IS SIN NECESSARY TO THE EXISTENCE OF LAW?
By R. F. Cottrell
A GREATER number of flat contradictions, in so small a compass, cannot, I think, be found, than are huddled together in the compass of fifty pages of a tract by Eld. M. Grant, entitled, “The True Sabbath,” in which he tries to prove that there is no Sabbath for this dispensation, and also that Sunday, the day so generally observed by Christians, is the true primeval, Edenic Sabbath, and should be kept. On p. 29 of his tract he says, “From a careful examination we are satisfied that ‘the law’ never means the ten commandments.” But on p. 13, he says of those who keep the seventh day, “They have turned back from Christ to Moses; from the new to the old covenant; from the gospel to the law.” If the ten commandments are not the law, how can keeping the Sabbath of the fourth commandment be turning back to the law? Now let us examine a grand argument. On p. 37 he200designates the decalogue as “No. 1,” and argues that it has been abolished. He says: “No. 1 does not contain a single precept that will be needed by the saved in the world to come. Look over the ten commandments. Will these be necessary in the kingdom of Heaven? Does any one believe it? Will a holy man need a commandment telling him he must not murder, steal, swear, lie, or commit adultery?” Now I submit that a fallacy more bold was never put forth as a sober argument. A holy man does not need these commandments; and why? because he breaks them? No; but because he would not break them. Therefore he keeps them. Are they not law—the rule of a holy life—because a holy man does not break them, but keeps them perfectly? Is it impossible for them to be the good man’s law unless he breaks them? Is a law not a law, because it is not transgressed? Is sin necessary to the existence of law? If this be so, then sin and misery must be perpetuated eternally, or every righteous principle of the law of God must be abolished. But the design of the Elder’s argument is to prove that the Sabbath of the decalogue is not now binding. This is the point in the controversy. But should it be admitted that his argument is sound, that there will be no law against murder, theft, profanity, or lying in the world to come, because they will not be needed, still it is a fact clearly revealed in prophecy that the Sabbath will be observed there. See Isa. 66:22, 23. The Sabbath will be there, needed or not needed. So his attempt to prove that the Sabbath commandment is abolished only proves that the other nine are! I should rather say that his effort has proved himself demented,—that the enemies of God’s law are not of a sound mind. In quoting from Neh. 9:13, 14, Eld. G. not only substitutes the for thy, but he garbles the text so that its meaning is perverted. It is no perversion to abbreviate a text by dropping clauses that have no bearing upon the argument; but so to mutilate it as to change its sense is perversion. Neh. 9:13, 14 makes a clear distinction between the law and Sabbath which God gave in person directly by his own voice, and the statutes and judgments which were given by the hand of Moses. But Eld. G. says, “We read the Lord made ‘known unto them’ the ‘holy Sabbath . . . by the hand of Moses.’” Now the text as it is does not say that. But it shows very clearly that God gave with his own voice “right judgments, and true laws, good statutes and commandments,” together with his holy Sabbath, and besides this, commanded them “precepts, statutes, and laws, by the hand of Moses.”