Brief Outline of the Sabbath Question
By W. A. S.
No. 3—The Sabbath of the Lord
God, who made it, declares that “the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.” Do you take him as “thy God”? Take his Sabbath also. Jesus said that the Sabbath was “made for man.” Mark 2:27. It was not made for the Jew, but for man, for the human race. From of old God has promised blessings to the son of man, Jew or Gentile, who lays hold upon the Sabbath and keeps it. Isaiah 56. The blessing is still upon it, as everybody finds who really keeps it. The Witness of the Spirit
In all the New Testament the Holy Spirit calls that day which Jesus kept “the Sabbath.” The very word “Sabbath” means “rest.” Therefore the Holy Spirit declares over fifty times in the New Testament that the day which the Jews formerly observed, and which Jesus kept truly, is the rest day. And the New Testament was written from six to sixty years after the resurrection. The Holy Spirit can not lie, therefore this day is still the only divinely appointed rest day. Men may choose to rest on any other day, but that can not make any other day God’s rest day. You can not change your birthday by celebrating some other day as a birthday. It is a historical fact, that can never be changed, that you were born on a given day of the month. Just so it is a fact of divine history that God rested on a given day of the week, and on no other. That made the seventh day his rest day. It is different from other days in character also; for he blessed it, and made it holy. When men deny this difference, they practically say that when God blesses and makes holy, it is a vain performance. He also sanctified the day, and to sanctify means to set apart. God has set it apart, and asks men to so treat it, as a day apart from others. A few texts which mention the first day are caught at to support its observance; but not one of these texts contains the remotest hint of any observance of the day. Not once has the Lord ever said a word about honoring the day. Christ showed himself after his resurrection on the first day, as the disciples were to be witnesses of the fact that he rose “the third day.” The disciples were not keeping the day in honor of his resurrection, as some say, for they did not believe he had risen. Mark 16:14. They were sitting “at meat” in their common living room. In Acts 20:7 it is said that Paul broke bread on the first day at Troas. The context shows that it was an evening meeting after the Sabbath, Saturday night, as we would call it; for the Bible reckoning begins the day at sunset. After the Sabbath, Paul’s companions resumed their journey by boat, while the apostle had an all-night farewell meeting. Sunday morning he went on his way, walking nineteen miles across country to Assos to meet the boat. (See Conybeare and Howson’s “Life of St. Paul.”) In 1 Cor. 16:2 the apostle asked the brethren to lay by in store a special contribution for the poor at Jerusalem. On the first day of the week they were to look over their business affairs of the preceding week, and give as they had been prospered. There is no hint of any meeting on the first day. As Dean Stanley says:— “There is nothing to prove public assemblies, inasmuch as the phrase par heauto (“by himself, at his own house”) implies that the collection was to be made individually and in private.6 These First-day texts show plainly that the Word of God gives no hint of any observance of Sunday, but, on the contrary, are witnesses against it. The evil of perverting the words of God in order to excuse transgression and sin is nowhere more prevalent than in this effort to uphold the Sunday-rest idea. A friend of the late John Ruskin has told, in one of the magazines, how he and Mr. Ruskin once went into the evidence for Sunday observance. Mr. Ruskin had previously accepted the ecclesiastical interpretation of these First-day texts. When he saw them for himself, he was so disgusted with the untruthful inferences drawn from them that he for a time lost faith in all Bible study. “If they have deceived me in this, they have probably deceived me in all,” he declared. It was not a logical frame of mind, and showed that his faith had rested in preachers rather than in personal knowledge of the Word. But the arguments that have been resorted to in order to foist the Sunday institution upon men are responsible for much unbelief. Some now say that they will begin to count Monday as the first day of the week, and thus make Sunday the seventh! But it was God who made the week. He appointed the times. Acts 17:26. The divinely ordained order of the days of the week is preserved in the languages of all nations from antiquity. But aside from all this, the Holy Spirit plainly declares that the Sunday (on which all know that Jesus rose from the dead) is “the first day.” Matt. 28:1. Why should men dare trifle with sacred things? Anybody who believes the Holy Spirit’s testimony knows that Sunday is “the first day.” Anybody who can count seven knows that it must certainly follow that the day called Saturday is the seventh day. God says that this day is his Sabbath. By the Lord’s reckoning of the day, however, it is from sunset Friday evening to sunset Saturday evening. This is holy time, made holy by the holy God, commanded by his holy law. It is a time of blessing and spiritual refreshing to all who keep it. The very ones who would count Sunday the seventh day, to evade the fourth commandment, will, almost in the same breath, tell us that we ought to keep Sunday because Christ rose on the first day of the week. If it be the first, it can not at the same time be the seventh. Inspiration gave the numerical titles to the days of the week, and named the seventh the Sabbath. What reason can men give to the Lord for not keeping his Sabbath? W. A. S.