WHY DO THEY DO IT? by Ethan Lanphear

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 26, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 55.

WHY DO THEY DO IT?

By Ethan Lanphear

BY ETHAN LANPHEAR.

"For until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed where there is no law." Rom. 5:13. By this we learn that sin existed from the time of man's fall to the giving of the law from Mount Sinai, even as afterward. It is presumed that Moses has given a correct history of creation and the fall of man, as well as of the giving of the Decalogue, for each is combined in the same record. It is presumable that the Decalogue was intended to cover all man's duties to God and his fellow-men. In fact, it is so stated. Eccl. 12:13, 14. In that law God demanded that men shall have no other gods before him. He demanded that men shall remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Why?—For in six days the Lord created the heavens and the earth, and rested the seventh day, yes, and blessed and hallowed it. "Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work," etc.

This was God's own arrangement. Thus man was commanded to labor and do all his work in six days, and to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Was there any intimation that man's obligation to his God should ever change so long as man existed in this world? Christ and God never disagree; they are one. Christ says that he came to teach the Father's will, as the representative of the Father. He therefore has a perfect right to require that we observe the Sabbath, a part of God's will.

That the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, is as clear as the noonday sun. Since there is not a word to be found in either the Old or the New Testaments demanding or ordaining a change of the seventh-day Sabbath to the first day of the week, how is it that professed Christian denominations of the United States are advocating an American sabbath, Christian sabbath, Sunday sabbath, and trying by legislation to compel men to observe these festive days in place of God's holy Sabbath? In some States men have arrested, fined, imprisoned, and compelled Seventh-day Adventists to work in chain gangs with criminals on public roads, for working on their own farms or in their own shops upon the first day of the week, after having kept the seventh-day Sabbath according to God's commandment. Do these persecutors of God's people propose to go back and take up the customs of the times when Roger Williams was driven from Massachusetts, John Huss burned at the stake, or when the Baptists were beaten by Pedobaptists because they would not allow their children to be sprinkled for baptism, or when the Waldenses were persecuted and driven into the caves of the mountains to escape persecution and death for keeping the Sabbath of their God? Have men assumed the prerogative of God to change times and laws? It seems to be so. Read Jer. 2:8: "The priests said not, Where is the Lord? and they that handled the law knew Me not; the pastors also transgressed against Me, and the prophets prophesied by Baal, and walked after things that do not profit."

Why do these professed Christians attempt to compel men to obey religious laws? God has not commanded Sunday rest; it is, therefore, no sin to labor, for no law is transgressed. We may call attention to the law and the testimony of God's word, and then persuade men. We may go no further. God's order never requires human laws to compel men to be religious, but to constrain them by love and faith in wisdom. Those to be saved are "those that have kept the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus." Men can never have any faith or conscience in any Sunday sabbath, or Lord's day, without the law and word of God and of Christ back of it. And every intelligent man and Bible scholar knows that there is no such law in our Bible. Cardinal Gibbons says, "There is but one Protestant denomination in our country that lives up to our Protestant Bible, and that is the Seventh-day Adventist people." He of course knows, and is good evidence, because he knows the origin of Sunday observance, and that Constantine, a heathen king, issued the first edict for Sunday observance, about 321 A.D. But even that did not apply to the country people or farmers. How long shall men advocate the commandments of men, and teach for doctrines the traditions of men and false prophets?