THE BIBLICAL INSTITUTE by Uriah Smith

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 14, 1877

THE BIBLICAL INSTITUTE.

By Uriah Smith

HELD IN OAKLAND, CAL., APRIL 1–17, 1877.

In this form we give a synopsis of the lectures presented at this Institute, the aim being to give principal facts, dates and references, with as few words as will serve to connect them. The lessons are not intended to measure the recitations. A lesson embraces an entire subject; but some of these occupied a number of recitations in the class.

LESSON EIGHT—CONCLUDED.

THE SABBATH.

The Sabbath was not a type; for all types look forward to a work of redemption, and of course could not be introduced till redemption was needed, and till some plan of redemption had been instituted. But the Sabbath was given to Adam before he sinned, before he needed any redemption, and before any system of redemption was devised. Had Adam never sinned, he never would have needed redemption, and no type would ever have been introduced. But he would still have had the Sabbath as recorded in Gen. 2:2, 3. The Sabbath, therefore, was not a type.

The Sabbath not being a type, the commandment for the Sabbath is not a typical law. There are plainly two kinds of laws: one class binding on man before he fell, regulating his duty to God, and to his fellow-men; the other class, growing out of the changed condition of man after he had fallen and the plan of salvation had been introduced. If man had never fallen, it would have been his duty just the same to render supreme honor to God, and to deal justly with his fellow-men. But if he had never fallen, there never would have been any laws regulating ceremonies, sacrifices, offerings, baptism, the Lord’s supper, etc. These all grow out of man’s necessities in consequence of his fall. The first may be called original or primary laws; and they are, in the very nature of things, immutable and eternal; the others are derived, secondary or typical laws, and are temporary and changeable. No one has any excuse for ignoring or denying a distinction so plain.

The transgression of Adam did not change or abolish any of these primary laws. We are under no less obligation to God and our fellow-men than if we were not sinners. To which of these classes of laws does the Sabbath belong? To the original and primary laws which we should have had even if man never had fallen. It is therefore an immutable and perpetual institution.

The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week as it is reckoned at the present time. The fourth commandment does not, to be sure, use the term week, and say the seventh day of the week; but its appeal to the record of the great facts of creation for its origin, where the week is defined and the seventh day of that week is the one set apart as the Sabbath, makes it just as explicit. To quibble over the absence of the word week in the commandment, as we have frequently known ministers to do who even professed to be candid, is the thinnest kind of sophistry, to use no harder term; for of what is it the seventh day? Not the seventh day of the month, or of the year; not a seventh day, nor every seventh day, allowing us to begin where we will to reckon; but the seventh day of some definite cycle of time. And inasmuch as we have in the Bible a division of time given us, consisting of just seven days, the shortest of all which consist of a number of days, to say that the seventh day of the commandment is not the seventh day of this division, or week, is to go in the clearest manner contrary to reason.

But it is asked if the reckoning of the week has not been lost; in other words, can we now tell which is the true seventh day from creation? Once admitting that the seventh day in regular succession is what is required, and there is no difficulty. It could easily be handed down from Adam to Abraham, and from Abraham to Moses. But if anything was out of the way, then God would have set them right when he gave them a written copy of his law. By three distinct miracles wrought every week for the space of forty years, God pointed out what day he meant in the commandment; and it was the seventh day of the Jewish week. From Moses to Christ there was certainly no derangement in the reckoning. They had the true seventh day at that point; and if there had been any mistake then, Christ, the Son of God, would have known it and set them right. But instead of this he endorsed the day they then observed. From the days of Christ to the present time, the methods of computing time have been too accurate, the custom too wide spread, and the agreement too perfect, to admit for a moment of the idea of any loss of time, or derangement of the week. Therefore the week as we now reckon it, is the same as at the creation, and the seventh day of our week, is the true seventh day from creation down.

