COLOSSIANS 2:16 | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 15, 1877

“Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days.”

“This text,” says a recent number of an “Age-to-come” paper, “will ever stand as an insurmountable objection to the observance of the seventh day, by the disciples of Christ, in the present dispensation.”

Nothing could better illustrate the lack of discrimination, and the utter confusion of ideas, which some men who stand high in their own conceit as religious teachers, bring to the investigation of the word of God.

Take, for instance, the following parallel to the foregoing statement: “Bunkerhill monument will ever stand as an insurmountable obstacle in the way of the construction of a railroad from New York City to Buffalo.”

Such a statement would no more than match the remark quoted above respecting the relation of Col. 2:16, to the observance of the seventh day as the Sabbath. Yet if any one should make such a statement, it would be very evident that he knew nothing about geography, and had no coherent idea of the situation, and relation to each other, of the objects named.

Exactly so with the man who thus speaks of the Sabbath in connection with Col. 2:16. That text has no reference whatever to the weekly Sabbath. The Sabbath is separated from the objects there named by a space of more than twenty-five hundred years. The Sabbath was instituted at creation, before man sinned, and consequently before a type could have been introduced. The meats, drinks, feast days, and yearly sabbaths of the Mosaic system of which Paul speaks in the text under notice, had their origin twenty-five hundred years later in the typical system which had been introduced on account of sin. The weekly Sabbath would have existed just the same if no sin had ever come into this world, and no typical system had ever been devised. The ceremonial sabbaths, of which there were seven in the course of the year, see Lev. 23, owed their existence to the typical system. That Paul refers to these we know, because he says, “Sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.”

The seventh-day Sabbath antedates all shadows, and never was and never could be, under any circumstances, a type of anything connected with the redeeming work of Christ. We sincerely pity the man whose mental vision has become so clouded that he cannot discern a distinction which is so plain, and who is in consequence betrayed into the foolish statement that Col. 2:16 will ever stand as an insurmountable objection to the observance of the seventh day.

COLOSSIANS 2:16.