p. 522 | SUNDAY ARGUMENTS by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 24, 1881

SUNDAY ARGUMENTS.

By Editor

It is doubtful if there is so much false reasoning uttered on any other subject as on that of the Sunday Sabbath. And it does not decrease—it is rather on the increase. As the advocates of the Sunday are driven from their former grounds of dependence by the current investigation of this question, they catch up new reasons and take new positions even more absurd than the old ones. A notable instance is found in the American Baptist Flag, of St. Louis, Missouri. It is in a Sunday-school lesson,—"International Series," of course;—the subject is the feast of tabernacles, and the scripture, Lev. 23:33-44. Our readers know that this feast commenced on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. As usual, the first and last days of the feast were special days, of holy convocation. Comment says, "It began on the Sabbath and ended on the Sabbath." But this is not true. In the sense of a holy convocation or "day of restraint," these days were considered sabbaths, each called "a sabbath," but not "the Sabbath." That title belonged to the seventh day of the week—not to the days of a feast. True, they sometimes occurred on the Sabbath, the seventh day, but it was not the Sabbath on that account. Its claim to that name lay altogether back of these ceremonials. It was made when God made the heavens and the earth.

We must consider the following comment on verse 39, "on the first day shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day shall be a sabbath," a strange declaration:—

"First day, i. e., the Sabbath. This month always began on the Sabbath."

Now it is very well known that the beginning of the month with the Jews was counted from the first appearance of the new moon. The Sunday-school writer catches at the term, "first day," makes it the Sabbath instead of "a sabbath," and then makes the seventh month "always begin on the Sabbath." Now only one step remains to make the argument complete; that is, to prove that the new moon always came on Sunday! If this is not so, then that sabbath day fell on different days of the week, and is not "the Sabbath," but only one of the several sabbaths connected with the Levitical service, each occurring but once a year. Every unprejudiced reader of the Bible knows that this is the truth of the matter. No one not hard pressed would affirm otherwise. But what is the responsibility of those who thus mislead the youth in a school? A temporary triumph over the minds of our fellow-mortals will be but a poor compensation for what they who carelessly handle the word of God will have to meet in the day spoken of in Eccl. 12:13, 14.