It is supposed by some that the change from Old Style to New must have changed the reckoning of the week. A few facts will show that this is a mistake. Old and New Styles are simply methods of reckoning time according to the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Old Style follows the Julian manner of reckoning months and days, or the calendar by Julius Cæsar, in which every fourth year consists of 366 days, and the other years of 365 days. This is something more than 11 minutes too much in the year; and by the time of pope Gregory XIII, in 1582, it had so disarranged the months as to throw the vernal equinox 10 days from where it was at the council of Nice, A. D. 325. To bring it back, 10 days were taken out of October, 1582, and the 5th day of the month was reckoned as the 15th. Gregory then reformed the calendar so that such a derangement would not again occur, by having every year which is divisible by 4, unless divisible by 100 without being divisible by 400, consist of 366 days, and all other years of 365 days. This makes the calendar year coincide so nearly with the solar, that the lapse of centuries makes scarcely any appreciable difference. This is called the Gregorian calendar, and reckoning time by it is called New Style. This change was not adopted by Great Britain till 1751. Then so much time had been gained that to bring the matter right 11 days had to be dropped. Therefore in the following year, 1752, the 3d of September was reckoned as the 14th; and New Style has since been followed there, and from there brought to America. It will be seen that this simply changed the day of the month but not the day of the week. For instance to-day, May 24, 1877, is Thursday; if we should drop 7 days and call it May 31, it would be Thursday still. Russia still reckons by Old Style, and her week corresponds with ours.

Another attempt is made to nullify the force of the record of Gen. 2:2, 3. It is claimed that the seventh day which God blessed was the first day of Adam’s existence, and hence the point where the reckoning should commence. If that was the point at which to commence, doubtless Moses, guided by the Spirit of inspiration, would have commenced there. But it so happens that he commenced the reckoning six days before, and has given it to us day by day down to that point. How is it that modern expositors have come to be so wise above what is written? We can answer: they couldn’t oppose the Sabbath in any other way. To make this position, if of any force, the ground must be taken that Adam’s first day was the first day of time. Then all that went before was eternity. God created the world and all things therein, not in the beginning, but in eternity. But time as distinguished from eternity is duration measured, eternity being unmeasured duration; and these days of creation are measured off to us, and hence belong to time and not to eternity. What blind presumption for men to set a point from which to reckon different from that which the Bible has given us!

But the assumption of this objection is entirely false: the seventh day was not the first day of Adam’s existence, nothing of the kind. When was Adam created? On the sixth day. All the animals were then brought to him and he named them, no small amount of work. Then he was put to sleep while Eve was created. After that a marriage ceremony took place. And then followed instruction to Adam and Eve in regard to their manner of life, means of support, extent of dominion, etc., before Moses declares that the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Surely here was enough to occupy the greater part of that day, yet so anxious are people to oppose the Sabbath that they will tell us that the next day was the first day of Adam’s existence. What! Adam married before he had an existence? If any, still inclined to urge this ghost of an excuse, should plead that the seventh day of the record was Adam’s first complete day, then we ask them why they do not celebrate American independence on July 5 instead of July 4, as July 5, 1776, was the first complete day of our independence. This objection cannot be made to stand, however men may try to bolster it up. It is the imbecile offspring of prejudice and folly.

Again it is said that Moses, writing after God had spoken the ten commandments, stated in Gen. 2:2, 3, what was done on the seventh day not at creation, but at Sinai. That is, Gen. 2:2 states what took place on the first seventh day of time, but verse 3, without any change in the narrative, or any intimation that other than a consecutive order of events is introduced, narrates what took place 2500 years afterward. This view is fabricated by those who claim that the Sabbath originated at Sinai. It is very evident from what source it springs. The wish is father to the thought. To barely state a view which rests so utterly on assumption, and is so contrary to the whole tenor of the narrative, ought to be sufficient. There is not the slightest intimation that God blessed and for the first time set apart the day of the Sabbath at Sinai. The record in Genesis states in the same style of narrative that God rested on the seventh day, and that he blessed and sanctified it. God did not perform the act of resting, certainly, at Sinai; the resting was done at creation; then upon what ground or authority does any one throw in between the sentences of an unbroken narrative a period of 2500 years and make the resting at Sinai, when there is not an item of evidence to show that any resting there took place? It is evident that the resting took place at the creation, and the blessing and sanctification immediately thereafter; and if the day was not to be used till Sinai, we leave with our friends another question: Why was all this done so long beforehand?

