SABBATH PROFANATION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 13, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 46.

SABBATH PROFANATION.

It is strange how many learned men will utter truth in unmistakable language, and then apply it to the support of error. A case in point is a report in the Toledo, Ohio, News, of a sermon by Rev. J. R. Shannon, of St. Paul’s M. E. Church. The report says:—

After speaking of Jeremiah’s career, Dr. Shannon spoke of the doctrines which he preached. “One doctrine,” said Dr. Shannon, “which the prophet emphasized at the gates of Jerusalem, is the doctrine of Sabbath observance. He arraigns the people for their violations and profanations of the Sabbath day. He preaches that all encroachments upon the Sabbath day undermine a nation’s morality. He preaches that profanation of the Sabbath and national decadence go together, that the nation that abrogates the Sabbath day signs its own dissolution.”

This is truth, but when the minister used Jeremiah’s zeal for the proper observance of the Sabbath of the Lord as an argument for Sunday observance, he just as emphatically perverted the truth which he had so tersely stated. Neither the law of God nor the prophet Jeremiah ever gave countenance to the observance of any weekly Sabbath save the one blessed and sanctified at creation.

Mr. Shannon further says: “We need in this American land to have Jeremiah’s doctrine about the Sabbath preached with new emphasis from all our pulpits.” True again, and this is just what Seventh-day Adventists are set to do,—to preach it not only in every pulpit to which they have access, but in every house and to every individual. This is the purpose of their literature. They stand with Jeremiah on the Sabbath question, as on every other doctrine that he promulgated. And Jeremiah says, “Hallow ye the Sabbath day, as I have commanded your fathers.” Had the people of Jerusalem heeded the doctrine of Jeremiah, that city would have remained forever. It was destroyed because they did not do so. See Jer. 17:19–27.

Now every one who reads the Word of God at all knows that the Sabbath commanded to the fathers was the seventh day of the week. The Word gives no record of God’s ever blessing or making holy any other weekly Sabbath. And why should He? Has He not assured His people that “it is a sign between Me and the children of Israel forever; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day He rested.” Ex. 31:17; Eze. 20:12. Now who are the children of Israel?—“We are the circumcision, which worship God in the Spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.” Phil. 3:3.

With Mr. Shannon, we also “are alarmed at the growing desecration of the Sabbath in our country.” And inasmuch as the seventh day is the only day which God has sanctified, it is the only day which could possibly be desecrated. We also indorse the sentiment that, “Inordinate greed for money is a great enemy of the Sabbath. It says six days in the week are not enough to make money in; we must rob God of the seventh day.” And it is another cause of alarm that men who profess to follow Jesus are the leaders in profaning the day which God has hallowed; they persist in devoting it to the purposes of worldly gain. Not only so, but even those who profess to be ministers of the Word teach men to violate the Sabbath that God has hallowed. Yea, they go even further, and urge the enactment of human law to compel men to observe another day. Thus they would levy a tribute of one-sixth of the God-given working time upon those who desire to observe the Sabbath according to the law of God and the doctrine of all His prophets.