SOME MIXED by P. STRONG

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 23, 1869

SOME MIXED.

By P. STRONG

BRO. SMITH: I send you a brief synopsis of a discourse against the Sabbath; delivered in this place by Eld. White, Methodist from Wayland, in which you will see some mixing, and crowding of time, in order to get rid of the seventh-day Sabbath.

Text, the ten commandments, Ex. xx. These are just as binding on us, as on our forefathers. But there is a diversity of opinion in regard to the day. God gave the Sabbath in commemoration of creation week. But we can not tell whether it was a week of days, or of years, or of a thousand years, or of indefinite periods of time. Sufficient for us to say, is, that it was six periods of time; and we are commanded to keep the seventh-day Sabbath in commemoration of that event.

Abraham, Enoch, and others, kept it till the exode. God then recorded it on stone at Sinai, and we are in duty bound to obey it.

But history says that the children of Israel left Egypt on Thursday, and Moses commanded them to keep that day in commemoration of that event. And therefore that day [Thursday] was kept as the Sabbath till Christ abolished it on the cross, and established the first-day as the Christian Sabbath.

Paul was converted before Christ’s ascension, and preached as his manner was on the Jewish Sabbath, [Thursday] Acts xiii, 14–43; xxi, 13; xvii, 2, 3; xviii, 4–11; but after the Christian church was established, [at Pentecost] he immediately celebrated the first day of the week. Acts xx, 7; 1 Cor. xvi, 2.

The Jews are bound to keep the old law now until they are converted to Christ. And to keep the same day [seventh] that Abraham kept, and they have always kept that day. Here he got so mixed up that he could not find which day they did keep, Thursday or Saturday; and therefore it was a hard matter to tell which day is the day after the Sabbath, on which the Lord arose. But of this he was certain that we are in duty bound to keep the day that the laws of the land set apart, and therefore we, as a Christian nation, must keep Sunday, the glorious day on which our Saviour arose.

So according to this, Christ was crucified Wednesday, the day before the Jewish Sabbath [Thursday]. And the third day after the Sabbath [Thursday], he arose very early in the morning, on the first day of the week, making him rest in the tomb part of five days, and abolish two weekly Sabbaths, which God never claimed to have, and making God’s law a mass of contradiction and nonsense.

Again there are only fifty-three days from the crucifixion to Pentecost. And Paul preached eighty-four Sabbaths, taking one year and seven months’ time to do it in. How could he crowd in so much preaching and time, before the church was established at Pentecost? Truly none but one of Ezekiel’s foxes could so pack time, Eze. xiii, 4, 5, and make Paul preach Christ before he was called; for the first testimony we have of Paul or Saul, is his consenting to the death of one of the church’s deacons, Acts viii, 1, and his conversion is after that. Acts ix, 1–18.

Would it not be proper to say with Ezekiel, “They have hid their eyes from my Sabbaths, and I am profaned among them. And the prophets have daubed their wall with untempered mortar.”, Eze. xxii, 26, 28. P. STRONG.