THE Sabbath is one question that is much agitated among nearly all classes of people in this present day. Some believe that the seventh day is the Sabbath; some believe that the first day is the Sabbath. It is treated somewhat like a pain in some part of the body. Men try to relieve the pain without removing the cause of the pain. In treating it in this way the pain is liable to return again at any time. So to discuss this question without going to the foundation leaves it still unsettled.
The only knowledge that we have of a Sabbath and how a Sabbath was made is that found in the Holy Scriptures. Outside of the Scriptures we find no record of a Sabbath made by the God of heaven. In the Scriptures, however, we read that in the beginning God made the Sabbath out of the seventh day; and that it required Him to rest upon that day; to bless the day, after He had rested on it; and to sanctify it. It took all of this work to make the Sabbath out of the seventh day. And God considered it of sufficient importance to place on record how He had made the Sabbath, and of which day He made it.
When man sinned he transgressed God's law. He fell by that transgression, because man can not sin without transgressing God's law; "for sin is the transgression of the law." The law of God is as eternal as God Himself. God is "from everlasting to everlasting." So is His law. "God is love," and love on our part is the fulfilling of that law. As God is eternal, because He is love, so, as the law of God is love, it is eternal also. And as the Sabbath is a part of that law it is as eternal as the law is. And God tells us that in the new earth it is to be kept. Isa. 66:22. And when we enter into that kingdom it is for eternity. When God spoke His law at Mount Sinai it was only a repetition of the law that all of His prophets had been keeping all the way down to the days of Moses. God said of Abraham that he had kept His laws and His statutes and His commandments; and we also find in the sixteenth chapter of Exodus that Moses told the children of Israel as they gathered the manna on the sixth day, that the morrow was the Sabbath day. They were to gather on the sixth day twice as much; for on the seventh day, which was the Sabbath, there would be none. This was about a month before the law was spoken from the mount.
Again, the Scriptures tell us that Christ was the Creator of this world. As the Creator of the world, He also was the One who made the Sabbath. And He said that He made it for man, not for the Jew-man only; for if He had made it for the Jews only, then the Gentiles would not have had a Sabbath to keep. Why?—Because if the seventh day was to be kept by the Jews only, and not by the Gentiles, there can not be found in Holy Writ another weekly sabbath. And no Christian is under any obligation to observe any day or law or any institution that is not fully recognized and sanctioned by the Holy Scriptures. The word of God is what we will all have to meet in the judgment; and as that is so, let us live as that word tells us to live. By so doing we will be able to stand in the judgment. It will not do to try to pass the judgment by what men say.