The Fourth Commandment:

The Sign of the Church in the Wilderness

Kelly P. Gallagher

The story of the church of Jesus Christ is a story of the persecution of a small remnant by the universal church wedded to the state.  It is a small group of faithful witnesses to the truth of the gospel, who have always prized the Word of God above the traditions of men.  In this study, we will focus on one of the greatest deceptions to fall on the church.  This is the deception that God, through Jesus Christ, His apostles, or the successors of the apostles, has changed one of the 10 commandments, the Decalogue, from the rest commanded on the seventh day of the week, to the first day of the week. 

We will examine the scriptural truths concerning this subject as well as a thorough examination of church history to uncover the truth in this matter.  The apostle Paul tells us that we are not under the law, but under grace.  Many Christians have taken this as a license to disregard the laws of God and live a lawless life, breaking almost all of the ten commandments, thinking that grace covers all sins.  This is the same lie that Satan has told people since the garden of Eden, that there will be no consequences for sin.

If the commandment of God to keep the Sabbath  can be disregarded by the church, then why not the other nine?  Is keeping Sunday instead of Saturday the correct thing to do?  What difference does it make whether we worship and rest on Sunday instead of  Saturday?  We will examine all these things and endeavor to come to the truth.

After the destruction of the city of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., by the Roman general Titus, in fulfillment of the prophecy of Jesus, the church moved to the city of Antioch, in Syria.  The name “Christian” was first given at Antioch, its capital, to the followers of Jesus.  Paul and Barnabus preached to the Jews only at first.  These Jews understood the Jewish roots of Christianity and were faithful to the strict monotheism of the Old Testament. 

Another center of Christian expansion was Alexandria, Egypt.  Gnosticism, was a product of this seaport town where syncretism with the world’s religions took place.  Gnosticism was a union of pagan philosophy and gospel truth.  It rejected the Old Testament, denied creation, and held in contempt all Jews, even Christian Jews.  We will see that this spirit of anti-semitism overtook the church and caused the glorious church of Jesus Christ to be forces to flee to the wilderness to maintain the purity of the holy scriptures and the apostolic doctrines learned directly from the apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Alexandria was known for a mystical, allegorical interpretation method, but the area of Antioch insisted on the grammatico-historical interpretation of the scriptures and rejecting the mystical or allegorical method of Alexandria.

The fall of Jerusalem caused millions of Jews to listen to the gospel.  The fulfilled prophecy of Jesus was a powerful witness to those Jews who did not live in Palestine.  These converts were effective in spreading the gospel all over the world.  These Jews were not under the fanatical legalism of the Pharisees of Jerusalem rabbis and the stunning event of the destruction of Jerusalem left them teachable to the truth of the gospel as preached by the apostles. 

One of the leaders of the church of Syria that God raised up to combat the onslaught of heretical doctrines, allegorical interpretations and the mutilation of the holy scriptures coming from gnostic Alexandria was Lucian.  He lived from 215 to 312 c.e.  He was a gifted scholar.  In an era of confusion and perversion of the original texts of the Bible, Lucian defended, preserved and passed on to other generations the true text of the Holy scriptures.  A Hebrew scholar, his version of the Old Testament was adopted by most of the churches of the East.  He also worked on the New Testament.  He also left a masterpiece of theology to believers.  His opponents have seen to it that his writings have been either destroyed or vilified, and not much history about him has been preserved, yet his works live on in the church in the wilderness.  God used this man as a foundation of truth and to preserve the true text of the Word of God throughout the centuries. 

The Jews at Alexandria were compromising with paganism.  Rome was the capitol of world paganism.  A dangerous ecclesiastical alliance between Rome and Alexandria began to take place.  As early as 150 A.D., Justin Martyr began to exalt tradition over the scriptures.  He was the spiritual father of Tatian, a teacher of Clement.  Clement’s most famous pupil was Origen, who corrupted the scriptures with his allegorical exegesis.  Origen boasted that he would not even teach Christianity unless it were mixed with pagan philosophy.  1

Victor I, bishop of Rome, entered into a compact with Clement of Alexandria, about 190 C.E., to secure support to help make Sunday the prominent day of worship in the church.   Sunday was already exalted by the heathen, the day they worshipped the sun.  The first attempt to compromise with paganism arose over the celebration of Easter.  Victor I, pronounced excommunication on all who would not make Easter always fall on a Sunday.  Lucian defied this and has been attacked ever since by the compromising church.  In a shameful act, the Roman church appealed to the pagan emperor Aurelian to settle dispute over Paul of Samosata.  This emperor gave the case to the church of Rome, thus empowering the myth of the succession from Peter to the Pope of Rome. 

