This year on December the 25th, there will be a direct conflict between a popular day of man’s devising and the weekly day that God sanctified by his own example at creation and commanded us in his moral law to remember and hallow.

Some church officers are cancelling the public worship of God on Sabbath, December 25, 2022. Such men are forsaking the public worship of God’s house on his day and encouraging the souls under their care to observe an anniversary day that purports to be a religious observance unto Christ, but which lacks any Biblical warrant and is attended by fleshly excess, direct violations of the Second Commandment in the form of purported images of Jesus Christ, and pagan-tinged trappings like special trees.

Such men should beware that they are tempting God to make his wrath fall upon the church under their care. “And they left the house of the LORD God of their fathers, and served groves and idols: and wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem for this their trespass.” (2 Chronicles 24:18)

At such a time, Christians should search the Scriptures, where they will find a rich development of the theme of the weekly Sabbath in the Old and New Testaments. Of course, they will find nothing about Christmas, nor any hint of Christ establishing the anniversary remembrance of his own birth as an observance of worship.

Besides the Scriptures themselves, Christians who have sincere questions about the perpetual, binding nature of the Fourth Commandment can find help in writings such as this one by John Murray.

Besides the positive testimony of the Westminster Standards on behalf of the Christian Sabbath referenced in Murray’s article, Westminster bore a faithful testimony against holy days of man’s devising, as seen in the Appendix to the Westminster Directory for the Publick Worship of God: “There is no day commanded in scripture to be kept holy under the gospel but the Lord’s day, which is the Christian Sabbath. Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.”

Rev. Brent Evans
Pastor, Reformation Presbyterian Church
Free Church of Scotland (Continuing)

John Murray article: https://www.westminsterconfession.org/resources/worship/the-fourth-commandment-according-to-the-westminster-standards/