The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign: 1847 editionBates, Joseph
Religion
The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign: 1847 edition
Bates, Joseph
Sabbath; Seventh-Day Adventists -- Doctrines
Once more; think you that the spirit of God ever directed Moses when he
was giving the history of the creation of the world, to write that he
(God) "blessed the _seventh_ day and sanctified it, because that in it
he had rested from all his work." unless he meant it to be dated from
that very day? Why, this is as clear to the unbiassed mind as it is that
God created man the sixth day. Would it not be the height of absurdity
to attempt to prove that God only intended Adam should be created at
some future period, or that the creation of the heavens and earth was
not in the beginning, but some twenty five hundred years afterwards? All
this would be as cogent reasoning as it would be to argue that God did
not intend this day of _rest_ should commence until about twenty-five
hundred years afterwards. (The word Sabbath signifies rest.)
It follows then irresistibly, that the weekly Sabbath was not made for
the Jews only, (but as Jesus says, for 'man') for the Jews had no
existence until more than two thousand years after it was established.
President Humphrey in his essays on the Sabbath says, "That he (God)
instituted it when he rested from all his work, on the _seventh_ day of
the first week, and gave it primarily to our first parents, and through
them to all their posterity; that the observance of it was enjoined upon
the children of Israel soon after they left Egypt, not in the form of a
new enactment, but as an ancient institution which was far from being
forgotten, though it had doubtless been greatly neglected under the
cruel domination of their heathen masters; that it was re-enacted with
great pomp and solemnity, and written in stone by the finger of God at
Sinai; that the sacred institution then took the form of a statute, with
explicit prohibitions and requirements, and has never been repealed or
altered since; that it can never expire of itself, because it has no
limitation."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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