Easter and Sunday by L. A. S.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 1, 1902

Easter and Sunday

By L. A. S.

EASTER, as a professedly Christian institution, owes its observance to the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. It is celebrated as the anniversary of that event. As an anniversary day it must necessarily, like Christmas, fall successively upon different days of the week. It cannot fall successively on any particular week day; with such a day it can coincide only once in about seven years. Only about one seventh of all Easter days can coincide with Sunday. Hence, if Easter were observed each year on the true day of its recurrence, the Sunday-observing portion of the religious world would almost annually exhibit the strange self-contradiction of celebrating the resurrection day on two different days of the same week. In such an instance, supposing for example that Easter fell on Tuesday, the people would first observe Sunday as being the day of the resurrection; and the following Tuesday being Easter, they would next observe Tuesday for the same reason, the one reason in both cases being that it was the day on which Christ rose from the dead; which would be to say that Christ rose from the dead on two different occasions! The only way to avoid this fatal dilemma is to set aside mathematical truth, and bring in a manifest absurdity by decreeing that Easter day and Sunday shall always coincide; and this is what the Sunday-keeping world has done. They solemnly countenance an absurdity, rather than acknowledge that the fact of Christ’s resurrection from the dead on the first day of the week is no valid reason for Sunday observance. Such is the hollow and worthless foundation on which Sunday observance rests.

Christianity rests always upon solid truth; and the solid truth as regards Sabbath observance is stated in the fourth commandment, which declares, “The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God,” and that it is to be observed because “in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.” Thus the Sabbath day was indissolubly bound up with the week, and must occur in every week. The Sabbath is the memorial of creation; it can be nothing else than this, and only in this truth can be found the reason for its observance.

L. A. S.