Is It God’s Sabbath, or Man’s?
By W. A. S.
In notes on the Sunday-school lessons, in the Christian Herald (Sept. 3, 1913), Dr. W. F. Crafts gives his readers the following paragraph:— “The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord.” It is putting into Scripture what is not there when Saturdarians quote “seventh day” in the commandment as if it read “seventh day of the week.” It is the seventh day after the six days of work that were previously specified. Sunday rest is a literal obedience to the commandment. This is constitutional law, requiring a whole community to work six days and then rest one. The Jews’ Sabbath was on Saturday, but the word Sabbath is no more tied up to one day of the week than Christmas. Nor can any one tell which day of our modern week is the lineal successor of the original Sabbath of Eden. There is no proof that the week has come down in unbroken succession through all the idolatrous days between Adam and Abraham. God does not make anything uncertain a condition of salvation. We keep the fourth commandment both in the letter and in the spirit when we work faithfully six days at our regular task from Monday morning to Saturday night and devote Sunday, which may be called the seventh day of the Christian week, to worship and rest and altruistic service. It is plain that this argument sets the Creator aside and makes man the creator of the rest day. It is not God’s six days of work and his day of rest that is taken as the standard, but man’s six days and man’s rest. The Lord rested on the seventh day, and made that day holy. It is the day of God’s rest, “the Sabbath of the Lord,” that all are commanded to keep who take him as their God. For man to say that he will work six days of his own appointing, and rest the seventh day thereafter, basing the count on his own work, is to set himself forth in the place of God, making a sabbath of his own in place of “the Sabbath of the Lord.” His day of rest would commemorate his own work, a memorial of—himself! The very essence of the original rebellion against God and of the lawless self-exaltation of the Papacy—man exalting himself in the place of God—is in this theory that man’s work and man’s rest can make a holy Sabbath. Man can make only a human substitute for the divine and holy. “There is no proof,” says Dr. Crafts, “that the week has come down in unbroken succession through all the idolatrous days between Adam and Abraham.” But even if those idolaters were heedless of God’s appointments, this is no reason why we also should repudiate the divinely ordained order of the week. The Lord knows which is the seventh day that he made holy. And long after Abraham’s day he spoke his law with his own voice from heaven, commanding men to keep the day on which he rested, and which he made holy at creation. Which one of the seven this was he himself had already pointed out by the miracle of the manna. At that time the Lord put on record forever the true seventh day. And no one can suggest that there has been any confusion of the order of the weekly cycle from that day to this. “The Jews’ Sabbath was on Saturday,” says the doctor, insisting upon calling it the sabbath of the Jews, though in the lesson text before his eyes, God calls it “the Sabbath of the Lord.” “But the word Sabbath,” he says, “is no more tied up to one day of the week than Christmas.” Surely the Sunday-school teachers who read these “helps” to lesson study ought not to be misled by such an argument. The humanly appointed festival of Christmas comes on different days of the week, it is true, for it is an annual holiday; but it is “tied up” to the twenty-fifth day of a given month, December. It does not slip about over the days of the month indiscriminately. The Sabbath is a weekly institution, and by no mathematical possibility can it come every seventh day and not fall on the same day of the week through all time. This theory that we are reviewing desires definiteness, too, just as soon as the Lord’s Sabbath is set aside and the Sunday substituted. Dr. Crafts says that Sunday “may be called the seventh day7of the Christian week;” and thereafter this seventh day of his own counting would recur with beautiful regularity on Sunday. But while Dr. Crafts says that Sunday “may be called the seventh day of the Christian week,” the Holy Spirit, who speaks for Christians, actually calls it “the first day of the week.” And the Spirit also bears witness that the day before Sunday is “the Sabbath,” or day of rest. Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:1, 2. All who listen to the Spirit’s voice in the New Testament, then, will keep that day, the seventh day of the week, as the day of rest. This is the language of the New Testament throughout, teaching Christian doctrine—“not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth.” Whenever men attempt to justify the substitution of the humanly selected day of rest for the divinely appointed and holy day, they are involved at once in flat contradiction of the words of Jehovah.