Discovering the New Covenant by Greg Taylor - exAdventist Outreach

THE SABBATH IN COLOSSIANS
be to get things out of order. The New Testament was
written to give us a more full revelation of God’s workings
in human history. It gives us the fullest revelation of all,
Jesus Christ. Since we must apply the message of Jesus to
our personal lives as post-Cross Christians, the Epistles were
written specifically for that purpose. Jesus came to fulfill
much of the system of Judaism, for example. He came to
fulfill some of the aspects of the Old Covenant or Testament.
How do we know which ones? The Gospels do not spell out
which ones. The Epistles do that. So it is of crucial
importance that we remember the application principles
when studying the Scriptures.
I went first to the New Testament (covenant or will) and
specifically to the Epistles to see what is taught there about
the application of the Sabbath to Christians today. Then I
went to Jesus’ life to see if He made room for such an
interpretation in His life and ministry. I asked myself if
Jesus’ life and ministry prepared the way for what I had
learned in the Epistles. Finally, I went back to the Old
Testament to see if what is written there agrees with the
Epistles and Jesus on the subject. In this way, I made every
effort to focus on the application sections of the Scriptures
first.
The first text I studied is found in Colossians two. (I am
using the New King James version of the Bible unless
otherwise indicated, and all of the emphases are my own.) In
the book of Colossians, Paul is addressing a syncretistic
heresy that is a mixture of angel worship and ascetic
practices. But mixed into it all is the Judaizing element
(Jewish legalistic Christians who were requiring Jewish law
of the Gentile believers) that is trying to influence these new
Christians. In the Colossians two passage, the focus is on the
Jewish part of the heresy. Starting with verse 11, Paul
focuses on the fact that circumcision has been replaced by
baptism; therefore circumcision is no longer required. Then
he points out that the record of our sins is nailed to the Cross
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