CHRISTIAN SABBATH

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 11, 1860

"CHRISTIAN SABBATH."

(Continued)

THAT the original Sabbath was instituted in paradise, and was designed as a memorial of the work of creation, Mr. Lee expressly admits in the following language:

“The seventh-day Sabbath celebrated the work of creation, and for four thousand years did its weekly return talk of the day when God ceased from his works when he had made the world and lit up the sun.” p. 17.

For this purpose the commandment expressly declares the Sabbath was designed; and this purpose the original Sabbath effectually accomplished. Why then, we ask, do we look for a change of day, since no other day can serve as a memorial of these great works? Hear Mr. Lee again:

“Indeed the resurrection of Christ is more worthy of a monument than creation itself.” p. 4. He says further of the Christian Sabbath alias Sunday, “But when we look at its commemorative character, we see a reason for the change as much greater than existed for the appointment of the Sabbath at the finishing of God's six days' work, as redemption is greater and more glorious than creation.” p. 16.

Mr. Lee's work is evidently not a very modern one. We do not say but more recent writers on this subject would urge such ideas as the above; for there is but little else to be produced in favor of christianizing Sunday. But really this class of assertions is getting rather stale and threadbare. Redemption greater, forsooth, than creation! Chapter and verse for that! The anxious inquirer for truth wants something better than bare speculation, conjecture, assertion. Creation and redemption are, both of them, events far beyond the finite comprehension of man. God has seen fit to keep silence in regard to the places they respectively hold in point of magnitude and glory. None but the presumptuous will then, we say, venture to pronounce upon this question.

But the advocates of Sunday-keeping proceed still further in their bold work. Having concluded, as near as they can calculate, that the work of redemption is greater than that of creation, they further decide that the former is more worthy of a memorial than the latter. Presumptuous as all this is, it might perhaps be tolerated or passed over in silence as a mere theory, did it lead to no practical expression. But these two theoretical steps lead to a third and outward one, which is more daring and presumptuous than all the rest. They lead men to discard the ancient memorial, to destroy the ancient institution, in order to make room for a new institution, founded upon reasons of their own imagining. For we have seen that no change of day can take place and the original institution still exist, or the original law be still in force.

The death and resurrection of Christ, as events in the work of redemption, are indeed worthy of an impressive memorial. And here let it be noticed that all the arguments urged in favor of the first day of the week as a memorial, and all the cheap rhetoric expended upon the glories of this day in contrast with the wonders of creation, proceed upon the covert insinuation that unless we keep the first day, the death and resurrection of Christ have no memorial. Mark this: for the fallacy of the whole argument in regard to the commemorative character of Sunday lurks in this one point. But if we can find in the word of God, divinely appointed memorials of both these events, it will be seen at once that we extract every particle of force and vitality, from every argument of this nature. Turn then for a divinely appointed memorial of the death of Christ to 1 Cor. xi, 26: “For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup ye do show the Lord's death till he come.” In the Lord's supper, then, we have a divinely appointed memorial of his death: have we anything that speaks to us of his resurrection? Turn to Rom. vi, 4: “Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life;” also Col. ii, 12: “Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him,” &c. A most striking and appropriate memorial of the death and resurrection of Christ is thus given us in baptism. They therefore, who plead for the first day of the week as a memorial of the resurrection of Christ, engage in altogether a superfluous work; for it is not needed in any such service.

And when the advocates of Sunday-keeping have completed their work, when they have fixed up the new institution to their own liking, what have they done? They have done just this: God, it seems, thought it meet that the work of creation should be commemorated by man, but they have seemed to say, by the substitution of Sunday, that God has so far changed in this respect that he would not insist upon these events' being longer commemorated. 2. They have discarded that memorial so that we now have nothing by which to commemorate creation; for the idea that the first day of the week, the day on which the work of creation was simply begun, can be used to commemorate that work when finished, is too preposterous to be for a moment tolerated. 3. They have pronounced upon the relative magnitude and importance of two events concerning which the Bible is significantly silent. 4. They have made this, their own unaided human decision, the basis of their hazardous treatment of the original institution in transferring the Sabbath to Sunday. 5. They have nullified the fourth commandment. 6. They have instituted as a memorial of the resurrection of Christ, an observance which God has never appointed; and 7. Since the Bible already gives us a memorial of that event, they make the great Author of our religious institutions guilty of a tautology in giving us two memorials of the same event.

