An Illustration of the Sabbath Question
By J. B. Cook
“The following is the illustration to which Bro. Cook refers: “I have been looking over the Sabbath question. Let me illustrate it as it lies in my mind. “Put out one arm, reach back to creation. Gen. ii, 1—3. There you find the Sabbath as firm as the world. Then he [God] did not make or derive it for the Jews. He made it “known” to them.—Neh. ix, 14. Ex. xvi, 23,—and adapted it to their edification. He reveals its importance in Isa. lvi, and lviii, and connects large promises with obediences, and in Eze. xx, dreadful curses with disobedience. Then Jesus affirms it as really as any precept of the moral code. He seems not to legislate, as if giving a new law in this case, any more than in that of marriage. He explains its spirituality and affirms that it was “made for man.” Thus harmonizing with the Spirit’s teaching in ancient times. If it be made for man, man needs it, will suffer without it as he would without other provisions that his Creator has made for him. He and his disciples rested on the Sabbath after his crucifixion. They did it “according to the commandment” and the original institution. “Now, let your person, in the illustration, with your arms extended, represent Jesus. There you find him affirming the Sabbath and the principle on which it is founded. Nay, more, you find him recognizing the Sabbath as really as a winter at the destruction of Jerusalem, 37 years this side of you, as we proceed down the stream of time. Then at the end [of your arm, representing time, across this dispensation to “the rest,”] you find the Sabbatism, the antitype of “the Sabbath of the Lord our God”—“the rest” which “remains for the people of God.” “Thus you have the Sabbath from the beginning. A Sabbath reaching 15 hundred years across the old dispensation, or down one arm. Jesus in the centre putting down the Sabbatic stake deep in the necessities of man’s nature, and the constitution of the world. Thus you find the most holy of his honored attendants observing it after his crucifixion and while he lay in his humiliation. Again, it beams out clearly 37 years subsequent, and the substance shadowed forth by it at the termination of man’s toilsome, trying period of labor and sorrow—God’s great week of six great days, which are each as 1000 years. “Now, if there be not a weight of testimony here that can not be thrown lightly aside, then I do indeed misjudge greatly. Do read Rom. xiv. Surely the apostle does not give us the Sabbath law there. No, no!! He gives us a rule to govern ourselves by in our intercourse with weak brethren who may not have been so well instructed as others. The connection makes it necessary that we understand the Good Spirit as referring to the Jewish ritual, concerning which both Gentiles and Jews were taught to be forbearing towards each other. We trace the Sabbatic institution from the beginning, through the former dispensation, see it observed according to the commandment, the day before the resurrection of Jesus, recognized by him 37 years afterward, and in the light of inspiration, we can see the blessed substance, shadowed forth by it at the close of earth’s laboring, groaning week of the curse. Then, I go for God’s institution.—Amen. “As I want the antitype, I’ll follow out the type till we reach it. As I would share the substance, I’ll trace the shadow up to it. Amen! Lord help us. Then I’ll understand the Spirit speaking by Paul, as the connection clearly teaches, to speak of the Mosaic ritual services which find their antitype in Jesus and the coming glories of the great salvation, leaving the Sabbath by itself on its foundation, Jehovah and Jesus. Yours in +