Which Day Is the Sabbath?
By F. M. W.
This is a question propounded in the September number of the Ladies' Home Journal, to Dr. Lyman Abbott, in charge of the religious questions and answers department of that magazine. Dr. Abbott gave the following reply:— I do not think that on any proper interpretation of the fourth commandment it makes any difference what day is observed as a sabbath or rest day. The commandment simply says: “Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work,” etc. If this were a human statute, no lawyer would conceive that it required anything more than one day of rest out of the seven. Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath. After the resurrection of Jesus Christ the Christian church observed the resurrection day with special services, and Saturday when Jesus' body lay in the tomb was not a natural festival day. At first both days were observed. But, as the Jewish element became less important and the converted pagan element more important, the first day gradually became the sabbath of the Christian in the place of the seventh day. Paul makes it clear that which day was observed was a matter of no consequence. “Let no man therefore,” he says, “judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holiday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days.” It would be a strange logic indeed, and one which we could not conceive of being recognized in any court of law, for a lawyer to argue that when the commandment of God requires the observance of a definite day—namely, the seventh day—of the week, any other day of the weekly cycle would answer as well. Suppose, for instance, that a note were drawn payable on the thirtieth day of a certain month. Would a judge admit a claim from the holder of the note that because there were thirty days in the month, therefore it was his right to demand payment on any one of the thirty, say the tenth or twentieth of the month, instead of on the particular day specified for the payment of the obligation? The admission of such a claim would be a travesty upon justice; but this is a fair example of the claim made regarding the Sabbath of the Lord in the quotation above. The seventh day of the week God used as his own rest day. Upon it he placed his special blessing. Because he made it his own Sabbath, he set it apart as the Sabbath day for the human family. Gen. 2:1–3. He did not use the first or second or third or fourth or fifth or sixth day in this manner. Upon none of these days did he let his blessing rest, nor did he set apart any of these six days as a Sabbath of rest. He chose the seventh day from all its fellows for a special and holy use. See Ex. 20:8–11. That the disciples of the early church, after the resurrection, observed the first day of the week rests wholly upon assertion. Dr. Abbott affords not one iota of historical or Biblical proof that they so observed the first day. It is true, as he says, that both days were for a time observed in the Christian church, but not in the days of the apostles. The historian Neander says:— Opposition to Judaism introduced the particular festival of Sunday very early, indeed, into the place of the Sabbath. . . . The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always only a human ordinance, and it was far from the intentions of the apostles to establish a divine command in this respect, far from them, and from the early apostolic church, to transfer the laws of the Sabbath to Sunday. Perhaps at the end of the second century a false application of this kind had begun to take place; for men appear by that time to have considered laboring on Sunday as a sin.—Neander's “Church History,” Rose's translation, page 186.
And to the truthfulness of this statement we have the added authority of Dr. Abbott himself as published in the Christian Union of June 26, 1890. At that time he said:— The current notion that Christ and his apostles authoritatively substituted the first day of the week for the seventh, is absolutely without any authority in the New Testament.
The Sabbath of the Lord, according to historical writers, down to the fourth and fifth centuries was observed as a sacred day. William Prynne says:— It is certain that Christ himself, his apostles, and the primitive Christians for some good space of time, did constantly observe the seventh-day Sabbath.—“Dissertation on the Lord's Day Sabbath,” page 33.
Morer, a learned clergyman of the Church of England, says:— The primitive Christians had a great veneration for the Sabbath, and spent the day in devotion and sermons. And it is not to be doubted that they derived this practice from the apostles themselves, as appears by several scriptures to that purpose.—Morer's “Dialogues on the Lord's Day,” page 189.
Gradually, little by little, as the spirit of worldliness increased in the church and heathen influences prevailed, the observance of the Sabbath of the Lord was discontinued, and the pagan Sunday holiday was adapted to Christian uses and put in place of the Sabbath of the Lord. The statement of the apostle Paul to which reference is made is wholly with respect to feast days and ceremonial sabbaths observed by the Jewish church, about which there was a dispute among the Christian believers. Compare Hosea 2:11 with Col. 2:16, 17. It is better to accept the plain, positive statements of Scripture as a basis of our faith than the opinions of religious teachers, however eminent may be their reputation or honorable their position in the religious world. It is by the royal law, the law of liberty (James 2:8, 12), that we must be judged at the last great day, and not by the religious fallacies of those whose teachings set at naught the Scriptures of Truth. F. M. W.