3622 — Questions to Seventh-Day Adventists
By Editor
Where is the proof that man had ever before kept the Sabbath, except by special commandment, anterior to the proclamation of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai? This is one of several questions which a correspondent sends us from Haiti. They are a revamping of a number of questions published in a tractlet several years ago, and still in circulation, entitled "Hard Nuts for Seventh-Day Adventists to Crack." The edition in Haiti seems to have been published by a minister there as if they were original with him. Most of them are mere catch phrases. They puzzle no one who understands the Word of God. The one above quoted is a fair sample of several. We have God's law proclaimed from heaven to Israel for the world, in Exodus 20. Exodus is a book of law. Genesis is not a book of law at all; it is simply a record of God's providential dealings with His children, and of the channel through which the promised Seed who would save the world was to come. It gives us records of events, but nowhere does it give us a code of laws. We could as well ask concerning a half dozen other of the commandments: Where is the record that God ever told us to do this or that? Where is the commandment in Genesis that we should honor our father and mother, or that we should have no other gods before the Lord, or that we should not make any graven images, or should not covet? Of course the record shows very clearly that all these laws were in force, and that he who transgressed them committed sin before God. That record just as conclusively, and even more strongly, shows that the Sabbath was in force during all that time. The very record of its making, as Lange points out in his commentary on Gen. 2:2, 3, shows that God must have given a command concerning that day in the sanctifying, or setting apart, of that day to His glory. And when we come to the 16th chapter of Exodus, as soon as Israel was relieved from the slavery in Egypt, one of the first things done is to restore to them the Sabbath, spoken of not as a new institution, but as a well-known institution which was already in vogue. This the commandment also indicates: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy."