Faulty Arguments for Sunday-Keeping
By L. A. S.
A CORRESPONDENT asks for an answer to the argument for Sunday-keeping which has been presented to him, that the Sabbath commandment requires the observance of one day in seven, but no particular day, and that Sunday should be selected as the proper day because the resurrection of Christ was an event greater and of far more importance than creation. This argument for Sunday observance does not rest on a solid foundation. The only true foundation for Christian belief and practise is the Word of God. Sunday-keeping has another foundation altogether. In the first place, the Sabbath is not any one day in seven, but a definite day of the week. The week originated at creation. It was the change from work to rest on the seventh day which made the division of time into periods of seven days, and the Sabbath was the seventh day of the first week. The Creator instituted the week and the Sabbath. He put the Sabbath in its place in the week, and no human power could afterward change it. Adam received the week and the Sabbath from his Creator, just as he did the garden in which he was placed. He had no need to change or attempt to create anything himself, for everything had been made for him by an all-wise Being, and it was all perfect. “God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” No one is at liberty, therefore, to make the Sabbath any one day in seven. The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week. It was given to commemorate creation, and no other sabbath but the creation Sabbath can do this. To have made the Sabbath any one day in seven, with each person free to choose his own day of rest, would have resulted in general confusion, and it would have been necessary for man, to avoid a confusion which would be intolerable, to designate and appoint some definite day of the week as the Sabbath day. Imagine a community of people in which all days of the week were observed as the Sabbath. Under such a practise one day would not be the Sabbath any more than another, and the observance of all days as Sabbaths would result in there being no Sabbath at all. For the fundamental idea of the Sabbath is that it is a day distinguished from all other days of the week. A particular day was set apart by the Creator, and blessed and hallowed. All days were not blessed and hallowed; not even two days were so honored, but only one, and that one is the Sabbath day, the day on which God rested. And as surely as only one day of the week was blessed and hallowed, so surely must it be that the Sabbath can not be any one day in seven, but only one definite day of the seven. There is but one Sabbath in the week; there can not be two. Was not the Creator wise enough to know that the Sabbath must be a particular day of the week, and to designate the day? The idea that the resurrection of Christ was an event greater than creation likewise rests upon another foundation than the Word of God. Resurrection power and creation power are one and the same, and the Sabbath, being the memorial of creation, is also the sign of the power which raises from the dead. The sinner who repents and turns to God dies, is buried in baptism, and rises to a new life. There is a new birth. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.” 2 Cor. 5: 17. There is a new creation. “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works.” Eph. 2: 10. The resurrection of the sinner to the new life, the Christian life, is by a new creation. Hence only the Sabbath which commemorates creation can be the Sabbath of the Christian, the one who has experienced the new birth. No other would be appropriate. The creation Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, is as vitally related to the resurrection as it is to the original creation. Only creative power can create the sinner new in Christ; only creative power can redeem the sinner. Redemption is by creative power, and the Sabbath is the sign of this power. Only the true God can save the sinner from his sins. The true God is distinguished by the possession of power to create, and the Sabbath is the sign of the true God. Eze. 20: 12, 20. Thus the resurrection calls for the observance of the creation Sabbath, which observance is a sign to the Christian that he worships and is sanctified by the true God, the Creator, who, having the power to create, has the power to redeem. The Sabbath day is related to the other days of the week. There must first be work before there can be rest; working days before there can be a rest day. But the resurrection of Christ is not in any way related to the week. The Sabbath was made the seventh day of the week, marking the end of the working portion of the week. The week was made by the institution of the Sabbath. But the day of the resurrection of Christ, while it was necessarily a day of the week, bears no relation to the week as such, and to say that every Sunday is the day of Christ’s resurrection is a manifest absurdity. The day of Christ’s resurrection, like the day of one’s birth, can occur but once a year, and a yearly celebration would be the only proper way of observing it. The celebration of Easter as the day of Christ’s resurrection, is an acknowledgment of this fact. But here a new difficulty for the Sunday-keeper presents itself, for a yearly celebration, like Christmas or the fourth of July, would fall on a different day of the week with each successive year. The day of the month on which Christ rose from the dead would coincide with Sunday only about once in seven years. But it would never do to celebrate the resurrection on any day but Sunday, for that would deny the whole argument for Sunday as the Sabbath day. Hence Easter is a movable feast, so movable, in fact, that it ranges through a period of several weeks, and the anniversary of the resurrection day comes sometimes in one month and sometimes in another! There is consistency and harmony and beauty in doing what God has commanded us to do; but when men get outside of God’s instructions and institute religious observances of their own, their efforts to maintain them against the statements of Scripture only lead them further and further into the mazes of inconsistency and absurdity.