By the Rev. PATRICK FAIRBAIRN.
(Continued from page 265.)
VI.
AS far as we have hitherto examined the Word of Inspiration, it seems to utter a clear and harmonious testimony in favour of the Sabbath. The obligation to keep every seventh day whole and entire, as a day of holy rest unto God, is acknowledged and enforced through every period of the Church’s history, from the beginning of the world to the ascension of Christ into heaven. The institution of such a day was a part of God’s plan in creation, and came recommended by His authority and example to the very first inhabitants of the earth. The patriarchs, we have reason to believe, observed it; and the ancient world at large, amid innumerable corruptions, still preserved some manifest traces of its existence. When the chosen seed, at the close of the patriarchal age, were released from Egyptian thraldom and placed in separation from the world, the Sabbath was immediately restored to them, as indispensable alike to their purity and their wellbeing. It was shortly after proclaimed from mount Sinai as one of the Ten Commandments, which contain the sum of all duty to God and man, and which, as being of permanent and universal obligation, were engraved by the finger of God on the two tables of stone, and placed alone in the ark of the covenant. The prophets abound with allusions to the Sabbath; and not only when addressing those who lived under the Jewish dispensation, but also when predicting events which could not happen till Gospel times, they speak of its observance as a leading privilege and characteristic of God’s faithful people. Finally, Christ Himself declared the perpetual obligation of the Sabbath, first at the commencement of His ministry, when He proclaimed the object of His mission to be the fulfilment, not the destruction, of the law of the prophets, in both of which the Sabbath is enforced; and again at the close of His ministry, when He directed His disciples to
pray during the distress which, forty years after His departure, should attend the siege of Jerusalem, that they might not be constrained even then to make the Sabbath a day of travel and flight.
So far every thing seems confirmatory of the law of the Sabbath. The obligation, instead of weakening, appears rather to gather strength as we proceed. The last word of Christ regarding it, is one of the most impressive intimations to be found in all Scripture of the tender respect that should be paid to its dutiful observance; and the earliest and the latest dispensations of God alike concur in doing honour to the day which He has blessed. Where, then, or by whom has its authority been impaired, or its obligation cancelled. The apostles alone remain of all that the Christian Church looks to for direction in duty; and do they indeed utter a different testimony? Can they possibly have taken it upon them, or have been commissioned from above, to qualify in this particular the Word of Christ, to nullify the law and the prophets, and make void an institution to which all ages have borne witness? The mere statement of the question must carry its refutation to every well-informed and pious mind; but we shall look for a moment at the few things which are commonly alleged on the opposite side, to array the apostles against the Sabbath.
They are, indeed, very few. First of all, the apostle writes, in the 14th chapter of Romans, “One man esteemeth one day above another; another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it.” If these words referred to the Sabbath, we should certainly be warranted to infer from them that we are under no obligation to keep it sacred, and that to make no distinction of days in that respect is a part of our liberty in Christ. But the very slightest inspection of the apostle’s reasoning may convince us, that it is of things strictly and properly Jewish that he is there speaking. The distinction of days is introduced in connection
with distinction of meats, which is the more immediate subject of discourse; and that this was a Jewish ordinance, a part of the ceremonial institutions, and ordained only till the time of reformation, admits of no doubt. How can we, then, in fairness doubt that the other distinction referred to, and coupled with it, was of the same character? The Sabbath, as we have already shown, was no distinctive part of the Jewish dispensation. Even as imposed upon the Jews, it was engrossed in that part of God’s revelations to them which were not typical and temporary, but moral and permanent. But there were many other days, connected with the feasts and services of the ceremonial worship, which the Jews were commanded to keep sacred, and which, no doubt, were shadows of good things to come, and as such to be abolished in Christ, along with distinctions of meat and the other parts of a typical worship. So far as such days were concerned, a man might either regard them or not; the command had ceased to be imperative, and each individual might be left free to follow the dictate of his own conscience. But that the primeval institution of the Sabbath—that day which God had from the first hallowed and blessed, and at every successive stage of His dispensations had again reinforced, as essential alike to man’s wellbeing and His own glory—that this day should have been included among these distinctions of a short-lived and shadowy ritual, as a thing to be dealt with according to every man’s private inclination, it utterly opposed to sound principle and the fair interpretation of the apostle’s discourse.