There is another objection coming to be urged by a certain class very frequently and with a great deal of assurance; and that is, that the record of God’s rest upon the seventh day has nothing to do in fixing a weekly Sabbath; for those days are not literal days but immense periods of time as is proved by geology. And they affect to look with great disdain upon any one who will not acknowledge so notable a scientific fact. It can readily be seen that this contradicts the Bible; and this many so-called geologists are doubtless very willing to do. But even some professed defenders of the word of God have been frightened by this bugbear of geology into an admission that these days are great periods, and then gone into a theological St. Vitus’ dance to harmonize it with the record. Into a controversy with geology it is not our purpose here to enter further than to deny in toto what they call conclusions and we call guess-work, and challenge the proof. In their conclusions geologists assume that the results which modern research has discovered have been produced in ages past by such agencies only as we see at work at the present time. And right here their theory breaks down; for that is what cannot be proved. The Master Mind in Nature’s great laboratory may in remote ages have called into action potent agencies to produce in a short space certain results which by any process now going forward it would take ages to accomplish. To reason from that which is present and known to that which is past and unknown, is illogical. The premise being assumed, the conclusion is but an assumption also. And after all the ludicrous mistakes which geologists have made, attributing a pre-Adamic age to bricks found in the delta of the Nile, which subsequent investigations proved belonged to the age of the later Pharaohs, and dancing with delight over the immense antiquity of a strange piece of wood found in the delta of the Mississippi, which was found upon a little more careful scrutiny to be the gunwale of a Kentucky flat-boat, they ought to be a little modest in their assertions.

It will be enough for Bible believers to test this claim on the age of Adam, and dismiss it. Adam was created on the sixth day, the sixth long period the geologist would say. He lived all that period through, his life covering probably the greater part of it. He then lived the seventh day, or entirely through the seventh long period. By this time he must have been many hundred thousand years old. The record then goes on with his history, introducing the birth of Cain, Abel and Seth, and when he came to die, lo, he was all of nine hundred and thirty years old! Where now are the long periods during which he lived? Vanished into the moonshine from which they venture now and then to flaunt themselves.

So far as the record in Gen. 2:2, 3 is concerned, the field is now cleared of every objection. All the raiders upon that citadel of truth are repulsed. The record stands in its native strength and simplicity. The six days of creation were such days as we now have, ruled by the sun, determined by a revolution of the earth upon its axis. The seventh of these was devoted by the Creator to rest. It was set apart to be thus used by man. A command was given to Adam, and through him to all his posterity to keep it. It was not a temporary nor a typical institution, but designed to last through all time, like other primary institutions. These facts are established; and we might rest the whole Sabbath question right here; for if these stand, as they surely do, and will, the Sabbath stands. It was all right in the beginning, gleaming like a coronet on the fair brow of a creation unsullied by sin; and if men had always kept it, the world would have presented a very different moral and religious aspect from what it does to-day; for men never could become idolaters so long as they remembered to worship the Creator of all things; and we should not, as we do to-day, behold the sad spectacle of seven hundred millions of idolaters, whose dark abodes are the habitations of cruelty.

