GOD'S SEVENTH DAY OF REST.
Says Prof. Joseph Emerson in The Advance, of Aug. 27, 1868, in concluding an article on this subject: “We can therefore come to no other conclusion than that the seventh day, and therefore probably all the other days, are not to be measured by revolutions of the earth upon its axis, but are days known to Him with whom ‘one day is as a thousand years.’ The ‘evenings’ and the ‘mornings’ therefore are not settings and risings of our sun, but periods perhaps of gloom and then of glory, like those which we see measuring this seventh in which we are living. We need, therefore, be no more disturbed than Moses was to find the Spirit telling of ‘days’ and ‘evenings and mornings’ before the sun and moon were set to rule the day and night for men. And if modern science should come to a like conclusion, we shall only welcome it to the ground which the word of God has held from of old.”
Doctors of divinity, and doctors of medicine! As the latter have killed more persons than they have cured, so the former have created more errors than they have overthrown. No person less than a “professor,” who has a large share of that wisdom which is foolishness with God, would have thought of making such a muddle of the record in Genesis as is made in the paragraph above quoted. Their leading if not their only rule of interpretation seems to be that the Bible must not be allowed to mean what it says; its language must be strained, distorted, mystified, perverted, and made to signify that which is as wide as possible from what it would naturally be supposed to mean. This writer asserts that we are now living in the seventh day. Now there is language in the record of Moses from which we think it might reasonably be inferred, inasmuch as it is most directly and positively stated, that the seventh day of that record has long been past. God rested, says Moses, upon the seventh day, and then blessed and sanctified the day because he had rested. But no, says the wisdom of the nineteenth century, you are six thousand years ahead of time: God has not yet completed his rest on the seventh day, that day is not yet ended; we are still in it; so God has not yet blessed and sanctified the day, because that in it he had rested; for his rest is not yet complete; Moses to the contrary notwithstanding. Probably the time will soon come, when God, having passed the seventh day in resting, will bless and sanctify it, as Moses said he did in the beginning, about six thousand years ago. Such is one of the discrepancies which have been doctored into the text by those whose profession is to explain and defend it. But there are other difficulties. According to the record Adam was created on the sixth day. He lived a portion of that day, or, as our writer would have it, that period, all through the seventh period, and nine hundred and thirty years afterward. But we are told that we are yet in the seventh day, or period. According to this Adam should be still living. Will some D. D., who advocates the period-day theory, produce him? No one, of course, will have the boldness to assert without any evidence that there is any change in the nature of the narrative between the first two chapters of Genesis, and subsequent portions of the same book. But there is another statement still more strange, as it contradicts not only the inspired record, but the evidence of our own senses. These “were periods,” says the extract, “perhaps of gloom and glory, like those which we see measuring this seventh in which we are living.” Astonishing! Where do we see it? The gloom precedes the glory. The evening and the morning constitute the day. We must be near the close of the seventh period, that is, in the time of its glory! The time of its gloom, then, must have been when angels walked and talked with men, when patriarchs held converse with God, and prophets wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost; but this age of unparalleled spiritual dearth, this age when many times the millions are spent on pride, tobacco, rum, lust, and the demon of war, that is used in the promulgation of the gospel, when thoughtful minds are compelled to admit that they cannot contemplate the mad and intoxicated state of the world without a shudder—this is the time of the glory of the seventh period in which we live!! What need we say more to such an argument? Were the prophet Isaiah here, would he not re-utter against the writer of such absurdities, his seething denunciation, “Woe unto them that call evil, good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter? Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight.” Isa. v, 20, 21.