by Prof. B. B. Warfield D.D., LL.D.
(continued from page 211)
It cannot be necessary to multiply examples. Nothing could be clearer than that the Ten Commandments are treated by our Lord and the writers of the New Testament as the embodiment, in a form suited to commend them to Israel of the fundamental elements of essential morality, authoritative for all time and valid in all the circumstances of life. All the references made to them have as their tendency, not to discredit them, but to cleanse them from the obscuring accretions of years of more or less uncomprehending and unspiritual tradition, and penetrating to their core, to throw up into high light their purest ethical content. Observe how our Lord deals with the two commandments, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, in the passage near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount to which we have already had occasion to allude. Everthing external and mechanical in the customary application of these commandments is at once swept away; the central moral principle is seized with firmness; and this central moral principle is developed without hesitation into its uttermost manifestations. Murder, for example, is discovered in principle already in anger; and not in anger only, but even in harse language. Adultery, in the vagrant impulses of the mind and senses; and in every approach to levity in the treatment of the marriage tie. There is no question here of abrogating these commandments or of limiting their application. One might say rather that their applications are immensely extended, though “extended” is not quite the right word: say rather, deepened. They seem somehow to be enriched and ennobled in our Lord’s hands, made more valuable and fecund, increased in beauty and splendour. Nothing really has happened to them. But our eyes have been opened to see them as they are, purely ethical precepts, declaring fundamental duties, and declaring them with that clean absoluteness which covers all the ground.
We have no such formal commentary from our Lord’s lips on the Fourth Commandment. But we have the commentary of His life; and that is quite as illuminating and to the same deepening and ennobling effect. There was no commandment which had been more overlaid in the later Jewish practice with mechanical incrustations. Our Lord was compelled, in the mere process of living, to break His way through these, and to uncover to the sight of man ever more and more clearly the real law of the Sabbath—that Sabbath which was ordained of God, and of which He, the Son of Man, is Lord. Thus we have from Him a series of crisp declarations, called out as occasion arose, the effect of which in the mass is to give us a comment of this commandment altogether similar in character to the more formal expositions of the Sixth and Seventh Commandments. Among these such a one as this stands out with great emphasis: “It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath day.” And this will lead us naturally to this broad proclamation: “My Father worketh even until now, and I work.” Obviously, the Sabbath, in our Lord’s view, was not a day of sheer idleness: inactivity was not its mark. Inactivity was not the mark of God’s Sabbath, when He rested from the works which He creatively made. Up to this very moment he has been working continuously: and, imitating Him, our Sabbath is also to be filled with work. God rested, not because He was weary, or needed an intermission in His labours; but because He had completed the task He had set for Himself (we speak as a man) and had completed it well. “And God finished His work which He had made”; “and God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good.” He was now ready to turn to other work. And we, like Him, are to do our appointed work—”Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work”—and then, laying it well aside, turn to another task. It is not work as such, but our own work, from which we are to cease on the Sabbath. “Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work,” says the commandment; or, as Isaiah puts it: “If thou turn thy foot from the Sabbath—” (that is, from trampling it down) “from doing thy pleasure on my holy day” (that is the way we trample it down); and “call the Sabbath a delight, and the holy (day) of the Lord honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words; then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will make thee to ride upon the high places of the earth; and I will feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.” In one word, the Sabbath is the Lord’s day, not ours; and on it is to be done the Lord’s work, not ours; and that is our “rest”. As Bishop Westcott, commenting on the saying of the Lord’s which is at the moment in our mind, put it, perhaps not with perfect exactness but with substantial truth: “man’s true rest is not a rest from human, earthly labour, but a rest for divine heavenly labour.” Rest is not the true essence of the Sabbath, nor the end of its institution: it is the means to a further end, which constitutes the real Sabbath “rest.” We are to rest from our own things that we may give ourselves to the things of God.
