The Rev. Dr. G. L. Tufts on the Sabbath Question
By Editor
WE do not particularly refer to Dr. Tufts as a man, or personally, but simply because he stands as a representative man regarding the Sabbath question. He is an accredited secretary of the Lord's Day Alliance, having its headquarters in New York City. Dr. Tufts is a secretary of that Alliance for California. He is strenuously working to secure a Sunday law in this state. He endeavors to back up his demands for a Sunday law by Scripture, and is therefore speaking throughout the state on the various phases of the question. Sunday night, June 30, he spoke at a union meeting of the St. Helena Protestant churches in the Methodist church, and our quotations which we may make here are from a verbatim report taken at the time. We wish to note two points in this article: First, the speaker declared that "the Sabbath is an institution, and not a day, and can be applied to any day of the week." He says, "If it is especially blessed of the Lord and made a holy day it becomes a holy Sabbath." Further he says: "There is no such language in all God's Word commanding you and me to keep the seventh day of the week as a holy day, and as the Sabbath day, and those who so teach are simply reading into this law language that is not there, such as no court would allow; and so I say, in no place, from the beginning of Genesis to the conclusion of Revelation, is it commanded men that they shall keep the seventh day of the week, that is, the day we call Saturday in our common language, as our sacred day, our holy day, the day in which we must meet in order to worship, if we keep God's commandments." Now in the first place, the Sabbath is of the Lord's institution. The record of that institution is given in Gen. 2: 2, 3. It tells us that the great and all-wise God deemed it necessary to take three distinct steps in the making, or instituting, of the Sabbath day: He rested on that day, He blessed that day, He sanctified, or set apart that day. He did not rest on no day in particular; He did not bless no day in particular; He did not sanctify no day in particular. That, in the very nature of the case, could not be done. He rested on a particular day; and just as long as facts remain facts, it is true that God rested on the seventh day of that septenary cycle which we call the week, and the day upon which He rested He blessed and sanctified. And there it stands, and forever will stand, until we shall have His word that He has removed the blessing and the sanctification from it. That that day was the seventh day of that cycle, He demonstrated, according to the record in the 16th chapter of Exodus, by a threefold weekly miracle for forty years, showing that only one day of the cycle—not any day of the cycle, but one day only—could be observed as the Sabbath; and when men who seemed to have the same idea that Dr. Tufts has, that any day would do just as well, went to gather manna on that day, the Lord said to them: "How long refuse ye to keep My commandments and My laws? See, for that the Lord hath given you the Sabbath. . . . So the people rested on the seventh day." When God spoke His eternal law from heaven, not simply for Jews but for all, He placed a command guarding that day in the very heart of that law, so that men must pass over three eternal barriers of moral precept on the one side and six on the other, before they could get to that Sabbath commandment to change it. He declared in that commandment: "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 of the Lord thy God," and then the law refers to the institution of the Sabbath as the proof of its setting apart. See Ex. 20: 8-11. Note that the Lord does not command, Remember the Sabbath day to make it holy, but "to keep it holy." Man in God can keep holy what God has made holy, but man can not make holy that which God has not made holy. Now the commandment does not say, "The seventh day of the week," but the Scriptures of truth, inspired of the Spirit, fix it so clearly that no court would have any trouble whatever in deciding that the "seventh day" of the law meant the seventh day of the week. We read in Matt. 28: 1, "In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week;" and in Mark 16: 1, 2, "And when the Sabbath was past, . . . very early in the morning the first day of the week." What do we learn from this? — The simple fact that the Sabbath comes just before the first day of the week, and therefore it must be the seventh day of the week according to the Scriptures. And that Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, was, according to Luke 23: 56, "the Sabbath day according to the commandment." Therefore the inspired comment fixes the Sabbath to the seventh day of the week. No one contends that there must be an absolute meeting together in order to keep that day holy. The day is to be kept holy to God.5Secondly, Mr. Tufts, leaving the thought that any day is holy, or that the Sabbath commandment applies to any day, says: "And it is a fact, a notable fact, that Jesus, after His resurrection, appeared only upon the first day of the week, so far as the record goes; that is, of the ten appearances of our Lord to His disciples, six of them at least were upon the first day of the week." "Paul taught very clearly that they were to come together on each first day of the week, literally translated, and bring their offerings to God as the Lord hath prospered them; and so in many of the passages throughout the New Testament after the resurrection of our Lord we find it indicated that it was this day, the day of the resurrection, the greatest day in the life of Christ on earth, that the disciples met for their worship." One can but wonder if Dr. Tufts presumed on the ignorance of his audience regarding these loose and reckless statements. The first day of the week is mentioned just eight times in the New Testament. Six of those times it refers to the one day, the day on which Christ rose from the dead, the day in which He tried to convince His disciples that He was indeed risen. These six passages, to the reader who is interested, are as follows: Matt. 28: 1; Mark 16: 2, 9; Luke 24: 1; John 20: 1, 19. All these passages refer to that same first day. The disciples did not meet together on that day, not until the day had drawn to a close, and they all met in their common abode. Acts 1: 13. They were disturbed, distracted, divided, confused, perplexed, over the reported resurrection of Jesus. One or two of them may have believed that He was risen from the dead. Some had heard from the women that He had risen. But in a general way all of them were unbelieving. Our Lord did not meet with them until the evening of that day, really when that day had passed according to Bible reckoning, for the day begins at sunset; and then He "upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen Him after He was risen." Two other disciples journeying to Emmaus, seven and a half miles from Jerusalem, on that day, tell Jesus Himself of their disappointment in His death: "We trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to-day is the third day since these things were done." And He tells them that they were "fools, and slow of heart to believe." But after making Himself known to them He leaves them, and they go back to the disciples, who are met together in their common abode, and tell them that they have seen the Lord; and Jesus then appears, but "they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit." Luke 24: 37. To use such passages as these about the amounts given concerning that first first-day, in which our Lord was endeavoring to assure His disciples that He was risen, as evidence that that day was a sacred day, it seems to us is an utter misuse of the words of Holy Writ. Everything indicates it was a common, ordinary, secular day, and the disciples so understood it, and our Lord did not even give it the semblance of a sacred day by calling His disciples together upon that day, but met with them after the day was over, and reproved them for their unbelief. Mr. Tufts says that there are many passages "throughout the New Testament after the resurrection of our Lord," where "we find it indicated that it was this day, the day of the resurrection, the greatest day in the life of Christ on earth, that the disciples met for their worship." There is one passage, only one, in the whole New Testament, that records a religious meeting on the first day of the week, and that was the evening of that day, which, according to Bible reckoning, was our Saturday night. The record is found in Acts 20, and the day is mentioned in verse 7. The rest of that day was spent in ordinary, common labor, in travel. That meeting would probably not have been mentioned at all had it not been for the noted miracle which Paul wrought on that occasion. One record of a meeting is certainly a very slim foundation for first-day sacredness. The only other time that the first day is mentioned in the New Testament is 1 Cor. 16: 1, 2, and there a secular duty is enjoined. Paul asks the churches to "let every one of you lay by him in store," "upon the first day of the week," that there be no gatherings when he should come. Every translation that we have examined carries the idea that that laying by was not in a general assembly of the people, in a general contribution-box or plate, or church treasury, but by himself in his own house. After the Sabbath was over, and the week’s expenses were in the past, the man could better tell what he could spare for the poor at Jerusalem. These scriptures, Mr. Tufts would have us believe, lay a foundation for first-day sacredness, or first-day observance. And in the four pages of manuscript of his talk before us he has no better argument. Let the reader found his faith in the Word of God and in the example of our Lord Jesus Christ.