This is indeed a singular theory. Its every premise is assumption; but not even from its assumptions do its conclusions follow. It would be most natural to expect that were anything to be assumed, something would be taken which would render the conclusion necessary. But this is not the case in the Sunday theory. All that is assumed may be granted—we may grant that redemption is greater than creation, grant that it is more worthy of a memorial than that event, grant that it should be commemorated by some day, and grant that that day should be Sunday—and yet from none of these, singly or collectively, does it follow that Sunday is a Sabbath, or a sacred day, or that the original Sabbath has been transferred to it. And should God prove not to be so changeable as seems to be presumed [Mal. iii, 6], should he adhere to his original arrangement, what would they answer? If, when they are judged by that word by which Christ has declared we shall all be judged at the last day, that word which they have daily before their eyes, the inquiry should be put to them, Who hath required this at your hand? what would be their reply?

Would they claim before the Judge of all the earth, as they now do before men, that Christ and his apostles by their example ratified the change? Let us examine this claim. Following the well-beaten track of his predecessors, Mr. Lee proceeds with all due gravity to bring forward the few scanty texts which are said to show how Christ recognized the Christian Sabbath. He seemed to think them sufficient to support the following broad assertion: “The day on which Christ arose began to be observed immediately by the apostles and their associates, and has clearly been observed ever since.” p. 6. The first reference in support of this is Jno. xx, 19. “Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week,” &c. This is spoken of the day on which Christ arose, and is claimed as proof that the disciples were met together to honor the first Christian Sabbath, and Christ sanctioned their course by meeting with them. How is this? We read in Luke xxiii, 56, that the disciples rested the day before this, and that too, “according to the commandment;” and here it is claimed that they were keeping Sunday, the day following, also according to the commandment; for Orthodox Sunday-keeping, be it remembered, claims the authority of the commandment. Can two days in succession be kept, and both be “according to the commandment?” We leave this query with our friends to solve, while we proceed to a further examination of their proof texts.

“The following,” continues Mr. L., “is the record of the second meeting: ‘And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them. Then came Jesus and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.’”

We are not disposed to spend much time over the question whether the phrase, “after eight days,” means just a week, or whether this second meeting took place definitely on Sunday; for it effects nothing one way or the other. A score of instances of Christ's meeting with his disciples on the first day of the week, would amount to nothing, unless it could be shown that the time determined the meeting, and unless the purpose for which they met was also specified. But to show that our friends are dangerously stretching their evidence on this point we present the following testimony from others. We quote again from W. B. Taylor:

“It has been assumed all along that ‘after eight days’ from the previous appearance denoted exactly the interval of a week. However unanimous Sunday Sabbatarians may have been in taking this for granted, it is a point which never has been proved. It is at least quite as probable that the latter appearance occurred ‘after’ a week and a day from the former one, as upon that day week. There is no necessity whatever (excepting that of contributing an imaginary straw to a drowning cause) for the stereotype construction. Even were it highly probable that the construction is correct, is my friend satisfied to rest so important a question as the divine obligation of a day on a ‘highly probable’ conjecture? Where is his Protestantism? The very uncertainty of the expression should be sufficient evidence to every unbiased mind, that a specification of time was not here the writer's object, and could not have been a vital part of this account. Had it been, it would have been written in letters of light, the first day of the week is ‘His own chosen day’ of rest.”

But J. N. B. is not alone in this conjecture! He notices that ‘Townsend, the learned harmonist, says on this passage, “The first appearances of our Lord to his apostles appear to have taken place uniformly on the first day of the week.”’ Indeed!—‘Wot ye not what the Scripture saith?’ ‘After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples at the sea of Tiberias. And he said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship and ye shall find. . . . This is now the third time that Jesus showed himself to his disciples, after that he was risen from the dead.’ Jno. xxi, 1, 6, 14. Here remarkably enough we have an actual precept, and since my friend has labored so long and fruitlessly to find a warrant of example, I hope he will seize upon it with eager gratitude. I hope that forthwith collecting a chosen few upon some pleasant Sunday, he will say with Simon Peter of old, “I go a fishing!—not as a ‘fisher of men,’ but with literal net, in a literal boat,—‘We also go with thee.’ We shall have the gratifying encouragement that the ‘first appearances’ of Jesus ‘took place uniformly on the first day of the week.’”

