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CONFLICTING TESTIMONY

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Aug 30, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 35.

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CONFLICTING TESTIMONY.

By G. D. Ballou

THE witnesses for Sunday observance do not agree in the many schemes they feel obliged to employ in bolstering up their substitute Sabbath. Mr. Gamble, and some other “pillars” of the first-day theory, argue that Sunday was the true seventh day until the Exodus, when it was changed until the resurrection of Christ, when, by some peculiar means, it became the seventh day again.
But a writer in the Watchword and Truth presents a different theory. He admits that God gave the seventh-day Sabbath to our race in the very beginning; that it was reaffirmed in the time of the Exodus, and was to be a sign between Israel and Jehovah forever. Ex. 31:17. But when Israel was set aside as the special people of God, and the Gentiles were taken up, He gave the first day of the week to the church as its “dispensational sign and day of sacred rest.” The theory is that “the present age or dispensation is parenthetical;” and when the “fulness of the Gentiles” shall have come in, Israel will be restored to its place of headship among the nations. Then the seventh-day Sabbath will also be restored as a millennium result.
The Gamble, et al., theory is designed to do away with the Sabbath of the Lord altogether, and substitute the counterfeit; while the contributor to Watchword and Truth endeavors to apologize for Sunday observance and at the same time advocate the restoration of the natural Jews. If he would but acknowledge that “he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly. . . . but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly” (Rom. 2:28, 29); that all of God’s covenant people are Israel (Phil. 3:3); that the entire population of the new Jerusalem will be reckoned as of the twelve tribes of Israel (Rev. 21:12), he might be spared the restoration muddle, as well as the task of trying to sustain the Sunday “parenthesis.”
But the erection of Babel towers always results in confusion. The witnesses for error never can agree only in the one point—the determination to oppose the truth. G.