Is it Answered?

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 23, 1872

A CORRESPONDENT of the Standard, Chicago, is in trouble and seeks help. The Standard essays to help; how successfully, the following will show:—

“I write to ask you and your numerous correspondents this question, or rather questions: Are the ten commandments, commonly called the decalogue, of binding force upon Christians to-day, and, if so, ought we not to observe the fourth one as the Jews? Is it right to call the first day of the week the Sabbath? I ask these questions for information. We have been annoyed here, this winter, with the Seventh-day Adventists. They make the keeping of the seventh day a very important item in their religious services. They have succeeded in making some of our brethren and sisters believe they ought to keep the seventh day, Saturday, sacred. Answers to the above will be gratefully received. Yours for the cause of truth.” E. WARD. Davis Creek, Iowa.

“There could be no possible question as to the perpetually binding force of the command, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ nor has any serious question, to our knowledge, ever arisen with reference to any one of the ten commandments, save the fourth, as to its perpetual and universal obligation. Can any one give us a reason why the fourth should be an exception? But what is it to keep the fourth commandment? That is the real question. Our Lord showed, both in his example and in his precept, what it is not. It is not to insist on the mere letter, to the neglect of the spirit; least of all is it to follow man-made injunctions or interpretations, as if they were a voice of God. Jesus kept the Sabbath by doing that which, according to Pharisaic formula, was breaking it.”

“In our judgment, it is simply another form of that same Pharisaic spirit to say that Saturday, and no other day, was fixed by divine decree as the Sabbath until the end of time; a decree from which there could be no swerving, not even for such a purpose as a commemoration, in weekly rest and worship, of so great an event as the resurrection of Jesus. When, according to testimony of authentic history, and as is plainly implied in the New Testament itself, the first day became, in observance, the seventh day, and for the Judaic Sabbath was substituted the Christian Lord’s day, it was, in its spirit and ground, precisely like what Jesus did when, in defiance of Jewish prejudice and Pharisaic formalism, he performed works of healing on the Sabbath day, and justified the act of his disciples in plucking ears of corn to satisfy their hunger. ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.’”

REMARKS.

One thing is well said, viz.: “To follow man-made injunctions or interpretations, as if they were the voice of God,” is not keeping the Sabbath. That is very true. If the Standard is familiar with “authentic history,” it knows that Sunday came into the church in the wake of no-Sabbathism. It knows that the Sabbatic character of Sunday was assumed very slowly, after the beginning of the fourth century, and that it began by virtue of a heathen civil law. Was this like the work of Christ in rebuking Pharisaism? Does the Standard really mean to put the vagaries of Justin Martyr’s no-Sabbath theories and the pagan legislation of Constantine on the level with the words and example of Christ? Christ pruned away the false growths which formalism had thrown around the law of the Sabbath, and left the law and the institution enforced and purified. Justin Martyr makes the first authentic reference to a sort of observance of Sunday by Christians (about 150 A. D.). His words show that the observance was not of a sacred day, or a Sabbath. He was rather the first expounder, at least so far as writings are concerned, of undisguised no-Sabbathism. He did not seek to prune the tree, but to tear it up. Nearly two hundred years after his time, came the first prohibition of labor and business on Sunday, as a heathen day, and still later began the ecclesiastico-civil legislation against the Sabbath. It was nearly or quite one thousand years after Christ said, “The Sabbath was made for man,” before the Sunday became generally recognized in the Romish church as a day of cessation from labor. It was a slow process by which “the first day became, in observance, the seventh”—a “man-made” process, which culminated in the darkest ages of papal misrule.

Note, again, how the Standard begs the question by its ingenious statements: “When, according to the testimony of authentic history, and as is plainly implied in the New Testament itself, the first day became, in observance, the seventh,” &c. To “imply” things from the New Testament is rather un-Baptist like, and to recognize the clear distinction between the first day and the seventh day, is to yield the whole ground. Has the Standard any strange logic by which the first can be made the seventh? Or does it mean to mark the time when Sunday began to be observed after the manner of the Sabbath. If the latter, then the case is brought a long way this side of the New Testament; for no appeal was made to the fourth commandment as authority for the manner of observing Sunday until the “dark ages,” and then only by the law of analogy; and the “change of day theory” is of very modern date—a Puritan make-shift. Truly, it is difficult to avoid the plain truth concerning the Sabbath question, and the wise men of earth only make confusion more confounded, when they seek to support popular theories by ingenious answers to the earnest inquiries of the people who seek for light. May the day hasten in which the church will have moral courage enough to seek and accept the truths of the Bible. To pretend to believe, and yet refuse to obey, is sadly inconsistent.—Sabbath Recorder.