“Even supposing however,” says Milton in his Christian Doctrine, Book ii, chap. 7, “that it had been so, still the assigning this as a reason for the institution of a new Sabbath, is matter solely of human inference; since no commandment on the subject, nor any reason for such institution, is found in all Scripture.”

Heylin, an English divine of the seventeenth century, in his History of the Sabbath, says of Jno. xx, 26, “But where the Greek text reads it, meth' heemeras okto (post octo dies in the vulgar Latin—‘after eight days’ according to our English Bibles), that should be rather understood of the sixth or tenth, than the eighth day after.” We thus welcome our friends to all the consolation they are able to derive from the fact that after eight days from the first meeting, Jesus, taking advantage of the disciples' being again together, and this time Thomas with them, appeared in their midst to satisfy the incredulity of his doubting disciple.

Returning to the work under review, we read again: “Twenty-five years after the above transactions, we have the following record: ‘And upon the first day of the week when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready to depart on the morrow, and continued his speech until midnight.’ Acts xx, 7. Thus was he to commence his journey on the first day after the Christian Sabbath, allowing this to have been their regular day for celebrating Christian worship as it already was.”

This testimony reminds us of that sublimely logical

maneuver of Justin Edwards in which he says that Pompey, the Roman general, taking advantage of the fact that the Jews would not interfere with the operations of an enemy on the Sabbath, spent the day in constructing his works around their walls, and preparing to attack them on Monday? See Sabbath Manual, p. 216.

The fact is, Acts xx, 7, directly controverts Mr. Lee's position, as he would have seen by a little closer examination; for Paul, instead of waiting till after the Christian Sabbath, before pursuing his journey, pursued it directly on that day. This can be proved to a demonstration. As the day of the Bible commences with the evening at sunset, so evening meeting, as was the one mentioned in Acts xx, 7, could be held on the first day of the week, except on the evening immediately following the seventh day, which would correspond to our Saturday evening. This then was the time of Paul's meeting. This meeting from some unusual interest was continued until break of day [verse 11], and then Paul departed on his journey, “broad Sunday though it was!” This point is conceded by such authorities as Prof. H. B. Hackett and Kitto. See History of the Sabbath published at this Office. What proof then, is afforded by this text? Incidental proof that Paul “rested the Sabbath day according to the commandment,” since he waited till it was past, before resuming his journey, and direct proof that he attached no sacredness to Sunday. In seizing upon Acts xx, 7, Mr. Lee has evidently acted against the interests of his own cause; for it does not furnish the kind of evidence for which he is seeking.

But they came together on the first day of the week for the express purpose of breaking bread, it is said, and that was the Lord's supper, and that was a religious service. Not quite so fast. We respectfully submit that even this stands in need of proof. The phrase breaking bread, was the ordinary designation of a common meal. Jesus was recognized by the two disciples [Luke xxiv, 30, 35] in breaking of bread; that is, at the supper table. Also Acts ii, 46: “breaking bread [that is, eating their meals] from house to house;” for they “had all things common.” Again Acts xvi, 34: Paul, having persuaded the sailors to eat, took bread and “broke it.” Says W. B. Taylor (Discussions on the Sabbath, p. 233), “The popular acceptation of the phrase is familiar to every scholar. In Valpy's Greek Testament there is the following comment on this passage: ‘In the Jewish way of speaking, says Bishop Pearce, to “break bread” is the same as to make a meal; and the meal here meant (Acts xx, 7) seems to have been one of those which were called agapæ love-feasts.’ Chrysostom thinks it ‘an ordinary meal.’ And Milton says upon this text, ‘Who shall determine with certainty, whether this was a periodical meeting, or only held occasionally and of their own accord; whether it was a religious festival, or a fraternal meal.’ Christian Doctrine, Book ii, chap. 7.” This view is certainly strengthened by the expression of verse 11 of the very chapter under notice; namely, “When he therefore was come up again and had broken bread and eaten”—an expression wholly inappropriate to the celebration of the Lord's supper.

(To be continued.)