Are the Lunar Sabbatarian's "Pause & Reset Days" Biblical?

Join Doug this evening at 7:15pm EST (Wed, Jan 22, 2025) https://youtube.com/live/6G-W8bOnDwg?feature=share on the JesusNotPaul/Acts channel for a podcast discussion surrounding the recent phenomena of the rise of those who say the Sabbath must be honored according to the moon phases, rather than every seventh day consecutively.  This is because the lunar calendar month is 29.5 days in length, while four seven day weeks only comprise 28.  This means the extra 1.5 days per month have to go somewhere, so to keep with the lunar phases one or two spacer, "pause & reset" days are added which means the first week to start a new month, the sabbath could occur on the eighth or ninth day, ultimately breaking the Father's order of every seventh day of each week.  No where in the scriptures is it ever implied there would literally be monthly skip days inserted to stay on a lunar calendar.  The conjecture and projection it takes for lunar sabbatarians to convince themselves that the Bible does is beyond the pale in terms of its magnitude.  The people that inject such a falsehood into other people's faith are operating just like Paul, making up new traditions as they go, and putting others in bondage to following the Sabbath in such a way that it disparages the Sabbath in the eyes of those who are observing them.  I pray with my whole heart that this podcast can settle the matter for anyone confused about this.  This truly is another red herring, just like that of the sacred name movement, both of these false teachings being Satan's way of throwing in confusing doctrines and dogmas that the Father never even made a peep about.  Hope to see you then!

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Where the Lunar Calendar Sabbath Guys Go Wrong: monthly new moon skip days.

The main thing is that nowhere in the Bible does it speak of adding days to a month where to the days of the week are literally suspended to make up for the fact that there are 29.5 days in the lunar month.

The question then becomes, what do you do with the extra 1.5 days per month, considering that a week is constituted by 7 days, which when multiplied by 4 weeks, equals 28, 1.5 days less than 29.5.

Lunar calendars from the beginning have adjusted for this by having months with 29 days, and others with 30.

But the one thing that remains is that the number of days in the week and how they repeated themeselves remained steady.  There is no evidence in the Bible that states otherwise.

Lunar people would say, well there’s no evidence there WASN’T a system where they skipped a day on the new moon once every couple of months, (causing the additional days to turn one of the seven day weeks into 8 or even 9 days, meaning the next sabbath could be on the 8th or 9th day), but I say with several thousand years of Biblical history and there being NO MENTION whatsoever of just such a system is WAY MORE TELLING that no such system existed.  You could read the Bible for years and until a lunar Sabbath person comes along and tells you that’s how it should work, you would never even consider it a possibility. 

These extra spacer days put a HUGE BLIP in one’s month.  Even without being aware of a solar year, this would still be something that would rock the order of one’s approach to time keeping enough that it would at least be referred to at some point in scripture.

Especially when the Bible can be very specific about times and seasons, even down to the hours of the day.  During Jesus’ time, while he was bodily here on earth, the Bible even speaks of the 3rd or 6th or 9th hour of the day.  

The Hebrews, for me, seemed to be precise descriptors of time and date, how could they not mention monthly skip days???

The other aspect of this is that the agricultural year is totally based on the seasons which are obviously predicated by the movements and position OF THE SUN.

Lunar calendar proponents say the sun, moon and stars are for to indicate times and seasons, why then do they exclude the sun in that calculation?  Surely, the Bible itself doesn’t do that because in determining when the feast would occur, Leviticus 23 plainly explains that the Feast of Tabernacles is occurs in the fall AFTER THE HARVEST.  This would not be possible if the Hebrew calendar stuck only to the lunar calendar in the purist sense.  

The reason for this is because a lunar year is roughly 354 days and a solar year is roughly 365.  This is an eleven days shorter period for the lunar than the solar, so if one were to keep the lunar only, each year the Feast of Tabernacles would be 11 days earlier in the solar calendar.  This means that in just 9 years Tabernacles would be celebrated a full three months earlier that the Fall Harvest, smack dab in the middle of the summer!

I have searched and searched, but can’t find how the ancient Hebrews dealt with this, but some time around the second century AD, they came up with a way of adding an additional month during what they call leap years, which would occur on seven separate years spread out over a 19 year span.  They add a month to the end of the calendar in the leap years, their last month being called Adar, and they simply call the added month Adar II.  