Two of the major heresies combated by the church of Syria and Lucian were gnosticism and Manichaeism.  Manichaeism demanded celibacy of its priests and leaders and worshipped the sun as the supreme dwelling of Deity.  It brought the ancient Persian hatred of the Old Testament and ridiculed the Sabbath of the fourth commandment and exalted Sunday.  

Erasmus, the great scholar who brought back the Received Text and opened the way for the Reformation simply brought back what Lucian had first edited.  He was the true author of the Received Text, yet few know this because of the successful destruction of his memory.  Two apostates who successfully destroyed the Received Text in 1881, Hort and Westcott went so far as to say that the Alexandrian manuscripts of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were the original text of the apostles and that Lucian made a recension of these originals and added many things to them.  This is supposedly why the Received Text is longer and different.  They have called Lucian a heretic and ascribed to him many of the heresies that he successfully combated in his life.  Because of the manipulation of history and the destruction of evidence, this great lie has been believed by the majority of seminaries and Christian scholars and historians since 1881.  These lies have done much to bring back the Protestant churches to unity with Rome, starting with a unity of scriptures.  Many of the modern versions, based on the Hort/Westcott Text have the imprimatur of the Roman Catholic church. 

Jerome was Rome’s answer to Lucian.  His Latin Vulgate was based on the corrupted, shortened and mutilated Alexandrian texts.  To Jerome’s Latin edition were added the seven spurious books called the Apocrypha, accepted by the Roman Catholic church and finally made into dogma at the council of Trent.  Trent was convened and dominated by the Jesuit order, whose sole mission has been the destruction of the Protestant Reformation and a return of all to the fold of Rome.  First was the destruction of the Received Text.  The Douay-Rheims version of the Jesuits, written to combat the King James Authorized Version of the Bible, even says in its preface that the King James version is cursed by God.  The council of Trent anathematizes all who will not accept the seven apocryphal books and curses them with excommunication from Rome.

The council of Trent also exalts tradition to be equal to the holy scriptures, and binding on the conscience of all Christians.  Listen to what Catholic cardinal Gibbons said: 

            The scriptures alone do not contain all the truths which a Christian is bound

            to believe…Not to mention other examples, is not every Christian obliged

            to sanctify Sunday..But you may read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and

            you will not find a single line authorizing the sanctification of Sunday.  The Scriptures

            enforce the religious observance of Saturday, a day which we never sanctify. 

Even today, so called Protestants do not make a big deal about what day to rest and worship, most continue to celebrate Sunday, not knowing that this comes from the traditions of the Roman Catholic church, in compromise with pagan Roman sun worship and Apollo worship.  The Seventh Day Adventists believe that worshipping on Sunday is the mark of the beast.  Of course this is wrong, however it is a spiritual deception that opens the door for unification with Rome and may indeed cause many to accept the real Mark of the Beast as the antichrist will come from the Roman Catholic church mixed with all the pagan religions of the world.  Antichrist will substitute worship of the sun for worship of the true Christ Jesus, of this there can be no doubt. 

On one hand the Roman Church binds all to keep Sunday as the day of rest, yet on the other condemns those who deny that the ten commandments are binding on the Christians. 3

Here is a classic example of contradiction and hypocrisy in the Roman system.  Because Lucian believed that the ten commandments were binding on Christians, he was called a “Judaizer” by John Henry Newman, an Anglican apostate later given the red cap of Cardinal by the Roman Catholic church for his “heroic” work of bringing many back to the fold of Rome in the Oxford movement of the late 19th century. 

It was the synod of Laodicea (the city of compromise in Revelation chapter 3) that passed a decree that “Christians must not Judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day... But is any shall be found to be Judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ.” 4  

Sosomen, the historian, says, “The people of Constantinople, and almost everywhere, assemble together on the Sabbath, as well as on the first day of the week, which custom is never observed at Rome or at Alexandria.” 5

It was the custom of churches in the Syrian area to celebrate Sunday, but they did not recognize that day as the holy day of the fourth commandment.  For more than seventeen centuries,, the Abyssinian church continued to sanctify Saturday as the holy day of the fourth commandment. 

