The Meaning of the Sabbath Question
Four Vital Things Involved
THAT there is agitation over the Sabbath question, world-wide, insistent, needs not to be said; we all know it. It comes to us from zealous religionists, in the clamor for "sabbath laws," or "Sunday laws;" in religious discussions, from platform and press; and even the lonely soul in the midst of solitude or surrounded by paganism has the great question brought home to his heart by the Holy Spirit and the Bible. Priest, preacher, publisher, legislator, judge, may endeavor to keep this question in the background, but it continually thrusts itself upon the attention of all with ever increasing persistency. For instance, there were thirty bills presented before the legislature of New York at its last session, having to do with Sunday. The question can not be set aside. Religiously, politically, socially, Scripturally, it is constantly pressed to the fore. It is an important question, for it involves in its comprehensiveness, among other things, the four vitally important matters following:- The Veracity, not to say Infallibility, of Holy Scripture;
- The Authority of God's Word as against Tradition and Apostasy;
- The Existence of Protestantism;
- The Future of Civil Government.
I. As Regards the Veracity of Holy Writ
Do the Scriptures speak the truth in the account given in Genesis as to the origin of the septenary, or weekly, cycle and the Sabbath? Gen. 1:3-31; 2:1-3. Very clear and explicit is that record. The Sabbath precept stands in the Ten Words of the Decalogue (See Exodus 20) as God's memorial of creative energy, to call to the constant remembrance of His creatures His almighty power, manifest in speaking in six literal days the things of Gen. 1:3-31. "By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made." Ps. 33:6, 9. "He spake, and it was; He commanded, and it stood fast." Is the record true, or shall we believe the fanciful abstractions of evolution, which either deny the Word or explain away its creative power by hopeless hypotheses? Did God then bring disorder into beauty in six days by the mighty power of His Word, or did it "evolve" through countless ages? This great fact of the exercise of creative power is recorded, affirmed, indorsed, and confirmed by all the Bible from Genesis to the Revelation. Our Lord believed it, taught it, without question. Modern "science" and "higher criticism" at first thought to reject the Genesis story of the origin of things and the fall, and retain the rest; but when they rejected Genesis, they were forced, as was quoted four weeks ago from the Independent of June 24, to place on the same basis all that followed, including the origin and creative energy of Jesus Christ, manifest in miracles, as well as the record and miracle of prophet and apostle. Now the entire Bible as inspired Record and Guide is in the light of "higher criticism" gone, and the world under the rejection of the Sabbath story has found itself with but one standard, "human reason." The Sabbath is the sign between God and His people, that they may not only know that He is God, but that He is Jehovah that sanctifies them. Eze. 20:12, 20. But the Sabbath is nothing to the evolutionist. To hold it as God gave it would be a denial of his elaborate and uncertain hypotheses. In the very nature of things he must reject it as unscientific and traditional or relinquish his theories of evolution. But evolution gives him no Gospel for the poor, the sinful, the weak. On the other hand, repeatedly God encourages the weak and sinful soul to believe that He is able to cleanse, save, and regenerate now, and He offers as the proof of this His power manifest in creating and making the earth. See John 1:1-12; Isa. 42:5; Col. 1:13-19; Isa. 45:17, 18, etc. Does He mean this? Jesus said: "If ye believed Moses, ye would believe Me; for he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?" John 5:46, 47. II. The Sabbath Question Involves the Authority of the Bible as Against Tradition and Apostasy
Only apostasy pleads for tradition; loyalty will be satisfied with nothing else than the5original source. Now the only weekly Sabbath, or Lord's day, which the Bible knows, is the seventh-day Sabbath. All Sabbath laws, precepts, promises, and blessings, center in that. They are given to confirm, support, uphold, declare, establish that Sabbath in the hearts of God's children. The Sabbath was constituted by God's rest, blessing, and sanctification; by these He placed His own presence in THE seventh day, a constant pledge of everlasting rest through the power and love of Jesus Christ. Gen. 2:2, 3. The Sabbath law is one of the immutable Ten Words spoken by God's voice, written by His own finger on tables of stone. Ex. 20:8-11; Deut. 5:22. It was observed by our divine Exemplar, Jesus Christ, by whose "obedience" to the holy law we are made righteous (Rom. 5:19), and by faith in