The Sabbath came out of Christ’s hands, we see then, not despoiled of any of its authority or robbed of any of its glory, but rather enhanced in both authority and glory. Like the other commandments it was cleansed of all that was local or temporary in the modes in which it had hitherto been commended to God’s people in their isolation as a nation, and stood forth in its universal ethical content. Among the changes in its external form which it thus underwent was a change in the day of its observance. No injury was thus done the Sabbath as it was commanded to the Jews; rather a new greatness was brought to it. Our Lord, too, following the example of His Father, when He had finished the work which it had been given Him to do, rested on the Sabbath—in the peace of His grave. But He had work yet to do, and when the first day of the new week, which was the first day of a new era, of salvation, dawned, He rose from the Sabbath rest of the grave, and made all things new. As C.F. Keil beautifully puts it: “Christ is Lord of the Sabbath, and after the completion of His work, He also rested on Sabbath. But He rose again on the Sabbath; and through His resurrection, which is the pledge to the world of the fruit of His redeeming work, He made this day the Lord’s Day for His Church, to be observed by it till the Captain of its salvation shall return, and having finished the judgement upon all His foes to the very last, shall lead to the rest of that eternal Sabbath which God prepared for the whole creation through His own resting after the completion of the heaven and the earth.” Christ took the Sabbath into the grave with Him and brought the Lord’s Day out of the grave with Him on the resurrection morn.
It is true enough that we have no record of a commandment of our Lord’s requiring a change in the day of the observance of the Sabbath. Neither has any of the Apostles to whom He committed the task of founding His Church given us such a commandment. By their actions, nevertheless, both our Lord and His Apostles appear to commend the first day of the week to us as the Christian Sabbath. It is not merely that our Lord rose from the dead on that day. A certain emphasis seems to be placed precisely upon the fact that it was on the first day of the week that He rose. This is true of all the accounts of His rising. Luke, for example, after telling us that Jesus rose “on the first day of the week, on coming to add the account of His appearing to the two disciples journeying to Emmaus, throws what almost seems to be superfluous stress on that also having happened “on that very day.” It is in John’s account, however, that this emphasis is most noticeable. “Now, on the first day of the week,” he tells us, “cometh Mary Magdalene early,” to find the empty tomb. And then, a little later: “When therefore it was evening on that day, the first day of the week,” Jesus showed Himself to His assembled followers. The definition of the time here, the commentator naturally remarks, is “singularly full and emphatic.” Nor is this all. After thus pointedly indicating that it was on the evening of precisely the first day of the week that Jesus first showed Himself to His assembled disciples, John proceeds equally sharply to define the time of His next showing Himself to them as “after eight days”; that is to say it was on the next first day of the week that “His disciples were again within” and Jesus manifested Himself to them. The appearance is strong that our Lord, having crowded the day of His rising with manifestations, disappeared for a whole week to appear again only on the next Sabbath. George Zabriskie Gray seems justified, therefore, in suggesting that the full effect of our Lord’s sanction of the first day of the week as the appointed day of His meeting with His disciples can be fitly appreciated only by considering with His manifestations also His disappearances. “For six whole days between the rising day and its octave He was absent.” “Is it possible to exaggerate the effect of this blank space of time, in fixing and defining the impressions received through His visits?”
We know not what happened on subsequent Sabbaths: there were four of them before the Ascension. But there is an appearance at least that the first day of the week was becoming under this direct sanction of the risen Lord the appointed day of Christian assemblies. That the Christians were early driven to separate themselves from the Jews (observe Act xix.9) and had soon established regular times of “assembling themselves together,” we know from an exhortation in the Epistle to the Hebrews. A hint of Paul’s suggests that their ordinary day of assembly was on the first day of the week (1 Cor. xvi. 2). It is clear from a passage in Acts xx. 7 that the custom of “gathering together to break bread” “upon the first day of the week” was so fixed in the middle of the period of Paul’s missionary activity that though in haste he felt constrained to tarry a whole week in Troas that he might meet with the brethren on that day. It is only the natural comment to make when Friedrich Blass remarks: “It would seem, then, that that day was already set apart for the assemblies of the Christians.” We learn from a passing reference in the Apocalypse (i. 10) that the designation “the Lord’s Day” had already established itself in Christian usage. “The celebration of the Lord’s Day, the day of the Resurrection,” comments Johannes Weiss, “is therefore already customary in the Churches of Asia Minor.” With such suggestions behind us, we cannot wonder that the Church emerges from the Apostolic age with the first day of the week firmly established as its day of religious observance. Nor can we doubt that apostolic sanction of this establishment of it is involved in this fact.
