p. 7 | IS IT SUFFICIENT?

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 14, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 20.

IS IT SUFFICIENT?

A RELIGIOUS contemporary remarks:—

We do not keep Sunday in obedience to any law of Christ, but as a freewill offering to the Lord and a beneficial Christian custom. But we could not preach and teach Sabbath observance without feeling that we were going back from Christ to Moses, and tacitly admitting that Christ’s commands, as conveyed to us through His apostles, were insufficient for our guidance through life. The fact that Christ kept the Sabbath while under the law, is no more a command or example to us than His observance of the Passover and other legal requirements.

1. But so every so-called “holy day” came in through the apostate church. So Good Friday, Easter, Whitsunday, Candlemas, Christmas, and every saint’s day came in; so came in all works of supererogation, “not . . . in obedience to any law of Christ, but as a freewill offering to the Lord and a beneficial Christian custom.” Mentioning the observance of the first day, offerings for the dead, the sign of the cross, etc., Tertullian (A. D. 200) says: “If for these and other such rules, you insist upon having positive Scripture injunction, you will find none. Tradition will be held forth to you as the originator of them, custom as their strengthener, faith as their observer.” And that is the origin of every anti-scriptural and extra-scriptural doctrine which has cursed and divided the church of Christ. Well may the Lord ask, “Who hath required this at your hands?” What right have we to substitute? Jesus declared: “Every plant which My Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up.” If Sunday observance is a planting of the Father, where is the record? If it is not of God’s planting, whose planting is it?

2. But the Sabbath antedated Moses 2,500 years, existing before sin entered, antedating marriage. Does it make our contemporary feel that he is going back from Christ to Moses to teach or preach, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”? or, “Thou shalt not kill”? or, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”? The relation of Moses to these divine and eternal principles was precisely the same as his relation to the Sabbath. Of course, if our contemporary received or taught the Sabbath precept or any other command as pure, cold law given by man, he would go back to the same place the Jews were when they accepted the law through Moses. But he who receives God’s eternal law by faith in Jesus Christ finds every command a wellspring of joy, an enabling act, pregnant with the life of the infinite. The apostles taught this obedience to God’s law and Christ’s example (1 John 2:3-6; 5:3; Rom. 3:31, et al) as ever new and living principles.

3. All the types and shadows of the Jewish ceremonial service expired by limitation, as the shadow ends when it reaches the substance. When “Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us,” the type ended. But the Sabbath is eternal. “He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also so to walk, even as He walked.” He said, “I delight to do thy will, O My God; yea, Thy law is within My heart.”