WHICH WAS SANCTIFIED, THE SABBATH INSTITUTION OR SEVENTH DAY?
By Elmer E. Franke
ONE of the most common first-day-of-the-week arguments is that God had anticipated a change of the Sabbath and therefore sanctified the institution and not the day. They then attempt to prove it by quoting the fourth commandment. But as most of those who use this argument get it from the writings of Dr. Timothy Dwight, we will quote from his Theology, Vol. 4, Sermon CVI. After quoting the Sabbath commandment he proceeds as follows:— "It cannot escape the notice of every reader of this passage [the fourth commandment] that the duty of remembering the Sabbath to keep it holy enjoined at the beginning, and the blessing and consecration mentioned at the end, are applied to the Sabbath and not to the day. . . . The blessing also and the sanctification were annexed to the Sabbath day and not to the seventh." If such language as this should come from a man who was unlearned and did not have the benefit of a classical education, it might be thought excusable, but coming as it does from the late president of Yale College, it deserves severe criticism. I have before me a literal word-for-word translation of the Sabbath commandment of the decalogue, which I quote in full:— "Remember the day of the Sabbath to keep it holy. Six days thou shalt work, and perform all thy labor; but the seventh day is Sabbath to Jehovah thy God. Thou shalt not do any labor; thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter; thy servant, nor thy handmaid, nor thy beasts, nor thy sojourner who is within thy gates. Because in six days Jehovah made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all which in them is and he rested in the seventh day; for this cause Jehovah blessed the day of the Sabbath, and pronounced it holy." The reader will notice in this word-for-word translation just the contrary to what Dr. Dwight teaches; we are told to remember the day of the Sabbath, and reminded that Jehovah blessed the day of the Sabbath, and not the institution only. But even if he did take the words just as they are in our King James's edition it does not appear how he could separate the institution from the day. Christ said, "The Sabbath was made for man," and how it was made we read in Gen. 2:2, 3 and Ex. 20:11. The highest authority in the universe tells us it was made out of the seventh day, and the facts of God's creative work and of his rest upon the last day of the first week of time. Therefore you cannot change the day without destroying the institution. But to prove by plain text of Scripture that the blessing and sanctification were inseparably connected with the seventh day, let us quote Gen. 2:2, 3: "And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it, because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made." Oh, how the first-day advocates hang onto these old threadbare arguments! But after these sophistries are all well sifted, they become as the chaff of the summer threshing-floor; no place can be found for them; and it leaves their advocates just where Absalom was when his hair was caught in the tree, with nothing to stand upon. Let us stand firmly on the sure foundation, and remember that the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord.
ELMER E. FRANKE.
Pittsburg, Penn.