whom the law is established in the heart (Rom. 3:31). "The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God." Opposed to this is a day which, in the position it occupies in the septenary cycle, could NOT be a Sabbath, could NOT be a memorial of creation. It has no authority in the Word of God. It is only by unwarranted inferences, hallowed by tradition, that it is made to SEEM to have any Biblical authority at all; and it is safe to say that if the professed people of God were not now keeping it, they would utterly reject as unworthy of a Sabbath basis the insufficient and often contradictory support put forth in Sunday's behalf. Upon the one side or the other of this question THE WORLD MUST CHOOSE. One is of God; the other is against Him, whatever it may have seemed or does seem to be to honest the uninstructed thousands. A counterfeit bill never becomes genuine by passing as current money, tho it may have been used as such by thousands of honest people. Error never becomes truth, however many honest people may have believed it. The Sunday sabbath, or pseudo Lord's day, is, according to God's great Detector,—the Bible,—a counterfeit, a hoary error; it is neither divine memorial nor pledge of heavenly power; and Jesus tells us, "Every plant which My heavenly Father planted not, shall be rooted up." Matt. 15:13. Reader, which shall it be,—the eternal Word of truth, or lying, and perishing tradition? The truth in that tradition once led and held you despite the error. That truth brought you to the Word of God, that it might be confirmed, and that you might see your errors and relinquish them for more truth. God blessed you while you held the error, not because you were in error, but in spite of the error. You followed the light, you saw and found blessing. But the "path of the just" "shineth more and more unto the perfect day." Will you follow the light of truth, or abide by the error of tradition? III. The Sabbath Question Involves the Existence of Protestantism
Protestantism is founded on the Bible, and the Bible only; but when Protestantism KNOWINGLY COMES face to face with truth and rejects that truth for tradition, or holds to received tradition in the light of opposing truth, she, by so doing, as Dowling well says, "steps down from the Protestant rock, passes the line which divides Protestantism from popery, and can give no valid reason why every doctrine of the Papacy should not be received on the same basis." In this Sabbath question, now before the world, Protestantism is facing the very question of its existence, and by it she stands or falls. She must follow the Word or tradition. If she follows tradition, she loses the very source of her origin and life, and is left to drift. Then, finding no divine proof to support her substituted tradition, she turns to the last resort of apostasy,—union with the state, and oppressive, intolerant, and persecuting laws to silence the faithful voices raised in protest against error. Then her name may continue, it may still be called upon an apostate church; but the life and the light in Protestantism are departed, and Protestantism is dead. Yet Christianity is not dead. "Even so then at this present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace," who will lift aloft the true standard of "the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus," and go forward. IV. The Sabbath Question Involves the Future of Civil Government
Why?—Because the friends of Sunday, the pseudo sabbath, the sabbath of traditional apostasy, all over the world are, under various pleas, pressing upon the governments of earth, contrary to the teachings of Christ, the duty of the state to enforce the observance of Sunday by law. But Christ's "kingdom is not of this world." Control of conscience and of faith and of religion belongs to God alone. Every government that has set itself against truth and liberty in the past has fallen. As long as civil government, however imperfect it has been, has progressed toward liberty, God has suffered it to continue and grow strong. But when, in the face of light, government sets itself against God, or assumes to act in God's stead, its fall is certain; its days are numbered. So it was with Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. By the pressure now being brought to bear upon civil governments, legislators, rulers,—local, national, and international,—decision must soon be made. Popular governments will go with the prevailing human influence, and this will be to enact sabbath laws. To yield once, is to yield again and again; and to continue to yield to such demand, is death to any government; for it is departing from the law of its life. This, in brief, shows the importance of the Sabbath question. O soul, on which side will you stand? Will it be with error, tradition, civil law, and death? or will it be with God and righteousness and truth and life?