A CURIOUS BLOSSOM

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 3, 1879

A CURIOUS BLOSSOM.

A BROTHER sends us an abstract of a discourse by W. B. Wright on Ex. 20 : 8, recently delivered in Boston, Mass., and reported in the Boston Herald. In it we find the puzzling change from Sabbath to Sunday summarily accounted for as follows :—

“Our Lord abolished the fourth commandment exactly as he abolished the other nine; that is, as he destroys an acorn when he makes an oak. He touched the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and it blossomed into, ‘Thou shalt not be angry.’ He touched the Jewish Sabbath, and it became the Christian Sunday.”

This last blossom is certainly an anomaly in the floral world. We can well understand how the command, “Thou shalt not kill,” can receive so broad an application that it shall reach to the thoughts and intents of the heart, and prohibit even the feeling of anger; for the two are related: anger must precede murder; it is the very root of that terrible deed, and the injunction not to cherish anger must be broken before the murder can follow. This is the sixth commandment “magnified and made honorable,” the very work which the prophet said Christ should do in reference to the law.

But how the Sabbath blossoms into Sunday, we do not understand. Is Sunday-keeping the root of Sabbath-keeping? Does Sabbath-keeping spring from it, as murder springs from anger? Must we transgress the Sunday before we can break the Sabbath? How did Christ “touch” the Sabbath in reference to the Sunday? He labored diligently to strip off from the Sabbath the abuses and superstitions which the Jews had heaped upon it, and show them what was in accordance with the Sabbath law; but of Sunday he said never a word.

If he had somewhere said, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; but I say unto you, Thou shalt keep the first day in the stead thereof; for God need no longer be remembered, and the creation is no longer worth commemorating. Therefore thou shalt keep another day, even the first day, for another purpose, namely, to commemorate my rising from the dead, in addition to baptism, which is given for the same purpose; because my work in redemption [the reader will pardon the length of this revised portion of the decalogue; we do not know how it could be complete and be any shorter] is to be greater than that of the Father in the creation, and therefore should be commemorated in the place of that. And although the work of redemption will by no means be completed on the first day when I shall rise from the dead, yet the observance of that day, instead of the Sabbath, will perhaps commemorate the work as well as anything can, before it is done!”

The fourth commandment sets forth the Sabbatic institution, and the reason therefor; and if the Sunday is a corresponding institution for this dispensation, it should have been set forth, and the reason given for it, in some such language as above indicated. Then the controversy would forever have been settled; or, rather, it would never have arisen. Sunday would have been received everywhere in Christendom as a Sabbath of divine appointment.

But this would not have been a “blossom” from the old stock; it would have been a new flower set out in new soil.

The difficulty under which our friends labor in this matter is well illustrated by Christ’s parable of the new wine and old bottles, and the new cloth and old garment. The new will not unite with the old. If Mr. Wright still insists on advocating the Sunday institution, he must try his hand again in constructing a reason for it. Our advice to him, however, would be to abandon it to its inevitable fate; for Christ said, “Every plant which my Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up.”