"So when the Jews went out of the synagogue, the Gentiles begged that these words might be preached to them the next Sabbath. Now when the congregation had broken up, many of the Jews and devout proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas, who, speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God. ... But the Jews stirred up the devout and prominent women and the chief men of the city, raised up persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them from their region." (vv. 42,43,50)
As it was Paul custom, he preached the gospel to the Jews in their synagogues on their sabbath. When the apostate leaders of the Jews refused to listen to the gospel, Paul took his message to the Jews and gentiles who would listen. They merely gathered on the customary day of the Jews. No big mystery.
You still cannot point out where the church specifically is mentioned in this verse.
We know it was the custom, of the Jews to worship on the last day sabbath. We know it was the custom of Paul to preach the gospel to the Jews in their synagogues on the last day sabbath.
But you still have no record of the church (baptized Jews and gentiles) coming together to worship -- to break bread in the Lord's Supper and to hear the preaching of the good news about Jesus Christ -- on the last day sabbath.
I realize this is a hard fact some some folks to accept, but such is the case. You can read Acts 13 plainly and conclude "nearly the whole city" does not equal "the church".
It'd as if one is saying that "nearly the whole city" came out to a Billy Graham crusade on a Saturday. Billy picks his dates to get maximum audience exposure. Paul did the same thing when he preached the gospel to unbelievers on the sabbath of the Jews.
"And as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed."
Then they were baptized and became identified with Christ's body, the church, and, as was the custom of the apostles, began to gather on the first day of the week as we see in Acts 20.
I'm seeing a lot of the same-old, same-old here, so you'll forgive me if I don't go back to hit every line of every post. Instead, I'm going to hit some broad points and some of the specific arguments and questions that have leapt out at me. I'll write an entirely separate post to deal with the issue of sacrifice and answer TC in full on that issue.
I see that once again, TC is running around passing judgment on the Messianic and Sabbatarian segments of the board in defiance of Col. 2:16—and his arguments are mutually contradictory! In post #79, he objects,
God nowhere in His word authorized the church (Jews and gentiles together) to worship on the old covenant last day sabbath, or with the shadows of the new moons and feast days of the Jews.But in post #88, he appeals to the “universal practice of the church according to the Scripture”! Of course, after numerous requests on numerous threads, he has yet to provide the supposed Scriptural support for this universal practice. God is quite explicit about the proper day of the Sabbath (Exo. 20:10, Deu. 5:14)—in fact, He wrote the day in stone by His own finger, literally. It would take an equally explicit countermand from the Lord Himself in order to change the Sabbath!
Does TC provide any such countermand? No. Instead, he provides only passages into which a change can be read back into (eisegesis, not exegesis). But without a passage clearly making a change in this particular aspect of the Torah, there is no reason to read the passages in the way he does.
For example, he has pointed out that the Resurrection occurred on a Sunday. Okay, and? Is there any passage of Scripture which then goes on today, “And therefore the Lord commanded that the Sabbath be observed henceforth on the first day”? If not, then why should we read such an interpretation back into the event? This is a clear case of twisting Scripture in order to uphold a tradition of men.
Second, he’s pointed to Sha’ul’s nighttime speech in Troas (Acts 20:7). Again, TC is guilty of committing eisegesis: While it’s true that this passage says that the brethren were gathered together to break bread “upon the first day of the week,” again, one must ask, “So what?” First of all, the Biblical day begins at sundown, not at daybreak or midnight (Gen. 1:5, Lev. 23:5, Lev. 23:32, etc.), and therefore this meeting which continued “until midmight” would have been taking place on Saturday night by our calendar, not Sunday night as some have imagined. Secondly, there is no reason to connect the coming together to break bread with the Sabbath—“to break bread” simply meant that they gathered together to eat and in this case to hear Sha’ul’s last words before he departed.
Again, there is no reason to take this oblique statement as overturning the direct command to keep the seventh-day Sabbath. Only a person who sets out to defend a pre-existing tradition of men could read it as such.