But leaving the creation with its established facts and explicit record, we are willing to follow the Sabbath opponent to all his strongholds, and candidly weigh, and compare with Scripture, his strongest arguments. Taking us to Neh. 9:13, 14, he says that the Sabbath was not known nor given to the children of Israel before God spoke it from Sinai; for Nehemiah says: “Thou camest down also upon Mount Sinai, and spakest with them from heaven, and gavest them right judgments, and true laws, good statutes and commandments; and madest

known unto them thy holy Sabbath, and commandedst them precepts, statutes and laws by the hand of Moses thy servant.” The only trouble with the conclusion drawn from this passage is, that it is contradicted by other scriptures. Thus, Ex. 16 gives an account of the Hebrews’ having the Sabbath in the second month after their departure from Egypt. When God would prove his people to see whether they would walk in his law or no, he took the Sabbath as the one with which to test their obedience, reproving some who in their unbelief and rebellion went out to gather manna on the Sabbath by saying, “How long refuse ye to keep my commandments and my laws.” This is not the language that would be used with reference to laws new-made and then for the first time introduced. But this was thirty-three days before the law was spoken from Sinai. Therefore the Sabbath was not first made known to them from Sinai, as is claimed from Neh. 9:13, 14. How then shall the statements of Nehemiah be harmonized with the record of Ex. 16? Our opponents make a contradiction between these two chapters by giving a wrong meaning to the words “made known” in Neh. 9:14. These words do not mean that the Sabbath was then for the first time brought to their knowledge, but only that it was more especially unfolded to them by the commandment’s being spoken with the voice of God in their hearing, and a copy of it placed in their hands written with his own finger. In Eze. 20:5, God says that he made himself known unto them in the land of Egypt, when he lifted up his hand unto them saying, “I am the Lord your God.” This does not mean that they then for the first time received a knowledge of God; for they already knew and revered him. Ex. 1:17. It simply means that he then gave a more intimate revelation of himself to them; and it only means the same in reference to the Sabbath in Neh. 9:13, 14.

It is further urged in behalf of the idea that the Sabbath originated at Sinai, that God gave it to the Israelites to commemorate their deliverance from Egypt. Deut. 5:15 is quoted to prove this: “And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm; therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day.” This is not the original Sabbath commandment, but a rehearsal by Moses of God’s dealings with that people, as he was about to leave them. It was 40 years after the law had been given by the voice of God on Mount Sinai. Moses intimates as much by referring them back to the commandment. See verse 12: “Keep the Sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.” Why then is this rehearsed by Moses, forty years after the giving of the law, always quoted by our opponents instead of the original commandment as found in Ex. 20:8–11? The answer is obvious: Because in that original commandment there is no mention of the coming out of Egypt, and hence that would not furnish anything which they could torture into proof that the Sabbath originated then, and was limited to that people. But we submit to every candid and honorable mind whether it is a fair method of reasoning thus to ignore the commandment as spoken by God, and then endeavor to draw the origin of the institution from a rehearsal by Moses, forty years afterward.

But we need not leave the question here. There are other duties which certainly did not originate then, and were not confined to that people, but in reference to which the same language is used. They were commanded not to pervert judgment, nor oppress the widow, nor do any unrighteousness, but to do all the commandments; and in reference to all these, as in reference to the Sabbath, it is said, I am the Lord which brought you out of the land, therefore I command you to do this thing. See Deut. 24:18, 22; Lev. 19:35–37. Why do they not use this fact in reference to the other commandments as they do in reference to the Sabbath? The answer again is obvious: They do not want it for any except the Sabbath; hence they studiously shut their own eyes, or endeavor to shut the eyes of their readers, to all the others. But the argument will apply to all alike, and hence proves too much for them.

Having shown that there is no proof in the text that the Sabbath was given to that people and confined to them, because they came out of Egypt, since if it proves this, it proves that all the commandments were given for the same reason, we have said all that is demanded of us in this argument. But to clear away all doubt it may be remarked that the reference to the deliverance from Egypt was simply an appeal to their gratitude. They had been in Egyptian bondage, where in all probability the severity of their servitude prevented their worshiping God in keeping his commandments and ordinances. But now they had been delivered from that hard state of bondage into perfect freedom. Should they not therefore, by a ready compliance with his will, show their gratitude to Him who had delivered them? Therefore, in addition to all other obligations, as their great Benefactor he commanded them to keep the Sabbath, not to pervert judgment, nor oppress the widow, but to observe all his commandments.

U. S.