Sunday Guess-Work

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 12, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 43.

Sunday Guess-Work.

Following is the article from the Sabbath Memorial (London), to which we made reference a few weeks ago. It will be found interesting and profitable reading:—

Let us not be irreverent. We believe Sunday to be as good a day as Monday or Friday. The sun shines as bright on Sunday as on the other days. Pure worship may be offered on any day of the week; prayer, preaching, singing, reading the Scriptures, even plowing and sowing, may be enjoyed as much on Sunday as on Monday. When the Saturday comes, we lay aside what little worldly business we have, and give ourselves to those mental and spiritual exercises which we learn we should do on the Lord's holy Sabbath day, especially remembering God's example and the reason for it. We get as far away from the din of business that goes on during this general wash-up day of Christians as our circumstances will permit. We are not often disturbed in our worship, and, as far as we know, we have never disturbed the quiet of Christian worship on Sunday, nor of Mohammedan worship on Friday, nor of pagan worship on any day. As between man and man, the right to public worship undisturbed is most sacred. It is a matter of joy that in nearly all countries man can now worship under his own vine and fig-tree, none molesting nor making afraid.

So much we say that we may not be misunderstood while dealing with what ministers of the gospel so intimately connect with the Sunday, namely, that it is a holy day, if not the Sabbath day, by divine appointment. Already have these pages abounded with quotations of statements, assertions, and assumptions of the defenders of Sunday, so that our readers know pretty well the ground on which that man-made fabric is built. It is curious, however, to note the trend (what a dreadful word!) of certain minds that have been disturbed, chiefly in America, by the Seventh-day Baptist Outlook. There seems to be a general flight upward to dingy attics and a bringing down of musty theories, newly vamped, as remarkable ‘finds’ of the year of grace 1885. A professor in the German Theological School at Rochester, N. Y., has discovered that Christ spent forty days in teaching his disciples about Sunday; the Rev. George Thompson, in the Christian Secretary, tells the world that God began his work on Monday, and if we only begin to “count from Monday, then our Sunday is the seventh day;” and he calls upon the Outlook and Advent Review and Sabbath Herald “to cease unsettling the minds of the unstable and ignorant, and join to uphold the Lord's day.” (A warm exhortation is sometimes refreshing.) Then the Rev. Mr. Crafts, a Baptist minister, has written a book designed to save the Sunday. How far he addresses himself to the intelligent and scholarly world on the point of a “thus saith the Lord” for a Sunday Sabbath, may be judged from the following extract, which contains a theory about two hundred years old, but is here condensed and ingeniously put together:—

“It is at least unprovable and improbable that the original Sabbath was Saturday. In the record of creation, God's seventh day is man's first day, from which history is reckoned. There is strong evidence that the primitive holy day was the first day of the week. The ancient nations all about the Jews devoted the first day of the week to what was at first the chief symbol of God and then the chief god, the sun, calling it Sunday. This holy day was strangely enough one day after that of the Jews. This remarkable fact may be explained by the theory of many scholars, with which the Scriptures harmonize, that the first-day Sabbath which Adam bequeathed to all nations—not under that name however—was, at the exodus, changed for the Jews, only as a sign of their separation, and a protection against idolatry, to the preceding day, this change continuing until the ceremonial mission of the Jewish people had been completed. Then the Saviour buried in his own grave, by sleeping there on Saturday, the Jewish part of the Sabbath—its sacrifices and its order in the week—partly because Christians now needed to be separated from Jewish ceremonies as much as the Jews of the exodus had needed to be separated from heathen days of worship, partly because the narrow Jewish dispensation was now to give place to one as broad as mankind, which called for a return to the original Sabbath of Adam!”

Is it too much to say that the foregoing is a remarkable production? “Ladies and gentlemen!” exclaimed Dr. Lynn, the Crystal Palace juggler, as he came onto the stage, “ladies and gentlemen! my profession is to deceive!!” The chief, if not the only basis for Sunday-keeping, according to Mr. Crafts, seems now to be, that, somehow, the Lord set the Sabbath back for the sake of the Jews, and then, somehow, set it forward to its original place for the sake of the Gentiles; that the Jews now keep a wrong day, and the Gentiles the right day; and that these events took place at the exodus and at the resurrection.

Now, we have been told again and again by professed Christians, observers of Sunday, that none but the most ignorant and self-willed would contend for such a thing,—that it is absurd and beneath criticism; yet “let us run with patience the race that is set before us,” and state a few things which appear to us as facts, and which contradict most emphatically the foregoing:—

1. History is reckoned from the first day of creation, and not from the sixth day.

2. Man was created on the sixth day, and therefore it, and not the seventh day of the week, was his birthday. The seventh day was his second day.

3. The seventh day, according to Genesis and Exodus, is the Sabbath. Mr. Crafts says it was the first day.

4. Not a word is quoted from Scripture to show the change he affirms. It is all guess-work against God's word.

5. The seventh day of Gen. 2: 1–3 is referred to after the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, in Ex. 20: 9–11; 31: 15–18, and in Deut. 5. Thus we have three divine witnesses to the identity of the Sabbath of creation with the Sabbath of Mount Sinai and the wilderness.

6. All that Mr. Crafts says about Jesus burying “the Jewish part of the Sabbath” in his grave, is wholly unsustained by Scripture, which knows no such thing about the Sabbath being separated from the day. Nothing is said there of a Jewish, or a Gentile, or a Christian Sabbath. That “Jewish ceremonies” are to be avoided “as much as” “heathen days of worship,” shocks Christian sensibility. Perish the thought! for God commanded the ceremonies, but strictly forbade idolatry in every form.

7. Christ kept the self-same day that his countrymen did; and he says of it: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath; therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath,” i. e., he is its possessor, owner, and master.

8. That mention of the Sabbath, from the beginning of the Bible to its end (even in Hebrews God spoke of the seventh day), refers to the one self-same day that God chose at the beginning,—the seventh day—as already quoted. And with this agree all Biblical expositors.

9. Would God have been thus plain about the day; would Christ have given so much honor to the day, and assumed so much authority over it, had it been changed at the exodus, and was about to be changed again at the resurrection; and yet the Scriptures remain perfectly silent about all this? Can this be called fair and honest dealing with the Scriptures? If so, what a mighty incentive has here been given to men to impeach the Almighty with craftiness.

10. Well, the whole paragraph reads like the effort of a drowning man to save himself by clutching at an imaginary straw.

Is it to be expected that God would appoint one day for the Jews and another for the Gentiles, when the day he appointed he commanded the Jews to keep forever, throughout their generations, as long as they should exist, and this commandment holds good, whether they accept Christ or not? If God appointed two days, then, as the Jews are mixed with the Gentiles all over the world, necessarily there must be two Sabbaths every week. From the teachings of the New Testament, does this look reasonable?

Further, the Jews who wrote the whole of the sacred record, Old and New, should be the people who would know of the change of the Sabbath by divine appointment, if any had been made. But they know it not. They are world-renowned in all ages for conscientious and scrupulous regard for all matters pertaining to times, and seasons, and worship. They are a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us, forever testifying to the uninterrupted return and perpetuity of the self-same Sabbath day.

To add to the weight of evidence already adduced, is the testimony of languages to the unchanged week and the identity of the Sabbath. Of 125 languages, ancient and modern, 76 give the name “Sabbath” to our Saturday, and the remaining call the seventh day after Saturn, as we do, so that there is no conflicting testimony here. Languages speak the ideas and customs of the peoples using them; and in case of the week, modern nomenclature is in complete harmony with that of all antiquity. The Sabbath, therefore, is the day we call Saturday, the whole world over.