HONORING GOD by Roswell F. Cottrell

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 30, 1878

HONORING GOD.

By Roswell F. Cottrell

CHILDREN honor their parents by obedience; and the Lord asks, “If then I be a father, where is mine honor?” Mal. 1:6. We honor God when we keep his commandments. But there is one commandment of the ten which requires a special act of honor to God as our Creator. Remembering the day of his rest to keep it holy is an act having direct reference to the honor of God. This may account for the special hatred of Satan against the Sabbath of the Bible.

According to Eze. 46:1, there are “six working days” in the Bible week. On each of those six days God worked. We honor God by working on each of those days. On the seventh he rested. This made it his rest, or Sabbath, day. He blessed and sanctified this day, “because that in it he had rested.” The sanctification of the day was the consecration of it as a memorial of his finished work, the reserving of this day to his own especial honor and service. “The Sabbath was made for man.” God requires all men to rest upon it; because he rested upon it, and then separated it from the other six days as his own memorial.

Hence we read, “If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable; and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words; then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord.”

To truly keep the Sabbath is to honor God; to stigmatize it as “old” or “Jewish” is to dishonor him. It is a monument erected to his memory. Who will be so bold as to attempt to pull it down with sacrilegious hand, or to alter the inscription from “seventh” to “first”? To accept of a substituted day, is to honor the changer of “times and laws,” and not the Creator. R. F. COTTRELL.