A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath and the Commandments of God: With a Further History of God's Peculiar People from 1847-1848Bates, Joseph
Religion
A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath and the Commandments of God: With a Further History of God's Peculiar People from 1847-1848
Bates, Joseph
Sabbath; Seventh-Day Adventists -- Doctrinal and controversial works
the Lord’s: follow the Scripture rule, and the Sabbath will be a delight
to us, and God will sanctify and save.
THE BEGINNING OF THE SABBATH.
Here, also, we cannot be too particular; God claims every moment of his
day. Out of one hundred and sixty-eight hours in the week he claims
twenty-four, and gives man the balance, one hundred and forty-four, to do
his servile work. According to the record of Moses, in Gen. i: 2, God
commenced the motion of this Planet from a chaotic state of darkness, and
sent it flying round the sun at the rate of about fifty-eight thousand
miles per hour. He “divided the light from the darkness, and God called
the light day, and the darkness he called night, and the evening and the
morning were the first day,”—4, 5. God “made the sun and the moon; the sun
to rule the day, and the moon the night, to divide the light from
darkness.”
Jesus says “are there not twelve hours in the day?” Well, then, there must
be twelve hours in the night, to make a twenty-four hour day, and it must
be equally divided, for us to keep the weeks correct. For example—say now
the first of Jan., the inhabitants of the north pole have no sun, while
those at the south have the sun all the twenty-four hours; now as we
approximate to the centre or middle of the globe from the south pole, we
shorten the days, but from the north we shorten the nights; when arrived
at the centre, or under the sun, (the great time piece for the inhabitants
of all the earth, Deut. iv: 19,) we find the days and nights are equal. At
the beginning of the sacred year, for the passover, the sun rises at 6 A.
M. and sets at 5 P. M., and there is not an inhabitant on any part of this
globe that can regulate the time for day, or night without admitting the
polar distance into his calculation, which is 90° from the centre. This at
once shows that all the way we can calculate time is by calculating from
the centre of the earth, and also bringing the sun there, if his
declination be north or south. Therefore by the same rule (and no other,)
we regulate the weeks, and must of necessity begin the scripture day at 6
P. M., or else being in one place, we never have two Sabbaths begin at one
time. Says the objector we might begin at sunset. If so, no two persons
could keep the same time except they were directly north or south of each
other. But can they keep the same time all over the globe if they begin at
six P. M.? Yes, certainly. For example.—Jerusalem being about 90°, or
fifty-four hundred geographical miles east of us, makes a difference of
six hours; it is six P. M. with them when it is noon day with us; their
Sabbath closes then, six hours before it does with us—but it is at six
o’clock P. M. there. And so when the Sabbath closes here, although it is
precisely the same hour of the day, viz. six P. M., and in like manner all
round the globe. Hence the necessity of beginning the twenty-four hour day
at sun set from the centre of the earth. We are told that we cannot keep
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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