And third, TC ironically appeals to the aforementioned Col. 2:16. He claims that it is written to address the Judaizers. This does not hold up to the context of the passage. In v. 8, we read the setup: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Messiah.” “Rudiments” here is stoicheia (from stoicheion, Strong’s #4747), which means “elements” and is explained in v. 20 to mean, “the elements of the world” which Sha’ul further elaborates to be equivalent to “the commandments and doctrines of men” (v. 22). This by definition excludes the Torah, of which he writes, “For we know that the Torah is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin” (Rom. 7:14), and “Wherefore the Torah is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good (7:12).
The Torah (i.e., the commandments of the Torah) was given by God Himself—it is therefore sheer blasphemy to say that anything the Torah commands is “the commandments and doctrines of men.”
What then is he talking about, if not about the Torah? Two possibilities suggest themselves:
First, that he is not referring to believers being judged in regard to the actual commands of the Torah, but on the extra-Biblical traditions of the rabbis. This would make this passage parallel with Mat. 15, in which the Pharisees judge the disciples of Yeshua HaMashiach not based on the violation of an actual command of the Torah, but because they were not obeying the extra-Biblical tradition of ritually washing their hands before eating. It should be noted that they did not make the same criticism of Yeshua Himself, which means that He was keeping the tradition personally, but that He still condemned them for judging His disciples based on “the commandments of men” (v. 9) and pointed out where their own transgression violated the actual Scriptures (vv. 4ff).
It is entirely possible that Sha’ul was dealing with a similar situation, in which the Gentile believers were being condemned by some of the non-believing Jews, not for violating the actual commands of the Torah in regards to God’s Appointed Times, but for not keeping them in the fashion of Jewish tradition. One can easily imagine a Gentile being condemned for walking more than the half-mile “Sabbath’s day journey” allowed by the rabbis in order to attend service on a Friday evening, for example, or not saying the “correct” traditional prayers on the Feasts and new moons—especially if the Gentile believers were actively adapting and creating songs and liturgy to reflect their belief in Christ.
Indeed, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s also possible that whether they wanted to or not, many Gentile believers simply couldn’t observe the Sabbaths of both the week and the Feasts due to their situations: A slave did not get to claim time off, nor indeed did many freemen have that option. However, if such was the situation and the intent of Sha’ul’s letter, such did not represent the abrogation of all the Feastdays—for we see throughout the book of Acts that Sha’ul and the other Apostles continued to observe them—but a mercy extended to the Gentiles, a reassurance that their “circumcision without hands” sealed their salvation despite their inability to keep all of God’s commands. That would say nothing about whether a person who has the luxury of keeping God’s Appointed Times should or not, let alone whether those who desire to “may.”
However, the context does not seem to make this Sha’ul’s primary intent, which brings us to our second possible interpretation: That Sha’ul was speaking of judgment being passed by pagans, not by Jews.
Stoicheia, the elements, can also bear the meaning, “the elemental spirits.” As John MacArthur gives a fair presentation of the two possible translations when he writes :
Though not absolutely required, the latter interpretation definitely seems to be favored by the context, in which Sha’ul emphasizes that the Messiah “is the head of all principality and power” (v. 10) and “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in [the cross]” (v. 15). It’s also supported by the mention of “the worship of angels” (v. 18) and asceticism (v. 23), neither of which were nominal Jewish practices in the first century. The entirety of the passage is written around assuring the Colossian Christians that the old gods and spirits who once dominated their lives had no more power over them, for they were fully in the Messiah Yeshua, baptized with Him in death, and raised to live in Him, forgiven of all sins. It would seem odd to suddenly take a swipe at the “Judaizers”—on the contrary, Sha’ul is telling them not to let themselves from being dissuaded in joining with their Jewish brothers and sisters in celebrating “an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath” just because the stars weren’t right!b) Rudiments of the World
That is not an easy term to determine because there are several possibilities. Let me give you a general idea of what Paul had in mind.
