Faith & Language
Words Matter — And "Sabbath" Is No Exception
A comment on the internet, a flood of pushback, and one word worth getting right.
A Blog Post on Scripture, Rest, and Why Definitions Matter
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It started with a chicken sandwich joke. On May 16th, the Babylon Bee posted an AI-generated image of a Chick-fil-A storefront rechristened "Seventh Day Fil-A" — closed Saturday, open Sunday. As a satirical jab at Seventh-day Adventist theology, it landed. I chuckled. Fair enough. But then I kept scrolling through the comments, and I found one that stopped me cold: "It would be more Biblically accurate."
That phrase burrowed under my skin. Not because the person was being mean-spirited — they weren't — but because it assumed something that, when you actually examine the text and the language behind it, simply doesn't hold up. So I replied. I pointed out that "Sabbath" doesn't mean Saturday. I've since deleted my comment because the replies it generated were more heat than light — some people flatly told me I was wrong, some dropped Exodus 20:8–11 like a mic, and some just told me to read my Bible.
Fine. Let's read the Bible. And let's start even further back — with the word itself.
What Does "Sabbath" Actually Mean?
Here is where words do their most important work. The English word Sabbath comes directly from the Hebrew Shabbat. And Shabbat means one thing: to rest, to stop, to cease.
That's it. Shabbat does not mean Saturday. It does not mean Sunday. It does not mean the seventh day of the modern calendar week. It means rest.
The chain looks like this:
Shabbat (Hebrew) → Sabbath (English) → to rest, to stop, to cease.
The etymology, plainly stated.
This matters — enormously — because when we add meaning to a word that the word doesn't carry, we create confusion. And when that confusion gets treated as doctrine, we end up with people arguing over which day of the week God is most pleased to see you resting, rather than asking the far more important question: are you actually resting?
Now Exodus 20:8–11
This is the passage most often cited in these debates, so let's take it seriously and pick it apart carefully.
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Look closely at verse 9: "Six days you shall labor and do all your work." It says six days. Not Monday through Saturday. Not Sunday through Friday. Just — six days. The text is deliberately non-specific about which six. Then verse 10 continues: "but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God." Out of seven days, the seventh — the final one in the cycle — is the rest day. The pattern is what matters: work six, rest one.
Verse 11 seals it by pointing back to creation itself: God worked for six days, then rested on the seventh.
This is the pattern He set in motion in Genesis 2:2–3, and He's calling His people to mirror it. But at no point does He say "and that rest day shall forever be called Saturday" or "mark it on your Gregorian calendar." He established a rhythm, not a date.
The Joy of Sabbath — and What Jesus Said About It
Isaiah 58:13 speaks about the Sabbath not as an obligation to dread but as a delight to embrace. And it's worth noting that the word Sabbath is capitalized in many translations — a signal that this concept carries real theological weight. The principle of sacred rest is not a throwaway suggestion. It is important. It is good. That's precisely why it deserves to be understood correctly.
Then comes the verse that, in my view, settles the spirit of this entire conversation. In Mark 2:27, Jesus says: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
Read that twice. The Sabbath — this gift of rest — was made for us. It is not our offering to God; it is His offering to us. Man does not exist to serve the day. The day exists to serve man. Jesus is echoing the very second commandment, which warned against bowing to and serving things that were never meant to be served. Don't serve the Sabbath. Let the Sabbath serve you.
Hebrews 4:9–10 draws the full picture together: "There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his." The Sabbath is both a reflection of God's creative pattern and a standing invitation — an ongoing gift of rest extended to anyone who will receive it.
So What Does This Mean for Chick-fil-A?
Back to the chicken. Do I think Chick-fil-A should be closed on Sunday? Honestly, not necessarily — but here's what I do think: if Sunday is the day God's people tend to gather and worship in a given community, and if being closed on Sunday means Chick-fil-A's workers get a day of genuine rest, then that's a beautiful thing. It's the principle working exactly as intended.
And if a Seventh-day Adventist wants to swing through the drive-through on Sunday and finds it closed? Well — Chick-fil-A will see you Monday. No hard feelings.
This was never meant to be a post pitting Adventists against anyone else. This is about something much simpler: saying that Saturday is the Sabbath — or that Sunday is the Sabbath — is adding to a word something the word was never given. Sabbath means rest. If someone's rest day falls on Friday, or Tuesday, or any other day, that can be their Sabbath. The rhythm is the point. The calendar date is not.
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Words carry meaning. When we stretch them beyond their meaning, we don't strengthen our theology — we muddy it. The invitation stands, regardless of which square on the calendar you mark: rest, delight in that rest, and let the gift be what it was always meant to be.