Sunday Keeping by E. BOOTH

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 11, 1866

Sunday Keeping.

By E. BOOTH

Do not some who profess to keep the commandments of God—the whole law—by observing the Sabbath, break them by observing with equal sacredness the first-day of the week? Can we regard Sunday as a regular holy-day and keep the commandments perfect? “Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work; but the seventh-day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.”

God wrote nothing amiss when he deigned to inscribe for man his law with his own finger. Every word is essential in the law, “it is perfect converting the soul,” “and in keeping of them there is great reward.” Psa. xix.

The power of habit is very strong; and those who have been accustomed to regard Sunday as the Sabbath up to an advanced age, certainly will experience a strange feeling in discarding this papal imposture for the true Sabbath. But with all this strangeness, strength of habit and prevailing unpopularity, if Sabbath-keepers have not the love of the truth established deep enough within their hearts to keep the fourth commandment, free from traditional jurisdiction, and a sufficient quantity of moral courage to face error and unpopularity with a firm will and steady purpose, I fear they have not sufficient strength of character to stand the final test of God’s people, or to hold fast that faith, without which no man shall see the Lord.

God may have blessed his people in Sunday keeping, but not for it during the days of “Gentile ignorance.” Now the times of restitution and refreshing are at hand, and he commandeth his law to be known. In the fulness of time Christ died for the ungodly and the “time of reformation” was ushered in. All God designed at that time to make known to man was declared. Pharisaical tradition was sternly reproved, evils were condemned, but the law and the Sabbath needed no re-enacting. When the days of degeneracy came, making void the law; when the son of perdition exalted himself above all that is called God, trampling the truth to the ground and persecuting the faith; when the long night of darkness enshrouded the world till it was replete with abomination, making desolate the “heritage of Jacob,” the fulness of time was come. Dan. viii, 12. These things were to be, but deliverance came. God’s hand was in the work. He raised up a Luther, a Melancthon, a Zwingle, with their contemporaries, to carry out his grand designs.

They were godlike, holy men. They had a host of errors to combat, and if God did not enlighten them upon his broken law they could not see the breach. They lived out all the perfection of holiness they in the providence of God could attain to, and were blessed. We are not slow to acknowledge the work of God in all religious movements, and know he is at work now.

The labors of the Wesleys, the zeal of Lady Huntingdon and all her friends, the devoted Clark and Fletcher, all were instruments of a higher power in establishing the great ecclesiastical revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And God still blessed them in Sunday keeping, though not for it. The time of his truth was not wholly revealed and he suffered it to be. Every work must have its appointed time; for as God has spoken through his holy prophets, so must it be fulfilled.

The time for his law and sanctuary to be revealed, at last came. Dan. viii, 14. Rev. xiv, 12. In the last days truth must be known. With what force the poet declares,

“Truth crushed to earth will rise again; The eternal years of God are hers.”

Yes, God’s truth is eternal. It cannot be crushed out by mortal man. The “breach” will be restored, the “gaps” built up, and commandment-keepers alone will inherit the “everlasting possessions.” Isa. lviii, 12. Rev. xxii, 14. Commandment-keepers were not mentioned during the apostasy, they are not mentioned in the “times of Reformation,” nowhere but in the “last days” have they a place in sacred history as God’s people. Rev. xii, 17.

The fulness of time is come when “truth” is to plant her foot upon the earth. Each epoch has received its truth and this is present truth with us. Shall we heed it? or shall the power of fatal apostasy mark us for its own. Rev. xiii, 16. We cannot serve two masters. God will have the whole heart or none. He will not accept that service which unites truth with error, the love of this world’s applause with the true merits of Jesus, or carnal mindedness with the commandments. 1 Jno. v, 2–3. His jewels must be genuine. Therefore “establish your hearts for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.” E. BOOTH.