2147.—The True Seventh Day.
By Editor
What grounds have you for saying that Saturday is the day God set apart? Is not our calendar one gotten up by man, and have there not been years of mistakes made in reckoning? The Jews had a different calendar. Such being the case, is it not foolish to claim that Saturday is Sabbath, when the whole Christian world keeps Sunday and thus fills the Spirit of the commandment by keeping one day in seven holy? 1. We do not teach that Saturday is the day set apart. Sometimes this is said in a loose way, but it is not critically correct. Our civil day is not identical with the Bible day. The Bible day is from even to even, the evening beginning at sunset, "From even unto even shall ye celebrate your Sabbath." See Gen. 1:5, 8; Lev. 23:32. Luke 4:31, 40 and Mark 1:32 and Matt. 8:16 clearly show that the Sabbath closes at sunset. Therefore only about three-fourths of Saturday is identical with the Biblical seventh day, which begins with our Friday night sunset, and closes Saturday night at sunset. 2. Our yearly calendar is a human calendar, but not so the calendar of the week. There may have been years of mistakes in human reckoning so that chronologists would not agree, but all authorities of any worth whatever agree as to the identity of the week. That is a matter not of chronological record only, but of human experience. It is not an uncommon thing for an individual to forget the day of the week. It is an uncommon thing for a whole family to go astray, tho such instances have been known; but no one ever heard of a township forgetting the day of a week, or of a State, to say nothing of a nation and nations. Whatever may have been the condition of the world previous to the Exodus, God fixed the Sabbath by a great threefold weekly miracle for forty long years in the wilderness. See Exodus 16. There could be no question as to its divine appointment and divine approval and identity. He placed the commandment regarding that sacred day in the very heart of His great moral law, so that there could be no question among His followers as to the nature of the commandment itself. Whatever may have been Israel's condition, we again have a divine identification of the day at the time of the death of Jesus. Two days are placed in juxtaposition; one the first day of the week, the other the day previous to that day, the seventh day of the week, which is said to be "the Sabbath day according to the commandment." Luke 23:56; 24:1. Consequently down to the time of Jesus Christ, the Sabbath is immutably fixed by inspiration. Since that time, the Jews have been scattered to every country of the world; still there is agreement among them in regard to the Sabbath. They are all holding to the sacredness of the same day. It was true at that time, and for centuries previous, that the first day of the week was the great heathen sun's day, devoted to sun-worship; and those two days have held their relative places from that time forward, so that the very languages of the nations prove the same thing. For instance, in a chart of the week, prepared by a noted antiquarian, the late William Jones of London, it is demonstrated that one hundred sixty-two languages give the order of the week, and the great majority of them call the seventh day the Sabbath, or by a name which shows its sacred character. 3. The simple fact that the world keeps Sunday is no evidence of a mistake in the day of the week, for the great majority of them which do this do it simply because they have been taught that, or from a wrong conception of what the Scriptures mean. The greater part of the Christian world consider themselves baptized by sprinkling, and yet the majority of Christian scholarship declares that baptism means immersion. The great majority of the world is heathen. We keep the spirit of God's commandment when we do just as far as lies in our power what He has commanded. These are the words of Jesus, "Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?" This interpreting of God's commandments by keeping the spirit of them has led to a fatal perversion of His truth, and to all the errors which have cursed Christianity from the early centuries to the present time.