Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.” Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation: Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time [lit. “at the end of days”] it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”; Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark; Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”; cf. Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”; Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf. verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed: Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”
The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce: “Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.” But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words: “A day of rest.” The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called “the day of rest for the heart,” but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.
S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week: “Subattu in Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.” Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.” We [pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.
(b) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.
Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need. Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made [by God] for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day. Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.
Origen, in Homily 23 on Numbers (Migne, II:358): “Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.” Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether “the Lord's day” was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley: “In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”
According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said: “Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.” But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is “the core of our civilization.” Charles Sumner: “If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.” Oliver Wendell Holmes: “He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.” In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.
(c) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ's example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ's resurrection, and so the day when God's spiritual creation became in Christ complete.
No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day [pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to “a Sabbath rest” that “remaineth,” and to “another day” taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles: “On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”
The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon “the first day of the week” (Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became “the Lord's day” (Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. on Ps. 92 (Migne, V:1191, C): “Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”