The passage in the 2nd chapter of Colossians, which has always been strongly urged by those who deny the obligation of a Christian Sabbath, is precisely similar to the one now considered. “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath-days: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is of Christ.” The therefore, with which this authoritative declaration is introduced, connects all the things here specified with “the handwriting of ordinances,” which the apostle declared immediately before had been nailed to the cross
of Christ, and taken out of the way. Now, that that was simply and exclusively the ceremonial ritual, the yoke of carnal services connected with the tabernacle worship is on all hands admitted. But this being the case, it follows by undeniable consequence that the Sabbaths, and other things here particularised as severally belonging to the handwriting of ordinances, must have been such days of rest only as were ordained by the Mosaic ritual—the days of stated and solemn observance specially connected with its peculiar rites of worship. These all went by the general name of Sabbaths, and, no doubt, were designed to fall into abeyance with the solemnities out of which they grew. But the Sabbath, properly so called, was no part of the handwriting of ordinances, and neither began nor ended with the ceremonial worship. It was not a legal ordinance, but a creation-gift from God to man, intended to continue so long as the present framework of nature might last; and in its original character, a memorial of things past, rather than of a shadow of things to come. We have no ground, therefore, to suppose it to have been here included by the apostle among the ordinances abolished in Christ.
The same line of remark is applicable to another passage of this apostle in the epistle to the Galatians, in which he complains of the Judaising Christians, as “observing days, and months, and times, and years.” Under this description, he evidently speaks of them as keeping up the observances which were peculiar to the Jewish economy. Of these the weekly Sabbath, as we have said, formed no part; and the apostle himself, so far from being opposed to all distinction of days in this respect, elsewhere refers to the solemn meetings for worship on the first day of the week, as an understood part of the Christian life and character (1 Cor. xvi. 2).
But the grand argument for the abolition of the Sabbath under the Christian dispensation, as connected with the authority of the apostles, lies in the change of the day from the last to the first day of the week. That this was done at the very commencement of the Gospel dispensation, by the direction of
the apostles, and by them acting under the divine influence of the Spirit of Christ, is admitted on all hands. Without their authority, the general abandonment of the last, and substitution of the first day of the week, were it only for the services of public worship, could never have been introduced into the primitive Church; and we may be well assured they would never have lent their authority to such a purpose, unless possessed of a clear warrant and direction from above. But then we are told this change completely alters the nature of the thing. The Sabbath which was expressly confined to the last day of the week, was thereby abolished, and a new institution, consisting in a certain pre-eminence of the first day, brought into its place. How far this latter day was designed to be kept sacred, we can only ascertain from those portions of New Testament Scripture which speak of it; but we are by no means to confound it with the older and much stricter institution, which it supplanted.
Now, in answer to this strain of reasoning, we would first of all reply, that even if we could assign no adequate reasons for the seventh day being dropped, and the first substituted in its place, a mere change of that kind could hardly outweigh with any serious mind the long chain of arguments we have produced in support of a Sabbath, reaching from the creation of the world to the destruction of Jerusalem. This is a chain which links together the law and the prophets, Moses and Christ, patriarchal, levitical, and Christian times. And we should certainly be the less disposed to set aside this large amount of evidence, and to view the change in question as of itself conclusive against the existence of a proper Sabbath, when we know that the first day, on being appropriated to acts of worship, received the name of the Lord’s Day (Rev. i. 10.) Why called emphatically His, but to show that He now claimed the same propriety in it that He had hitherto done in the seventh? If this day, as a day—that is, as a whole, and not some particular portion of it—is His, in a sense in which other days of the week are not, how can it possibly be so, unless as being set apart
for employments and services peculiar to itself and more immediately connected with His own glory? The distinctive character of the seventh day was just that it was God’s day, because peculiarly set apart by Him for sacred purposes; and this character appears, by the very name in question, to be transferred to the first day of the week.
