argument suspended on it.
But so plausible can even a doubtful passage sound to those who need the support it provides that, despite the damaging evidence here presented, there will still remain in many minds a feeling that the phrase was actually used by church fathers to describe Sunday within a generation or so of John's day. Furthermore, so intriguing is the fact that John uses a phrase that is later used to describe Sunday that those same minds will naturally lean toward the conclusion that probably, after all, John likewise used the phrase to describe Sunday.
Besides the emotional weakness that afflicts that kind of conclusion, there is a glaring fallacy that invalidates it, the fallacy of concluding that because a word has a certain meaning at one time, it has the same meaning at an earlier time. This is one of the worst fallacies into which a person can fall in reading writings of a former day. Because in the writings of a Second-Century father the phrase “Lord's day” meant Sunday, it does not therefore follow that in the writings of John the phrase meant Sunday.
Words change and even reverse their meanings, and sometimes in an amazingly short period. Until the seventeenth century the word “Sabbath” had rather uniformly been used by Christian speakers and writers to describe the seventh day of the week. But in the British Isles, in that century, there was a great Puritan revival of religion, which focused on an endeavor to secure better observance of Sunday. Sunday was declared to be commanded in the Ten Commandments, with simply a change from the seventh to the first day of the week. In order to make their language consistent with this view the Puritanical reformers began to call Sunday “Sabbath.” In almost one generation the change was made. So far as a large segment of the population was concerned, and the term “Sabbath” now meant Sunday, the first day of the week.
Hence, the word “Sabbatarian” for many decades meant a Sunday advocate who believed that Sunday should be rigorously kept, often with the aid of civil legislation. But today “Sabbatarian” is used nearly exclusively to describe a Seventh-day Adventist who keeps Saturday and who is opposed to civil laws enforcing the observance of Sunday. Here again is a complete reversal of meaning, and in a rather short space of time.
As late as the 1840s in America the word “spiritualist” meant a person who “spiritualized” away the literal meaning of Scriptures, or one who had very spiritual views. But in less than ten years the word began to be used to describe those who had taken up with the Hydesville rappings of 1848, which started modern spiritualism, i.e., the belief that disembodied conscious spirits of the dead continued to haunt the living.
[To adduce an example from after Nichol’s time, the word “gay” went from meaning “happy and carefree” to “homosexual”—a radically different meaning—in the space of less than a decade in the 1970s.]
By examining an unabridged dictionary, one can compile a near-endless list of such changes in the meaning of words and, after such an examination, one will be highly suspicious of any argument that would seek to read back into the words of a man who wrote at one time the meaning given to those words by men who wrote at a later time.
We may properly understand a writer's words in the light of the meaning that those words have had up to the time he wrote. But we cannot safely read back into his words a meaning acquired by those words in later years.
John wrote the Revelation about the year AD. 90. Up to that time had the Bible writers ever used the term “Lord's day” to describe Sunday? No. They uniformly described Sunday simply as “the first day of the week.” (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Mark 16:9; Luke 24:1; Mat. 28:1) Even more striking is the fact that John himself, in his Gospel calls Sunday by the same colorless phrase as the other Bible writers used, “the first day of the week.” (John 20:1, 19)
There is only one day described in the Bible that could lay claim to being the Lord's day, and that is the Sabbath. The Ten Commandments describes it as “the Sabbath of the Lord.” Ex. 20:10. Isaiah tells us to call this day “the holy of the Lord.” Isa. 58:13.
Christ described Himself as “Lord also of the Sabbath.” Mark 2:28. John had heard the Savior utter these words. He knew also the words of the Ten Commandments and the words of Isaiah. How reasonable, then, to conclude that he meant the Sabbath when he said “Lord's day.” If we allow Scripture to interpret Scripture, there is no other conclusion we can possibly come to regarding what John meant by the phrase, “the Lord’s day.”
But why, we might ask, did John use the phrase “the Lord’s day” in Revelation whereas in his own gospel he always simply called it the Sabbath? We do not know. However, the history of John's day, when Christianity was coming into greater conflict with pagan Rome, offers an interesting suggestion:
The Caesars were often deified, and Christians were called on to offer incense to them—or forfeit their lives. Days such as an emperor's birthday took on a religious quality because of the cult of the emperor. Domitian, who was emperor from 81 AD to 96 AD had himself and his entire family deified, and went by the title Dominus et Deus, roughly “Lord and God.” John, who almost certainly was on Patmos writing the Book of Revelation during Domitian's reign, was likely anxious to set the record straight as to who was the real Lord and God—Jesus Christ! He is King of Kings and Lord of Lords (Rev. 19:16), and also Lord of the Sabbath (Mat. 12:8).