THERE IS SOMETHING BETTER.
REV. DR. LYMAN was recently quoted as saying: “I want something better for America than the Sunday of Continental Europe.” Why not take “the Sabbath of the Lord thy God”? Next to Christ Himself it is God’s best and most blessed gift to the human race. It was blessed and hallowed by the Lord when given to the world. That blessing and that sanctification were never repealed by the One who only had a right to repeal them. The institution itself was never set aside by a command of the One who only had the right and the power to make such a change. One of the purposes of its establishment was to keep in men’s minds the memory and love of the “Maker of the heavens and the earth.” God pronounced a blessing upon those who would remember to keep it. Christ kept it. He neither changed it nor intimated that He ever intended to change it. His disciples kept it. There is no record, sacred or profane, that they ever ceased to keep it, or that they ever kept any other day. No statement of the New Testament can by any fair or impartial interpretation be made to teach that they kept any other day as a Sabbath or sought to teach others to do so. We are free to admit that the world needs something better as a Sabbath than the “Continental Sunday.” And we know there is something better. It is the Sabbath of Jehovah, given in Eden; given with His seal; protected by Him through all the ages; still in force as when He spoke the law concerning it; never to be repealed. “Blessed is the man that doeth this, and the son of man that layeth hold on it; that keepeth the Sabbath from polluting it, and keepeth his hand from doing any evil.” Isa. 56: 2. This is God’s own promise to the man that honors His hallowed Sabbath day. He who does it God will cause “to ride upon the high places of the earth,” and to be fed “with the heritage of Jacob.” Isa. 58: 13, 14. That is better than anything which the “Continental Sunday” has to offer. There is no promise in all God’s Word of a blessing with the keeping of a “Continental Sunday” or an “American Sunday,” or any other kind of a pseudo-sabbath. Look it up, and find out for yourself, if you are not sure already that this is true. Man is not a source of divine blessing. So no Sabbath that he can institute can carry a divine blessing with it. Dr. Lyman declares that “there is no distinction in the days,” and proposes to have the Sunday preserved “one-half for religious culture and the other half for real rest and recuperation.” Now, that is a man-made arrangement, pure and simple. There is no blessing pronounced upon it by the One who only can bless humanity with spiritual blessing. No one who has the right and power to hallow a day, or a Sabbath, has hallowed that one. It can carry no divine blessing with it; for none has been put into it by the One who alone could do it. More than that, it is a distinct defiance to the Author of the true Sabbath; for the would-be founder of this half-and-half Sunday-sabbath has declared that there is no difference in the days. To him (and to many others) it makes no difference in the days for God Himself to declare one day blessed and hallowed, and command it to be kept. But God has put a difference between the days of the week; and in the body of the law which He wrote with His own finger He has declared that difference. He is the same unchangeable God “yesterday, to-day, and forever.” “I am the Lord, I change not.” Mal. 3: 6. The difference is still there; the blessing is still there; and he who honors God in the keeping of His holy day will receive and know that blessing, and will have something better than the “Continental Sunday.” Then why not take Him at His word, honor the day He appointed for a Sabbath—the only one He ever did appoint—and get the blessing which He has in it for you? Let us be loyal to the great King now, if we expect to dwell forever under His government by and by.