SUNDAY OBSERVANCE—STRANGE EVIDENCE.
The Vancouver World of recent date prints a sermon on “Sunday Observance,” not at all a strange proceeding in these days; but the evidence for Sunday observance which the minister presents is strange. He first lays down this foundation:— “It is a notable fact that at every stage of God’s revelation to the world the Lord’s day emerges into special prominence.” This is emphatically true. Then referring to the creation he continues: “Then at once the Sabbath emerges, ‘and on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.’” He then refers to the bringing of Israel out of Egypt to Sinai, and says: “And then, with every circumstance of solemnity, He gave them the Decalogue, the great moral law of the world, and imbedded in the heart of the divine code, the command, ‘Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day.’” Quoting other scriptures referring to the Sabbath, like Isa. 58:13, he comes to the first advent in these words: “The last great stage of revelation brings us to the Incarnation. Our Lord Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, came not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it. He came to expand it into the Gospel, to spiritualize it, and to make it applicable to all nations, and to all sorts and conditions of men. But here again the Lord’s day emerges into all its former prominence.” Now all this is true and good, with the exception that the Lord did not come “to spiritualize” the law, but to reveal its inherent spirituality. “For we know that the law is spiritual.” But all the scriptures and terms quoted and used by the preacher from the Bible refer to one day, and only one day, the seventh-day Sabbath; the strange thing is that the preacher turns them all onto Sunday. Such evidence in a court to justify B would be set aside at once by the upright judge. He would say: “This is utterly irrelevant; this evidence relates wholly to A; it has no application to B.” And so all Sabbath sacredness and evidence of the Word relate to the Sabbath, the seventh day, and not to Sunday. And concerning it all as applied to God’s holy Sabbath we may say, in the words of the preacher, “To all who receive the Holy Scriptures as the revealed will of God, its [the Sabbath’s] prominence, in both the Old and New Testaments, ought to commend it as a day to be kept holy unto the Lord.” Such a Sabbath needs no help from temporal power. It is rooted in God.