We answer again, that while the appointment of a weekly Sabbath carries the appearance, from the very first, of having been designed for all classes and generations of men, it is the seventh portion of time, rather than the precise day of the week, on which the revelations of God concerning it have sought to fix our attention as the main thing required in the ordinance. It is the remembrance of a seventh day, as distinguished from other six days constantly going before and coming after it, which forms the substance of the Fourth Commandment; and that this seventh day was to be regarded as the last, rather than the first day of the week, appears only in what is assigned as the original ground of the appointment. We have no reason, but rather the contrary, to think that the Lord intended it to be always and solely connected with His own procedure in the work of the creation. At the giving of manna in the wilderness, when the Sabbath was restored after a period of oblivion caused by the hard bondage of Egypt, the seventh day was counted from the time of God’s beginning to bestow the manna. And instead of binding them to keep it as a mere memorial of creation, He more frequently enforced it on their regard as a sign of the covenant which He made with them, and a memorial of His goodness in delivering them from the land of bondage. After all this, is it not preposterous to suppose that the mere change of the day from the last to the first of the week, so as more distinctly to connect it with another and better covenant, and render it the fitting memorial of a higher and more glorious work, should utterly destroy its obligation or alter its character?
For we answer once more, that the change was not made capriciously, but for weighty and important reasons connected with the new work and covenant of God, as distinguished both
from that to which it stood immediately opposed in Judaism, and from that to which more remotely, but still more essentially, it stood opposed in creation. The observance of the last day of the week, as peculiarly set apart for God’s service, though belonging, like circumcision, to an earlier state of things, had yet come, in great measure, to be connected with the covenant made at Sinai. It was appointed to be a sign of that covenant, and the remembrance of the day as a memorial of creation ceasing, in course of time, to be maintained among the Gentiles, the observance of it came ultimately to be regarded as a public testimony, on the part of the Israelites, of their adherence to the covenant made with their fathers. For the same reason, therefore, that God discontinued circumcision, and introduced baptism in its place, was it necessary also to substitute the first, in the room of the last day of the week, as a day of holy rest to himself. The worship of God on the seventh day, having become blended with Judaism, could not serve as a proper sign and testimony to the world of the faith of the gospel; and without such a change as was actually made, one important end of the institution must otherwise have been lost.
But if we look back from Sinai up to the work of creation itself, a still stronger reason suggests itself for this change. As a memorial of that work, the Sabbath cannot be now what it originally was; for sin has entered with its destroying powers, and laid creation, we may say, in ruins. The once beautiful and glorious inheritance is now given up a prey to the spoiler; and a memorial of it, while it tells us indeed of God’s first purposes of goodness towards His creatures, tells us at the same time how these purposes have been opposed, and nature’s life and glory have been brought down within the gulf of death. We need, for our peace and wellbeing, another work and covenant of God, to repair the ruin of the first, and lay the foundation of a higher, even an imperishable glory. And as we have this in the work of Christ, so we have the memorial of it in the Sabbath, transferred from the last to the first day of the week. For on that day Christ arose again from the dead, resting from
all His labours in the mighty work of redemption—the first-fruits of them that sleep, the earliest example of revived and glorified humanity, and by the very act begetting all who believe on His name to the lively hope of an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that faileth not away. How befitting, then, and how delightful the change! Instead of taking occasion from it to impair or destroy the Sabbath, it should but endear to us that blessed day the more. For it tells now, not so much of a paradise that has been lost, as of a better paradise that has been won—not so much of a covenant broken and a heritage spoiled, as of a covenant for ever ratified by the blood of Christ, and a kingdom that never can be moved. If the corruptible work and covenant of nature had by Divine appointment its sabbatical sign and memorial, must not this higher work and covenant much rather have it? And if we refuse now to enter into the fellowship of Christ’s rest, by hallowing the day which He has set apart in His Church for spiritual rest and blessing, what is it in effect but to cut ourselves off from the hope of his redemption and declare our light esteem of His finished work?
We conclude, therefore, that it is now, as it ever has been the will of God, that one whole day in seven should be kept holy to Himself; that since the resurrection of Christ, this has been divinely appointed to be the first day of the week; and that this change, while it could do nothing to weaken the obligation of a proper Sabbath, was both necessary to make the observance of a Sabbath conducive to some of the ends for which it was appointed, and also gives to it a character which cannot fail greatly to enhance and endear its sacredness to every child of God.