"O Les! You're way off," laughed her brother. "God did. He said,
'Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor,
and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord
thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy
daughter, thy man servant nor thy maid servant----' Don't you remember
the Ten Commandments? No, I guess you were too little to learn them.
But I got a Testament for learning them once. Say, Cloudy, when did He
give that command? Right away after He made Adam and Eve?"
"I'm not sure," said Julia Cloud, fluttering the leaves of her Bible
over to the second slip of paper. "I don't find any reference to it in
my concordance till way over here in Exodus, after the children of
Israel had been in Egypt so many years, and Moses led them out through
the wilderness, and they got fretful because they hadn't any bread
such as they used to have in Egypt, so God sent them manna that fell
every morning. But He told them not to leave any over for the next day
because it would gather worms and smell bad, except on Saturday, when
they were to gather enough for the Sabbath. Listen: 'And they gathered
it every morning, every man according to his eating; and when the sun
waxed hot, it melted. And it came to pass, that on the sixth day they
gathered twice as much bread, two omers for one man; and all the
rulers of the congregation came and told Moses. And he said unto them,
This is that which the Lord hath said, To-morrow is the rest of the
holy sabbath unto the Lord; bake that, which ye will bake to-day, and
seethe that ye will seethe; and that which remaineth over lay up for
you to be kept until the morning. And they laid it up till the
morning, as Moses bade; and it did not stink, neither was there any
worm therein. And Moses said, Eat that to-day; for to-day is a sabbath
unto the Lord: to-day ye shall not find it in the field. Six days ye
shall gather it; but on the seventh day, which is the sabbath, in it
there shall be none. And it came to pass, that there went out some of
the people on the seventh day for to gather, and they found none. And
the Lord said unto Moses, How long refuse ye to keep my commandments
and my laws? See, for that the Lord hath given you the sabbath,
therefore he giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days; abide
ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the
seventh day. So the people rested on the seventh day.' It looks as
though the people had been used to the Sabbath already, for the
commandments given on the mount come three whole chapters later. It
looks to me as if God established the Sabbath right at the beginning
when He rested from His own work, and that's what it means when it
says He sanctified it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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