In these circumstances it cannot be supposed that Paul has the religious observance of the Lord’s Day as the Christian Sabbath in mind, when he exhorts the Colossians to keep themselves in indifference with respect to the usages which he describes as “the shadow of the things to come,” and enumerates as meat and drink such things as festivals and new moons and Sabbath days (Col. ii. 16). They have the substance in Christ: why should they disturb themselves with the shadow? He does indeed sweep away with these words the whole system of typical ordinances which he repeatedly speaks of as weak and beggarly elements of the world. In a similar vein he exclaims to the Galatians (iv. 10): “Ye observe days and months and seasons and years. I am afraid of you lest by any means I have bestowed labour upon you in vain.” In thus emancipating his readers from the shadow-ordinances of the Old Dispensation, Paul has no intention whatever, however, of impairing for them obligations of the moral law, summarily comprehended in the Ten Commandments. It is simply unimaginable that he could have allowed that any precept of this fundamental proclamation of essential morality could pass into desuetude.
He knew to be sure, how to separate the eternal substance of these precepts from the particular form in which they were published to Israel. Turn to the Epistle to the Ephesians, sister letter to that to the Colossians, written at the same time and sent by the hand of the same messengers, and read from the twenty-fifth verse of the fourth chapter on, a transcript from the second table of the Decalogue, in its depth and universalising touch, conceived quite in the spirit of our Lord’s own comments on it. “Wherefore,” says Paul, “putting away falsehood, speak ye each one truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another.” That is the form which the Ninth Commandment takes in his hands. “Be ye angry and sin not; let not the sun go down upon your wrath: neither give place to the devil.” That is Paul’s version of the Sixth Commandment. “Let him that stole, steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have whereof to give to him that hath need.” That is how he commends the Eighth Commandment. “Let no corrupt speech proceed out of your mouth, but such as is good for edifying as the need may be, that it may give grace to them that hear.” Thus Paul subtilises the requirements of the Seventh Commandment.
If we wish, however, fully to apprehend how Paul was accustomed to Christianise and universalise the Ten Commandments while preserving nevertheless intact their whole substance and formal authority, we should turn over the page and read this (Eph. vi. 2): “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother (which is the first commandment with promise) that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long in the earth.” Observe, first, how the Fifth Commandment is introduced here as the appropriate proof that obedience to parents is right. Having asserted it to be right, Paul adduces the commandment which requires it. Thus the acknowledged authority of the Fifth Commandment as such in the Christian Church is simply taken for granted. Observe, secondly, how the authority of the Fifth Commandment thus assumed as unquestionable, is extended over the whole Decalogue. For this commandment is not adduced here as an isolated precept; it is brought forward as one of a series, in which it stands on equal ground with the others, differing from them only in being the first of them which has a promise attached to it: “which is the First Commandment with promise.” Observe, thirdly, how everything in the manner in which the Fifth Commandment is enunciated in the Decalogue that gives it a form and colouring adapting it specifically to the Old Dispensation is quietly set aside and a universalising mode of statement substituted for it: “That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.” All allusion to Canaan, the land which Jehovah, Israel’s God, had promised to Israel, is eliminated, and with it all that gives the promise or the commandment to which it is annexed any appearance of exclusive application to Israel. In its place is set a broad declaration valid not merely for the Jew who worships the Father in Jerusalem, but for all those true worshippers everywhere who worship him in spirit and in truth. This may seem the more remarkable, because Paul, in adducing the commandment, calls especial attention to this promise, and that in such a manner as to appeal to its divine origin. It is quite clear that he was thoroughly sure of his ground with his readers. And that means that the universalising reading of the Ten Commandments was the established custom of the Apostolic Church.
Can we doubt that as Paul, and the whole Apostolic Church with him, dealt with the Fifth Commandment, so, he dealt with the Fourth? That he preserved to it its whole substance and its complete authority, but eliminated from it too all that tended to give it a local and temporary reference? And why should this not have carried with it, as it certainly seems to have carried with it, the substitution for the day of the God of Israel, who brought His people out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, the day of the Lord Jesus, who brought them out of worse bondage than that of Egypt by a greater deliverance, a deliverance of which that from Egypt was but a type? Paul would be dealing with the Fourth Commandment precisely as he deals with the Fifth, if he treated the shadow-Sabbath as a matter of indifference and brought the whole obligation of the commandment to bear upon keeping holy to the Lord the new Lord’s Day, the monument of the second and better creation. That this was precisely what he did, and with him the whole Apostolic Church, there seems no room to question. And the meaning of that is that the Lord’s Day is placed in our hands, by the authority of the Apostles of Christ, under the undiminished sanction of the eternal law of God.