p. 15 | Question Corner

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Nov 29, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 48.

Question Corner

1736.—Not a Question of Eating. Matt. 15:17, 18.

What is the meaning of Matt. 15:17, 18? Does it mean we may eat anything we want? F.

God gives man the privilege of choosing to do evil if man wishes. If he wants to sin and commit self-murder, he may; but he will reap the harvest of his own sowing. If he wants to eat unwholesome food, clog his liver, and ruin his digestion and nerves with tea and coffee and beer and tobacco, God will not hinder him; but as he sows so shall he reap. Gal. 6:6, 7. But Matt. 15:1-20 does not give permission to eat and drink everything. That was not the question between the Pharisees and Jesus. They were careful to keep the ceremonial law and much more. Jesus also kept it, and they knew that he kept it. But He did not observe “the tradition of the elders.” His disciples did not wash their hands to suit the Pharisees, tho their hands may have been clean. To the Pharisees they might possibly have touched something that defiled; therefore must they wash, whether the need could be seen or not. That was the only question. Jesus said that eating as His disciples were eating did not defile. The real root of all defilement grows in the soil of the heart. The evil thought, the lustful thought, gives birth to the lustful desire, the unlawful appetite, and develops both the glutton and drunkard, and all other evils as well. The duty of the Christian is set forth in 1 Cor. 10:31: “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” It is not to God’s glory to destroy health or corrupt our blood or benumb our moral sensibilities.

1737.—The Sabbath and the Pope.

Mr. Gamble says in his book, “True Sabbath of God,” page 147, “If the pope, centuries after the apostolic times, changed the Sabbath, there would be no trouble to locate the time and the pope who did it. Such person has never been found.” He further says, “The papacy did not begin till 1073 A. D.”; but I understand that you people teach that the pope changed the Sabbath long before 1073. If there were no pope, how could he change the Sabbath? H. S. R.

In the first place we do not teach that the pope as an individual changed the Sabbath. The change of the Sabbath came about through the great apostasy, of which the pope was the head. Roman Catholics themselves make Peter their first pope, and so continue down through a line of bishops to the present. Of course, Protestants do not hold to that. We would naturally date the papacy from the time that the bishop of Rome came to supremacy, which was practically in Constantine’s day. Constantine decided that the church of Rome was the true Christian Catholic Church. “The earliest instance of assumption,” as Dowling states (History of Romanism, page 32), was in the second century, by Victor, bishop of Rome, who attempted to force his brethren of the East to fix the paschal feast, or Easter, on Sunday. The various steps by which the thing was carried out are well told in the “History of the Sabbath” by Andrews. Mr. Gamble is speaking of that of which he knows nothing when he says that there was no pope till 1073; the very essence of the Papacy was all developed seven centuries before that time.