IS IT JEWISH?

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 16, 1880

The seventh day of the week is the Jewish Sabbath, just as much as, and no more than, the Bible account of creation is a Jewish record, as the books of Moses are Jewish books. It is the Jewish Sabbath just as much as, and no more than, Moses, Joshua, and Samuel were Jewish prophets and law-givers, as David was a Jewish psalmist, as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other ancient prophets were Jewish prophets, as Jesus Christ was the Jewish Saviour, and the twelve apostles Jewish apostles. In short the seventh day of the week is the Jewish Sabbath just as much as the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the Jewish Bible, or as Jehovah (or the God revealed in the Bible) is the Jewish God. Its institution, observance, perpetuation, and handing down to the present time, is the memorial and monument of the creation, and giving of the divine law, which the whole Christian world should tenaciously hold on to as the most precious testimony to the reality of the divine record. The strong tendency of the times is for all these things to lose their hold upon the memory and consideration of the world, and to be merged, obscured, and forgotten, in the general inundation of material progress, prosperity, and change. Let Christians beware that they do not aid this materialistic and atheistic tendency.

Sunday observance, on the other hand, is a memorial or monument of the heathen worship of the sun. It prevailed long before the Christian era. It was brought into the Christian church by the pagan converts. Some twenty-five or thirty years since there was a reward offered through the New York papers of 500 dollars for a single precept in the Bible in favor of the first day of the week as a Sabbath—500 dollars for a single instance where Christ or the apostles called the first day of the week a Sabbath, and 500 dollars for a single example of their ever having observed the first day of the week as a Sabbath. No one ever came forward to claim the reward. —W. B. Maxson in Sabbath Recorder.