I AM to speak to you to-day, not of the usefulness or of the blessedness of the Sabbath, but of its obligation. And I am to speak to you of its obligation, not as that obligation naturally arises out of its usefulness or blessedness, but as it is immediately imposed by God in His Word. You naturally dwell on the joy of the Sabbath. This is the day of gladness and triumph, on which the Lord broke the bonds of the grave, abolishing death and bringing life and immortality to light. As naturally you dwell on the value of the Sabbath. This is the day on which the tired body rests from its appointed labour; on which the worn spirit finds opportunity for recuperation; an oasis in the desert of earthly cares, when we can escape for a moment from the treadmill toil of daily life and, at leisure from ourselves, refresh our souls in God. I am to recall your minds—it may seem somewhat brusquely—to the contemplation of the duty of the Sabbath; and to ask you to let them rest for a moment on the bald notion of authority. I do not admit that, in so doing, I am asking you to lower your eyes. Rather, I conceive myself to be inviting you to raise them; to raise them to the very pinnacle of the pinnacle. After all is said, there is no greater word than “ought.” And there is no higher reason for keeping the Sabbath than that I ought to keep it; that I owe it to God the Lord to keep it in accordance with His command.
It may nevertheless require some little effort to withdraw our thoughts even for a moment from the utility of the Sabbath and fix them on its bare obligation. Since Prudhon taught the world the natural value of the Sabbath, its supernatural origin and sanction have, in wide circles, passed perhaps somewhat out of sight. In its abounding usefulness to man, it may seem so obviously man’s day that we may easily forget that it was for two thousand years before it was discovered to be man’s day already the Lord’s day; and, stretching back from that, from the creation of the world God’s day. The Sabbath is undoubtedly rooted in nature; in our human nature and in the nature of the created universe. Unbroken toil is not good for us: the recurrence of a day of rest is of advantage to us, physically, mentally, spiritually. But had we been left to find this out for ourselves, we should probably have waited very long for it. Certainly Prudhon tardily learned it from observation, not of pure nature, but of the Sabbath-rest ordained by God. We are told on the highest authority that “the Sabbath was made for man.” Man needs it. It blesses his life. But man apparently would never have had it, had it not been “made” for him; made for him by Him who from the beginning of the world has known all His works, and, knowing man, has made for him from the beginning of the world the day of rest which he needs. He who needed no rest, in the greatness of His condescension, rested from the work which He had creatively made, that by His example He might woo man to his needed rest.
The Sabbath, then, is not an invention of man’s, but a creation of God’s. “This is the day that Jehovah hath made”—a verse than which none in the Psalter has had a more glorious history—does not refer to the Sabbath; but it is not strange that it has been so frequently applied to it that it has ended by becoming on the lips of God’s people one of its fixed designations. It is Jehovah who made the Sabbath; though for man, the Sabbath is not of man, but has come to man as a gift from God Himself. And, as God has made it, so He has kept it, as He has kept all else that He has made, under His own hand. It is in the power of no man to unmake the Sabbath, or to remake it—diverting it from, or, as we might fondly hope, adjusting it better to, its divinely appointed function. What God has made it, that will He Himself see that it shall remain. This in effect our Saviour tells us in that very saying to which we have already alluded. For, immediately upon declaring that “the Sabbath was made for man”—with the open implication, of course, that it was by God that it was made for man—He proceeds to vindicate to Himself the sole empire over it. “So that,” he adds, “the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”
The little word “even” should not pass unobserved in this declaration. “The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath,” or perhaps we might translate it “also” or “too”—”the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath,” “of the Sabbath too.” In the former case it is the loftiness of the lordship which is Lord even of the Sabbath which is suggested; in the latter, it is the wideness of the lordship which our Lord asserts for Himself which is intimated. Both elements of significance are present, however, in either case. The emphasis in any event falls on the greatness of the authority claimed by our Lord when He declared His lordship over the Sabbath, and the term “Lord” is in the original thrust forward in the sentence, that it may receive the whole stress. This great dominion our Lord vindicates to Himself as the Son of Man, that heavenly being, whom Daniel saw coming with the clouds of heaven to set up on earth the eternal kingdom of God. Because the Sabbath was made for man. He, the Son of Man, to whom has been given dominion and glory, and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him—who reigns by right over man and all things which concern man—is Lord also of the Sabbath. There are obviously two sides to the declaration. The Sabbath, on the one hand, is the Lord’s Day. It belongs to Him. He is the Lord of it; master of it—for that is what “Lord” means. He may do with it what He will: abolish it if He chooses—though abolishing it is as far as possible from the suggestion of the passage: regulate it, adapt it to the changing circumstances of human life for the benefit of which it was made. On the other hand, just because it is the Lord’s day, it is nobody else’s day. It is not man’s day; it is not in the power of man. To say that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath is to withdraw it from the control of men. It is to reserve to the Son of Man all authority over it. It is not man but the Son of Man who is Lord of the Sabbath.
When we wish to remind ourselves of the foundations of the Sabbath in the Word of God, it is naturally to the Decalogue that we go first. There we read the fundamental commandment which underlay the Sabbath of which our Lord asserted Himself to be the Lord, and the divine authority and continued validity of which He recognised and reaffirmed when he announced Himself Lord of the Sabbath established by it. The Ten Commandments were, of course, given to Israel; and they are couched in language that could only be addressed to Israel. They are introduced by a preface adapted and doubtless designed to give them entrance into the hearts of precisely the Israelitish people, as the household ordinances of their own God, the God to whom they owed their liberation from slavery and their establishment as a free people: “I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” This intimacy of appeal specifically to Israel is never lost throughout the whole document. Everywhere it has just Israel in mind, and in every part of it it is closely adapted to the special circumstances of Israel’s life. We may, therefore, read off from its texts many facts about Israel. We may learn from it, for example, that Israel was a people in which the institution of slavery existed; whose chief domestic animals were oxen and asses, not, say, horses and camels; whose religious practices included sacrificial rites; and who was about to enter into a promised land, given to it of the Lord for its possession. We may learn from it also that Israel was a people to whom the Sabbath was already known, and who needed not to be informed, but only to be reminded of it: “Remember the Sabbath day . . .” Nothing can be clearer, then, than that the Ten Commandments are definitely addressed to the Israelitish people and declare the duties peculiarly incumbent upon them.
Unless it be even clearer that these duties, declared thus to be peculiarly incumbent upon the Israelitish people, are not duties peculiar to that people. Samuel R. Driver describes the Ten Commandments as “a concise but comprehensive summary of the duties of the Israelite towards God and man. . .” It does not appear but that this is a very fair description of them. They are addressed to the Israelite. They give him a concise but comprehensive summary of his duties towards God and man. But the Israelite, too, is a man. And it ought not to surprise us to discover that the duties of the Israelite towards God and man, when summarily stated, are just the fundamental duties which are owed to God and man by every man, whether Greek or Jew, circumcision or uncircumcision, barbarian, Sycthian, bond or free. Such, at all events is, in point of fact, the case. There is no duty imposed upon the Israelite in the Ten Commandments, which is not equally incumbent upon all men, everywhere. These commandments are but the positive publication to Israel, of the universal human duties, the common morality of mankind.
(To be continued.)