In fact, Pope Gregory I, in 603, declared that when antichrist comes, he would keep Saturday as the Sabbath. 6

A man named Jovinian (a.d. 330-390) was so superior in scholarship that the united attempts by Jerome, Augustine and Ambrose failed to overthrow his arguments.  Jerome hated this man because he believed that married people were not inferior to celibates, that eating with thanksgiving is equal to fasting.  Jerome called his teaching “the hissing of the old serpent.” 

The leaders of the church in the wilderness, if successful, like Patrick of Ireland were co-opted as saints of the Roman Catholic church, when the truth is, that men like Patrick, Columba and others were as anti Roman catholic as possible.  The arrogance of this great Whore to take into its bosom those of the pure truth is simply a sign of the massive cover-up and distortion of the truth that has all “orthodox” Protestants today except for a few cults and Messianic Jewish congregations to celebrate the rest that God commanded on Sunday, in league with the great Whore of Babylon.

Not only did the Catholic church deny that Jesus was the sinners’ substitute and sacrifice, but tried to force its exacting definitions of Nicea on the entire church.  A definition of three separate persons in the Godhead which borders on tritheism.  It should be noted that the church of Patrick and his successors denied the definitions of Nicea including the “homousion” - that Christ and the Father are of the same substance.

The Roman Catholic historian Bellesheim says that the church in Scotland, under Columba, and his successors celebrated the Sabbath, instead of Sunday as their day of rest, just as the ancient church of Ireland did.

Queen Mary of the Scots said, “Let us venerate the Lord’s day, inasmuch as upon it our Savior rose from the dead:  let us do no not servile work on that day.” 

It was Clement who was the first to call the Lords Day Sunday.  The first to DARE to call the Lord’s day Sunday.  Clement of ALEXANDRIA, Egypt. 

The origin of Sunday worship began with Zoroastrianism.  The then five planets, plus moon and sun were each given al day of the week.  Thus Sunday was devoted to Mithra, or the sun, the greatest of all the gods of Zoroastrianism.  Mithraism was a big part of the religion of Rome.  The seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic church all had a similar sacrament in Mithraism.  As the followers advanced through the seven stages or degrees upward in the cult of Mithraism, many purifications and flagellations were demanded.

Other world religions began to imitate the success of Christianity.  Hinduism, for example invented the legend of Krishna and Buddhism also added the coming of Buddha as a copy of the second coming of Christ. 

As the power of the Roman Catholic church increased, they used the secular power of kings to destroy the church in the wilderness.  Massive slaughters of the Waldensians, Albigensians throughout the centuries threatened to exterminate the church in the wilderness and the true text of the scriptures, yet in spite of the fury of Satan, God preserved both. 

The church in the wilderness rejected the Catholic ideas of elevating tradition beyond the scriptures.  Pope Gregory issued a bull declaring that the decrees of the first four general councils of the church were of equal inspiration with the gospels. 

The Catholic church used the emperor Charlemagne to promote Roman Catholic and papal faith with such force that the Danes left their home in great masses and sailed away, swearing that they would destroy Christian churches wherever they went.  The Danes attacked England and Ireland and destroyed churches in their rage against Rome.  It was the church in the wilderness that suffered for the sins of Rome.

Any branch of the church in the wilderness that would not bow to Rome was called either Manichaeism, Arian or some other brand of heresy, which was not based on truth.  The Paulicians, for example were some of the worst vilified “heretics” of Rome.  Here is what they believed:

            We meet with no special Sunday observances, and possibly the Saturday Sabbath was maintained.  When we

            come to consider the question of doctrine, we not that the word “Trinity” never appears on the book. 6

According to Bejamin Wilkinson, there are reliable historians that say that the Waldenses and Albigenses were fundamentally Sabbath keepers.  The Roman Catholic church commanded fasting on Saturday, to make the Jewish Sabbath burn in the memories of Catholics as a day of suffering, rather than rest and rejoicing, as it was meant to be.  The fasting on Saturday was one of the reasons for the split of the Eastern church from Rome in 1054 A.D.  That the Waldenses were Sabbathkeepers is evident from the oath of the Inquisitors:

"I, Sancho, swear, by Almighty God and by these holy gospels of God, which I hold in my hand, before you Lord Garcia archbishop, and before others  your assistants, that I am not, nor ever have been , an Inzabbatate, Waldense, or poor person of Lyons, or an heretic of any sect of heresy condemned by the church." 8

Inzabbatate means Sabbath keeper.  The Portuguese sent Jesuits to the Abyssinian church in 1604 and influenced the King to submit to the papacy.  One of the first efforts was to have a proclamation by the king prohibiting all his subjects upon severe penalties to observe the seventh day any longer.

