THE SABBATH AND IDOLATRY.
By Uriah Smith
One of the grandest thoughts connected with the Sabbatic institution, and one which clearly shows one of its most important offices and beneficent designs, is, that if all men had always observed this day of rest, there never would nor could have been an atheist nor an idolater in the world. An effectual safeguard was thus erected against two most insidious forms of apostasy, which had to be broken over before these evils could appear. The advocates of the Sabbath have not been slow to use this fact with telling effect in behalf of this institution. But now an objection is raised; and it comes on this wise: If people could not go into idolatry while keeping the Sabbath, how does it happen that the Israelites, who had just had the experience touching the Sabbath, recorded in Ex. 16, and had just heard the Sabbath law uttered in majestic grandeur from the summit of Sinai, fell to worshiping the golden calf, even while Moses was up in the mount with God? The answer is not difficult. Before they fell into that act of apostasy, they had entirely cast away from their minds the obligation of the Sabbath law. Consider if this was not so. The command had just been given them not to make an image of anything to bow down to and worship it. In worshiping the calf they trod this commandment into the very dust. They deliberately rebelled against the authority that gave it, and cast it from them. In doing this, they cast away every one of the other commandments belonging to the same code, so far as they rested on the authority of that God from whose worship they then departed. Now can we suppose that when the next Sabbath came they would have observed it? What was the object of the Sabbath? It was to keep in mind Him who had made the heavens, the earth, and all things therein, and who demands our worship in opposition to all idols. But the Israelites had by their idolatry cast off all allegiance to this God; and if they had then continued the observance of his Sabbath, it would have been only a self-imposed condemnation of their own course. They would have acknowledged the supreme authority of one God while worshiping another. They were fools to go thus into their idolatry; but we cannot suppose they were such hopeless idiots as to so squarely contradict themselves. No; if they had continued in their idolatry, they never would have kept another Sabbath of the Lord. To have kept it would have been a virtual renunciation of their idolatry. When they set up the golden calf, they did not say, These be thy gods, O Israel, which made the heavens and the earth; but, thy gods which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And when Satan gets such complete control of men, as he had of the Israelites at that time, he does not lead them into any such half-way doings in the direction of rebellion against God, nor suffer them to act thus at cross purposes. The case of the Israelites, therefore, furnishes no objection to the statement that the Sabbath was designed to be, and would have proved, if it had been kept by all as God designed, an effectual barrier against atheism and idolatry. And this fact is one of the most convincing of arguments in favor of its perpetuity and immutability. U. S.