Where God Has Spoken by Geo. F. Brown

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jan 13, 1914

Where God Has Spoken

By Geo. F. Brown

OBEDIENCE to the word of God is required until God Himself declares that obedience to the Word has become unnecessary. This is a truth of Holy Writ taught by precept and example.

Hear the following declarations from God Himself: “I am the Lord, I change not.” Mal. 3:6. “My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of My lips.” Ps. 89:34.

THE CLASH OF THE PROPHETS

In 1 Kings 13:9, the express command of God to a prophet was, “Eat no bread, nor drink water, nor turn again by the same way that thou camest.”

The familiar record tells how another prophet claimed that an angel had spoken to him by the word of the Lord, saying, “Bring him back with thee into thine house, that he may eat bread and drink water”; but the account says, “He lied unto him.” The result was the death of the disobedient prophet.

Even a message from a prophet, if it does not harmonize with the spoken Word, is unsafe to follow. No prophet of God or apostle would be used as a mouthpiece for God if the word of God were to have its meaning altered. God Himself would make the change, as publicly as the proclamation of the original command.

The work of apostle, prophet, minister, or any gospel worker, is not to announce something contrary to or change the word of God, but to “preach the Word” as he finds it. 2 Tim. 4:2.

The testimony of an angel from heaven, if found in opposition to the word of God, is an accursed thing. Gal. 1:8, 9; 1 Peter 1:25.

NONE BUT GOD OR CHRIST COULD DO IT

Dear reader, did it ever occur to you that as God made the Sabbath, sanctifying it, and speaking His blessing into it, if there ever should come a time when He would transfer the Sabbath blessing to some other day, God and Christ were the only ones who would have any authority to make the change? A prophet was well aware that the blessing of God could not be reversed or transferred by man. Num. 23:20.

God has said, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” The same God, in the same law, on the same occasion, also says, “The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work.”

Men are trampling on the authority of God by violating precepts made so plain as are both these commandments. His power as Creator places Him above all gods. Hence the Sabbath, the sign of His creative power, is beyond the power of angels, apostles, prophets, or any man, to change.

Now let us see if we find the change of the Sabbath even hinted at in the New Testament. Our Saviour says, “Think not that

I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets.” Matt. 5:17. He also says, “I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do.” John 17:4. Then if Christ came not to destroy the law, and He also finished His Father’s work, it is plain that His Father’s work and will was to leave the law as He spoke it.

Our Saviour never mentions the first day of the week or a change of the Sabbath.

Matthew did not say, in Matt. 28:1, In the end of the old Jewish Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day, or the Christian Sabbath.

Mark and Luke did not brand themselves as impostors by writing thus of the same occasion.

John did not place himself in the same class by declaring, in John 20:19, for a new first-day Sabbath: but quite the contrary, in 1 John 2:7. Listen to inspiration in harmony with the spoken Word: “Brethren, I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. The old commandment is the Word which ye have heard from the beginning.”

And how glad we ought to be that the beloved Paul did not make God’s word of no effect through his own tradition, but we behold his life of love and faithfulness to God! He says, “I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God.” Acts 20:27. And as nowhere in the counsel of God do we find a call to depart from the creation Sabbath, we conclude that the progress we see in this direction is the work of “grievous wolves” speaking perverse things. Read the whole admonition in Acts 20:18-35.

THE PRECIOUS AND THE BLESSED DAY

What a precious institution is the Sabbath, full of the blessing of God, and as far beyond the power of man to change as it is for him to make of our God a god of wood or stone!

Let us pray that God will impress upon our minds the importance of His Sabbath, and that we may receive its rich blessings, found on no other day. “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.” Ex. 20:11. GEO. F. BROWN.