Sabbath as God's Sacred Day, Not a Type
By Wm. Penniman
reason is as old as man, and as universal as mankind. Most of the preceding is a very good argument for the Sabbath. “This sacred day is God’s day.” This is a strong point and a truthful one. What sacred day is God’s day? If any or every day is sacred, or if the sanctity can be placed upon any day at man’s option, then where is the force of the language: “This sacred day is God’s day”? No other day but the seventh, the day on which God rested, has been sanctified; therefore this day is the one to be observed by man as a holy day. Again, it is an “on-going day,” and is to continue till the close of time. Truly, it is to go on forever. Isa. 66:23. It has been an “on-going day” for nearly six thousand years, yet it has never yet reached, traveled to, or changed itself into, first-day. No man can take the sanctity off from this day, and put it on to another, and then prove that the same day is going on. In calling it the type of the Sabbath, he robs it of its true glory; for it is not a type, it is the Sabbath itself. It is impossible for a moral principle to be typical. What is there typical in the command against idolatry or the making of graven images, or in the law against profanity? And further, in respect to our duties to man, what is there typical in the law requiring us to honor our parents, and to avoid murder, adultery, theft, bearing false witness, and covetousness? It is plain to be seen that all these commands are founded upon immutable moral principles. Is the law of the Sabbath, which requires us to observe God’s sacred day, any less a moral principle, or any less enduring than the rest? Nothing but sophistical reasoning can make it appear so. Then where is the type? But mark, he does not attempt to prove that it is a type, but only asserts that it is one. “The blessing and hallowing was the solemn establishing of the institution.” The meaning of establish is to make permanent. Now the question is, What kind of an institution was it? It was not one making holy any or every day, but the seventh day, which is the Sabbath, or rest-day. Then it is sheer nonsense to talk of perpetuating the institution on any other day but the right one. His ideas in regard to the division of time into the week are very good; yet we cannot regard the division as “arbitrary” only so far as it is not founded upon the motion of the heavenly bodies, as it can be traced to nothing else but to the six days of creation and to the rest of the Sabbath. It is no wonder that Mr. Thompson considers the division arbitrary, as in his work (from which we have quoted) he holds to the six indefinite or thousand-year periods of creation. Those who hold to this position, to be consistent, must think that we are now in the rest-day, or seventh indefinite period. We can see how this will work. “Six thousand years shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh thousand years is the Sabbath,” &c. To go through with the whole command in this way makes nonsense of it. Those who advocate this theory cannot consistently believe in any twenty-four hour Sabbath. But the Bible says God created the earth in six days, not in six indefinite periods. God “spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.” How much better to take the word of God as it reads. “The Sabbath is perpetual in its nature and obligation.” As the Sabbath, or rest-day, naturally comes on the seventh day, why attempt to change that which is founded in nature and in the immutable law of God? The assertion that the resurrection of Christ is an antitype of first-day observance is entirely without foundation. We have shown already that the Sabbath is not a type; therefore it is a waste of words to show that the first day is not an antitype. “So grandly does the resurrection of Christ symbolize our deliverance from bondage, and our new creation into a higher life, that the day has been changed to correspond with it.” To support this imaginary change he settles down into the exploded position that the keeping of a seventh part of time will do. This position would give a father the privilege, if he had six children, of allowing each one to keep a different day of the week from himself. Could he thus “command his household after him,” and would he thus keep the law? Those who would commemorate the burial and resurrection of Christ need not keep the first day of the week. Has not the Lord ordained a much different, far better, and more appropriate memorial? “Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” Rom. 6:3–5. “Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.” Col. 2:12. In respect to the change in the ordinance of baptism, and of the change of the Sabbath, Eld. J. N. Andrews, in his examination of “Seven Reasons for Sunday Keeping,” truthfully says: “It is true that the professed church have changed this ordinance to sprinkling, so that this divine memorial of the Lord’s resurrection is destroyed. And that they may add sin to sin, they lay hold of the Lord’s Sabbath and change it to the first day of the week, thus destroying the sacred memorial of the Creator’s rest, that they may have a memorial of Christ’s resurrection!” “The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.” When will the professed church cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord? Not until the “inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left.” Isa. 24:5, 6.