An Indefinite Sabbath by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Dec 29, 1904

An Indefinite Sabbath

By L. A. S.

In an argument to prove that the first day of the week is the Christian Sabbath, Rev. R. C. Wylie, a prominent advocate of Sunday legislation, says that “the expression in the fourth commandment ‘The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God’ can not refer to the seventh day of the week or Saturday, but to the seventh, after six days of labor. . . . The fourth commandment fixes nothing as to the day of the week to be observed. It is just as applicable no matter what day of the week the rest day falls upon.”

Is it not strange that men who strenuously insist that there should be a definite fixed weekly Sabbath, appointed and enforced by law, for the people of this day, should contend that God left the world for thousands of years to observe the Sabbath by keeping any one day in seven after six days of work, as might suit their preference or convenience? The Bible says that “God is not the author of confusion;” but either this statement must be wrong or Dr. Wylie must be in error in charging God with the authorship of a system of Sabbath observance which would allow men to have as many different sabbaths as there are days in the week.

The fourth commandment states as the reason for keeping the Sabbath, the fact that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and rested the seventh day. This made the week, and the Sabbath day was and is necessarily the seventh day of the week. And so long as this division of time was observed by all, there could be but one day observed as the Sabbath. It would be necessary to violate God’s law before any new weekly cycle of time could be set up. Every other weekly rest day than the seventh day of the primeval week, must rest on a foundation of disobedience to God.

Is it not strange also that any intelligent person should make this further

statement of Dr. Wylie’s that “it is clear that the Jewish Sabbath was repealed, but not the fourth commandment”? If, before there was any other Sabbath day than that observed by the Jews, that Sabbath had been repealed, and if, as Dr. Wylie says, that Sabbath could be repealed without repealing the fourth commandment, then the fourth commandment could have existed without any Sabbath at all, and the Sabbath and the fourth commandment are independent of each other! Such statements are noteworthy only as illustrating the blindness into which men are led by clinging to an unscriptural doctrine.

L. A. S.