(1) ELEMENTAL RUDIMENTS
In its literal sense, the term refers to the basic elements of learning. Rudiments would be like learning ABC's. It literally means "things in a column," or "things in a row" (i.e., 1, 2, 3, or a, b, c). Paul says that those are the rudimentary principles of instruction for childhood and not adequate for mature adults.
The thought of Paul is this: To return to philosophy would be to cast away the mature teaching of the Bible for the infantile poverty- stricken opinions of an immature religion drawing its being from this world and not God. The same phraseology is used in Galatians 4:3, "Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world [The elementary teaching of human religion]" (cf. Heb. 5:12). In Galatians, Paul was referring to the Jews' religion; in Colossians, he is referring to the religions of the Gentiles. And what is the elementary teaching of human religion? Salvation is by works. Where does that philosophy come from? It comes from tradition--perpetuated error--and from man's infantile, primer religion. It isn't some advanced, deep, new, profound spiritual knowledge. The really advanced people are those who know the Word of God.
(2) ELEMENTAL SPIRITS
The phrase "rudiments of the world" has a second possible meaning in the ancient world, although I would guess that the first meaning I gave you is probably the one Paul had in mind. It could also refer to elemental spirits--spirit beings. The people of that day were bound up in associating spirits with the stars and the planets. They were heavily involved in astrology. It's amazing that people today think that astrology is something new when it's the same old rudiments of the world.
For example, Julius Caesar was an astrology buff who governed his whole life by what the stars told him. Alexander the Great ruled his life in the same way. They were both devout believers in the influence of the stars. People who believed in those elemental spirits were in the grip of a rigid kind of determinism that was set by the stars. The influence of those spirits through those stars dominated their lives.
It was said that there was only one way of escape: You were an absolute prisoner of the stars and the spirits unless you knew the right passwords or formulas in order to escape the fatalism built into the stars. It was said that you had to have a secret knowledge--a secret teaching. So along came the false teachers who said, "We have the secret teaching that can relieve you from the fatalistic determinism of the stars. Jesus Christ can't save you from the spirits in the stars and planets. We have the secret information for that." Some of the people in the Colossian church had probably been involved in that kind of system. Even when they were saved out of that system, they still might have had lingering thoughts about it. They might have been tempted to say, "What if these teachers are right?"
But Paul warned them (and us) to be constantly aware of the false truth--that which is just human tradition. It is perpetuated ignorance--infantile, inadequate human religion of the past being revived. We have Christ; God is enough.
The very most that our Sunday brethren can glean from this verse is a reiteration of the idea conveyed in Rom. 14, that we should not judge each other on matters of holy days and kosher—but if that’s the case, that’s a two-way street.
TC wants it to be a one-way street, where everyone who doesn’t do everything exactly the way he does, according to the traditions of his particular denomination, is proclaimed a heretic and a cultist. That’s most Pharisaical of him.
It is most telling how often TC appeals to “the New Testament” as if it were in opposition to instead of the continuance of the Tanakh. Marcion would be proud. No doubt many here have wondered why I continually refer to the Hebrew Scriptures as the Tanakh (an acronym for the Hebrew words for Torah, Prophets (Nevi’im, and Writings (Ketuvim)) instead of the Old Testament. This illustrates precisely why: The “Old Covenant” referred to in Hebrews is neither the Tanakh nor the Torah nor the legal part of the Torah—it is the promise all Israel made to keep all of the Lord’s commandments under their own power (Exo. 24:7), “the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt (Jer. 31:32, Heb. 8:9).
By referring to the Hebrew and Apostolic Scriptures as the “Old” and “New” Testaments/Covenants, we confuse the issue, and make it sound as if the NT was written to supercede the Old. But Yeshua did not come to destroy the Torah or the Prophets, but to make them complete (Mat. 5:17-19) and the New Covenant did not come with a promise to take away the Torah but to write it on our hearts (Jer. 31:33).