Sabbaths, Divine and Human
WHY make so much ado over a question of days? Isn't one day as good as another, providing it is properly observed? Surely God will not expect us to keep Saturday as the Sabbath when it is much easier to do as other people do. In reply to such representations, which are frequently made in these days of easy-going superficiality in religious matters, it is only necessary to point out that the real issue is not one of days but of institutions. It is the failure to grasp the real meaning and design of the Sabbath as a divine institution that lies at the root of much of the neglect of the fourth commandment so palpable to-day. The Sabbath was given primarily to serve spiritual and not mere physical ends. It was to be the grand memorial of God's creative work,—a weekly reminder to the human race that God had created the world in six days, and rested on the seventh. Idolatry would have been impossible had men kept the Sabbath, for every week would come the reminder that one creative hand had fashioned every living thing, and as mankind lifted their hearts in thanksgiving and praise to the divine Author, they would have received fresh grace and strength. But men fell away from the worship of God and the keeping holy of his Sabbath. They chose to render homage to the creature instead of the Creator. Naturally the sun, as the most powerful object within the range of human vision, became the center of the idolatrous system, and in course of time the day especially devoted to the riotous orgies connected with such worship, came to be known as Sunday. Thus a writer in the North British Review calls Sunday 'the wild, solar holiday of all pagan times.' Origin of Sunday Observance
It may naturally be asked how a day with such unfavorable antecedents, and without a single trace of divine authority as a day of rest, came to displace the Sabbath of Jehovah, the day which he expressly blessed, and hallowed, and commanded mankind to keep holy. The answer, to be very brief, is that Sunday-keeping came into the church along with the heathen customs, which, taken all together, brought about an era of apostasy and high-handed bigotry, known as the Dark Ages. Sunday observance and the elevation of the bishop of Rome to the chief place in the church, grew up side by side. The papacy in reality established the rival sabbath as an institution peculiarly its own, though taken originally from a heathen source, and the Roman Catholic Church to-day glories in the general observance of Sunday as an evidence of her power even to change God's law. Only the most superficial suppose Sunday to have a New Testament standing as a divine institution. Careful readers of the Bible know that, searched from cover to cover, it does not afford even so much as a hint that the first day of the week had any sacredness attached to it. Everywhere it comes to view as an ordinary working-day, and such it must still remain to those who found their belief and practise on the Holy Scriptures. That Sunday has been observed as a day of rest for centuries, does not make it a holy day, nor in any sense transfer to it the divine blessing which was placed on the seventh day. The Sabbath of creation is a divine institution, occupying an honored place in the great moral law of the ten commandments, and as such having binding claims on all Christians. The sabbath which Rome proudly boasts that she has given the Christian world in place of that Bible rest-day is a purely human institution, having its first origin in the pagan ideas and customs which, in the days of the corrupt but professedly Christian Constantine, became largely embodied in the church. The Sign of a Rival Power
Knowing these facts, how can one reject the true Sabbath, and observe Sunday as a day of worship, without thereby dishonoring the God of the Sabbath, and yielding traitorous homage to a rival power? Surely such an important matter as the observance of the fourth commandment can not be set aside on the mere ground of inconvenience. No doubt it was something more than inconvenient for the early Christians to refuse, at the cost of their lives, to offer up a handful of incense to the emperor: but their loyalty was at stake; and, rightly viewed, it is our loyalty which is at stake in this question of Sabbath-keeping. Shall we honor God or honor the papacy? Shall we obey the commandment and keep holy the day which God has made holy? or shall we yield sinful homage to a rival power by observing the day which it has boldly put forth as the sign, or mark, of its authority?—Present Truth.