This way their lunar calendar stays in line with the seasons, and in particular to the agricultural seasons with regard to seed time and harvest that the Feasts are closely aligned with.  I still don’t know how the ancient Hebrews dealt with this, but they must have in order to keep the Feasts happening in their due seasons.

But to return to our original purpose, that is to say, were there “spacer” days placed in certain months to coordinate the days of the week with the moon cycle, so you could look up at the sky and know even what day it is, precisely enough that you could say this is the first or third or seventh day of the week the spacer days allowing you to do so?  The implication is that the moon itself can always tell us what day it is as long as we build in the spacer days.  In theory, this does sound like an amazing solution, but again, it doesn’t work when one considers that the Father never told us to build in spacer days, but did tell us to rest every seventh day, which assumes back to back weeks which never include spacer days.  I just don’t believe He set it up for us to have monthly skips days and after much prayer and reflection, I am more convinced of it than I was before.

So then it begs the question, is the seventh day of the week we honor really the seventh day? That is, we know the Gregorian calendar is replete with all sorts of demonic false god references, why would it be right about which days the days of the week are assigned to?  Also, the current Hebrew calendar lines up the Sabbath with the current seventh day on the Gregorian calendar, but why should we trust them when they don’t even believe Jesus is the Messiah?

(This entire issue reminds me of the Sacred namers who say we must know the Father’s triple top secret Tetragrammaton name in its original pronunciation so we can call on Him properly or we won’t be saved.  How can we know over millennia if we are saying His name correctly in the original form or honoring the Sabbath on the original 7th day? Both questions are red herrings if you ask me, meant to distract and trouble people with minutia that can’t be known).

The real question, in my view, is what is the Spirit of the Law?  We know the Father never once spoke to us in His Torah about skipping a day in a week to keep the seven day week in line with the moon.  We know those who call themselves Hebrews today have lined up their current luna-solar calendar where the Sabbath matches with the Gregorian seventh day.    

The entire world, for the most part, believes that the current Saturday is the seventh day.  I know that the whole world believing so does not make it so, but just going by the Father’s commandment, to honor the seventh day, in a world where the seventh day is a certain day of which the entire world sees it as being so, means that when we honor the sabbath on the worldwide seventh day, we are acting as a testimony that those of us who honor His Sabbath do so on the day that entire world sees as the seventh day of the week.  This is how they know we love the Father and are honoring Him each week, not by some random ever changing day that you never know each month where it will occur. 

And what sort of testimony is it to unbelievers, when people who say they are of Torah are literally making up a system that throws in monthly skip days that the Father never ordered, and then they literally look crazy to tell others that there’s supposed to be skip days so each month seventh day might really fall on the 8th day and be thrown of the seven day rhythm. 

Observers of this way also have to look ahead in their lunar calendars, find the skip days, find the changing Sabbaths, and then tell their employers or clients, or the people they’re involved with that they’re going to honor a Mexican jumping Sabbath each month that is often on a different day???

This is insane on its face.

And what makes it more insane is that the people who do this are so rabid about it.  They won’t let up, just like the sacred namers. 

Even once you’ve explained your position, many of them won’t let it go.  It’s like a cult you have to join, or else you’re damned.  I know this behavior is not from the Father because even if they were right, the Father is a gentleman in the sense that He never pressures anyone to believe His Truths or follow Him.  HIs is a still small voice, His yoke is easy and His burden is light, He doesn’t ride you like Satan does, overly trying to convince you to do something and chirping until you either give in or feel led to throw up your hands and disassociate with the person applying the pressure.

And this is what Satan wants, for us all to fight and to splinter and to never find any strength whatsoever in growing number of unified Beleivers.  These sacred namers and luna (tics) calendar people come into sew division with complete red herrings, putting burdens on Believers the Father never intended.

In conclusion, there is no where in the scriptures that it is ever implied we should skip a day in certain months as spacer which would cause the Sabbath to be bumped ahead in certain months a day or two account for it. The Sabbath has always been every seventh day.  If someone has information to prove to me otherwise, I would like to see that very much.