The Answer Comes from Culture and Not Scripture
In answering the question, what day of the week is the seventh? let’s look and see what the Bible says.
The Days of the Week
The various translations of the Bible never list the days of the week as we understand them now. There is no mention of Sunday or Saturday in Scripture. Nor is there a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday in the Bible.
Instead, the Bible talks about the Sabbath, which it mentions over 150 times, in both the Old and New Testaments. Given the context, we rightly understand the Sabbath as the last day of the week. It’s the day when God rested after he created our reality.
Scripture also mentions the day of Preparation, which is the day before the Sabbath. This, however, only appears three times, all in the gospel of John.
Last, we have references in the Bible to the first day of the week. This is the day after the Sabbath. It occurs at the end of each biography of Jesus, referencing the day Jesus rose from the dead. And the first day of the week shows up once in Acts (Acts 20:7).
Yet there are no mentions of the days of the week as we know them from today’s calendars—at least not in actual translations.
In an attempt to be more readable to today’s audience, however, a few versions of the Bible have inserted these words to help readers understand the text from today’s perspective.
The NLT, for example, mentions Saturday and Sunday a few times. And The Voice mentions Sunday and Monday. But these labels come from our world today and not the ancient texts.
In considering what day of the week is the seventh, we look to our present-day calendars instead of the Bible.
In North America, most calendars list Sunday in the first column and Saturday in the last. This visually shows us that the first day of the week is Sunday and the last day—that is, the seventh day of the week—is Saturday.
Consider Our Calendars
Other calendars used throughout the world don’t show this. They list Monday in the first column and Sunday in the last. From this representation it’s easy to see Sunday as the last day of the week.
Some computerized calendars even allow users to pick which day they want to display as the first day of the week: Sunday or Monday.
(I suppose this means we could pick any day of the week we want to be the first. If we arbitrarily said Wednesday was the first day of the week, that would mean Tuesday would be the seventh day. But we might be alone in that understanding.)
So when someone insists that the Sabbath day is Saturday, they don’t have the Bible to back them up. They’re relying on culture and our present-day calendars to justify their claim.
The Sabbath
Though my calendars all list Sunday as the first day of the week and Saturday as the seventh day, mentally I view Monday—my first workday of the week—as the beginning of my week.
That means I work through the week and rest on the seventh day, which for me is Sunday. It is my holy day of rest.
In this way, I mentally align the practices of my week with the narrative of Scripture.
For me, Sunday is the seventh day of the week. It is my Sabbath.
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront a status quo faith and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.
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