ndoubtedly you have at some point wondered why most people attend church on Sunday, while noticing that a few people go to church on Saturday. You may also have noticed that the Ten Commandments seem to say that the seventh day is the Sabbath but noticed that the seventh or last day of the week on your calendar, Saturday, is not the day that most Christians attend church.

While the first day of the week had long been observed and venerated by pagan custom as the day of the sun, there had been Christians, particularly the Christian church in Rome, who, because of Jesus Christ’s resurrection, began to regard the first day of the week with significance. They had begun a tradition of gathering on it, although there had never been a biblical authorization for the worshipful observance of the first day of the week as holy, or set apart by God.

The Roman emperor Constantine I, who was essentially a politician, became a nominal convert to Christianity with a geopolitical agenda of imperial stability and unification. That agenda included somehow uniting the somewhat divergent interests and observances of pagans and Christians.

Roman Emperor Constantine made a political compromise for the ages.

Coincidentally, in the early centuries of the Roman empire, there had also been significant anti-Jewish sentiment among Roman Christians; this was partially as a result of several Jewish revolts in the heavily Jewish province of Judea.

The pagan religious practices in the Roman empire were partially centered around the recognition of the sun deity Sol Invictus, (the Unconquered Sun). There had also been an agrarian pagan Roman god Sol Indiges (the Native Sun). In time, the title Deus Sol Invictus was formulated, under which multiple sun or solar gods, including Syrian and Persian ones, could be worshipped simultaneously.

On December 25 the Romans, under Empower Elagabalus held a festival named Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, meaning “the birthday of the unconquered sun,” which is the likely, if not certain, inspiration for the Christmas tradition.

So, there were multiple cultural, spiritual/pagan, and political movements and influences at play in this part of the world during the first centuries after Christ.

The imperial observance of the first day of the week, as an institutionalized weekly Roman festival, became official on Sunday, March 7, 321 A.D., when Constantine issued an edict that Dies Solis Invicti would be the Roman day of rest throughout the Roman Empire. At the core of this festival lay a politically convenient Constantinian compromise: the festival could represent the pagan-observed “venerable day of the sun,” as well as commemorate the Scriptural day that Christ rose from the tomb.

This historic church-state compromise implicates the conscience of Christian believers today. < < < < <

So now, this conflation of the pagan with the Scriptural is a traditional practice of more than 1,700 years. The church of Rome properly takes the credit for institutionally transferring the weekly observance of the biblically-recognized seventh day of the week to the pagan-observed first day of the week. It has always claimed to have authorized and sanctioned it in traditional commemoration of the resurrection of Christ.

The seventh day is a weekly God-ordained commemoration of His creation of the world (and everything in and around it, Exodus 20:8-11). Likewise, per Paul in Hebrews 4:3-11, both logically and theologically, the seventh day can and should also be observed by Christians to commemorate, by faith, our being the beneficiaries of Christ’s finished work on the cross for our salvation; and our entering into His rest, by faith, from that particular completed work.

So just as the names of the days of the week, starting with the first day, have pagan origin (as do Christmas trees, Easter eggs and bunnies, and Halloween); likewise, the veneration of the first day of the week, the pagan sun day, is now a time-honored man-made tradition that is widely observed as if it was the Sabbath established by God. However, it isn’t what it isn’t.

STEPHEN FOSTER is a freelance writer, blogger, media consultant, and a retired account executive.