Untitled article | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 19, 1892

MR. CRAFTS ON THE SABBATH. NO. 2.

WE noticed last week some of Mr. Crafts' statements of what was and what was not concerning the seventh day in Genesis. He further says, in the Christian Statesman of November 19:—

In order to displace the Lord's day, which has the contested seat, the advocates of Saturday, on whom now rests the whole burden of proof for their proposed "change of day" from that generally accepted to their own, must prove: (1) That God's original Sabbath was a twenty-four-hour day.

In the first place let us notice the word juggling which is here presented. No Seventh-day Adventist ever endeavored "to displace the Lord's day." The only day which the WORD OF GOD recognizes as the Lord's day is the seventh-day Sabbath. See Mark 2:27; Isa. 58:13; Ex. 20:10. For the observance of the only Lord's day recognized in the Bible we are contending.

2. No Sabbath keeper is advocating "Saturday," as we showed last week. The Bible week does not know the Roman Saturday.

3. As regards "the contested seat" we have only this to say: The seat of God's law on earth is in the hearts of his people. He demands open hearts to his claims and willing service to his commandments. If one, one million, or one trillion people prefer the pagan holiday of the sun to the Sabbath of the Lord, no man or set of men has the right to compel them to do otherwise. If they have enthroned Sunday in their hearts, it will remain there till they themselves cast out the usurper. What we are contending for is that in that Book which expresses God's will to man, and which all Protestants profess to take as the rule of faith and life, Sunday has no "seat," no throne, no sacredness whatever. It is not a matter of occupancy in the so-called Christendom; it is a matter of title deeds, of legitimate documents, of the records and decisions of the last Court of Appeal.

In this "Christian" church where Sunday as a "holy" holiday was first given existence, all the errors of apostasy held "the contested seat" for hundreds of years, but the Reformation contended for the faith, not on that basis, but on the basis of God's eternal truth. On that basis we plead for the Sabbath of the Lord. We do not ask or wish that that Sabbath shall be recognized by law; we do not ask for it a general recognition by unsanctified lips, which in words would honor God, while their hearts were as far removed as sin could separate; but we do ask that Christians, those who love God, those who profess to do God's will, who profess to follow his word, and who profess to be walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ,—we do ask that these, one and all, will yield themselves to do what they profess to do, and not stand as stumbling blocks in the way of those who are anxiously, earnestly, honestly inquiring, "What is truth?" This we ask. Yes, Sunday has "the contested seat" in a corrupted and corrupting Christendom; but the Sabbath of the Lord, the Lord's day, the seventh-day Sabbath, has the title deeds of a proved-up claim from the ever-living Jehovah.

4. But Mr. Crafts says that those who have all the Bible on their side "must prove that God's original Sabbath was a twenty-four-hour day." In reply we would say that they must prove nothing of the kind. If all the proof the Bible furnished was in Gen. 2:1-3, there might be a little more reason in Mr. Crafts' demand; but we have the commandment in the Decalogue, and the threefold-miracle-marked day, from sunset to sunset, for forty years. That was the day God enjoined on man. That is the day now obligatory. Mr. Crafts continues:—

Nearly all Christian scholars make the word "day" mean a period of time in connection with each of the seven days, as it certainly does in the very next verse after those in which the seventh day is named, where the six days are all spoken of together as "the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven." Gen. 2:4. That view harmonizes both with Scripture usage and scientific facts. In that case the Sabbath of God is the period of redemption, the age of man, in which God has ceased his creative week-day work among minerals, vegetables, and animals (science so declares) and is doing nothing save works of necessity and mercy for the sustenance of his great household, except the great sabbath work of redemption. Man's imitation of God's Sabbath in this case is in miniature, as indeed it must be in every other case. In our little human week we work our six human days and rest the seventh, as God has done in his divine week. Our doctrine of the Sabbath does not require us to prove this theory; but the doctrine of the Saturday keepers requires them to disprove it beyond a doubt.

But all Christians do not so consider it. Dr. H. L. Morris, in his "Science and the Bible," or "Work Days of God," proves conclusively that the six days of Genesis 1 were natural twenty-four-hour days. And this is the obvious meaning of the record. The sun was to "rule the day." Gen. 1:14-19. The evening and the morning, a dark part and light part, composed the day. On one of these days, the seventh of the cycle, God rested. But Mr. Crafts makes that Sabbath of the Creator "the period of redemption" now going on.

But the record places the rest of the Creator in the past when the blessing was placed upon the day, and it was set apart to man's use. God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it, because that in it he HAD RESTED. Of course this places Mr. Crafts' theory of God's indefinite rest, now going on, against the Bible, but that is not our fault.

It is true that their doctrine of the Sabbath does not require them to prove any theory of creation, for their "sabbath" had no more to do with it than has Monday or Tuesday. To say that the Sabbath which God gave man was not the day upon which the Creator rested, which he hallowed and sanctified, is not a charge against seventh-day observers, but against the record of Inspiration, and the wisdom and justice of his law. Read the following:—

"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." Gen. 2:2, 3.

"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath [the rest] of the Lord thy God; . . . for [because that] in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore [for which reason, the reason that God rested] the Lord blessed the Sabbath day [the rest day], and hallowed it." Ex. 20:8-11.

"This is that which the Lord hath said, To-morrow is the rest of the holy Sabbath unto the Lord." Ex. 16:23.

"Six days ye shall gather it; but on the seventh day, which is the Sabbath, in it there shall be none. And it came to pass, that there went out some of the people on the seventh day for to gather, and they found none. And the Lord said unto Moses, How long refuse ye to keep my commandments and my laws? . . . So the people rested on the seventh day." Verses 26-30.

"Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations, for a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between me and the children of Israel forever; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and in the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed." Ex. 31:16, 17.

"And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulcher at the rising of the sun." Mark 16:1, 2.

We do not believe that any candid reader will study the above passages and come to any other conclusion than this, that the day which God enjoined upon man is a definite day, and the identical day in the septenary, or weekly cycle, upon which the Creator rested. If otherwise, language means nothing, and the words of God become the merest shuttlecocks for theological jugglers. Every lover of the Lord Jesus Christ, everyone who regards His reverence for the word of God, ought to cry out against such perversions of God's word as are seen in the common treatment of the Sabbath question. Which is the better, Christian friends, the illegal squatter's claim of the Sunday or the title deeds of the Lord God of Israel? "What is the chaff to the wheat?"