Both Right and Wrong

Signs Publishing Co. · Melbourne, Victoria · Jun 14, 1920

FromAustraliasian Signs of the Times, Vol. 35, No. 24.

Both Right and Wrong

IN one of Sydney’s dailies of February 8 appeared a long symposium of opinions upon the question of Sunday sacredness and the right or wrong of permitting games and sports on that day. The opinion of the Lord Mayor, Sir Richard Richards, we quote:—

I am opposed to Sunday sport, unless the particular branch of sport has as its object the improvement of the moral and physical condition of our youth. I believe God, in His goodness, set down and sanctified the seventh day as a day of rest, and I very much regret to find the custom of sport made a property of easiness in our Christian community. The Scriptures show, throughout their teachings, that the seventh day is a hallowed day, and I have come to the time of life when I think that all men should wait upon the Lord, to renew their strength on at least one day of the week.

The Lord Mayor is right when he asserts that God “sanctified the seventh day as a day of rest,” and that “the Scriptures show, throughout their teachings, that the seventh day is a hallowed day.” But we ask in all seriousness, What has that to do with the “first day of the week commonly called Sunday”? The Lord Mayor asserts a divine principle, and then smashes the principle to bits in the application which he makes of it. Proving that the seventh day is a sacred and hallowed day, does not help the sacredness of the Sunday institution to any degree whatsoever. Jehovah Himself blessed and hallowed the seventh

day—not the first day—and set it apart for man’s use; but today men trample upon that divine institution, and the very law which God enacted to protect His Sabbath they use to guard and protect a rival institution. Such a perversion of the divine law is a double insult to the One who made the Sabbath. Let us be consistent. The seventh day is Jehovah’s day, blessed and commanded by Him, and our illegal use of His law to enforce the first-day Sabbath will never clear us of the charge of Sabbath desecration and wilful disobedience when we are summoned to stand before the bar of the great Judge.