Here is the argument for the seventh day Sabbath by the Abysinnian ambassador to Portugal:

            Which Day, as God would have it called the Holy of Holies, so the not celebrating thereof with great

            honor and devotion, seems to be plainly contrary to God’s Will and Precept, who will suffer Heaven

            and Earth to pass away sooner than his Word…  It is not therefore in imitation of the Jews, but in obedience

            to Christ and his holy Apostles, that we observe that Day…We do observe the Lord’s day after the manner  

            of all other Christians, in memory of Christ’s resurrection. 9

It was Constantine that began the Sunday laws for the church.  His Sunday law of 321 A.D.  was a bait to compromising Christians, weary of persecution, and an appeasement for those Romans who glorified the day exalted by the sun-worshipping Zoroastrians.  Persecution began only against the churches that resisted this edict.

The Jesuits have since their beginning in 1582, tried to destroy the Textus Receptus, influence colleges and seminaries, even to pretending to be Protestants.  For example, only 48 years after the order was founded they controlled 287 colleges in Europe, some of their own founding. 

They were masters of deception, secretly bringing on a public disaster and simultaneously providing salvation from that disaster and others were blamed for the cause.  In the council of Trent, the archbishop Rheggio used the argument that Protestants could not defend Sunday as the day of rest, from scripture.  From this, they proved that the church had the power to change commandments of God and that Tradition was ongoing inspiration.  Thus the Jesuits were able to infiltrate this council and make it totally theirs in the degrees and over 100 anathemas against Protestants. 

It was Jesuit treachery that finally caused the nation of Japan to send all Christianity out of their country.  Erasmus, who restored the Textus Receptus to the church has pointed out how strictly Bohemian Waldenses kept the seventh day Sabbath.  However, many of the reformers turned away from the Sabbath.    For example, Tyndale said

            As for the Saboth, a great matter, we be lords over the Saboth; and may yet change it to Monday

            or any other day, as we see need.” 10

Not only did the Reformers keep the Sunday as Sabbath, but they also kept the union between church and state and like Calvin, ended up killing in the name of Christ.  Michael Servetus, was killed by the government of Geneva, Switzerland for coming against Trinitarianism and infant baptism, as Rome teaches and as Calvin taught.  In one way, the Reformation was a failure, in that the pure truths of the Waldenses and others who endured centuries of persecution and slaughter were diminished by the Reformation, even though the basic concepts of salvation by faith alone were spread wider by the Reformation, was Sunday worship and Sabbath, infant baptism, Roman Catholic trinitarianism and many other Roman customs and doctrines retained in the Reformation really worth the Reformation itself?  Perhaps it would have been better for the church to have remained in the wilderness.  We can only hope that all the doctrines of original apostolic Christianity will be restored again amongst the remnant of the faithful.  Satan has also hidden truth by creating cults that proclaim some of the truths the Reformation hid.  United Pentecostals have truth about baptism in the name of Jesus Christ, yet go so far in Oneness that they deny the Father and Holy Spirit.  Seventh Day Adventists have embraced the false teachings of Ellen White and have promoted this false prophetess to almost equality with scripture itself.  Those who are not in a cult or deception that practice and believe that the fourth commandment is still binding on Christians and who reject the pagan amalgamation with Sunday worship are as rare as gold.  But God always has a church in the wilderness, even to this day. 

1  Mosheim, Commentaries, cent 2, vol 1, p.341

2  Gibbons, The Faith of our Fathers, pp. 111,112  63d edition

3  Trent, session 6, canon 14

4  Council of Laodicia, session 29, Scribners NPNF, Vol  14, p. 148

5  Sosomen, Ecclesiastical History, book 7, chapter 19

6  Epistles of Gregory, book 13, epistle 1

7  Adeney, The Greek and Eastern Churches, p. 218

8  Robinson, Ecclesiastical Researches, pp. 322,323

9  Geddes, The Church History of Ethiopia, pp.  87,88.

10  Tyndale, “An Answer to Sir Thomas More Dialog”  book 1, chap 25, p. 97